Fraulein M.

by Caroline Woods

  Stunned, unsure what else to do, she nodded.

  Klaus laughed. “We’ll even do it in church, if you’d like—my little Catholic fool. We’ll get you a pair of lace gloves. In Poland, you can surround yourself with Catholics if you want.”

  “Oh, Klaus,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, one slipping down her cheek, but she couldn’t be sure what caused them.

  • • •

  Butter, not guns.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  Grete couldn’t sleep. Goebbels’s slogan hammered against the inside of her skull. Klaus snored beside her. After his proposal, she’d finished the bottle of champagne.

  Guns, not butter.

  After a while she got up and pulled the curtain aside, letting in enough moonlight so that she could study him, his long white body immodestly draped in her sheet, his sticky genitals exposed. He’d drifted off immediately after they made love. His penis curled in its nest like a giant grub.

  He wanted to take her to Poland. She could tell he meant it by the way he’d attacked her once they were alone in her room. They’d staggered to the bed, attached at the mouths. Kissing before intercourse had been tossed aside months or years ago. Normally he started at her nipples, or by dropping his pants. Tonight he held her, cradled her head between his forearms as he pushed himself into her. He teased her tongue with his teeth. Did it hurt, he wanted to know. Did it feel good? Just these questions were almost too much for her to bear. He’d never asked before.

  Warsaw. Married at a Catholic church in Poland. She dug around inside the bottom drawer of her desk, careful not to make much noise as he went on snoring. She’d heard the wives, even the officers’ children, who went to Czechoslovakia had helped make Case Green a success. They flirted with, hosted, befriended the Slovak nationalists whom their husbands convinced to side with Germany.

  She found what she’d been looking for and quietly shut the drawer. In Poland, Klaus had told her, she could surround herself with Catholics. He’d figured out how to give her the biggest assignment of all and offer it dusted in sugar.

  What would he think if he could see her now, naked except for her thin pair of panties, her tired hands pointing a gun at his face? Hers was a Mauser C96. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain, not after the Night of Broken Glass; the government’s ban on Jews keeping firearms resulted in a surplus for everyone else. All the salesman told her was that it was preowned. She’d never fired it, or even held it for so long; it required both wrists steadying the wooden handle, and still the barrel shook.

  As delicately as she could, she cocked her weapon, keeping her eyes on his face. Soon he would ask about Herr Reuter. He’d ask after Frau Blumenthal. He was smart enough to put it together. She either had to leave him or kill him. She took a step closer, watched his chest rise and fall. Her sweat took on a different smell, something animal. Her neighbors would hear and come running. She would have to take care of herself before they could break down the door.

  She couldn’t have known, not at this point, just what she might accomplish in killing Klaus. The annexation of Poland still sounded fairly innocuous. She could not know where Klaus would be in three short years, his boots caked in Lithuanian mud as he watched an endless parade of Jews, stripped naked and holding hands, march toward Soviet-dug trenches. Watching his brows lift innocently as some dream took him by surprise—he let out a faint whimper—Grete could not have imagined he’d be one of the men standing on the perimeter of those pits. That on command he would empty his weapon into the crowd.

  She did not know what was to come, and yet she did.

  Spit foamed in her mouth, leaking from her lips and mingling with her tears. Even if she convinced Herr Reuter to take her to Sweden tomorrow, even if she never committed another evil act for Klaus, she wouldn’t have done enough to stop him.

  These would be her last thoughts on earth, then. One she offered to God, a prayer for forgiveness that she didn’t expect to be answered or even heard, and one for Berni. Wherever Berni was—above her, watching; abroad, living another life—she’d want Grete to pull the trigger.

  Do it, little bird. Squeeze. It’ll be over in a second. One squeeze is all it takes.

  Counting, Grete thought, might help; she’d count to three, and then she’d do it.

  Eyes pressed shut, she got to three, still stood there trembling.

  First she would touch him one last time. One caress, and then she’d end it for both of them. She chose her favorite place on his body: the hip, white and smooth, blue veins under the skin. When she felt how warm he was she realized too late that her hands had frozen. He jolted, eyes fluttering, and she stumbled backward, the gun dangling in one hand at her side.

