by Susan Isaacs
So Margarete retreated to the kitchen. When she spoke about her childhood, and about the warmth and patience of the family’s chef and his wife, who assisted him, you could see—in her stories about getting lost while picking white asparagus or her early disasters in learning to eviscerate a hen—not only the girl who became the laughing, high-spirited Berlin sophisticate, but also the sad child who, despite her high and comfortable niche in society, had grown up feeling that there was no place she could really feel at home. Her father would be off hunting or decanting wine for Nazis, her mother would be off emoting, and even the kindly chef and his wife—the second their work was done—would rush off to their own two children.
Sometimes, she said, she’d stay in the kitchen after all the help—the menservants and the kitchenmaids—went to bed. I’d sleep there, she told me. It was the warmest place in the house. Warm not in degrees, but in…Do you understand? I said yes, I did.
“Lina, I have to tell you something.” I glanced up from the Preiselbeeren, the German equivalent of cranberry sauce, I had just started. “I have a lover.” I had barely begun to smile when she added, “I hate him.”
“Who is he?”
She was wearing a long white wool skirt—real wool—and she rubbed her hands up and down the front of it, discoloring it with the residue of goose grease that had been on her hands. “No one knows.” She sounded edgy.
I understood. “I won’t ask, then.”
“Except the people in the…movement. They know. When I mentioned this man’s interest in me”—she was talking unnaturally fast—“they wanted me to…they encouraged it.” Suddenly her blue-gray eyes turned a shadow color and filled with tears. “He is a colonel. On Hitler’s personal staff.”
“I see,” I said.
“No you don’t. He is fifty-four years old and he is fat as”—she lifted her head and looked at the oven—“an over-stuffed goose. With fat little fingers and fat thighs and breasts—like a sagging woman.” She came back to the table, lowered herself into a chair and wiped her eyes with a kitchen towel. “Oh, God, I hate it.”
“Then don’t do it, Margarete.”
“I have to.”
“No. There’s a limit. Tell them you can’t.”
She made herself smile and lifted her chin. High. Aristocratic. “Oh, but, Lina, the information I get from those fat lips. He sneaks away from his sow of a wife and I prepare Königsberge Klopse and what takes me an hour to make he sucks in less than a minute. But then, before we go…inside, he sits back and burps and tells me about his day. In the time it takes him to digest, I get intelligence that sometimes saves lives. You tell me. Should I give him up?”
My eyes suddenly got wet with the tears that had been in hers a moment before. “I don’t know,” I whispered.
“Oh, Lina, I know there is something better than this. I only pray I live long enough to enjoy five minutes of it.”
If it had been up to Konrad Friedrichs, I would have visited the fish store every day. Practice! Practice! Practice!
But Herr Friedrichs was a spy only in that he gleaned information from the foreign office, flew to Lisbon on legitimate Third Reich business and, while he was there, brought in a suit to a dry cleaner, with the data written in code and folded and slipped into a minuscule slit in the cuff of his trousers. The dry cleaner would bring the suit to the back of the store, to a waiting OSS operative, and for Herr Friedrichs, that would be the end of it.
Unlike Margarete and Rolf Vogel, fishmonger, Konrad Friedrichs was always aloof; he worked alone. The idea of an organized German resistance cooperating on an American intelligence operation was too horrible for him to even contemplate. But he trusted Margarete. Not because she was trusted by Norman Weekes and not because of her bravery and skill, but because, despite her parents’ fascist views, she came from a great family who for centuries had stood for the best Germany had to offer. When Norman stuck me on Herr Friedrichs, it was Margarete, his only contact in the resistance, who calmed him down, and Margarete who promised to make sure I indeed became the great cook the OSS claimed I was.
But Margarete had to be insulated from knowledge, protected from my operation, so it came down to me and Herr Friedrichs working together. The two of us were not born to sing a duet. Konrad Friedrichs did everything from bathing to spying on a rigid, unvarying schedule. But as Margarete or Rolf could have told him, you can’t have an obvious schedule when you’re out in the field. So even though it caused a number of major nostril flare-ups, I told him I would not go to Rolf’s every day to Practice! Practice! Practice!
