Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  As for where the invasion was going to take place—well, it seemed to me the allies had succeeded in baffling the Germans. There were three prime areas Horst’s agents in England kept swearing would be the spot: Pas-de-Calais, Normandy, and running a distant third, Seine-Maritime. I’d creep up to bed by three-thirty and listen to the bombs and the anti-aircraft fire, and I’d try to conjure up a map of France, but even though I was positive I once knew which area was which, the only thing I could remember was that all three were north, across the Channel from England.

  Mornings, I trudged toward Rolf’s, stepping over bricks and twisted metal, moving aside for the streams of people left homeless, who wandered around with their few possessions in soup kettles or, if they were lucky, baby carriages, and I prayed that the fish store hadn’t been hit.

  One morning, though it had survived still another night, Rolf said, “Bad news,” when I walked in. Fortunately, before my mouth could drop open, he motioned me farther into the store, and I saw what he meant. There weren’t any more than ten fish in sight. That’s okay if you’re a cook for a foreign office big shot who brings home loins of French lamb and Polish hams, but it’s not okay if you’re a spy and there isn’t a goldfish with a mouth for a message. “Not even a mackerel can get through.”

  “Too bad,” I said. As usual, I was holding my tiny piece of paper between my index and middle fingers. I always took it from a slit in my coat sleeve just before I walked into the store.

  Rolf looked dejected. His head was down, and even his arm hung limp. But then I realized his index finger was pointing to the floor; he’d managed to steer me to the side of the counter where he cleaned and scaled, so our feet couldn’t be seen by the two other workers in the shop. I dropped the paper on the floor. “But come back as soon as you can,” he said. I noticed his shoe had moved a fraction of an inch and had kicked the paper under the counter. “They say there’s some nice herring coming in.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Good.” He guided me back toward the door. “The more you come, the better your chance of getting a nice piece of fish. It may be a bother, but I’m sure your employer will appreciate your efforts.”

  So the OSS wanted the intelligence as fast as I could give it to them. And a week later, I knew I had something big.

  It was a translation of a report from one of Horst’s agents in England, but when I shifted the paper to copy it better, I realized there was another paper stapled to it: the original report, in English. From the fold lines and the way it was curled up, it had obviously been rolled and pushed into a small space: a bullet casing, or even a pen.

  I have settled into the town of Lydd, and ensconced myself at the local pub, so much so that the Americans take me for one of the locals. One of them, a Captain Grayson, is a member of the liaison group between Eisenhower and Montgomery. Quiet chap. Quite the loner. He reads a good deal of poetry. I made his acquaintance after several nights of observing him reading from the works of Walt Whitman, the American poet.

  “Ah,” I said, “to think in this godforsaken spot there is someone else who cherishes Leaves of Grass.” He was stunned that the English knew of Whitman (!), but was rather thrilled. I used my cover story, and there is no doubt he believes that I am a (if not the) Royal Army expert on heavy artillery. I had “a bit much” to drink and told him all about the Gun Mark 3.

  Last night I got him talking about French poets, particularly Verlaine. One thing led to another, and my dear Captain Grayson, responding to my passionate Francophilia, told me the invasion will take place on the beaches of Normandy and that the talk of Pas-de-Calais is a ruse! I made light of it, saying it was too painfully logical and therefore unlikely. I have invited him to dine with me Thursday, when I will show him my library and allow him to convince me that Normandy is the place.

  I copied the English word for word, put back the envelope, flap side up, then stood at the door for the longest five minutes I’d endured since I’d started poking around in Horst’s study. Someone had to stop this Grayson guy. Or encourage him; if he was a plant, Horst’s agent in England believed he was telling the truth. And by the list of names at the end of the translation, enough people in the foreign office, SS, Army General Staff and Abwehr were getting copies to show that the Germans took him seriously. If “Grayson” was OSS, he should keep piling it on.