  “What is it?” he said, smacking his lips. He rolled over, facing the wall. “While you’re up, bring me a glass of water, will you? Then come to bed.”

  She stood there with the gun pointed at him, waiting for him to turn and see her. “Yes, Klaus.” Her chest heaved. What would he say if he could see her? Would his pulse even rise, or would he know she wouldn’t go through with it?

  After a while his snores began again, and slowly, slowly, her arms fell. She felt as though her spine had been yanked from her, as though she were a fish who’d been gutted. The Mauser returned to its drawer. Perhaps she’d have another chance, tomorrow, or after he returned from his next trip abroad. She spread her limp body onto the mattress, and Klaus draped a hand over her waist.

  Anita, 1970

  Anita stood at the motel window, watching the bleary landscape of Levittown, Pennsylvania, bend sideways in the wind. Between the sheets of rain and frothing trees the hardware store and sad strip mall across the street became almost beautiful; she could imagine them as little white castles at the bottom of an aquarium.

  “The news is on, Mutti!” called Janeen from one of the beds, and Anita turned, reluctantly, back toward the television. Her bowl of fluorescent orange macaroni and cheese, purchased from the diner downstairs, had grown cold and hard on her bed.

  As expected, the anchors began with scenes of hurricane devastation, the reporters in the field blinking under the hoods of their yellow raincoats. Hurricane Curt, via mudslide, had killed over a dozen people in the Caribbean. Much of the South had lost power as the storm grinded its way up the coast, and train travel had been shut down at Trenton, forcing Anita and Janeen to find a motel the night before.

  “Look at that,” Anita said now. “It’s turning.” The satellite image showed Trenton under one of the storm’s long fingers, its eye poised to follow a dotted-line path out to sea.

  “That’s a relief,” Janeen said, chewing the straw of her Coke. The lights flickered, and both of them tensed, but the electricity held.

  Neither of them said aloud what they both hoped: that the news would shift to other stories, that they’d hear Klaus had been apprehended. With every minute that ticked past, Anita wondered how much closer he could have gotten to freedom. A full day had passed in which Margaret could have turned him in, and hadn’t. The two of them could be on their way to a remote island—would the storm have stopped them? He could have driven west. By now he could be close to Alaska. In any case, Anita knew that wherever he went, this time, he’d be careful. He’d ensure nobody would ever find him.

  After the storm coverage ended, the anchors relayed the news of a failed mission in Vietnam that had taken the lives of thirty-six helicopter pilots, then a report of a fire in Philadelphia at the home of four Penn students: fortunately, nobody was hurt.

  “You see?” Anita said, swigging Coke. “Candles.”

  When the broadcast ended, again with no mention of Henry Klein or Klaus Eisler, Janeen dropped her head. She sat cross-legged on the bed, her bowl in her lap. “Liebchen,” Anita began, her voice cracking. What to say? Apprehending Klaus will not bring your father back? “I do not want you to be disappointed if Grete lied to us.”

  Janeen shook her head. “That’s not it. I’m worried about her and Erik.
What if Klaus found out about her plan and . . . did something to her?”

  “So you still believe she will do what is right. How, Janeen? How can you be so sure?”

  Janeen opened her mouth, but only a few sputtering sounds emerged. After a minute, Anita went with a sigh into the tiny bathroom to brush her teeth.

  Rain washed over the hotel through the night, and though they didn’t speak to each other, Anita knew neither of them slept much, if at all.

  • • •

  The bathroom window, like a porthole on a ship, revealed fair skies the next morning as Anita showered. Branches and debris littered the motel parking lot, and a few men stood beside a truck with a smashed windshield.

  “Tracks south are clear—” Anita began, trying to sound cheery, but when she came into the room she found Janeen sitting on the bed, phone to her ear, a piece of scrap paper in her lap. She looked up at her mother with worried eyes.

