by Susan Isaacs
“Yes.”
Had someone been watching Konrad Friedrichs all along? Was that it?
“Your age?”
“Twenty-eight years.” He had a thick pompadour, kept high off his forehead with hair tonic.
“Place of birth?”
“Berlin.” Oh, God—or Oh, Olga, Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Pohl—let him buy my accent.
Was the identity check one of those random ones they’d warned me about? I was just walking too slow for his taste, or too fast. He didn’t like my looks. He liked my looks, like the shopkeeper who’d grinned. He stared at my passport, then at me, over and over and over. Was he trying to paralyze me so that when he finally proclaimed, You are not from Berlin! Your accent is foreign! all I’d be able to do would be incline my head in agreement.
“What are you doing?”
“I was shopping.”
“Shopping?” His eyes narrowed with skepticism, and he shook his head, as if I’d told him an outrageously unbelievable lie. “What have you been shopping for?”
I started to rummage through my pocketbook, too frantically, I thought. Slow down. Find the potato peeler to show him. He yanked the pocketbook away from me. “A potato peeler,” I said. “That’s what I was shopping for.”
Just as I uttered the words, he pulled out the peeler. “You are from Wilmersdorf,” he said. “What are you doing in this area?” He pronounced every word precisely, separately, slowly, prolonging the threat. And oh, did it work! I was so scared, and he was electrified by my fear. He moved in on me, pressing his face against mine, a horrible cheek-to-cheek. Looking sideways, I could see the almost invisible dots on his skin where he’d shaved. “Well? Why are you in Alexanderplatz?”
“I heard the store here had potato peelers. The kind with the rounded top.”
“What?”
“So you can scoop out the eyes,” I whispered.
“And for that you came all the way from Wilmersdorf?”
“Oh, yes. I’m a cook. Please, my work passport is in there.” He jerked himself up, away from me, and groped through my pocketbook; he threw my handkerchief on the sidewalk. “I work for Herr Konrad Friedrichs, of the foreign office.”
He pulled out my work passport and scrutinized it as if positive that any minute he’d discover something I could be guilty of. A gust of wind came and blew away my handkerchief. He held the work passport up, so the sun could shine through it. I took a fast glance as he examined my papers. His face was in profile; he had a thick plug of yellow wax in his ear.
Suddenly he shoved the pocketbook back into my hands and slapped my identification on top of it. “All right,” he said. “Get going. And no more loitering.”
“Yes. I won’t. Thank you.”
I walked down the street, clutching all the papers that registered me as a citizen of the Reich—allowing me to work and live—tight against my chest. When I turned the corner I walked faster, but then slowed myself down. Easy. Put your pocketbook in order. Here in Germany, kiddo, neatness counts.
On that last night in the basement cell of Konrad Friedrichs’s house, I forced my mind to travel, to get back where it could be at ease for a few hours, to go home.
I thought about how my mother, who used her tweezers the way a carpenter used his hammer, had worked on her beauty, but after my father was killed in that fire, before she actually started boozing, she was never able to get the seams of her stockings straight. The first sign she was falling apart. She’d come out of her bedroom and call, How’re my seams, Linda, lamb? and after a couple of times when she’d gotten so upset she’d cried, I learned to say, Straight as an arrow, Mom.
And then my mind drifted into Manhattan, and I thought about having lunch in the conference room of Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley, with Gladys Slade controlling the gossip with the same thoroughness (but more seriousness) that Roosevelt would insist on in running a cabinet meeting. When I thought how the small talk about Mrs. Avenel’s pushiness and Mr. Post’s carrying on with Wilma Gerhardt and Mr. Nugent’s vague resemblance to Ronald Colman had once been the high point of my days, and how lying awake and inventing moments with Mr. Berringer—who in my imagination I dared to call John—had been the crowning glory of my nights, I realized what had become of me. Well, not what had become of me, because I really didn’t know, but at least that from where I had started to where I had wound up had been one hell of a trip.
