The Last Innocent Hour

by Margot Abbott

  “I had Henry do the blowup to make sure. I thought I might be able to identify him positively. But there’s still a question in my mind. If only he’d taken his cap off.”

  “She waited, didn’t she,” said the colonel, staring at the picture. “She tried to catch him so he could be identified.” He laid the photograph down. “So who is he?”

  “I think he is Christian Robert Mayr,” Sally said.

  “Your husband,” said Colonel Eiger.

  “Yeah,” said Sally, and stood up abruptly, spilling the photographs onto the floor. “Oh, damn!” She bent to pick them up. “That was stupid. Look, one went under the desk. Can you reach it? God, that was stupid.”

  “I’ve got it,” Tim said, kneeling in front of her.

  “I’m sorry to be so clumsy.” She grabbed for the one of her and Christian in the nightclub, not wanting Tim to see it yet.

  “That’s all right,” said Colonel Eiger. He was standing behind his desk.

  Sally and Tim stood up together and he handed her the photographs.

  “Thanks.” She wouldn’t look at him.

  He sat back in his chair. Sally laid out the sequence on the colonel’s desk, adding the enlargement to them. She put the pictures down deliberately, carefully, and then stood back, allowing Colonel Eiger to see them easily.

  “Is it your husband?” he asked gently, looking up at her.

  “Yes, Colonel, I think it is.”

  “Sally,” said Tim, almost in a whisper.

  “It’s okay,” she said, trying to smile, to let him know she was calm. “It doesn’t surprise me either. Not really.” She looked down at the pictures and touched the edge of one with her fingertips. “I wish it did. But Christian—he was a protégé of Heydrich’s. Had worked for him for years. He was already a Hauptsturmfuhrer the last time I saw him, a Captain at twenty-one. It makes sense he would have been sent out to do this, to have this rank.”

  The colonel and Hastings looked at the sequence of three pictures she laid out. Simply, they showed a child being shot out of a tree by an SS officer. In the first, the officer pointed his handgun, his Luger, at the child, visible only as a white blot in the branches of the tree. In the second, the officer wiped his forehead, ignoring the crumpled body of the child several feet away. The child, a boy, was in dark shorts, his thin legs splayed, his arms folded under his body. The last picture of the sequence showed another SS soldier dragging the body away. It was the second photograph that Sally had had enlarged.

  “So, you can identify this bastard,” said the colonel, tapping the middle picture with his knuckle. “Do we know where he was? Is he alive? Did he survive?”

  “I might,” said Sally, “that is, I know how we might find out. You know the German woman I visit occasionally? Tim’s been with me. She’s his sister and she told me he was still alive, although she claims not to have seen him since ’45, just before the end of the war.”

  “When did she tell you this?” Eiger asked.

  “The night we were there,” Sally answered, indicating Tim.

  “But Sally, that was a month ago,” Tim said softly.

  “I didn’t know whether to trust her or not. And we didn’t have these pictures then,” she said, answering his unasked question. “This is so. . .” She stopped for a moment, then spoke briskly. “I have these to help identify him more positively.” She held out the two personal pictures and sat down, carefully smoothing her uniform skirt over her knees.

  Eiger looked at the new pictures, looking from them to Sally and back. He handed them on to Tim. Out of the corner of her eye, Sally watched Tim take the prints. She didn’t want to see his reaction to the nightclub photograph, to the naked longing on her twenty-one-year-old face.

  “Tell us about him,” said the colonel.

  Sally cleared her throat and looked down at her lap. “He was born in 1913, in Berlin,” she began, speaking softly. “Like me,” she added. “He’s a month older than I am. His father was a professor, who died the year Hitler came to power. His mother . . .” Sally stopped, remembering Lisa Mayr. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” she said softly. “Lisa Mayr was very dear to me. She was killed in an air raid. Her daughter told me. I . . . it is difficult to betray her.”

  “Not him?” asked the colonel.

