The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  I thanked him, paid for my beer, then headed to the station. The train is speeding north through the dark German night as I write. I think I’m going to fall asleep. I really have to get some shut-eye. All that effort, only for Terese to turn out to be a confused, bitter, and nasty woman. I know I’m not always very quick on the uptake, but explain something to me and I’ll get it eventually. She doesn’t seem to understand what it’s like living in a foreign language. The Germans are obsessed with always trying to get you to see that you don’t understand, and that their lives, their stories, their concerns are far too complicated for your inferior foreign mind to handle. I think that’s something they could work on.

  Gabriel

  * * *

  Berlin-Lichtenberg, December 14, 1999

  Dear Michel,

  I’ll spare you the details. I saw Magda. She was in Magdeburg again. She came back Saturday. I got another invitation to sit down on her sofa. Now I know the full story. I’m sending it to you along with my latest batch of letters.

  Read it carefully. You’re blind if you can’t see the potential for a book or a film, or an opera. I can’t get the scene of the Gustloff out of my head. It’ll stay with me forever.

  I’m spending Christmas here with Magda. Since she’s an atheist, she’ll be happy enough watching screwball comedies on TV. She loves Leslie Nielsen, you know. She thinks he’s hilarious.

  Gabriel

  Magdalena Berg’s Third Notebook

  THE FIRST TORPEDO struck just after nine o’clock. I was awakened by a deafening clatter, as though a big dresser full of china cups and plates had been tipped from the second floor of a building out onto the sidewalk. Then another, and then a third. People were screaming, crying for help. Almost immediately, the Gustloff began listing to the port side. Where do your thoughts turn at times like that? I grabbed the children. I could only find Heinrich and Hannelore. Hans must have gone looking for his mother while I slept. I had the presence of mind to grab the life jackets. We had to get up on deck. And quickly. You know, you don’t really think of others in such circumstances. I walked over people’s heads. Over dead bodies, I think. Very quickly. I was very strong back when I was twenty-five. Heinrich on my shoulders and Hannelore under my arm. I was holding on to her so tight that I kept turning around, sure that I’d be carrying no more than an arm I’d ripped off. Without a word. Struggling our way up. You can’t imagine the screams. Over ten thousand women and children suddenly realizing their best bet has just become a fatal illusion. I can still feel their lifeless bodies giving way beneath my feet. Stumble and you wouldn’t get back up.

  Despite the panic, I managed to find the gangway leading to Clara’s cabin, but a group of men was coming in the opposite direction, blocking my path. One of them recognized me. “Your friend’s already out on deck!” I followed them, along with Hannelore and Heinrich. No sign of Hans. The boat was beginning to lurch terribly; people were toppling over.

  And the cries, Kapriel. The cries.

  (She got up and, for the first time since I’ve known her, she had to sort of mime her history, as though words had suddenly failed her. But without looking at me, her head turned away, as though she could no longer bear my gaze.)

  We eventually made it to the Sonnendeck, the sun deck outside. The lifeboats were already full of Wehrmacht officers, along with women and children. Scenes from the end of the world. When they saw that the lifeboats were full, the Wehrmacht soldiers began shooting women and children to save them dying from hypothermia. People clung on to whatever they could. And the cold, Kapriel. It was as cold as the Germans found God’s heart that night. The whole deck was inch-deep in ice. Rafts that should have been put to water were blocked by the ice. I remember one man going at the ice with an ax as he tried to free them . . . And I saw her. She was being carried off by people, soldiers, to a life vessel. I shouted her name. She didn’t hear me. Running as fast as I could across the icy, lurching deck, I caught up with her.

  “We need to get into the lifeboats, Magda. The boat’s sinking.”

  She didn’t seem frightened at all. In fact, she was calm and still as a summer night. Her fever seemed to have dropped. The lifeboats were already full. Just ahead of us a man was trying to climb into one. But they were for women and children only. He got in all the same. The officer in the lifeboat shot him dead. Right in front of us.

  The auxiliary who had taken such good care of the children had managed to follow us. I don’t know why. She was holding onto Heinrich.

  “Do you know how to swim?”

