The Dutch Wife

by Ellen Keith

  Luciano stared at the crisp uniform in front of him. The officer waved at the guard who had accompanied Luciano to the toilets. “Take him to find some decent clothes.”

  The guard brought Luciano to fetch his hood from the photography lab. Gabriel looked up as they entered, a stack of files in his hands, but pretended to be busy as the hood fell back over Luciano’s head.

  As they started up the staircase, Luciano tried to breathe through his mouth. The hood hadn’t been washed since his arrival, and the stink of it made him nauseated. They climbed to the third floor, the level of La Capucha, but instead of turning left toward the cells, they went right up a small set of stairs. A door clanged right behind them and then they descended a few steps. The guard pulled off Luciano’s hood.

  “Choose something.”

  Luciano looked around in shock. The room overflowed with furniture: chairs, nightstands, sofas, lamps, a gilded mirror, ornate hat stands, framed paintings of the Andes, a four-clawed umbrella holder—it was as if someone had run a rake across an entire city block and collected all the contents of the houses. In the centre, amid everything else, sat two giant mounds of clothing. While the guard watched, Luciano approached the closest pile. It dwarfed him, stretching almost twice his height and at least three metres wide at the base. Polo shirts, sports jackets, worn blue jeans, a red sundress with white flowers, a cable-knit sweater, platform shoes, a necktie wrapped around a suede boot. He felt the weight of the clothes on his chest and inhaled the faint smell of sweat and mixed perfumes.

  The guard shifted. “Hurry up.”

  Luciano reached his cuffed hands into the pile. The clothes shifted as he tugged at the sleeve of a checked shirt, and something fell into his hands along with it. A baby bonnet, a soft lemon-yellow. As he held it, he spotted the matching shoes, with soles no longer than his thumb and laces still tied in perfect bows. He dropped the bonnet, blinking hard to keep himself in check, and started looking for a pair of pants. He stepped around to the other side of the mound and grabbed the first pair that looked his size.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  MARIJKE

  APRIL 9, 1945

  BUCHENWALD

  GROANS AND WHIMPERS, THE SMELL OF ROT AND feces, and amid it all, something sterile and cold. My vision crept back, and a minute passed before the blurred shapes found their edges. I was surrounded by the dying. Around me stood tiers of bunks, men stacked like loaves in an oven, sometimes two or three to a bed. They clung to their thin blankets and gingham sheets as they murmured or stared into space. Figures in white coats wandered around but ignored those who cried out for help. The infirmary was a long, wooden block with windows every four or five metres, but these did little to brighten it up. I lay on a cot in the centre of the hall, the only female and one of few with a heavy blanket.

  I sat up with a nagging thirst, but dizziness hit and forced me back down. The blanket smothered me with its heat, so I tried to tug it off. The last thing I remembered was Bruno, the mud on his polished boots as he pulled at my clothes, but how much time had passed since then? In place of my skirt and blouse, a long shift covered my body. I slipped a hand beneath the blanket and checked between my legs. Not a twinge of pain.

  A doctor with a clipboard entered the infirmary blocks, stooping in front of a bed where a leg dangled to the ground. He lowered his stethoscope to the man’s heart before scribbling a note on the clipboard and gesturing with his thumb. Two prisoners came up behind him, dragged the corpse off the bunk and tossed it by the door. By the time the doctor reached the end of the hall, there were three piles, each five bodies high. Karl’s stories came back to me: the attempts to develop a typhus vaccine, to cure homosexuality, using patients as test subjects. I pulled the blanket around me. The motion caught the doctor’s attention, and he approached. A tall, thin man with a thick moustache that curled upward. His feet stuck to the floor as he walked, the wood covered in a pinkish layer of fluid. “And she awakens,” he said.

  I eased myself onto my elbows. “What am I doing here?”

  “Do you recall anything?”

  “Not very much.”

  “You need rest.”

  He left before I could ask anything else. A few flies started to hover around the piles of bodies. I shuddered, wishing I were back in the brothel, listening to the girls’ idle chatter or the clink of their coffee cups as they ate breakfast.