  “Yes, him, even him,” she answered.

  “But look at what he’s done,” said Eiger.

  “It could be him. I’m not sure.”

  “He was, is, SS, Sally,” said Tim.

  Her hands in fists in her lap, Sally spoke in a whisper. “I know. I’ve tried to see him killing that child, but I can’t, and I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid. I don’t want to see him there.” And she lowered her head, letting the coldness spread around her heart, killing all feeling, turning her soul to ice.

  When she raised her head, she was calm again. “As I said, he was one of Heydrich’s protégés. He was ambitious. And he believed in much of the Nazi line. He was idealistic you see, back then. So it is possible that he would, eventually, have come to this, shooting children out of trees.” Her voice was hard and impersonal and she was pleased she could speak so professionally.

  “His sister claims he’s alive?” said Eiger.

  “Yes. I might have even seen him. At any rate, I think Annaliese knows much more.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Eiger asked.

  “I don’t know. There didn’t seem to be anything to tell. It could have been my imagination. There wasn’t anything specific.”

  “You didn’t need to identify him now.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, I did. I do.”

  “Why, Sally?” asked Tim.

  “Mala’s pictures. Those Auschwitz pictures Mavis left me. All the damn pictures! I’ve been looking at pictures for years now. It’s become an avalanche of photographs, all of hell.

  “How could I reconcile the man I knew, the boy I knew, with those Einsatzgruppen pictures you had me identify my first day? I just don’t understand it.

  “But I can’t be silent any longer. I feel guilty. I feel so . . . But I just couldn’t do this alone any longer.”

  “You’re not alone,” murmured Tim and moved toward her. She raised her hand from her lap, stopping him. She could not bear his tenderness at that moment.

  “Is this your family?” Eiger asked, looking at the photograph taken on the lake.

  “Mine and his.”

  “Yes, I recognize you. Is this him?”

  Sally craned her neck to look to where Eiger was pointing. “No, that’s his older brother Kurt. He was an early National Socialist and was killed in the street fighting in ’27. That’s Christian.”

  “A good-looking boy,” said the colonel.

  “Yes. He was.”

  “Looks like an SS recruiting poster.” The colonel had picked up the nightclub photograph. “I can see the attraction.”

  “Why was my loving him not enough?” Sally said quietly. “Isn’t that egotistical of me? But I used to wonder . . . He promised my father he would bring me to the States. I don’t know if he meant it, if he was lying. What he was thinking?

  “I had a powerful rival—what woman has ever been able to win against boots and flags and all that hoopla? When have any of you ever chosen us over those other things—brotherhood, duty, and honor? Honor.

  “Not that we don’t fall for it ourselves. Hell, death is a fascinating thing and a good-looking guy in a uniform—and he was a very handsome man—could be irresistible. But Christian . . . he was also . . . kind and funny and honest. Sweet. He was. He was sweet. Generous too, toward me. Well, all of this is about how he was toward me, how I saw him. How I loved him, even while he wore that uniform.”

  She looked at the enlargement of Mala’s brutal photograph, at the tight mouth and thin face.

  “What happened to him?” she whispered.

  BOOK TWO

  BERLIN, 1933 - 1934

  SNAPSHOTS

  I SPEND MY working days looking at phot
ographs of strangers. It is an uncommon job and one I never would have anticipated. Not that I anticipated any other sort of job in its place. When I was young, I never thought about the future. I think it frightened me. Now I just let it come, knowing there isn’t a lot I can do about it.

  The photographs fascinate me, all of them. I can study them for hours, these captured moments of other people’s lives. I concentrate on the faces, trying to see through that moment when the shutter clicked and all those human thoughts and emotions were frozen forever.

  I don’t like photographs without people in them. Fortunately, there are other departments to study those. I stay with the faces. They are what are important, what I want to see clearly. Which is one reason the Czech girl’s, Mala’s, photograph of the Obersturmbannfuhrer is so upsetting: I can’t see the man’s face. Even if he turns out to be Christian, I would rather be able to see his face. Then, maybe, I could understand why he was in that place, doing those things. Whoever he was.

