Jacob felt his heart race. What a cow. He turned but couldn’t leave. He opened the gate and walked up the little path and knocked on the door, gently at first, then sharply, three times. The door opened slightly. “What do you want? We live here now. Go away.”
What did he want?
“What about my tomato?”
She pushed the door shut in his face. He banged on it with his fist, trampled her best cucumber plant, and held the gate open until the puppies ran away.
When Jacob described the woman, all Sarah said was: “Frau Schubert. The cleaner.”
There was no return tram so they walked home. After fifteen minutes of strained silence, with Leimersdorf well behind them, Sarah said quietly, “Jacob?”
“Yes?”
“You know that couple, the people walking up the lane near my house? When we stopped.”
“Yes?
“Remember the woman?”
“No. Why?”
“She was wearing my mother’s coat.”
* * *
When they reached home it was dark. That’s when Jacob found the sheet of paper under the door, read the few lines of poor German, and handed it to Sarah. “It’s for you.”
It was from Captain Monahan, the chaplain. “I came to find you,” it read. “I waited thirty minutes. Please come to the church in the morning, I have something important to tell you.”
Sarah slept poorly that night, thinking about her family. Wondering what happened to them. Well, that wasn’t new. But what about the chaplain? What could he want? Jacob thought it was about a job. Maybe someone needed a maid? An American officer? In a grand house? When she had told the chaplain she was looking for work she hadn’t told him that she had studied bookkeeping. She should have, but anyway, that was so long ago, she hardly remembered any of it. She’d liked it, though. She should carry on with it, as soon as she could. Jacob said the U.S. army base was growing by the day, he knew that from the soldiers he guided at the castle. The Amis had everything, every possible comfort, but what they didn’t have were Germans they could trust. Jews should get preference. It was obvious, Jacob said. First, we suffered most, so morally they should help us, and second, at least they know we weren’t Nazis.
Yes, it must be about work, they agreed. Or maybe he wants help in something? The Amis had collected tons of clothes, maybe they needed volunteers to distribute them, and as she had already been given clothes, maybe they would want her to help?
What could it be? What was so important that the chaplain himself had come to their room, and even waited half an hour? Maybe he wanted to give her a gold ring? The Nazis had stolen gold wedding rings from the Jews and the Americans had discovered cases of them, thousands of wedding bands, and were giving them to women who had lost theirs. A gold ring? You think? No, Jacob said, the note says he wants to tell you something, not give you something.
Jacob made tea to calm Sarah and she lay back against the wall, sipping from her cup. Soon it began to tilt. Jacob took the cup from her, and she wriggled down with a sigh and closed her eyes, and a few moments later her breathing became gentle and deep and even and finally she was asleep.
Jacob stood staring out the window, looking at nothing, until he found himself following the black shadows of the night clouds moving across the top of the dark building opposite. I wonder what’s happening in my house, he thought. I should go visit Dr. Berger. I’m going to make a claim to get it back. It’s ours. Or rather, mine. It’s stolen property. I’ll ask the Americans what to do. So far they think we’re all the same: “Germans, all same, all nix gut.” But that will change soon.
No sign of the Rat yet. Jacob drained his glass of water. He’ll come. Everyone goes home. One day. Where else would you go when the war ends? When the camps shut down. You’ll come home. And I’ll find you. He had been waiting at Lookout Point for an hour or two every day. Whenever the owners left the hotel he had gone inside and looked it over. Adolf was slow, to put it kindly, and would never remember him. In his ponderous voice he told Jacob that he worked from seven thirty in the morning to six in the evening.
He checked the dining room, the little bar with all the silly hunting trophies, looked at rooms, checked out the bathrooms, which smelled, and all the while an idea was forming, the outline of a plan. What to do when the Rat creeps back to his hole.
As the first light turned the rooftops gray, Jacob eased the blanket up and slipped in next to Sarah, who shifted to make room. He watched Sarah sleeping, the blanket rising and falling, tracing her curves, her bare shoulder by his chin. His thoughts winding down: Lucky she didn’t go to her house. One day I’ll go back and sort out that woman. He chuckled. Glad I ruined her cucumbers. I hope the puppies got lost. I hope the chaplain has good news, Sarah needs it.