  One bed over, an old man’s groans grew into sobs as he called for anyone and everyone to save him: his mother—probably long dead—the Lord, some woman named Francesca. I lay back, counting the ceiling boards above me in an attempt to ignore him. A split in the wood began in a patch of light by the window and ran down into the shadow. I debated whether Karl knew what had happened, whether he’d shown up to find an empty koberzimmer or had forgotten, distracted by lager and playing cards.

  Another prisoner came round with a vat of soup, pushed on a gurney with a squeaky wheel. He stopped in front of each bed to dole out a portion. When he passed me mine, I turned up my nose: clear broth with just a few chunks of potatoes. Ravensbrück all over again. Then I noticed the hollowness of his cheeks as he smiled sadly. I bowed my head and thanked him for the soup before he moved on.

  A nurse walked by when I was two spoonfuls in and halted at my bed. “No, no. You’re on a special diet.” She whisked away my bowl, and I sat bitterly, certain she’d robbed me of a meal. Ten minutes later, she returned with a small tray that she placed on my lap. “Someone must be watching out for you.”

  Milk, bread with jam and a slice of cheese. I took greedy bites before noticing the stares around me. I shoved one piece of bread to the side and, when the matron wasn’t looking, ripped it into two chunks that I passed to the men beside me.

  The afternoon crumbled away. The hard mattress hurt my breasts, forcing me to sleep on my back. When I awoke, the stacks of bodies had disappeared. I could guess what had happened to them. Corpses were carted to the crematorium, gold yanked from their mouths and the bodies tossed into the ovens like firewood. Over the months, Buchenwald’s secrets had poured out onto the beds of the brothel.

  The nurse came by with a tin cup and pointed to the corner of the room, where a pair of buckets served as latrines. “Bring it back half full.”

  I wobbled as I got up, a rush to my head. She put her arm around my waist and guided me to the corner before leaving me in privacy. I squatted in full view and struggled back to bed without help. My eyelids felt heavy and sleep found me again.

  I woke up when someone cleared her throat. The nurse stood at my bed, holding out my dinner. At the other end of the hall, that prisoner wove through the rows with his pot of soup, but she offered a bowl of stew, with chunks of meat amid the potatoes. Maybe Wilhelmina or Bertha had arranged it, ensuring I got well enough to return to work. More likely it was Karl. Whenever heavy boots crossed the floor, I perked up, but it was always the same pockmarked guard. Each time he entered the hospital wing, the medical staff swarmed him, their voices buzzing. I caught snippets of their conversation—“advancing . . . evacuation . . . Dachau”—but it left me confused. Who were they evacuating, themselves or prisoners?

  The wails of the other patients died down as dusk swept over the hospital wing. The nurses gathered in a side room, smoke from their cigarettes floating into the infirmary. That bastard was probably doing the same, lounging in his villa with a bottle of brandy, not a single concern.

  But when I fell asleep, I had a dream about a life with him, an estate in Munich, Sunday dinners with his parents—the table adorned with roast beef marinated in vinegar, red cabbage and raspberry custard—automobile rides and a little boy playing fetch with Axel and Faust.

  In the morning, talking pulled me from my dreams. The female voices sounded like they were coming from the foot of my bed. Feigning sleep, I listened.

  “We’ll need to terminate it.”

  “Is there any point? There’s nothing to send her back to.”

  “Give it a few day
s and she’ll no longer be our responsibility. It’s our own skin we should be worried about. We could end up like her, but working for the Yanks.”

  The starched fabric of their uniforms rustled, and their voices faded away. I wrapped my arms around my belly. The past months, my body had seemed as frail and dormant as a little girl’s. A tear slid down my cheek. How could I carry and bear a child in the middle of a war? And how had I let Karl sneak into the chamber of my dreams, that one sacred spot where Theo and I could still be together? I touched my empty ring finger, aching to know if Theo was still alive, where he was. Questions and worries churned my thoughts: whether he’d heard the guns of the approaching Allies, if he understood the end was upon us. Had he managed to hold on, and could he hold on that little bit longer? My fingers, my toes, my skin, my eyes, my lips, my ears—every part of me pined for him: wishing to hear his quiet laugh, to return to Sundays drinking tea along the canals together, to see his face beside mine at sunrise every morning. To give him a child he would love.