And there was no return ticket. That night—and every night I was in Berlin—I had some bad moments. To be honest, bad half hours, bad hours. Lying in my bed, my motor racing, I wasn’t able to concentrate on anything but one thought: I’m stuck. Caught. What border could I run to and say: Hey, let me across! I don’t belong here! I’m from Queens! What person could I throw my arms around and cry: Oh, God, I want to go home! Help me!
I made myself get control. I thought about John. It wasn’t easy. Not because it brought me any pain, but all I could conjure up as I lay in that miserable excuse for a bed was an image: his handsome face, his remarkable body. Images. John coming out of the shower. John’s face when he glanced up from editing a brief, or looming over mine during sex. John with me in his arms. John with Nan in his arms.
Hey, I thought, no matter what’s happened, this guy is still your husband. That didn’t help. Trying to feel something for John was like forcing myself to fall in love with air. I couldn’t. I felt no passion, no anger, no longing, no loss. Right before I finally fell asleep, I thought: The only thing I really feel is curiosity; simple curiosity. I mean, how can you love someone and feel absolutely, explicitly, indubitably nothing?
23
If he’d lived in the United States, the best a guy like Horst Drescher could have done for himself would probably have been to own a small business—one renting wheelchairs and artificial legs, or manufacturing paper party favors—and been vice-president of the Lions Club; he’d never make president, because most of the members would think anyone who would wear a satin vest was a jerk and unfit for the highest office. He would live in the suburbs, because city life would be too much for his nervous-wreck wife, Hedwig, but since he fancied himself so urbane, he wouldn’t want to be too far away from concert halls, the theater and expensive restaurants.
That’s what he would have been in America. In Nazi Germany, Horst Drescher, at age twenty-seven, was one of the most fortunate men in the foreign office. The army couldn’t go near him; he’d been born blind in one eye, and his feet pointed out so far it looked like he was doing a Donald Duck imitation whenever he walked. So he was fortunate. And powerful. Not because of the work he did, although he was chief of the British Section and worked at least twelve hours a day. And not because of his skills in diplomacy and language: anyone in the foreign service, from janitor to ambassador, could see through his so-called subtlety in two seconds flat. And the two times I overheard him speaking English to someone on the phone, it was so incredibly, stiffly German-accented that he sounded like a kid from Queens in a game of soldiers who got stuck with playing the Nazi.
But that’s what he was, the Nazi. His fanatical party loyalty was the reason he had risen so high in that huge gray building on Wilhelmstrasse. That, and the fact that for one week Hitler had gone on a rampage, calling for “young men, new blood” in government. He got what he deserved: Horst.
In the same year that Mein Kampf was first published, 1925, when Horst Drescher was ten years old, he joined the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior version of Hitler Youth, and he had been a true-blue believer ever since. He wasn’t loyal for any personal gain. He believed in Hitler and in what he stood for: the Master Race. What kind of ten-year-old boy wants to spend his time glorying in Aryan superiority instead of throwing a ball? According to the OSS report, little Horst Drescher. “He is a passionate believer in Hitler’s racial theories, and apparently believes himself to be an example of all that is noble, manly and cultured.” The report went on to say that Horst also embraced all the other Nazi notions: Lebensraum, anti-Semitism, Führerprinzip
—everything, the whole ball of Weltanschauung.
Well, almost. Adolf the Ethical was a vegetarian. Horst Drescher would eat anything that didn’t get up and walk off his plate—as long as it was washed down with a big glass of pilsener and a little glass of schnapps.
But when I started working for him at his beautiful stone villa in the Dahlem neighborhood, I didn’t know that. All I knew was what the OSS knew, and their information had come from Alfred Eckert, who had most likely dashed off something like “A callow youth who fancies old-fashioned German food, and a lot of it!” to pad out a too-short report. Some pencil-pusher at OSS naturally put a giant asterisk on that one. “Drescher, Horst: Born 1915 in Magdeburg. *Weakness—German cooking!!!” The OSS had passed on the word to Konrad Friedrichs. And when in desperation he’d gone to Margarete von Eberstein and, without naming names, described the person whose house I was supposed to slip into—and how impossible the task seemed—Margarete had declared, I can help.