  “Well, when’s the last time you saw him?” she said into the receiver, then nodded a few times, rubbing the little piece of paper between her finger and thumb. “Okay, thank you. Would you tell him, when he comes home, that his cousin called?” She hung up. “Erik’s not at his apartment, Mutti. His roommates haven’t seen him in more than a day.”

  “We hardly know him.”

  Janeen’s spine stiffened. “He’s our family. I don’t care what Grete did. He is.”

  “You misunderstand me. I mean we do not know this boy’s habits. He could have spent the night out, with friends or a girl. Or a boy!”

  Janeen shook her head, brown eyes solemn. “They said he doesn’t normally do this.”

  Anita went to her suitcase and turned her back to Janeen. “Tracks south are clear,” she repeated. “Now, let us get our belongings up from this awful floor, nicht? I fear there are fleas here. I am going to bathe everything in Lysol when we are finally home.”

  She began zipping bags, shaking out clothes, and slamming suitcases loudly, aware of Janeen’s complete silence behind her.

  • • •

  The station in Trenton wasn’t built to handle such a crowd. Locals glared from the pay phones at the tired travelers sitting on their luggage in front of the counters, waiting to be reissued tickets that had been canceled because of the storm. Janeen went to buy a candy bar from a vending machine beside the police station. Anita found herself staring up at the flip board above the tellers. In white letters on a black background: train number 72, Palmetto to Charleston, leaving at 10:32 A.M.

  Train number 358, Federal to Pennsylvania Station, New York, would depart at 10:10 on the opposite track. The clock on the wall read 9:52. She watched the letters flip as another train left the station, the remaining schedule bumped up one notch.

  “Excuse me?” the man behind her whined. “You going to move up?”

  “Maybe sometime soon,” Anita said to irk him, then pushed her suitcase forward with her foot. She wasn’t sure why she felt so edgy, but it might have had something to do with the dog. The policeman beside the ticket counter wore knee-high, shiny black boots and held the leash of a dog, a massive German shepherd with ears erect, big as a man’s hands. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, draped on jagged teeth.

  The police in Anhalter Bahnhof had dogs that day, when she and the three children awaited the train that would take them away from Germany forever. And at Gronau, dogs boarded the train with the guards, hunting for deserters.

  That day, too, she had been preoccupied with thoughts of Grete.

  When Janeen returned, her chocolate bar half-eaten, Anita handed her some change. “Go to one of the pay phones,” she said, gesturing toward the cluster of shady characters hanging around the booths. “I’ll watch you. Go and call your cousin’s roommates again.”

  Janeen turned the dimes in her palm with her thumb. “What should I say?” she asked, but in the quickening of her eyes, Anita could tell she already knew.

  “Tell him we will not be going home quite yet.” The line had cleared in front of her; she was next at the counter. Anita reached for the handle of her suitcase. “Tell him we must make a detour, back to New York.”

  • • •

  Anita wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see at Margaret’s building: signs of a struggle, or blue police lights whirling outside, but the place appeared exactly the same, the same two homeless boys camped at the base of the façade. Dark puddles, full of cigarette butts and trash, streamed toward the drains in the street.

  Janeen shivered. “He could still be in there, Mutti.”

  “We do not know her telephone number,” Anita repeated. They had gone over this during their brief train ride and in the taxi uptown. “It is a risk we must take.”

  They waited a little while in front of the doors, their reflections distorted in the glass, legs wide, mouths pulled even deeper into frowns. The doors reflected the sun’s attempt to burn through the clouds, a weak gray circle.

  On the train, Janeen had asked how Anita knew Margaret and Erik were in trouble, what she’d thought happened to them. Anita shook her head. “I have never been able to read my sister, to know what she’s done or will do. All I feel is a pull on myself.”

  Eventually a young man came out of the building with a pair of skates knotted over his shoulder, and he held the door without question as the two of them dragged their suitcases inside. They rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, anxiety so thick between them Anita could feel it buzz, like the beginning of a storm.

  At Margaret’s door, Anita knocked loudly, Janeen standing behind her, wringing her hands. “Margaret?” Anita called. “Open the door, it’s me.” She found she couldn’t say her name. “Open the door, Margaret,” she said, her voice cracking.