  Clara and I almost had a heart attack. Of course we knew how to swim, but in that water, death was no more than ten minutes away.

  “If we don’t jump now, we’ll be dragged down with the ship. Fasten your life jackets and follow me. We need to go down into the water.”

  That girl, who was just a little bit younger than I was, that girl whose name I didn’t even know, she saved my life. Her plan was absolute madness. The boat was beginning to pitch dangerously to the left. We were to climb up the highest side, she said, then step over the guardrail and slide down the side of the ship and into the water.

  “It’s our only hope. Once you’re in the water, swim toward a raft or one of the lifeboats out there. Whatever happens, stay clear of everyone else. Whatever you do, don’t cling to me or I’ll punch you! Those who hang on to each other will be dragged down. You need to swim!”

  “But will anyone come to our rescue?” I asked.

  “I’m not holding out hope,” she said, climbing across the listing deck toward the guardrail.

  Clara said the Führer wouldn’t let us sink to the bottom of the Baltic; he wouldn’t let an SS man’s wife and children die. She wanted to know about Hans. It would have taken a good, hard slap to get her to shut up about her Führer. As if this was the time!

  Others who’d had the same idea were sliding down the side of the boat. There was a mass of bodies at the bottom of the tilted deck. Thousands of people had already jumped and were in the water shouting and screaming. On our way down into the water, we slid past the windows of the Promenadendeck, an outdoor deck closed off by unbreakable glass. It was where people went for a stroll on cold days. Thousands of people were now trapped inside. They were beating on the glass; you could heard their muffled shouts. And gunfire, everywhere. The auxiliary, twenty yards before we reached the mass of bodies, pointed to where we should jump. I wanted to live. And so did she. We jumped. She with Heinrich, me with Hannelore. I think Clara must have jumped thirty seconds after us. The water was ice cold.

  “Get away from everyone! Now! Quickly! Don’t let them grab you!”

  You know, Kapriel, the Germans are very fond of swimming. It’s one of the things we do well. I followed the auxiliary, who was holding little Heinrich in her arms, but water, Kapriel, water undoes even the best-laid plans. Hannelore was lost. All I saw of her were her little feet sticking up out of the water. The life jacket was too big for her; it trapped her upside down, her head underwater. Drowned. The temperature outside was eighteen below. The water was barely above freezing. I kicked away two boys who were grasping at me, having lost their mother.

  “It’s too late for her. Don’t look back!”

  The auxiliary swam like a fish in spite of her wool coat. Clara followed behind, gasping for breath. How long did it take us to swim out to the lifeboat? People lifted us out of the water, took Heinrich in their arms. We were freezing and soaked to the skin, but alive. Not long after that, other swimmers clambered into the boat, and others after them, until someone shouted, “That’s enough! Another one and we’ll sink!” And the men began beating at the frozen fingers that were clinging to the boat. Those still in the water looked at us in disbelief. That man’s face, Kapriel. He looked me in the eye as if to say, “What are you doing?” Just before he got an oar to the knuckles and disappeared. I can still see him . . . Every evening.

  And suddenly the shouts intensified, if you can imagine! The Gustloff l
it up like there was a huge party on board. All the lights came on at the same time and the sirens began to wail. Seconds later, the ship slipped into the Baltic. All that remained were thousands of people floating on the surface. Their shouts could be heard for a few minutes longer, then they died of cold, one by one.

  There were twenty-five or twenty-six of us in that lifeboat that kept threatening to capsize beneath our weight. We had to wait hours in the freezing cold. The moon was full in the sky above. The wind froze our faces. A first boat came by, a German Navy ship. It turned back when it saw us, for fear of being torpedoed too. We had no notion of time. Very quickly it was too late for Heinrich. Hypothermia takes the children first, you see. We threw his frigid body overboard to lighten the load. People shouted and cried for hours. Every five minutes, a voice would fall silent, taken by the cold. And just like that, little by little, one by one, death came for nearly every person in the lifeboat. We threw their bodies into the water once we realized. The auxiliary, Clara, and I huddled together.

  “I think we’ve lost the war, Magda,” Clara said. “The Führer can’t do a thing for us now. He’s left us here to die.”

