Fraulein M.

by Caroline Woods

  Finally, Anita had to turn to face them. Their heads were bent together, Margaret’s smooth blonde one and Janeen’s frizzy dark one. “And how do you know this, Liebchen?”

  “You know she will, too, Mutti,” Janeen replied, imploring Anita with her eyes.

  “Is that so,” Anita said in a cold, quiet voice. “Here is what I wonder. You knew exactly where to find me, Grete. How? A letter arrived, addressed to Anita Moore, not long after Klaus resurfaced. You’ve been quiet about this coincidence, nicht? This is why I cannot trust you.”

  Slowly Margaret stood. She crossed her arms. “Yes. Klaus was the one who found you.”

  Janeen gasped. “He knows where we live?”

  “He knows where we live,” Anita said without taking her eyes off her sister, “because Grete told him, a long time ago, that I’d left the country, and she told him to send his SS friends to look for me. Didn’t you?”

  Slowly Margaret shook her head. “It was not like that.”

  Janeen’s chest rose and fell quickly, her face twisted in anguish, and this was the worst part, Anita thought: Janeen wanted to believe in Margaret.

  Margaret licked her lips. “I’ve been trying to find the right way to tell you. I didn’t want to put it in my letter, not the first one—” She stood and came to Anita. “He’ll be back soon. I need to tell you this now. Berni, I need you to listen. If you’re here when he returns, it will jeopardize everything.”

  “Just listen, Mutti!” Janeen pleaded from the sofa.

  Slowly, Anita laid her hands atop her sister’s outstretched palms and looked into her eyes, broken capillaries at the corners. Anita was reminded of a game they’d played as children to see who could slap the other’s hands first. Grete had the better peripheral vision; it was one of the few games she’d always won.

  “When you didn’t appear at the Zoo,” Margaret began, then cleared her throat a few times. “I knew something had happened. I went to Sonje’s building and pounded and pounded on the door, and eventually a woman answered, a Brownshirt for certain; she called Sonje ‘that Jew’ and claimed not to know a Berni, nor an Anita. ‘Whores flit in and out of that place, who can keep track?’ she said, though I could tell she was lying.

  “After that I searched all the nightclubs and bars, from the lounge in the Adlon to the seediest basement club. Nobody had seen you. I felt as though the world had been rearranged while I’d been sleeping. Finally I returned to Sonje’s, hoping to find you there, but your windows were dark. I’ll never know why I stopped in the café on the corner, maybe just to sit in a seat you may once have occupied. When I saw the owner wearing his SS uniform, I nearly left. I knew I had to get away from them. All of them. But then, behind me, I heard a familiar voice. I turned and recognized the sweep of Sonje’s pretty nose. She wore a snood, and she did not stand up straight, but I knew it was she, instantly.”

  Margaret stopped and swallowed. Anita’s diaphragm rose and fell rapidly. A metallic taste had come into her mouth.

  “She walked past without noticing me and hid at a corner table behind a pair of dark glasses. She looked like a ghost. I remember thinking how terrible it was, the way the government had erased these people who were still there.

  “After a few minutes, a man came to join her, a man in a black hat, obviously a Jew. I hid by the cigarette display and turned my ear toward them. They mentioned a group of children who had gone to America to study abroad.

  “‘They are enjoying their studies?’ the man asked.

  “Sonje spoke slowly. ‘Yes. All three have settled comfortably into their new schools in New York and are finding their lodging agreeable.’

  “They clinked their coffee cups together as if they were glasses of beer. Then the man asked, ‘And their Fräulein?’

  “‘Yes,’ said Sonje. ‘Fräulein M. is well, too.’

  “Of course, instantly I hoped the M stood for Metzger; it would mean you were still alive and that you’d made it safely abroad. Then my palms began to sweat, my heart race. If you indeed were Fräulein M., it meant you’d found out what I’d done and left me behind.

  “For a few unbearable moments, the two were silent. Then the man made his voice very gentle, very soft, and asked, ‘And your other friend. What news of her?’

  “From my hiding place I could not read their lips. I strained to hear, but saw only Sonje blowing her nose. She hid her face in her handkerchief.