  Is.

  Does this make any sense at all?

  I have looked at pictures of terrible things, things my mind can still barely encompass. I had such a sheltered life, in spite of the separations, in spite of the sophistication of my parents. Until my mother died, that is. But even after that, when I was put into a boarding school, the sheltering continued.

  Of course, everything changed when I went to Berlin with Daddy in 1933.

  I am reminded of an old Chinese curse I read somewhere: May you live in interesting times. I think of it and laugh. What a curse it is. Interesting times, indeed.

  There is death all around us these days. And although I keep myself apart, I feel guilty. I suppose I feel I must atone for my stupidity as a girl. I wish I didn’t, but I do. I still feel such a fool for having let Heydrich befriend me, for having been so naive, for believing Christian. I look at my hand and hate it because I shook Hitler's hand with it.

  So, studying the pictures, however horrible they are, is my attempt at penance. And understanding. Neither comes easily, of course. Oh, to be honest, I don’t have an inkling of either. I mean, I knew Reinhard Heydrich.

  He was a man who kept things secret. He loved secrets. He also loved power. Did he love National Socialism? I couldn’t tell you. He was one of the administrators of the Final Solution, so he believed in something. But, beyond his own personal, secret power, I couldn’t tell you what that was. I can’t explain him, arranging, organizing all that death, while loving Mozart. It makes no sense.

  I can’t understand why they did the things they did. I could give you reasons, but they don’t suffice. Reason is not at work in this situation.

  If you meet someone who thinks he can explain what happened to us in the last dozen years, hand him one of those pictures the British took at Dachau and ask him to explain it. He can’t. Nobody could.

  I keep looking at the pictures, as terrible as they are. Searching, I guess. A terrible mystery, an awful mystery, took place here on planet Earth and I, like a visitor from Mars, search the artifacts for evidence. I also think, and I’ve never admitted this to anyone, that I have been looking for him.

  It has been at the back of my mind that I might, someday, stumble across a photograph of him grinning at some poor, elderly Jewish man being shaved by SS men half his age. I once had an opportunity to study a photograph of an Einsatzgruppen unit, one of the special squadrons sent to conquer Russia, expressly, to murder as many Jews as possible. They were a tough-looking group of men, a dozen of them, all murderers. I searched the faces, praying he wouldn’t be among them.

  I have learned to read photographs, although I also have learned that they can be deceiving. A picture of a German soldier, in steel helmet and greatcoat, reaching up to take a tiny child from someone’s arms. It seems to be one of those shots of the compassionate soldier. You’ve seen them, the battle-weary man cradling the lost child. Then, one day, I came across the complete photograph of which mine was a detail.

  The arms are those of a woman and she is handing down the child—obviously, from her expression, against her will. She is handing her child into the arms of the enemy. She is on a train, packed into a train, on her way to a camp.

  I don’t know why the soldier is taking the baby until I look more closely. Ah. The child is dead. Once I realize that, I can see it in the baby’s limpness. And what I took for compassion is merely efficiency, taking out the bodies before the train leaves. Still, there is a terrible tenderness in the soldier’s hands, reaching up to take the dead child. Things are seldom black and white, not even in black-and-white photographs.

  I brought my photos of the two families, of the nightclub, to Berlin with me probably for the same reason people carried their snapshots onto the cattle cars—as talismans, and for company. We keep albums to mark the passing of the years, our personal signposts, but it’s the pictures we carry in our wallets or set up in empty hotel rooms that show whom or what we really care about.

  I don’t often look at my own pictures, having spent so much time trying to put the memories behind me. Because that’s what photographs are, of course, memories made concrete. Then there are the memories for which we have no photographs. These memory-snaps flash into our minds when we least expect them. We carry them with us everywhere. Even, I imagine, into a gas chamber.