  And then: “Suddenly everything seems so clear . . . I can see things so clearly now. It’s like before . . . before the fevers . . .”

  And a few minutes after that, the cold silenced her forever. All I could hear was the wind and the three voices the heavens had spared, the auxiliary’s body stiff against my back.

  Five hours it took for them to rescue us. When they hoisted me up onto the boat, I regained consciousness for a moment or two, then they dragged me over to the furnace with the others. Miraculously, the auxiliary was there, too, shivering. They poured cognac into our mouths and we passed out.

  They dropped us at Swinemünde; 1,239 survivors out of over ten thousand passengers. The rest are at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. I spent two weeks in a school that had been converted into a hospital. Then I went on alone to Berlin via Stettin. Some people took me by cart as far as Stettin. After that I walked, from farm to farm, from village to village, until I got to Charlottenburg, or what was left of it.

  There was no trace of Papa. He must have died in an air raid. Or at least that’s what I thought until the Red Cross got in touch to let me know he’d died in Uruguay in 1979. He’d taken refuge over there in the last days of the war. He’d lived under an assumed name, had even married another woman and had two children with her. It was his son who’d insisted the Red Cross contact me. He’d even included a photo. I wasn’t hard to find. Everyone was on file in East Berlin. I didn’t go around shouting it from the rooftops, naturally. I just thought how history repeats itself. Papa had told me one of our ancestors had left one day, never to return again. How had he known? As part of the hiring process with KdF, he’d had to produce what was known as an ancestor passport, a document that traced his family tree back to 1800. Every civil servant in Germany had to have an approved researcher look into their ancestry. You see, the Nazis wanted to be sure there were no Jews or Slavs or gypsies among their ranks. Do I still have it? Of course not! It was destroyed in an air raid. But Papa showed it to me once. The family tree went all the way back to the late eighteenth century, back to a certain Johann Berg, the son of Christian Berg, a carpenter who left to work as a mercenary in America. After that, we lost all trace of the Berg family. It’s strange: that man left to fight in a war, leaving his son behind in East Prussia, while my father was fleeing the war. In both cases, the result was the same: they both abandoned their children. At any rate, knowing he’d felt compelled to flee Germany in 1945 set me straight about a few things.

  I took refuge at a convent in Dahlem. And there I waited until the war was over. There you have it, Kapriel.

  (She sat back down on the sofa and finished off what was left of the wine.)

  After that, I was done with courtly love. I was having none of it. I chose to live in the East because, for me, if you took the “national” out of “national socialism,” you ended up with something viable, more or less. Wrong again. I mustn’t know what’s good for me. Now you know everything. No, wait . . . In 1948, I contracted tuberculosis, but I recovered. Imagine that!

  I’ve lived in this building since it was built in 1972. Are you crying, Kapriel?

  America Forever

  AT 11:57 A.M. on December 31, 1999, Solange Bérubé climbed the metal staircase to Madeleine Lamontagne’s office to deliver the tray of food that she took at that exact time every day. A thin filet of grilled halibut (it was a Friday) flanked by steamed peas, a boiled potato, a glass of Heinz tomato juice, a plain fat-free yogurt, a maple-leaf cookie, and a cup of extra strong Red Rose black tea. Solange knocked three times on the solid oak door. There was no reply. She knocked three more times, this time a little harder and faster: agitato. No answer. There was no point calling out; she knew perfectly well that it was impossible for a human voice to penetrate the four inches of solid wood that separated her from Madeleine. Solange set the tray down on the stainless-steel pedestal table that was screwed to the white wall and grabbed the door handle with both hands. She turned it slowly, without making a sound, hoping to find Madeleine deep in concentration over some important file. Instead, Solange discovered the sorry sight of the fifty-year-old woman splayed across a maple coffee table in front of a black leather armchair. Outside, the December wind howled, whistling around Lamontagne Tower. The other buildings around it scraped at the Montreal skyline like so many bodies buried alive clawing at the insides of their caskets.