“Listen to me. No human being can eat that much herring,” I told him, when he made one of his slippered trips to my room. “If I go there that often, that regularly, someone in his store is going to think it’s curious. I’m a cook working for a highly placed individual in the foreign office—you—and they know you have allowances ordinary citizens don’t have. You could eat veal seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner if you wanted to. So why is your cook hanging around the fishmonger’s?”
“You’re like all of them. ‘Secret agents.’ Enamored of cleverness. Disdainful of hard work.”
“If somehow the Gestapo gets onto Rolf, if he’s being watched, don’t you think they’re going to notice me?”
“Your execution of the transfer of information must be flawless before you leave here and enter the household of…where you are going. You must—”
“Practice!” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“‘Don’t worry’! The vanity, the naïveté in that expression. I have been doing…what I have been doing for years. You…For all I know, they picked you out from…from a burlesque line. Your only credential is that you obviously grew up in a household that included a low-class individual from Berlin.”
“My grandmother was German. Whatever her social class, she was a refined woman. She would never make offensive remarks about other people’s families.”
He stuck out his chest and took a deep, aggrieved breath. Very huffy. “You think I am arrogant, pompous. That is not the case.” Boy, did this guy need a mirror! “I am not denigrating your grandmother. I am merely trying to emphasize the fact that you come to this occupation as a novice.”
“You may be right, but there was only one person in the whole world who could take this job, and that was me. I have the willingness and I have the guts. And what I lack in training I make up for in common sense.”
“Your common sense! You will soon be dead, or wish you were, and it will be worse, worse”—his voice rose to a panicked squeal—“worse for me. You are my doom!”
I could sympathize with his terror. But I was really getting fed up with his contempt for me. “Do you think I would risk my own life and the lives of other people if I felt I wasn’t prepared?”
“You do not know what the word ‘prepared’ means!”
I got up and opened my door, which wasn’t easy because the room was so small I had to practically climb over Herr Friedrichs’s knees. “Please leave my room.”
He stood tall. “It is my room. My house.”
“Well,” I said, “our conversation is over. You can either leave or throw me out. Which would you prefer?”
Maybe I should have been more understanding about his predicament, but the truth was I was so preoccupied by my own near hysteria, I didn’t have patience for his.
On the plane to Lisbon, the OSS had given me a pocketbook with a tiny compartment in the bottom that opened when you pressed against a hinge. They said, When you get to Rolf’s store, have a sack full of heavy vegetables, cans, what have you. When he waits on you, he’ll have to help you set down your packages, and in that maneuver he’ll brush against your pocketbook. That’s how he’ll extract your information. He’ll pull out the paper you write everything on from the hidden compartment in your pocketbook. Don’t worry. This is guaranteed: No one will see what he’s doing. He’s a real pro. He knows how to trigger the mechanism; he’s used this kind of transfer t
echnique before. You just have to look burdened down so he can get close enough to help you. Relax. It’s a piece of cake.
Except the piece of cake didn’t work. On three separate visits to the fish store, Rolf couldn’t get the bottom of my pocketbook open. Okay, we were just practicing, and all he would have pulled out was a small piece of blank paper. But when the real time came, the paper—even with the tiny writing I’d mastered, with letters the size of commas—had to get out of Berlin. And he was the first step in its journey.
If anyone could have made that hinge work, it would have been Rolf Vogel. He was a man about my age, with thinning red hair, pasty skin, pale freckles and one arm. He’d lost the other in a motorcycle accident when he was young. But while that handicap kept him out of the army, it didn’t keep him from boning a fish with amazing dexterity or lifting a wooden crate of iced fish that must have weighed pretty close to what he did.