  I had to get to Rolf’s, but the more I thought, the more I realized going the next day would be risky; I’d just been there and bought two carp. No one, not even someone like me, with unlimited ration coupons, could be in such dire need of fish as to come back the next day. My orders were clear: Come often, but every day is too often. I didn’t want to risk arousing suspicions. I would wait one more day.

  My mistake.

  It was late afternoon, and I was in the kitchen seeding a cucumber, when Hedwig screamed. It was such a departure from her usual whine that it tore through the house, all the way down to the kitchen. By the time I raced up the stairs to the second floor, Else and Dagmar were already there. Hedwig stood in the dark, wood-paneled hallway in her aqua robe; it had a milk dribble down the right breast. Her hands were clenched tight on the open linen closet door.

  All Dagmar could do was say, “I didn’t know there was a key, Madam,” over and over. But even if Dagmar had wanted to help Hedwig, she couldn’t; Else had thrown her arms around the chambermaid in terror and was squeezing the air out of her, like a wrestler. And Hedwig herself was in such a woe-is-me state that, finally, all she could do was shriek again.

  The three of them looked like one of those stuffed wild animal tableaux at the Museum of Natural History; they were absolutely incapable of freeing themselves from their ridiculous positions. I would have laughed, except that what was happening was so perilous and I was on the brink of hysteria myself. My voice quavered so much I was terrified that it alone would give me away. “What happened?” I asked. “Is there anything I can do?”

  The actual sound of someone speaking a full sentence seemed to jolt them all. Else let go of Dagmar and began to cry into her apron; Dagmar bent over to the pile of giant tablecloths, which were now on the floor, and, clearly for the second or third time, began to open each one wide and shake it; and Hedwig said, “The key is missing!”

  “Key?” I asked. I had to do four things at once: get control of myself, look more innocent and dumb than even Else, figure out how dangerous my situation was, and see if I could save myself. “What key?”

  “The key to my husband’s study.”

  I tried to look confused. “It’s always locked. Doesn’t Herr Drescher carry the key?” If I was nearly hysterical, Hedwig was far out in front of me. She clenched at the door even tighter, her hands like claws, and screeched, “He called from the office! He forgot some papers here and he must have them. He is upset. No; angry. So angry. He told me I would find an extra key under the pile of big tablecloths.” She took a huge gulp of air and then whispered: “He said, ‘This is a top-secret key. Tell no one!’” Her whisper was replaced by a loud wail.

  Else grabbed onto me; it was like being hugged by King Kong. “We’ll all look for it, Madam,” I said, in the gentlest voice possible. I pulled out of Else’s strangulating embrace and moved toward Hedwig. “Let me help you into bed. You must rest. I’ll get you some warm milk…” I managed to unhook her claws from the door. “…and then the three of us will find your husband’s key.”

  She allowed herself to be led into her room. I sat her on the edge of the bed, knelt down and took off her slippers. “Everything will be fine, Madam.”

  When I stood up, I saw her hands were now covering her face; she was sobbing. “Hurry,” she begged. “He sounded…like a madman when I told him I couldn’t find it. He said he’d phone again, to see if…but he didn’t. Dear God, he’s probably coming home. You must find it, before he gets here.”

  “I will, Madam.” I shifted her bulky body into the bed.

  In the five or six steps it took me to cross the
room and close the door, I realized I had to get out before Horst came home, or I was finished. I was the newest member of the household staff, and for that reason alone I would be under the most suspicion. But all of us would be grilled, over and over, first by Horst, then, if he was stupid enough to let out the truth about his bringing papers home every night, by the professionals. They’d check our stories, our papers, our histories.

  “She wants her milk,” I told them. “I’ll be right back.” I hurried down the hall. For a second, I glanced at the flight of stairs that led to the third floor and my room. I should go get my papers, I thought. A change of underwear. But I couldn’t risk letting Else and Dagmar see me go up there; even they might start to wonder.

  I hurried down the stairs, through the dining room and into the kitchen, so, if they were listening, they could hear the door swing shut. I hung up my apron, grabbed my brown coat off a hook, took some loose change and an apple, and ran out the side door.