  “‘A telegram,’ she finally blurted out. ‘She was taken to Plötzensee this time. Fell out of the window trying to escape, they said.’”

  Janeen cried out, the blanket to her mouth. Anita had to compartmentalize the news in order to keep thinking straight. Hadn’t she always known her Anita had been killed by the Nazis, in one way or another? Why should it affect her, hearing how it happened? Why?

  “I could not help it then,” Margaret continued. “I burst from my hiding place. I frightened her, with my desperation, with my Nazi pins. She must have recognized me, for she shrank back into the booth; when I called her name, she pretended it wasn’t Sonje. ‘Berni,’ I cried, ‘tell me if it was Berni! Please!’ Before I knew it the two of them hurried from the restaurant.”

  “And Klaus?” Anita said, her voice very far away. “How did he find out about all this?”

  “I told him.” Margaret could no longer hold Anita’s gaze. “We were in a biergarten off Friedrichstraße. Everything tasted like sawdust.” She swallowed. “I told him one of you had made it to the United States, and one had fallen from a window. I figured his connections could get me answers, but also I wanted to let him know one of you had gotten the better of him. Of us.

  “‘Oh, Grete,’ he said. ‘You know that means your sister is either dead or wants nothing to do with you.’

  “‘I pray she is alive,’ I told him, ‘and I am glad for her if so.’

  “‘If I hear any news of your sister,’ he said then, ‘I will tell you.’ I suppose he kept this promise. It’s why we are here.”

  “How wonderful of him,” Anita said, mouth dry. “And then? You continued to see him.”

  “Yes. I did. His pull on me was that strong. But not anymore.” Margaret’s chin dropped to her chest. “Last month was the first I’d heard from him in years. He wrote to tell me he’d found you. When I saw the name Anita I assumed I had my answer as to who died in the prison. I’m sorry, Berni. I am so sorry for her.”

  Anita hadn’t even noticed Janeen rise from the couch, but suddenly there she was, standing beside her aunt, stretching her fingers toward Margaret’s arm. At her touch, Margaret flinched, then relaxed. “I also knew,” she said, her voice firmer, “that the only way this could end was with Klaus’s capture.”

  Klaus’s capture. But Klaus wasn’t here now. He’d gone. He was free as a bird. “I should have called the FBI when I had the chance,” Anita said.

  Slowly Margaret shook her head. “Not the FBI. Think, sister. The FBI will do no good.”

  The room blurred and tipped. “You are trying to tell me he was an informant.”

  “A CIA informant, yes, perhaps. I know he was given a visa in 1945. This is why we have to tread very carefully. I do not know what a call to the American authorities would do.”

  Margaret’s eyes were cold, icy blue in the light reflected from the windows. “I beg of you, please. You do not need to forgive me, but you must believe me.”

  Anita swayed on her feet. She heard her own voice telling Janeen they had to go, to meet her down at the curb if necessary, to say goodbye to her aunt for both of them—she said this as though Margaret was not in the room.

  She left the elevator for Janeen and took the stairs, turning down and down and down until she burst into the street. The rain had abated, but everything still felt cool. After her breathing evened, she looked up slowly at a pigeon bobbing its head in front of her, at two young men sprawled on a tarp. Both were too young to live on the street. One wore women’s shoes.

  We’re the sisters. Her sister had falle
n from a window in a Gestapo prison. She searched for a better image to focus on, a happy one, so that a shape on the ground would not be the Anita that stayed in her mind. Anita at Lake Wannsee, flirting with a burly American. Anita peering into a mirror with her mouth open, trimming her eyebrows with a razor blade.

  Janeen stayed inside a long time, long enough for Anita to begin to worry. She had nearly worked up the nerve to find her way into the building again when her daughter came out the front door, her face ruined from crying. “You aren’t going to do it, are you, Mutti? You can’t call the FBI. Will you?”

  “Shh,” Anita murmured, gathering her close.

  “I know she’s telling the truth.” Janeen’s eyelashes were pulled into points by her tears. “What she just told me . . . I know she’s about to turn him over.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me more, about Germany, about Klaus,” Janeen said, looking stunned, looking like the most tired seventeen-year-old Anita had ever seen. “She had a gun, but she . . . she wants to do right this time. She said that. And I believe her.”

