Keeper of the Mill

by Mary Anne Kelly

  Evangelika shrugged. “I’ll wait till she knows what it feels like behind bars. Let her be good and grateful to me when I tell them. Thinks she’ll get rid of me, does she!”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “She did it. She did that very thing. She was up there with Hans before he died. She could have told the Polizei she’d been with him. Maybe she saw someone. Who knows?”

  “You do! You know, don’t you!” Claire leaned up against her. Evangelika sat, flump, down on one of the chairs. Claire realized she was bullying an old woman; she sat down too. Evangelika was older than her mother. As old as Iris. She thought again of Iris’s wartime story. She’d been out with friends the night her family had been arrested. Claire remembered Iris’s description of that night on Ammersee. A girl had kept her out later than her curfew. A flighty girl. Effi. Effi?

  “You’re Effi!” she cried.

  Evangelika smiled. “Long time no one called me that.”

  “You knew Iris von Lillienfeld, didn’t you?”

  “Took you long enough.” Evangelika got up and hauled the bundles of white asparagus from the pantry. She sat across from Claire. She handed her a knife. “Long as you are sitting doing nothing, you can peel. You know the way?”

  “Isolde taught me,” Claire said. “Not too much and not too little.”

  “That’s right. I have eighteen bunches for tonight. You want to get busy. So. She told you about Effi, did she? Probably mentioned what a good-lookin’ hoofer I was, eh?”

  Claire didn’t say no. They sat across from each other and peeled. “You’re Effi,” Claire said again. “The girl who kept Iris von Lillienfeld from going home the night her family was arrested.”

  “Ja, ja. I was Effi then. Those were different times,” Evangelika said. “You wouldn’t believe what it was like then. How naive people like Iris von Lillienfeld were. Her whole family. None of them could believe the Germans would hurt them. They believed themselves to be Germans. Their families had lived in Berlin for more than a hundred years. You couldn’t blame them. I was different. I grew up on a farm outside Diessen. You learn quick on a farm. You know who is capable of what.” The words came tumbling out. It was as though she’d been waiting a long time to be rid of them.

  “The von Lillienfelds were like children,” she said. “They thought the people who worked for them liked them. Loved them. They thought animals were for petting. For pets. Not survival. Iris had a cat. Muschi. She used to sit and talk to that cat like it was a person. Oooh, she loved that cat. When I came to Saint Hildegard’s, I brought it with me, for her.” Here she lit a cigarette, an H-B. She blew the smoke out rigorously as if to demonstrate how ridiculous this idea had been. She put her cigarette in the ashtray and let it fume as she continued to work. She smelled of garlic and the raw, uncooked lamb.

  “You see, Iris wrote to me while she was at Saint Hildegard’s. She knew I had connections, men. She knew I knew some men in the SS. She thought I could help her find her parents. Thought it was my doing that she hadn’t been arrested. That was accidental, but I didn’t tell her that. She said she had ‘means’ and could pay. I couldn’t help. Who could help? They’d stick you in the camps if you even sympathized; you couldn’t even greet them on the street. They’d take you down to the Zollfahndungsstelle for questioning if you had anything to do with them. But then all the men left the farms. It was only women doing the work. Diessen was hard hit. Not as bad as later on. This was still early; this was in ’38. Later it got worse, of course. Then they had to break up the tar from the streets to boil up. For heat, you know. This was just the start of the bad times. All the elderly men were dying. Not the women. All the old men you saw had a stick, and at the end of the stick was a nail on the bottom for to pick up the cigarette butts. But the young people still had fun. I didn’t smoke, but if we were in a club and a soldier would offer me a cigarette, I always took it. Slipped it into my bra. I would give it to my father later. I used to carry a little bottle, like a jar. I would tip the drinks I got into the bottle when no one was looking. Put a little whisky in for my mother. But what I mean to say is they weren’t all bad, those days. We were young. We had a lot of fun. You know. It got worse. But in ’38 it was still all right.

  “I know what you’re thinking. How could we enjoy ourselves with what was going on with the Jews? But ask yourself, isn’t it the same now? Aren’t you having fun while the world is suffering?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it? You only know a small part. And yet you know so much more. With television. The world is smaller now.”