And he wasn’t a nervous wreck like Herr Friedrichs. Rolf was so calm he even soothed me. I didn’t know the reasons for his willingness to put his life on the line when ninety-nine point nine percent of his countrymen cringed and cowered and Sieg Heiled till the cows came home, but whatever the reasons, they were deeply felt. And because he knew how great the danger to him was, and was willing to accept it, he wasn’t going to fall apart. Rolf Vogel didn’t sweat. He didn’t bite his nails. In fact, he behaved pretty much the way I imagined Edward Leland would have. Matter-of-fact. If it’s cold, toss a wool sweater with starry snowflakes into your travel bag before you slip into Denmark. If you know you’re going into occupied Poland, just say, Well, see you in a few weeks, Linda, and simply walk out the door. Casual. In control.
After the third failed attempt at making a transfer, he just said, “Perhaps you would like to see the trout today.” He guided me toward the rear of the store. We were still in sight, but it was safer. “What do you think of them?” he asked, looking at the fish. His hand rested on a stack of wrapping paper. He seemed to be saying silently, maybe we can work a transfer with this paper. I sniffed. I didn’t like the idea; it was too open. “They are quite fresh,” he assured me. I sniffed again: Lina Albrecht, the perfectionist. “I like to see for myself.”
“Please go ahead,” he said, as if this was nothing new to him. At least a quarter of his customers were pains in the neck.
I lifted trout after trout, and stared into their dead eyes. Boy, were they ugly when you took the time to look at them. And resentful, with those little pursed mouths. But I had to come up with something. And then I cleared my throat. Rolf watched. I poked at a trout’s mouth. It opened, and I stuck my finger down its throat or gullet or whatever it was. Well, whatever it was was large enough for a small piece of paper. Rolf barely tilted his head, but I knew he was nodding his understanding.
“I don’t like these. Let me see the halibut,” I said.
“Certainly,” Rolf said. “Certainly.”
On my last night at Konrad Friedrichs’s, I arranged my body in its usual position: twisted right, left and sideways to avoid the jabbing mattress springs. On an earlier night, I’d tried something extra: putting my right arm over my head, my shoulder covering one ear and my hand the other, so I couldn’t hear the sounds of the bombing and the antiaircraft fire. But after a minute the silence wasn’t golden; I had to be awake to hear the wrong set of footsteps, or a voice asking for me.
On that last night, I lay awake, brooding over Herr Friedrichs. I couldn’t stand him, but in the end, I realized how much he’d done for me: bringing me in from Lisbon, allowing a member of the resistance to train me in his own house, hiding me, and most of all, nagging me all the time, shaking his head in disgust at my low-class stupidity, forcing me to be more frightened—and, I realized, more cautious and suspicious—than I might otherwise have been.
Two days earlier, I’d done what in England I’d been ordered to do: taken the subway all the way to Alexanderplatz, to test my ability to get around Berlin and to pass myself off as a working-class Berliner. Oh, had I been proud! I left early in the morning, and when I got to Alexanderplatz station, people were still leaving the safety of the underground; there had been an air raid the night before. I joined the crowd climbing up the stairs.
A good lesson. This was Berlin, not New York. Not a single person shoved, jostled, elbowed or thrust himself ahead of anyone else. I forced myself to walk at the measured pace of the crowd, not to try and beat it; I kept my head down, although it was as much to avoid the mass exhalation of the morning breath of people who’d slept underground as to mind my own Teutonic business.
Up on the street, the lines were already forming in front of the stores. Women held on to their pocketbooks, with their passports and ration books, more tightly than they did to their children. The people were poorer here, and at first I felt secure. I looked more like one of them, a housewife. When I walked into the fancier stores near Herr Friedrichs’s, I really didn’t belong. Shopkeepers eyed my knit hat, my shoes, and then realized: Of course! I was someone’s servant.