  I looked up at the tree branch. Let the key stay; I wouldn’t be needing it, and besides, I had to run. Except I had no sense of where to run to. I only knew that it was no more than a fifteen-minute ride to the villa from the foreign office, and Horst wouldn’t be telling his driver, Twice around the Tiergarten.

  I climbed the small wall in back that separated Horst’s property from the neighbor’s. There were sharp pebbles embedded in the stone and gravel; they bit into my hands and tore at my stockings. Just as I reached the cobblestone sidewalk outside the neighbor’s house, I heard the squeal of the brakes of a too-fast Mercedes-Benz stopping in front of Horst’s. The car door opened. Then came a faint but distinct cry of panic: “Hedwig!”

  It was almost six in the evening. Rolf’s store would probably be closed. I had been in Berlin for a year and a half—too long to gamble on going to the safe address I’d been given. So if I was going to survive, I had no choice but to jeopardize the life of my best friend. My only chance lay with Margarete; she knew the way the game was played. She could tell me what to do and, if necessary, galvanize the resistance into action. But as I stood in front of her apartment building, I wanted to cover my face and cry for what I was doing to her.

  It all looked so secure, so protected, with its ornate wrought-iron door. Imposing stone urns stood on either side. They were filled with red geraniums and seemed oblivious to the war. And just my walking through the front door, showing my face, would endanger everything Margarete had.

  There was one small chance. Horst might realize that his own life was in peril because he had housed a spy, and he’d keep my disappearance a secret. But I doubted it; it was too risky. He knew Else or Dagmar might talk, especially if he begged or bribed them not to; that was the beauty of his Third Reich. Or it would have to occur to him that the Gestapo might catch up with me—maybe when I was performing some terrorist act—and under torture I might cry out: Horst Drescher! Sooner or later—probably sooner, maybe within hours—the photograph on the passport in my room would be copied and sent to every policeman and Gestapo agent in Berlin.

  There was no doorman, but just to be safe, I walked around the huge stone building until I found the service entrance. There was an elevator inside, a cage. It was open. The operator was gone; he’d left his newspaper on his tiny half circle of a stool. But I walked past it, over to the door to the service stairs. It was locked.

  I had no choice. I got into the elevator, slammed the gate shut after me and turned the operator’s wooden handle to the right. The elevator jerked and then started slowly, so slowly, to creak upstairs. Finally it stopped. Margarete had once remarked that she lived on the top floor of her building; it was an endless cave of an apartment, she’d said, but it had a magnificent view of the Brandenburg Gate.

  I stepped out of the elevator, into a small alcove. There was a large metal door, the back door to her apartment, and another to the staircase. I made sure the door to the stairs was open and took the elevator down three or four floors, where I left it. Then, heart in throat, I climbed all the way up again.

  It was obvious Margarete’s endless cave took up the entire floor of the building; besides the door to the stairs, there was only one other door in the service alcove: The area itself was all empty space, with nothing to hide behind. I crouched close to the door to the apartment and waited, knowing all the time that if anyone came up on the service elevator, I was dead.

  You focus on crazy things at times like that. There I was, listening at a back door for a front door to open, my picture about to circulate all over Berlin, and I was thinking: Why did I have three cups of tea this afternoon? because I had to go to the bathroom. That’s all I could concentrate on. Okay, so maybe I thought a little about the rumor of the Gestapo’s latest persuasive technique: They smashed the joints of your fingers, one by one, with a hammer. And then I thought: Wouldn’t it be funny if all of a sudden, after going untouched, this building gets an early-evening bomb, with me on the top floor. But in truth, those pictures of peril seemed like nothing compared to the strain on my bladder.

  I must have been there nearly an hour when, through the metal door, I heard someone enter the apartment. I listened: There must have been rugs but, finally, wood floors, because there was the click of a woman’s heels. The noise advanced. I tapped at the door. Nothing. I knocked. The footsteps stopped. I said to myself, Oh, God, let it be her, then I put my mouth to the door and called out, “Margarete!”