  If the Americans arrived in the coming days, I imagined they would march through the camp gates, bewildered at their discovery. Hopefully enraged. The moffen would flee at the bark of American orders, the loaded guns. Maybe some would try to fight, but they would be no match for the storm of soldiers. The prisoners would spill from the blocks and start running, walking, even limping toward wives and children and home.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  KARL

  APRIL 10, 1945

  BUCHENWALD

  WHEN KARL WAS YOUNG, HIS MOTHER USED TO organize party games in their garden for his birthdays. She would set up obstacles for a relay and drive a short post into the ground. The children had to spin around it with their heads bent to touch the tip. After ten spins, Karl would stand up and race forward to tackle the obstacles, but the grass tilted toward the sky as he stumbled sideways, unable to tell up from down.

  His final day at Buchenwald felt like that. Beginning at six thirty in the morning, he ran around without a second to think of himself or Marijke. That afternoon, he succeeded in evacuating two batches of inmates, a total of 9,280, although this happened well behind schedule. He travelled to the train station in Weimar to oversee their departure. They had to march ten kilometres from the camp, down the same access road that some of them had helped pave years earlier. Many dropped dead in their feeble state, and others had to step over the scattered bodies. Karl’s driver honked to get past the columns of prisoners, but the officers in the automobiles in front started shooting at anyone who failed to keep pace, and the road became stained with bright blood. The evacuees hobbled into the station in clumps, looking as if all their willpower had drained away. As the guards herded them into the cattle cars, Karl tried not to think about the fact that they were sending these men, so close to freedom, to certain death. He imagined Marijke, the way she smiled in her sleep, her girlish, sputtering laughter, and he asked himself whom they were taking these men away from.

  They spent the rest of the day covering their tracks. Karl had the hooks removed from the execution room, the resulting holes filled in and the walls covered with a fresh coat of paint. A group of Jews collected stray corpses, though there were far too many for the crematorium to handle. The more orders he gave, the more conscious he became of the futility of the efforts, and he started to understand how much blood was on his hands. He saw it in the scrap of fabric snagged on the electric fence, in the raven that picked at a rotting finger, in the buckets of ashes they dumped in fresh pits. These images refused to leave his head.

  Between duties, Karl managed to send a message to the hospital to inquire about Marijke. He’d dropped by to check on her again the night before, but had found her fast asleep. The doctor’s latest update was that she was still mostly sleeping, and he would keep her there while he ran some tests. Karl debated what the doctor meant by “tests,” but as he composed a reply, Brandt called on him to produce a number of files.

  The Kommandant kept all of the officers busy well into the night. At midnight, he summoned them to his office for the latest dispatch. Hoffmann stood at the back of the room, as far away from Karl as possible. Karl gritted his teeth and tried to listen to Brandt’s speech, but all he could think of was what he planned to do to Hoffmann once the war ended.

  Brandt rose to survey the group. “I’m afraid we’ve reached the end. The first team of Patton’s Third has reached Grumbach and Wiegleben. Barring some miracle, we have less than twenty-four hours.”

  The beef Karl had eaten for dinner rolled in his stomach. The other officers shifted. Ritter’s knuckles went white from balling up his hands. They waited for Brandt to say more. Brandt took off his cap and rotated it by the brim, exposing the ebb of his grey hair. Over the course of the week, the lines on his face had deepened and the skin on his neck sagged. There was something both dignified and weary about his appearance, but it made Karl doubt whether he would live to have wrinkles himself.

  Ritter piped up. “What’s expected of us, sir?”

  Brandt gave Ritter a sharp look. “What do you think? You’re officers of the Reich as long as you’re still standing.” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair before replacing his hat. “I’m taking orders as much as you are. Hoffmann, Ritter, I need you on duty for the next few hours. The rest of you, get some shut-eye.”