I stood on a line for almost two hours. War showed on faces. People looked haggard, gray, exhausted by the effort to get through even this, the beginning of their day. That’s when I realized I wasn’t one of them, and I knew they realized it too. What set me apart was that I was healthy. My skin was clear; there was still a sheen to my hair. And most of all, I wasn’t gaunt. Okay, I wasn’t stout by anyone’s standards, but I was an American: solid, comfortable, at peace. And I’d had four weeks at Herr Friedrichs’s, cooking with Margarete, where—despite my nervous stomach—I’d tasted a little of this, a little of that, and though I was too overanxious and overwrought to actually eat, I hadn’t lost any weight. My figure appeared less like an ordinary German’s and more like an upper-class Abwehr translator’s: full, well-treated.
I examined those faces in the line; they all shared the same quality: They looked out at you but they didn’t see you. Well, that’s not quite right. Sure, they saw me, saw my suspicious vitality, but they didn’t give me a funny look: no New York “Hey, what’s with her?” or even a cool, calm, collected German-style once-over, like Olga used to give me if I went off to school in a dress that she had decided was wrong.
It was not dead eyes; the women on line had dead brains behind the eyes. They had made themselves stop thinking, so no random, renegade expression could pass over their faces: not a tic or a blink that could be challenged.
The fear I felt from being just that little bit different diminished somewhat when I realized these women weren’t going to call out: Hey, look at this one! She’s wrong! If I was, they knew the authorities would find me. They would not turn me in, because they were as afraid as I was of making any kind of scene in which they would call attention to themselves.
It was cold, and my feet throbbed as I stood there in the early December cold. I thought: Would people from Queens and Brooklyn ever be like this? Could they ever be made so scared that their insides died? I didn’t know. But then I looked down to the street corner from where I was standing in line and saw workers on their way to offices, stores and factories.
Not a single one of them put a foot off the curb when the light was red. New York was a city of jaywalkers, of parkers at fire hydrants. Would a cabdriver’s unwritten license to say to a cop, “Up yours, buddy,” protect a nation from a Hitler and his Brownshirts? Could a Hitler arise in a nation where the average citizen never thought twice about exceeding the speed limit?
To be fair, though, when you see your neighbors being rounded up and taken away and their houses and furniture and even their canned tomatoes snatched up by Party favorites, and you never see your neighbors again…well, it doesn’t encourage a big mouth and an anti-fascist sneer.
But to continue to be fair, Hitler and FDR had come into office within months of each other in 1933. Okay, conditions were much worse in Germany; they not only had a depression, they had the heavy burden of the First World War on them. But they picked a wild-eyed, booted, hate-spewi
ng monster who screeched to them by torchlight: You are the Master Race! And we picked a cripple with gusto and gallantry, who sat by a homey, crackling fire and urged us to have courage, to have patience, to have decency and to have hope.
I finally got into the store; it had once sold a combination of housewares and hardware, but now there was nothing even resembling the cast-iron skillet I’d thought of buying. Its inventory consisted of two items: soup bowls and potato peelers. I left with a potato peeler, but at least the store owner had not detected anything strange in my accent; I was almost positive of that. And it hadn’t bothered him that I was strangely robust; when he gave me my change, he said, Here, Fräulein, and then grinned at me. I put my head down so he’d think I was blushing, slipped the potato peeler into my pocketbook and left.
I’m doing okay, I thought, and though I didn’t skip down the street and whistle, I felt far more confident than when I’d left Herr Friedrichs’s that morning. I was almost at the station when I saw that a side street had been cordoned off. Police. Gestapo. I didn’t look. I calmed myself by thinking it was an area that had been hit the night before. Even though the bombings were getting worse, the authorities kept trying to prevent people from coming face-to-face with terrible devastation—rubble and the awful empty craters left after the attacks—especially in residential neighborhoods.
A bombing, I thought. A fact of life. And then felt a hand on my arm. I looked up. Gestapo. A face that would have been nice-looking if it hadn’t been so enraptured by its own ability to terrify. “Show me your passport,” he ordered.
It took me a second to open the clasp, and my pocketbook jiggled as I struggled. I prayed, Dear God, don’t let that hinge work now. I handed him my passport. He examined it, and then he came up close. How had I given myself away? “Is your name Lina Albrecht?”