  Taking out the family photograph I brought with me to Berlin, I study it, searching the faces, as I do the photographs of strangers, trying to see beyond the gray images. I stop, realizing that I am looking for a shadow. I imagine I can see the future in our faces, the death that is so close to us. I close my eyes, trying to remember, trying to be back there, back on the porch of the Mayrs’ house on the shore of Lake Sebastian. I should be dispassionate about this, if I really want to learn from this photograph, but I can’t.

  I could never be dispassionate about the Mayrs. Any of them. They all touched me, from my envy of the sisters’ pretty white dresses and the comfort of Lisa’s generous, almost impersonal mothering to all I felt about Christian.

  Everyone I have ever truly cared for, except perhaps for Graziella, the nursemaid who cared for me in Rome, is in this picture. Eddie. My parents.

  I like the way my parents look in this photograph. I wish, though, that I could see my father’s eyes. I wish, oh, how I wish, that I could talk to him.

  He had, Eddie told me once, spied for the United States during the Great War. I didn’t know if I believed it, but now I search my father’s regular features, trying to see if his was the face of a spy. I shake my head. There’s no way of knowing, except that he was a secret man. At least, to his children.

  My mother’s inheritance provided my parents with their comfortable, independent way of life, and I never heard my father discuss whether living off his wife that way bothered him. But that summer, I learned later, he was thinking seriously of taking up an appointment offered to him by the State Department. They wanted to send him to Vienna. He went, alone, to find a house, leaving the rest of us in Gramercy Park, and my mother and I followed later. Eddie was left behind in prep school.

  My parents were a handsome couple, and although they do not touch each other in the photograph, they seem connected to each other. They fit together in their light, sophisticated clothing, their postures relaxed. I am pleased at this observation because I have come to the conclusion that my parents cared more about each other than they did about Eddie and me. Not a bad thing, this fascination they had for each other, but I do think Eddie and I sometimes felt like guests in our family. Well-treated guests, but guests all the same.

  In front of everyone, on the lower step, sitting next to me, is Christian, his elbows on his skinny knees. He is my age, almost exactly, only a month older, and my best friend.

  Christian. Narrow face, straight eyebrows, long nose, and a shock of hair falling across his forehead. His face is as familiar to me as my brother’s. I try to look at him as a stranger would, trying to see him without feelings, but I can’t.

  I do see ho
w skinny he was, and I remember that, for most of our childhood, he was shorter than I was. He looks unsmilingly at the camera. He wasn’t always so serious. He looks very small, sitting so compactly on the bottom step, separated somehow from the rest of his family.

  I try to see past the adult, who stands so much more clearly in my memory, to this boy. I try to forget the picture from Czechoslovakia that may or may not be him. It is hard; the later memory gets in the way.

  We were such good friends, our interests and abilities meshing, balancing. We loved to read and study the sky at night. He knew all the constellations, and I, the myths about them. He was crazy for cowboys and I had a mother who had actually grown up on a ranch in Texas. I was nuts about the movies and he had to admit that Douglas Fairbanks could fence well. I would push him into adventures and he would follow without shame and then find the way to extricate us from trouble. We shared apples, books, jokes, and each other’s languages and a passion for ancient Egypt. We fought and made up and stood up for each other against our elder brothers.

  I never doubted that we would be friends forever. But I never thought we would grow older or that the world would change so.

  The summer afternoon’s light is gentle on us and the old photograph gives our skin a luminescence, a softness that threatens to break my heart as I look at us. We were all so young, so stupidly, blessedly secure in our world. I put the photograph down and lay my hand on it. It is precious. I feel its slickness under my hand.

  We lost it, didn’t we? All that golden summer innocence. But then, nothing lasts. I’ve learned that lesson. Nothing lasts, except, sometimes, by some strange fluke, things. Like photographs. And I remember the room of photographs, the box in my office, the wall of them in the conference room.