He kissed her hair and fell asleep.
* * *
The room was bathed in light when Sarah yawned and rubbed her eyes and remembered. She jumped up, threw water at her face, brushed her teeth, and eased the door shut, not to awaken Jacob. Clutching her coat to her throat, she hurried to the church. In case she would go straight to work somewhere, she wore her good clothes: a burgundy pleated skirt with a white blouse and a double string of what may or may not have been genuine pearls, that Jacob had obtained. Over this, a long gray woolen coat, and a mauve beret. She shrugged off a twinge of guilt at wearing confiscated clothes and bartered jewelry, loot from the defeated. Well, I’d happily wear my own clothes, she told herself, if the newly defeated hadn’t stolen them. She still didn’t like Jacob’s justification, that by exploiting the Germans’ misery he was simply correcting the wrongs they had done to him—not that it would ever be possible. She had told him, two wrongs don’t make a right.
He had laughed, said no, but it puts food on the table. A lot. He had several hundred dollars already, much of it in tens and twenties, which made it easier to hide.
Sarah stopped outside the church and paused to collect her breath. She adjusted her beret, smoothed down her collar, patted her coat, crossed her fingers, and knocked on the door of the anteroom facing the street. She waited. No answer. She knocked again, and still nothing. She tried the heavy metal door handle. It didn’t turn.
Sarah looked around. He isn’t here. She had rushed for nothing. She thought, I could have been sleeping right now. Now what? A man carrying a heavy bundle pushed by her. People were setting up stands, opening boxes, placing colorful religious trinkets and bottles of village wine and jars of jam on tables, bustling and shuffling around, and Sarah stood among them, desolate. I’ll have to wait, she thought. At that moment a U.S. army jeep drew up, and Captain Monahan stepped out.
The driver backed the jeep under an awning while the chaplain strode toward Sarah, his hand outstretched. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said, “have you been waiting long?”
“No, not at all, I just arrived,” Sarah said. She seemed even slighter than usual next to the bulk of the captain, in his army greatcoat.
“Please come in,” he said, unlocking the door and taking off his coat as he spoke. He took Sarah’s coat and hung it up.
“Coffee, tea, apple juice?”
“Apple juice?”
“Why, surprised?”
“I used to love apple juice. It’s just that I haven’t seen any for so long.”
“Well, this is your lucky…” He stopped himself. “Here, take as much as you like.” He filled a mug and left the carton next to it. “All yours,” he said.
Sarah sipped and smiled, and sipped again and then took a long slug. “Mmmmm…”
Captain Monahan shuffled some papers and opened and closed a file as if he were looking for something. His brow was furrowed and he frowned, as if he had mislaid an important document. “Have you lost something?” Sarah asked, looking around.
“No, no, I have everything right here. Would you like some more juice?” He stood to reach for the carton but Sarah said, “That’s fine, thank you, that’s enough for now.”
“T
ea? Coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
He sat down, inspected his hands, glanced at Sarah, and said, “Thank you for coming.”
“That’s okay.”
“I went to your room yesterday, I was looking for you.”
“Yes, I know, I saw your note.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Well … there’s something I want, something I need, uh, to tell you.”
Sarah watched him fidget. It didn’t sound like a job.
The chaplain coughed and took some tissues from a drawer. “Sarah, I have received some information from Rabbi Bohmer in Frankfurt that he has asked me to pass on to you. It refers to a report he apparently requested from Berlin.” Sarah noticed a difference in his tone. He had always sounded friendly and informal. Now his voice was deeper. He sounded as if he were delivering a sermon.
“He would have liked to have given this news to you in person, but as he can’t be here he asked me to tell you what he has discovered.”
Sarah sat stiffly with her hands folded in her lap, holding her beret. She was beginning to get the message. A knot was forming in her stomach. She nodded. Yes?
“Well, it’s like this, Sarah.” He cleared his throat. “The occupation authorities in Berlin have obtained the police and hospital records for the local districts and the Germans have kept their usual immaculate records. Everything is in perfect order and cross-referenced according to family names, dates, geographical locations, civil reports, crime categories, and, in the case of the hospitals, causes of death.”