  “Okay, Liebchen,” Anita said, too weary to argue or even to ask about this gun. “It is time for us to go home.” She expected Janeen to protest, but instead, she nodded and pulled a dark piece of hair out of her lips.

  Dark clouds roiled overhead. In the distance, faint thunder. Anita could sense Janeen remembering Klaus at the same time she did, wondering if he was somewhere nearby, watching. Anita hustled them toward Broadway, waving one arm at each taxi that passed, the other wrapped tightly around her daughter.

  Grete, 1939

  Grete had first heard of the Blumenthals, of all places, at the Café am Zoo. She hadn’t returned in three years, but everything looked the same: potted palms and fig trees, the three-story ceiling covered in green tiles like scales. Even the crowd, mostly uniformed men and expensive-looking women, could have been the very ones who’d stared at her that night she waited for Berni, the girl with a suitcase under her chair.

  Before their entrées arrived, Klaus slid a folded square of paper across the table.

  “I wasn’t expecting an assignment so soon,” she said quietly, her voice lost in the din of the restaurant, the buzz of good news. Czechoslovakia was now the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, thanks in large part to the success of Case Green, an SD operation. “I’m already tracking Herr Reuter.”

  “I know, darling.” Klaus made his eyes pained, sympathetic, the way one might look at a dog. He leaned over the table and kissed her hand. She felt the give of his soft lips, the immediate response between her legs. “But stakes are high—the Poles could invade any minute.”

  She unfolded the paper. Mr. and Mrs. Caleb Blumenthal. “Jews?” she said. “They’ll never let me inside. The Winter Relief wouldn’t send a nurse to check on a pair of Jews.”

  “The wife has a condition,” Klaus replied. “We think they’re plotting to abscond without paying their property levy. A neighbor heard them phone a doctor in Sweden. They’ll let you in.”

  Their wine arrived, and he inspected the bottle, gave a generous smile to the waiter. “In the Republic years,” he said, pouring Grete a glass of Riesling, “Mr. Blumenthal was a Lyzeum schoolteacher, a known rapist of students, I’m afraid—”

  “Stop. Please.” Each time he needed her to check up on someone, there was a story; the former doctor was a pedophile, the family of Communists had been plotting to blow up a school. She had to look at the ceiling to keep from crying. A chandelier the size of a Volkswagen dangled in the center. She imagined what would happen if it fell, the crater it would leave in the checkered marble floor. Shards of brass propelled outward like shrapnel.

  “I can’t do this,” she said quietly. “Not again.”

  “Pardon?” he replied, and he leaned forward, one hand cupped around his ear. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you.” He seemed to know she wouldn’t repeat herself. “You know I’ve brought you into the SD network to protect you, my love. Need we revisit your close calls?”

  She shook her head, staring at the heavy chandelier. She saw herself choosing the weakest link in its chain, taking aim, firing.

  • • •

  Guns, not butter: Goebbels’ slogan was everywhere in early 1939, to get people to accept the rations. The average German could live without butter; the Reich as a whole would never survive without guns.

  Grete had both.

  Klaus had installed her in a new apartment complex in Neukölln; all day she heard planes ripping overhead. She did her best to hide the scents of coffee and butter from her neighbors, but she saw the way they looked at her. Late at night, she heard them return from the factories where they assembled electronics or airplane parts as she hid in bed with a cup of chocolate, another gift from Klaus. Through the thin walls she heard them complain about low wages, the tariffs taken out of their paychecks for food, uniforms, time off. They couldn’t even change jobs without permission from the Party. They feared war would break out before the end of the year. They lived like slaves. They questioned Hitler. Occasionally she reminded herself—when she wanted to feel better—that she could have turned them over for questioning the Reich, but chose not to. She only spied on people when Klaus asked.

  He visited sporadically, when he was in town, and her neighbors treated him with fear and respect whether or not he wore the uniform. He usually came at night, after suppertime, a paper bag full of rationed goods in his hands, her next assignment in his pocket.

  “But I’m a nurse, not a spy,” she told him. “My work is to keep people healthy.”