  The officers exited the room single file, but Brandt motioned for Karl to stay. He locked the door and pulled a bottle of brandy from the cabinet under his desk. Karl sat across from him and took two long sips, letting the drink slide down his throat with a satisfying burn. Brandt drank his snifter dry. “What am I supposed to say to our men, Müller? Who knows where we’ll be this time tomorrow.”

  “This is what it comes to, then,” Karl said. “The Reich breaking apart beneath our feet, while the Führer sits back in Berlin and measures the tremors.”

  “The prisoners will overrun us the moment they hear machine-gun fire. We should kill them all now.”

  Karl ran a brandy-soaked finger over the rim of the snifter until it began a high whine that sent him back to the brothel: Marijke teasing out the first notes of a Brahms violin concerto, the cool touch of her feet on his lap. “Maybe we should let them go.”

  “Let those swine terrorize the countryside? Are you daft?”

  “The Americans will do it anyway. If we make the first move, they might go easier on us.”

  “I doubt that. Even if they did, Himmler would try us for treason. There’s no avoiding it, Müller. The Grim Reaper is knocking.” Brandt reached into his breast pocket and pulled out something small, which he slid across the desk. “You’ll need this.”

  A brass vial shaped like a lipstick tube. Karl knew what it contained. Visiting officials had handed out cyanide capsules like party favours at SS events for the past month, although he’d never accepted one. With a nod, he slipped the vial into his pocket. Brandt took off his tunic and latched his thumbs under his suspenders as he leaned back in his chair. “I’m sixty years old, Müller. I’m in no shape to do this myself, but I’m telling you because I like you: get out of here. Run and hide—stay away until this war is long over and they’ve given up on the little fish. Find your way to South America if you can. I’ll give you the contact information for my nephew.”

  Karl’s palms tingled. He rubbed them against his thighs, but that just made them itch. Brandt poured them each another glass of brandy, even though Karl had barely touched his. This one he drank like the Kommandant: in three quick slugs.

  “Just be glad you don’t have a family to think about.” Brandt poured yet another round. “Müller?” He looked concerned. “You seem lost. Can you keep it together?”

  Karl nodded but refused the offer of more brandy. “I’m going to catch a couple hours of sleep. You’ll notify me if any more news comes in, won’t you?”

  INSTEAD of going to sleep, Karl visited the zoo. Koch, the camp’s first Kommandant, had built the small enclosure for his wife and the families of
the SS officers. Although it was near Karl’s office, and he’d sometimes seen monkeys scrambling around their enclosures from behind the barbed wire of the prisoners’ camp, he’d never visited. Even as a child, zoos had made him uneasy. His mother had taken him to the one in Munich in 1916, and he had left the elephant house in tears after seeing the great mammal up close. Such a noble beast, but she had paced her enclosure with a heavy sadness in her eyes.

  The zoo was deserted. A torch guided him through the trees, but he could still see the light from the nearby watchtower. There came a crack like a gunshot and then another. He halted before concluding it was dead branches falling from the trees. Then he heard a sound like a scream and paused to listen, but this was just the monkeys screeching. At the main compound, he stopped. Four brown bears in a rocky pit. His torch hit one of them straight on. The bear squinted and yawned, revealing a string of saliva that bridged its sharp incisors. He took a seat on a nearby boulder. The yawning bear got up and circled the small pit before lying back down, like it wanted to show Karl how much it longed to escape its confines.

  The spotlights of the camp watchtowers passed by in intervals, lighting up the shadows between the bare trees. The rumble of artillery had finally settled down for the night. As Karl fingered the buttons of his tunic, his father came to mind: all the times as a boy Karl had run his hands over his father’s old military uniform, mystified by the thought of him chasing the enemy like a modern-day Achilles. But there was nothing glorious or heroic about what lay within a barbed-wire world.

  He wanted to be at Marijke’s side, desperate to believe in a future together, but his own future risked termination at any hour. Even if she were to run away with him, she faced a life of danger and uncertainty: her hands would be caked in dirt, shredded by brambles, while she shivered through the damp nights. But he couldn’t allow himself a goodbye either, knowing it would be so difficult to leave that he would end up sitting at her side until the Americans marched in and looped a noose around his neck. He had to let her go.