  The footsteps clicked closer. “Who is it?”

  “Lina.”

  The door was opened a slit. “It is you!” she whispered. “Why…?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. You must be…in terrible trouble. Come in.” She led me into a small vestibule between what must have been a maid’s room and the kitchen.

  “Do you have a bathroom?”

  “Lina!” she said softly, smiling. “If that’s why you came here, I shall be extremely annoyed. All right, follow me.”

  Some cave. We walked through hallways hung with framed paintings—a couple of old barons, and the kind of German still-life paintings of fruit bowls that somehow always have dead rabbits and candlesticks too.

  There were crystal bottles of bath salts, perfumes and lotions all over her bathroom, as though it never occurred to Margarete that in the middle of the night she would hear a whistle and then her life would be reduced to shattered glass.

  She took me into her kitchen and we sat together on some sort of fancy wooden bench she had along one wall of the huge room. “Let me make you something. A nice omelet?”

  I said, “Please, I can’t eat.”

  “Nervous stomach again?”

  “Nervous…everything. More than nervous. Oh, Margarete, I’ve done a terrible thing coming here. I’ve brought you into this whole mess. If I’m seen coming or leaving, everything, all this”—I waved in the direction of the hallway, with its rich gold-framed barons—“won’t do you any good.”

  Margarete slipped off her shoes and tucked her feet under her. For a minute she didn’t say anything. She studied her hands, fiddled with the heavy gold bracelets she wore, but didn’t look at me. “Lina, it is simple. If you had a choice, you wouldn’t be here, so there is no reason for you to feel remorse. Now tell me what happened.”

  I told her all about Horst, Hedwig and the key. All about my work. Every time I added another detail, I felt as if I was digging her grave a little deeper. So, for whatever it was worth, I didn’t tell her about Captain Grayson and how urgent it was that I get that message through. If I couldn’t save her, at least I could try to give her a little protection, allow her to have the luxury of a little ignorance.

  Both of us might be captured and forced to talk. But despite what she had once told me about how members of the resistance movement committed the sin of pride by thinking: Oh, yeah, I can withstand the worst kind of torture, I felt that I could last longer than Margarete. She had extraordinary courage and nobility, but I was afraid that the nobility might be the thing to do her in. E
ven though she’d talked a lot about how much she hated her pampered childhood, she had still lived it. Okay, I wasn’t raised on the toughest streets in New York, but no one had ever ironed my clothes or polished my chandeliers for me. I was older, and just a little bit tougher. Looking at her perfect white hands, with their opal and gold rings, her gleaming buffed nails, all of precisely the same length, I sensed that that small difference might be important.

  And there was another difference: I was half German but completely American. Even after all this time, they were foreigners to me. And if it came down to me and the Gestapo, I really believed I could hate them—and withstand them—a little better than she could. They had murdered her dear friend Alfred. Well, they’d rounded up and slaughtered my family. My people.

  Margarete finally looked me right in the eye. “Is there anything else I should know?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “You know everything now. How terrible does it look for me? Would it save time,” I demanded, trying to smile, “if I just went straight to the Berlin police and gave myself up?”

  She leaned over and adjusted a loose hairpin on one of my braids. “It might save time, but it would be infinitely stupid. Now listen to me, my dear friend. I’m going to tell you exactly what to do.” She glanced at a big wall clock. It was almost seven-thirty. “You have to get out of here. The pig is due here in an hour, and he might stay the night, so I can’t offer you my most choice accommodations. The first thing you must do is get to this Rolf.” She paused. “But his fish store is certainly closed by now.” I nodded. “So you will get to him first thing in the morning. Now, is your hair in your passport photograph braided?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Let’s hurry inside. You’ll take down your hair and I’ll give you something to put on—less domestic, more well-kept mistress. You’ll spend tonight in the Friedrichstrasse underground. Get in the middle of the crowds. Stay in the middle but don’t talk. Anything, even the tension in your voice, could give you away. I don’t think you comprehend how frightened you are, Lina.”