  “You and I have the same duty,” he replied, raising a blond eyebrow. “The SS pledge to uphold the health of the German ethnic body. You and I both must root out germs and disease.” He took her wrist into his hand. “You know I’ve assembled an immaculate file on your service as an informant. I’ve practically made you untouchable.”

  He said it as though she had nothing to do with it.

  She wished he’d be more discreet about the gifts, that he’d be quieter as they made love. Everyone in the building, she knew, called her the SD officer’s whore. She could have told them she wasn’t his whore, she was his fiancée, but then they would ask the wedding date. They’d ask how she got along with his colleagues or his parents, whom she suspected knew nothing about the engagement.

  The important questions might not have occurred to her neighbors. How many traitors to the Reich do you have to uncover in order for him to actually marry you?

  Or—how can you make love to someone who’d have you arrested if you ever dared disobey him?

  Or simply—how do you sleep at night? Sometimes, looking out her tiny round window at the new, plain courtyard, she imagined Berni asking these things, her voice high-pitched and righteous, her fist in her hand.

  Grete tried to stay in her victims’ apartments for the briefest time possible. Stop talking, she wanted to tell them when inevitably they slipped and said too much. The physician told her his blood pressure might have been high because that morning he’d given some students a hundred marks to print anti-Hitler leaflets. The old woman in bedroom slippers asked whether Grete thought anyone would notice if she withdrew money from her pension so that she might go to Denmark with her daughter’s family.

  Grete knew why they confided in her. They saw the same thing in her that Klaus did: weakness. They saw a limp dishrag. And who needed to be careful around a dishrag?

  It didn’t matter that she watered down the reports she gave Klaus after her house calls, that she left out some crucial information. The people she spied on could be hauled in for the tiniest infractions, then tortured, or killed, or sent to concentration camps. And they were.

  • • •

  She’d been visiting Herr Reuter for two months under the pretext of tracking his heart murmur. An auto mechanic, he’d been a labor organizer during the Republic, but had turned Nazi so enthusiastically in 1933 that he’d ended up on the watchlist with man
y other March violets. Herr Reuter saw her exactly for what she was; Grete could tell he despised her. He’d never let anything slip when she visited. For this, she could have kissed him.

  His garage wasn’t three blocks from the Blumenthals’ apartment, and so she went past it on her way to call on them for the first time. She peered in at the cream-colored Type 1 he’d been working on the last few weeks. Someone had brought in another car for service, a huge yellow Mercedes with headlights like round spectacles. Both obscured the view of a rusty van without tires, floating almost to the ceiling on lifts.

  She’d snuck past these doors in the middle of the night. She’d seen the flashlights, the van lowered, Herr Reuter and his assistant working to put a new engine inside. The tires, she knew, were resting against the back wall, ready to be installed at a moment’s notice.

  Herr Reuter planned to leave the country, and soon. Nobody else—she knew the Gestapo, too, checked in on Herr Reuter from time to time—seemed to have noticed. All they were looking for was evidence of Herr Reuter stirring up labor trouble, and she could honestly report she’d seen none.

  Reluctantly she left, walking her bicycle up a little street crowded with parked cars, leaping over puddles to avoid the trolley. Eventually she found herself facing a smaller street, almost an alley. One side was bathed in sun, the other shadowed. Halfway down, on the sunny side, she found the Blumenthals’ building, a five-story with blue flower boxes filled with geraniums. Every time, her heart pounded like this. She prayed they wouldn’t be home as she pressed the buzzer.

  Her spirits sank when she heard the locks shift and a chain swing loose. The door opened a crack. A man in his late twenties peered out at her. He had full cheeks and a snub nose, long-lashed green eyes. “Can I help you?”

  “Good morning, Herr Blumenthal. I’ve been sent by the Winter Relief to inquire after your wife’s condition. One of your neighbors implied she needed help, and we never let these reports go unchecked.”

  Herr Blumenthal let the door open a little more so that he could peer up and around the alley, perhaps wondering which of his neighbors had brought the Reich to his doorstep. He stared down at her for a minute, blinking. “Yes, come in. I’m not sure what can be done for her, but perhaps there’s something.”