  Madeleine Lamontagne must have fainted in her office on the sixty-first floor of 456 Rue De La Gauchetière. A large envelope postmarked in Rome a few days earlier lay on the floor. Pages from a school notebook were scattered in front of Madeleine’s body as though she had flung them away just before losing consciousness. Her posture suggested she’d been sitting on the edge of the armchair and fallen down onto the table. Solange Bérubé cried out and brought a hand to her mouth. She ran over to Madeleine and tried to bring her ’round.

  “Madeleine, wake up! Madeleine!”

  It was clear from Solange’s firm grip that she was used to lifting and carrying objects far heavier and more unwieldy than Madeleine Lamontagne’s tiny dried-out body. Solange shook Madeleine, slapped her gently, pulled and pinched her earlobes in the hopes of a reaction. No luck. Madeleine’s body remained inert. Overcome by panic, Solange rushed to phone for help, her staccato footsteps echoing off the wooden floor. As she explained to the emergency services in her contralto voice that Madeleine Lamontagne had collapsed onto a maple table, the rest of the immediate entourage attending to the president, founder, and principal shareholder of Mado Group Inc., alerted by Solange’s cries, had gathered around the still-open door. The deathly silence observed by the small group of some twenty women of varying ages was interrupted only by a few rumbling stomachs, which was perfectly normal for that hour of the day. Outside, in the distance, white icy fog was rising from the St. Lawrence River. A landscape that could have been painted by the hand of death itself. Like a concert of unbridled flutes, the piercing howl of the wind reigned over the sad spectacle.

  A secretary helped Solange lay Madeleine out on a leather sofa until the ambulance arrived. A dozen sheets of paper lay on the carpet, each covered in round handwriting, to all appearances a letter sent to the billionaire, its personal nature in stark contrast to the office’s sterile surroundings. Raising her eyes heavenward, as though familiar with the letter’s contents, Solange picked up the pages one by one and put them out of sight.

  “Is she breathing?” someone asked from the doorway, her tone strangely indifferent.

  “Barely!” the secretary replied as she felt for the president’s pulse.

  Solange moved quickly and surreptitiously, scooping up the little brown glass vial that lay by Madeleine’s wrist and dropping it into her pocket. If there had been a tiny microphone at the center of the crowd that had gathered, it would have captured the chatter of the emplo
yees who had been forced to work during the final hours of the turn of the new millennium. Torn between the prospect of seeing death carry off the hand that fed them and the hope of finding themselves at last released from their duties, their remarks ranged from neutral to somewhat irritated. They’d just seen her in the elevator, heard her on the telephone, or spoken to her themselves. An intern had given her the mail like she did every day, she said. One hour before noon. In fact, it would have been possible to work out almost to the second exactly when Madeleine had fainted by asking precise questions of the employees gathered in the doorway. All they would have had to do was work out who had been the last to receive an instruction from Madeleine, and at what time, then add on a few minutes. Because it was quite impossible for Madeleine to go more than ten minutes without telling someone what to do. That had never happened, not within living memory. There had once been a time, a far-off, almost forgotten time, when no one had been ordered around by Madeleine Lamontagne, but, aside from Solange Bérubé, none of the employees who worked at Mado Group Inc.’s headquarters could claim to have known it.

  In calling the emergency services, Solange Bérubé had made the serious mistake of mentioning that the victim was Madeleine Lamontagne.

  “Get a move on. The company president’s unconscious,” she’d said, to quote her exact words.

  The 911 operator had been only too happy to let the ambulance driver know, and he, in turn, had told his girlfriend, who he happened to be talking to when the call came in over the radio. His girlfriend, a gossip if ever there was one, armed with a cell phone and an address book as long as your arm, took a mere ten minutes to rouse enough people for the gossip to beat a path to the newsroom of a leading Montreal daily, where preparations for the January 1, 2000, edition were in full swing. The editor, Jacques Sanschagrin, was informed by a buxom intern who’d just sent him a touching piece on a toothless old local woman who’d been born on January 1, 1900, and was gearing up to celebrate her one hundredth birthday. “This might be of interest to you . . .” she’d said, after announcing that Madeleine Lamontagne, the rich and implacable businesswoman, was on the verge of being stretchered out of the skyscraper that bore her name.