  Sadly, they both shook their heads.

  “My father had a kiln,” Evangelika continued. “You know, to bake the pottery. I don’t know what happened. He used some other fuel because he couldn’t get the normal stuff, and it blew up. Burned down the whole house. The barn. All the buildings. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but it was November tenth. All the fire brigades were lined up by the synagogues. That was the day the synagogues were burned, and the firemen had orders to stand guard in case the fires spread to Aryan buildings. Well. We were out in the countryside. No one would leave their posts. We burned to the ground. November tenth. Kristallnacht. There was nowhere left, so I wrote to Iris in care of Adam. I lied. I told her I might be able to help. She sent me a stone.”

  “A diamond.”

  “Ja, ja, ein Brilliant. A diamond. I got to Saint Hildegard’s. Iris was away. They told me she was away, in Paris. Looking for her parents. Adam was such a handsome, big man. What did he care for a farm girl from Diessen, like me, looking for work? Everyone was looking for work.

  “But I had that letter from Iris promising me a place to stay. And I had Iris’s cat, Muschi. I thought I was smart. He, Adam, thought I was her friend. He was so good to me because of that. His mother honored Iris’s promise. She gave me a home. Work. Later, I had my parents here.

  “I’d brought this girl with me, Ursula. She was in trouble. Something wrong with her. One heard stories in Diessen about her father and her, you know. But no one ever knew for sure. I remember her very well, too well. She was witty, funny. She made me laugh. She made a mess of things for me, though.”

  “How was that?”

  “She was man-crazy. There was no one here but Adam. No young men but him. Had her go with Adam von Grünwald, she did. Then tried to tell him she was pregnant with his child. That was all lies. Adam was truly in love with Iris. Only reason he slept with his wife was to get an heir for the Mill.” Evangelika looked furtively left and right. “Once they had Hans, he never slept with Kunigunde again.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “She told me. Kunigunde told me. Shame. She was a sweet woman. Swine dumb. But sweet. She didn’t deserve that life.”

  “She had her grandchildren, though,” Claire reminded her.

  Evangelika snorted. “I had her grandchildren. They were more mine than hers. She wasn’t capable. You wouldn’t notice, though, because I took care of everything. Did everything. Amazing how normal you can make someone look when nothing is expected of them. She was good at her roses. Used to sit out there with Stella Gabriella. It was Imogene, the mother, who filled Stella’s head with nonsense. She’s the one we can thank for Stella’s ‘vocation.’ Nothing wrong with that one’s brain, though. That child. She’s bright as a shiny new Pfennig. I used to take her home with me to Diessen when she was just a very little girl. She used to love to go to the tin market and the pottery fair each May. That’s how she started out. Was me who got her started up, nobody else. Nothing really wrong with Cosimo either. It’s more nerves with him. Not stupidity. He just can’t cope with the world. The way it is. He can’t take pressure. And it’s no wonder. His mother, Imogene, always belittled him, used to say he was her punishment. He was so dark, you see. So foreign to her. She hated that. He was a regular rough-and-tumble little boy. She used to make him kneel with her and say the rosary. Over and over. Poor child.”

  “But
back to Adam for a moment, please. I’m confused. If Adam was so in love with Iris, why would he sleep with another woman?”

  “Oh, that’s about the easiest answer. Same reason as everyone else. Drinking. Lonely. Despair. You know, I still remember Ursula dressing up one night in a black hat when Iris was gone. I thought it was so strange, you know, I remember I was frightened. I thought it was Iris von Lillienfeld come back. That upstart Ursula tried everything to get Adam. Nothing worked. He really loved her. He really loved his Iris.”

  Claire hung her head. She thought of Iris, old and all alone. No children. “But why didn’t Adam look for Iris? Why didn’t they get together after the war? Why did he marry this … Kunigunde? And I thought Iris went to Paris. Why would she have come back when it was so dangerous?”

  “That’s just it, you see. Iris never really went to Paris to look for her parents.”

  Claire was shocked. “Well, where was she?”