Sarah squeezed her beret into a ball. Captain Monahan could hear her breathing from across the table. Her chest was heaving, her eyes fixed on his. It was unnerving. He took a deep breath and continued. “Sarah, when Rabbi Bohmer asked our people in Berlin to check the records for your husband, Josef Farber…”
“We never really married. We didn’t have time.”
“… we found his name, with his age and official address, in a police file that was closed. Now … I’m sorry to have to tell you … that the file shows that Josef Farber drowned in the Grosser Wannsee lake on…”
Sarah threw her head back, her eyes closed, and she gasped in relief. She beamed with a smile that could have lit up the room. “That’s it? Let me tell you a story,” she began. “Hoppi had a wonderful idea that…”
But Captain Monahan silenced her with a wave. He looked grim. “That isn’t all.” He picked up another sheet of paper.
“The strange thing is,” he went on, looking at the second sheet and then up at Sarah, “that seven months later, on June sixteenth, 1942, in the hospital records of the Charité Hospital, Josef Farber, of the same age and address, is shown to have been admitted suffering from severe head and brain trauma and that the same day he succumbed to his injuries. It seems the drowning must have been some kind of mistake, because in the hospital his body was positively identified by two people. It’s conclusive, I’m afraid. Josef…”
He looked up. Sarah seemed to have shrunk into her chair, she was a crumpled heap. “I’m so sorry,” he said, pushing across the box of tissues, but Sarah’s eyes were dry. She was staring at the floor, her head moving slowly from side to side as if she couldn’t believe it. Instead it was Captain Monahan who needed the tissues. Is there no end to their suffering? he thought. What a sweet and lovely girl. If only he could help her. He wiped his eyes.
Sarah was thinking: So he didn’t even go to Auschwitz, thank God he was spared all that. But all the time I was hiding in Berlin, he was there too. I could have visited him, hidden near him. We could have been together. I could have slept by his grave.
She had always known. But now she knew. “Does it say where he is buried?” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She felt all her energy drain from her.
“No. No, it does not. Sarah, I’m so terribly sorry to have to be the bearer of such news.”
SEVENTEEN
Heidelberg,
May 22, 1945
When Jacob returned from the castle at midday he found her clothes strewn across the floor and Sarah in bed. The room stank. She had thrown up in the sink and left the mess. “Ugh,” he said to himself. “Yech.” He opened the window and left the street door open. He took a piece of paper and wiped all the hard bits from the sink, and scrubbed it with more paper. He worked quietly, trying not to wake her.
Couldn’t have gone so well with the chaplain, he thought. I was right, it must be news about Joe. Or her family. He’d only talked about possible jobs so that she wouldn’t worry. If the chaplain had waited for half an hour he knew it could only have been very good news or very bad news. And there wasn’t much chance of good news. He picked up her clothes and hung up the dress, coat, and blouse. He tried to smooth out the creased beret and stuffed some socks in it to give it shape. A tiny voice came from the bed. “Sorry.”
He sat next to her and stroked her hair. He waited for her to add something, but she didn’t. He cupped her forehead with his hand. “Whoa, you’re hot,” he said. “I think you have a fever, how do you feel?”
He felt her body tense. “I want to be sick.” She rolled to the side and retched over the floor, but nothing came up but spit and bile. She lay back panting, wiping her face with both hands. Jacob held a washing-up rag under the cold water and held it to her forehead and dabbed her cheeks and neck. “I’m sorry, this is all I can find.”
“Thank you.” A feeble Aaiinnkhuu.
“That’s all right. Did you sleep?”
“I tried.”
“When did you get back?”
“Don’t know. What time is it?”
He looked at his watch. “Three twenty.”
“Oh. Head hurts.” Eehhuurrrtss.
“Don’t talk. Try to sleep.”
Sarah slept for the best part of three days. She sat on the toilet with her head leaning against Jacob’s chest. Jacob found the chaplain, who brought a doctor who examined her in her groggy state. “There’s nothing seriously wrong with her, the fever will come down by itself,” the doctor said. “She’s just exhausted, that’s all. After everything she’s been through, the body is just catching up. The more sleep she gets, the better. You must keep her hydrated, though, make her drink lots of water, ten glasses a day at least. The dashing of hope can be debilitating. What about you?” he said to Jacob.