Sure, but on my second night at the Dreschers’, I loused up the pheasants. Else, the downstairs maid, who did the serving, came charging in from the dining room. “You must hurry! They’re waiting for the next course!” I looked at her, a little surprised. They must have inhaled the appetizer.
I opened the oven. “Oh, my God!” I had been warming the roasting pan and the vegetables on low heat, but when I’d put in the birds, I’d obviously forgotten to turn up the oven. Else sidled over and we both stared at four barely cooked pheasants; they looked like they had been hanging around a hot kitchen instead of actually roasting.
“What are you going to do?” she squeaked.
“Hide them,” I said. They looked more wounded than dead; red juice was oozing out of the cavity. “And pray.” I grabbed the pot of white sauce I’d planned to use on the carrots and poured it over the pheasants. It covered them like a heavy sheet. Then I decorated the platter with all the greens, lemon slices and capers I could grab, thrust the platter into Else’s hands and said, “When you walk through that door, smile. And don’t be afraid.” Since she had a brain capacity equal to one of the pheasants’, she did what she was told, unquestioningly, and marched toward the dining room with a wide and empty smile on her face.
As the door swung open, I got a glimpse of Horst’s back, and the profiles of his wife, Hedwig, and his dinner guest, a somewhat older man, with a nose so upturned and flat that it looked like a pig’s snout; the man had been Horst’s beloved Deutsches Jungvolk leader and was now the chief Party functionary in Saxony.
“How are we doing in England?” the man was asking Horst.
“Very well, Bruno,” Horst replied.
“But they are bombing us more and more.”
“Desperation, Bruno.” And the door swung shut.
I got busy, trying not to think about how Horst would react to the pheasant disaster. I spooned about a cup of butter over the carrots. Then I did the same with the potatoes and, as an afterthought, tossed in some dried dill that hung from the ceiling, which Else said had come from France. By the time the Germans get through, I decided, the only thing that’ll be left in France will be the French.
Else came back for the vegetables. Her fair-skinned face was all flushed with pleasure. Good old Bruno had probably pinched her behind. I asked her, “What kind of a mood does Herr Drescher seem to be in?”
“He wanted more bread.” Brilliant. Some master race. She toddled out with the vegetables.
No screams of dismay had arisen over the gloppy, white-coated revolting mess I’d sent out on a silver platter. I calmed myself by saying that even if the meal was the worst thing in Horst Drescher’s life, he wouldn’t fire me. His former chef had been hit by a car on his way to the butcher shop and had two broken legs. And I had come so highly recommended…by Konrad Friedrichs, of all people.
Originally, the OSS had hoped Herr Friedrichs could find someone else willing to sing the praises of my cooking, but, already frightened, he was firm: I will not enlist anyone else into this foolhardy operation!
Konrad Friedrichs’s office was on the same floor as Horst’s, and so, on a Monday, he’d said, Well, on Friday I am off to Lisbon for two weeks. Then on Thursday, having spent most of the past few days listening to foreign office gossip, he called Horst and said, I hear your chef has met with an accident. Most unfortunate…but perhaps fortuitous. I have a cook—nice, quiet Berlin woman, a widow—and I’ve been wondering what to do with her. I travel too much. Don’t really need her. She’s quite capable. If you’re interested…
I arrived at the Dreschers’ villa on Saturday morning. It was a graceful stone house, set behind an ornate iron fence, on a cobblestone street. They had lived there for nearly a year; before that, it had belonged to a Jewish family who had owned a department store. They had “emigrated,” which meant they’d been rounded up and sent somewhere east. Probably Poland or Czechoslovakia. No one talked about it. Their house, from attic to basement, including the beds, clothespins, sterling silver, couches and extra light bulbs, now belonged to the Dreschers.