  Evangelika snorted. “That was a funny thing. You know, when we first came to Saint Hildegard’s, Ursula and I, we were both astonished how happily the cat, Muschi, took to the place. She just raced up the stairs behind the kitchen. It was like she fit right in. We laughed. It hadn’t been easy transporting a surly large cat all that way from the country in nothing more than a covered basket. It was Ursula’s idea to bring it. ‘It’s our ticket,’ she told me, so I did it. Frau von Grünwald, Adam’s mother, didn’t want her at all. They didn’t have surplus to feed another animal, she told us. Oh, she was a grand, haughty woman. If Iris were still here, she told us, it would be different. But now, with her in Paris, why should they take her cat?

  “Ursula, she was a quick thinker, Ursula was. Said off the top of her hat that the cat was a great mouser. ‘An excellent mouser,’ she said. Well, that was all Frau Grünwald had to hear. There had been strange noises in the night, she said. Banging and twisting sounds from the attic. She was sure there were rats in the house. All right, then, she said, the cat could stay. You’d have thought the cat understood. She jumped from my basket and ran up the back stairs to the attic. Oh, we laughed. We would not have laughed if we had known what was to come.

  “One morning, months after I’d first come to live at Saint Hildegard’s, I was shelling the last of the peas in the garden. Right out there on that very bench. It was peaceful, and I had been there so long, making no sound. I guess I was invisible. It was still winter. Snow was everywhere. But in the sun it was hot. Really hot, the way it can get. So I was outside. I heard muffled laughter. Noises. Up in the attic. I thought, look at this, someone is up there. No one was supposed to be at home at all, everyone off to the Viktualienmarkt because it was a Wednesday. I should have gone too, but at the last minute I came back. I have these sinuses. They were acting up. Well, I went carefully up the steps. I brought an iron saucepan with me. You could have knocked me down with a dandelion fluff when I saw what it was! There I was with my pan held high in the air, and when I threw open the door, it was Iris von Lillienfeld and Adam von Grünwald, locked fast in a grip. He was loving her! And she—well, you never get used to some things, growing up on a farm or not—but she was pregnant. And not just a little. I was very shocked, I tell you.”

  “My God! What happened?”

  “Well, they calmed me down and got tidy and then they took me into their confidence. There was nothing else they could do. At that point, even old Frau von Grünwald didn’t know. She was sickly. Always had been. It wasn’t hard to pull the wool over her eyes.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Oh, it’s true.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing happened right away. Things went on as they were. Only now, everything was different for me, see. I was in league with them. I didn’t want to be. You see, I had fallen in love with Adam myself.”

  Claire watched the stringy old woman remember. She found it difficult to imagine her young, but she could see how her heart’s dream had been shattered in that moment. “So what did you do?”

  “What could I do? I helped them. They were so… beautiful. When they came together, they would both sort of light up, you know. Despite all that was going on, they had each other up there.” She nicked her chin in the direction of the stairway to the attic. “They kept each other. She was like his treasure. His obsession. He couldn’t bear to hear of her leaving. Something had to be done, though. Even if they were not thinking straight, I was. I knew when a baby came there would be no more hiding either of them. The child was not far off. I had to find a way to get them away from Munich. It was terrible to think of what would happen to them. And I had another problem. Ursula. She was, as I said, strange. And she was beginning to suspect something. I could feel her watching me. Whenever I would turn a corner, she would be there. She didn’t like Adam talking to me. Whispering. Oh, she didn’t like that at all.”

  Evangelika took a deep breath. “Ursula had ingratiated herself with the old woman, Adam’s mother. She brought her her tea. Washed her hair. That sort of thing. Made herself useful. One night I heard the two of them talking. I was coming down the back stairs from the attic. I wore no shoes, just my old Pantoffeln, so no sound I should make. That’s why they didn’t hear me. Ursula was telling Frau von Grünwald how they got rid of rats on the farm. How they would put poison down. Wrap it in the Konfitüre, the marmalade. Oh, they loved it. They were dead before they knew it. I remember Frau von Grünwald’s enthusiasm. Good Lord, I thought. I hope she doesn’t go putting poison down around here! That’s all we need with Iris’s cat about. Well, not two days later, Iris took sick. Real sick. Vomiting. Loud, horrible retches you could hear throughout the house. She was dying. Ja. Really dying. Poisoned. By accident? I didn’t believe that, not for one moment! Not even then. I know what really happened. Adam’s mother. Frau von Grünwald. Thought she was above the law. She figured one Jew more or less—well, no one was going to imagine it wasn’t suicide. Adam would get over it. She was not going to see her dear son destroyed by a Jew. Oh no. A love affair was one thing. A family quite another. That’s what I think drove her to murder. But killing someone isn’t easy. People don’t just tip over and go to sleep. They agonize. Iris wouldn’t die peacefully. She wouldn’t cooperate, you see.