  Janeen chewed one of her knuckles. There was no answer. They could kick down the door, or find the superintendent, tell him they thought the people inside needed help. Anita felt blood pounding in the hand she used to steady herself against the door. What would they find inside? What devastation, what trauma? She knocked again, harder this time, and heard a small dog begin barking in the apartment next door. “Margaret,” she tried to shout, but what came out was mostly air. She needed a paper bag to breathe into. Margaret was her sister, her own flesh and blood. Despite everything, how could she have walked out on her once again?

  A hesitant voice came from inside. “Who is it?” A boy’s voice.

  “Erik?” Janeen came forward, put her fingertips to the door. “Is that you?”

  “Who’s there?” he said, sounding fearful. “Why are you covering the peephole?”

  “Mutti!” Janeen cried, moving Anita’s hand.

  “It is Anita and Janeen,” Anita said, looking straight into the peephole. “What’s going on in there—is your mother safe?”

  “I—” Erik said. “Something happened with . . . him. I think she might need a hospital, but she won’t let me take her.”

  “Let us in, Erik,” said Anita, trying hard to sound as if she were in control. “Let us see if we can help.”

  She heard him undo every lock. When he pulled the door open, he looked young and scared in his socks. Janeen took his forearm and held it for a second. “I thought you were going home,” he said, shutting the door behind them, relocking the deadbolt, the knob, the chain. “I tried asking her what happened. All she would say is they took him. They took him early in the morning, yesterday, I think—that’s all I could get her to say.”

  “Where is she?” Anita said softly, and he pointed, swallowing, toward the bedroom.

  Inside the room the blinds were drawn, the light gray. Margaret lay on the bed, her tiny, curled-up legs creating scarcely a bump under the covers. Her breathing sounded shallow. Only her eyes, large and icy blue, registered their arrival.

  Anita went to her, kneeling on the floor, as Janeen and Erik hovered on the threshold. Anita felt her sister’s skin, which had a yellowish cast, and found her forehead cool. Out of habit, she tapped the cleft in Margaret’s chin and tried to smile.
Margaret continued to breathe in short gasps, a slight rasping sound in her lungs, as Anita felt for her pulse. After a minute she tucked her sister’s wrist back under the blanket.

  “Call an ambulance, please,” she said as calmly as she could, and still her daughter and nephew looked as though she’d just told them to prepare to jump. “She will be fine, but I believe she is in shock.” Janeen hesitated as Erik went to make the call, and Anita went to her. “Stay with him, will you, Liebchen? Give him strength.”

  Janeen nodded, firming her jaw. When she’d gone into the living room, Anita closed the door behind them. Despite their fears, despite the fact that neither of them deserved to be part of what had happened here, Anita didn’t doubt they would be all right.

  A knitted wool blanket hung on a chair; she brought it and tucked it around Margaret’s shoulders, smoothing back her hair, which was damp at the roots. She brought a glass of water from the nightstand to Margaret’s lips and coaxed her to drink.

  “They took him,” Margaret said, her voice nearly inaudible. “The Mossad agents. In the middle of the night. They threw a hood over his head. They will put him on trial. And then they will kill him.”

  Doubts sprouted in Anita’s mind, weeds she’d pulled without taking care of the roots. How did she know for certain Margaret was telling the truth? How could she know Margaret hadn’t let Klaus get away, that the pain she felt now wasn’t merely lovesick grief?

  Doubts would always be there. But the ambulance would arrive soon. They would not have much more time together. Anita put a hand on Margaret’s forehead.

  “It cannot have been easy for you to do,” she murmured.

  “No. In a sense it was easy. It is what he deserved.” Margaret’s voice sounded high, nasal; her hearing aid sat on the nightstand. “But he cursed me, you should have heard the way he cursed me. He promised he’d tell them everything I did. And the agents said . . .” Margaret’s body convulsed in weak coughs. “They saw my records, from the SS,” she croaked. “If I hadn’t cooperated, giving them Klaus, they could have . . .”