He shrugged. “I feel fine.”
“Huh,” the doctor said. “After three years in Bergen-Belsen, you feel fine?”
“I didn’t have any hope in the first place,” Jacob said.
“Hah, that’s a good one,” the doctor said, “I’ll remember that. Well, if you need me, Captain Monahan knows where to find me, I’m never more than an hour away.” He glanced at Sarah snoring in the bed. “And don’t worry, she’s a strong young woman.”
“Thank you doctor, and thank you very much, Chaplain. Also for the chocolate. I’ll keep it for Sarah.”
“I doubt it, from what she told me.” They laughed.
Days and nights were as one. Sarah slept curled like a fetus until she would suddenly stretch and moan and throw her hands out as if calling for help. She would lie on her back and abruptly toss herself to the side and mutter, groaning and talking to herself. Jacob made out the odd words: Stop it; come back; Hoppi. Several times she shouted “No!” and her whole body twitched. She slept best when curled on her left side, facing the wall. In that position her breaths were long and even, not short and fast, as if she were panting. Then Jacob would lie next to her on the dank sheet, hugging her from behind, but mostly he slept on the floor wrapped in a sheet.
Whenever he could, and that was when Sarah was at her most restless, he would pull her up and hold a glass of water to her lips. Sometimes she gulped it, other times he had to push the rim between her lips and tilt her head back and pour in the water. Some would dribble down her chest, and he dabbed her dry so that she wouldn’t lie in a cold damp pool.
Frau Braunschweig knocked several times a day, bustling in with cleanin
g rags and advice and twice, until Jacob asked her firmly to desist, with pots of foul thin gruel. She called it meat soup: “Good for you.” There was more meat in the soup in Bergen-Belsen. He’d said to her, “I wouldn’t like to deprive your family of your food.” And she’d said, as he expected, “Oh, it’s all right, I made this especially for you.”
It was never quite clear to Jacob. Was she concerned about the health of a sick girl or was she worried disease would seep through her walls? She kept her distance from Sarah, looking at her as if assessing a lettuce in the market, standing by the door or walking in a loop to the bathroom to hang up the towels she found on the floor. Once she washed out a couple of rags and commented on the weak water flow. “We’ll have more water soon, they said so. Hot water too, the boiler’s back up in a day or two. Things are looking up.”
On the first day, Sarah had turned a waxy yellow and when she opened her eyes they were dull like stone. Jacob had tried to ask her how she felt, what was wrong, what had happened, and in a few barely lucid moments, that first night before the doctor came, he had been able to exchange some words with her. “Hoppi,” she said, as if that was all he needed to know.
It was. He understood that even though she had known he was dead, had lost hope, still, there must have been a ray, a final glimmer, that had not yet been extinguished, like the very last pink rim of the sun before it finally sinks over the horizon.
We all live with delusion, he thought; it is our best weapon of survival. If we don’t delude ourselves about ourselves, how can we live with ourselves? In the middle of one night she told him what she knew, as she squeezed his hand, and once said, “Hold me,” and he did, even though she was hot and clammy and smelled of musk.
On the second day, he had spent six hours searching and bartering until he found a reasonable set of sheets in a shop. It would have been easier if Frau Braunschweig had given him some but she shook her head, she didn’t have any spares.
Jacob gave Sarah weak tea and helped her to the bathroom, where she sat on the toilet, and once, instead of supporting her, he spread her feet on the floor and left her to slump forward with her head on her knees. He stripped the bed of the sodden sheets and threw them into a corner, and as he turned the mattress over, Maxie came to him. He wished he had been able to care for him like this. Maxie was sick most of the time, he became so frail. Yet instead of calling for a doctor they had to hide him from the Rat. And here I am, in my private room, complaining about Frau Braunschweig’s meat soup and that it took me six hours to find some sheets. How quickly we get spoiled. In Bergen-Belsen half the people had fever and disease and slept in the dust on the floor, and if they complained they were kicked and beaten. He sighed. Oh, Maxie, I tried to wipe your brow but I didn’t have any water.
Jacob's Oath: A Novel Page 14