  “Now, it was past caring if she was discovered. The whole house could hear what was going on. Now, Adam only cared that she should live. And of course it didn’t look like it. Adam wanted the doctor. His mother refused. She acted as if this was the first she knew of Iris in the attic. But of course she must have known. It was she who did the poisoning. Otherwise she wouldn’t have kept refusing to send for the doctor. She said they would arrest the whole house if they knew we were hiding a Jew. She was right, of course. We were all petrified. No one wanted to be sent to the camps. Ursula said get her out of here. Away from the house. That way, if she dies or not, they cannot say we hid her here. ‘Take her to the chapel,’ Ursula said. The mother said if Adam would do that, she would send for the doctor. Adam agreed. He carried her himself, out the Mill and up to the chapel. That little one, you know. Up on the hill.”

  Claire listened, holding on to every word.

  “So the doctor came. I don’t know if it was he who saved her or her own strength and will to live. But, live she did. Barely, at first. The child didn’t make it. He died.”

  “He?”

  “The doctor told her later it had been a boy. She never saw it.”

  Claire felt awful. Iris had had a son and never held it. Oh, the poor, poor thing.

  “So then,” Evangelika went on, “things happened very rapidly. The village began to talk. You couldn’t hold back an entire village from knowing what they knew. We were all frightened. Iris was so sick. She was a liability. Finally, Frau von Grünwald persuaded Adam to get rid of her, or we would all be arrested. I remember it like it was yesterday. Here was this old woman who could barely walk. Adam’s mother. And she came running up the front staircase. Flying, she was. Adam wouldn’t believe old Frau vo
n Grünwald had poisoned his Iris. His mother could do no wrong in his eyes. The mother suggested they pay someone to take her away. Far away. To London. Well. That was not an easy thing. Especially as she was so ill. She would have to be smuggled over land. It would take a lot of money. So. Adam knew a man in Schwenningen, in the Black Forest. It was near the French border. It was a man he could trust. A schoolteacher. It was impossible to trust anyone in the village. Adam had told them Iris was already gone, off to Paris to search for her parents, and now here she was, half dead.

  “The next night, very late, a car pulled up to the Mill. A truck. Like a bakery truck. I watched from the window upstairs. The main guest room, now. There was an argument. Adam did not want Iris to be taken that way, he kept shouting. Frau von Grünwald told him if she didn’t go this way, there was no hope for her. Already there was talk. She would be arrested and sent to the camp if she lived. So Adam let her go the way the schoolteacher planned. They carried her out in the old grandfather clock.”

  Claire swallowed but said nothing. The faucet dripped in the deep porcelain sink.

  “Ja. It was the only way they could think of to get her safely away. They took her out, Adam and the schoolteacher. I put the blankets down in the truck. They put the clock on top. I saw her through the glass. Her eyes. I said, ‘Auf Wiedersehen.’”

  “It’s horrible.” Claire shuddered.

  “Maybe so. But she lived, didn’t she? There were others. Many, many others not so lucky. Somehow, she made her way to England. She had Geld. Money.”

  “But why, then, did Adam marry this Kunigunde? Why didn’t Iris come back after the war?”

  Evangelika stood up. She walked around the kitchen in a circle and then sat back down. “That’s my doing. I wrote to her.”

  “But why? How could you do that?”

  “I will explain.” She lit another cigarette. Then she went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of schnapps. She sat back down. “Adam was arrested. The Nazis wanted the Mill for their own use. It was rumored that Adam was associating with a Jewess. So it was very easy for them to get rid of him. I went to the Zollfahndungsstelle. They let me see him. He was frightened. Not for himself. For his mother. They had arrested her, too. They wanted to make a case against them for harboring Jews. Jews guilty of illegally taking money out of the country. Then they could confiscate the Mill.