According to the OSS report, Horst loved what had become his. Alfred was quoted: “He will pass through a room and stroke the wood of his breakfront. He will discuss the value of his antique Meissen porcelain.” And I could just see him lifting a sugar bowl up to the light, peering at it with his one good eye, a small smile crossing his bland face. Horst looked even younger than his twenty-seven years. His face was still blotchy—although in the morning, the pimples were beige with dabs of Hedwig’s heavy foundation makeup. He was round-shouldered, and had a small, almost girlish build—except for his bloated, satin-vested belly. He was not the sort who got his Aryan kicks hiking in the Schwarzwald.
But if he was young, he had the tastes of an old man: beer, politics, food, culture. Not women. The report said: “He seems immune to the charms of women other than his wife…and our sources indicate he may be immune to hers as well. The couple have been married for five years and have no children.”
His main love was his work. Too bad for Germany. According to the briefing Konrad Friedrichs gave me just before I left, Horst was of almost no use in the foreign office because he had no ability to analyze intelligence or plan strategy. But he knew every single minuscule fact there was to know about his area, Great Britain. No report, magazine clipping, aerial photograph or coded message escaped his eye.
The problem was, once he absorbed all this data, he had no idea what to do with it. Sure, if you asked him the square footage of Windsor Castle he could tell you, and he knew the name, address and telephone number of every German agent in England, Scotland and Wales. He could choke you on facts; he just couldn’t think.
Still, all this information took time to digest, but so did dinner. Horst took great pleasure in returning to his graceful house, eating an elaborate meal and then going into his study to read over his reports. On the nights when he went to the opera or the ballet or the theater, where he sat in a box reserved for the highest officials, he would return and pore over his papers until two in the morning.
These nights of the lively arts were the best nights for snooping. That’s what my friend Alfred had related to the OSS. Alfred, designer for the Nazi elite, had always managed to drop in to help his client Hedwig get ready—a very intricate process. Horst would come home, put his papers in his study, lock the room, have a lighter-than-usual supper—alone, because Hedwig and Alfred were probably doing up her corset—then rush upstairs and change into his tuxedo. He’d come down later, wait and pace, until, finally, Alfred would escort an overwrought Hedwig downstairs. She’d plead a headache, a terrible period, a congested chest. Horst would look to Alfred for help. Alfred would reassure her: “My dear, look at you! I’ve made you beautiful. You will dazzle them! Go, now. Go.” The first few times, he’d picked up his case and left with the Dreschers. But then Horst, the gracious host, the man who knew that in Alfred he had found someone who could truly appreciate all his fine objects, said, “Please, stay. Have a bite to eat.
And drink, if you like. I have different glasses for red and white wine. No need to rush.”
Horst was deeply grateful for the help Alfred was giving him. He really needed help. Hedwig was definitely not an asset to his career—although that had been why he’d married her. Her father had been with Hitler since the early days in Munich, and although he was too old to hold a permanent position in government, he was a trusted—and therefore powerful—friend. But he died six months after the wedding, sticking Horst with a woman no other man, even the most politically ambitious, had been willing to take. Hedwig Drescher was lumpy, with hair so thin you could see her scalp, and tree-trunk legs. She was twelve years older than her husband.
She tried to disguise the age difference with heavy, mask-like makeup and bright-colored dresses, but she knew the attempt was a lost cause. She was the clumsy, chunky daughter of a dumb, jovial Munich policeman. She had nothing to recommend her, not even her father’s joviality; she just had his dumbness. No one wanted her around, least of all her husband, and yet as a proper wife she had to accompany him on his social and cultural outings.
But at least Alfred, with his charming patter and inspirational speeches, had been able to lift her out of her near-constant state of nervous tension and get her out with her husband. The OSS report had quoted Alfred: “She gets hysterical because she wants to please him and can’t, and so she makes herself ill. She loves him, poor cow.”
Else rushed back into the kitchen, breathless. “The master says, ‘My compliments to the new cook. A fine partridge.’”
Partridge? I thought. It’s pheasant. But then I knew that at least I was safe in the kitchen.
The poor cow seemed to have her period three weeks out of the month. That’s what Dagmar, the chambermaid, told me. “All the time cramps. But the cramps, I think they are in the head, not in the…” She used some word I’d never heard of, but I nodded my understanding.