The Good at Heart

by Ursula Werner

  Lara looked up, beaming. “Oh, Oma, her life is magical! Of course, it has its difficulties too, mostly because of the war, and fewer parties than there should be, but all in all, I would say it’s just glorious.”

  “Well, I’ll be very curious to read about it when you’re done,” Edith said. “If I may.”

  “Of course, Oma!” Lara looked overjoyed at the idea of sharing her love for Elizabeth. “I’ll bring you the magazine when I’ve finished reading it.” Whatever her occasional adolescent faults, Edith thought, kissing Lara on her forehead, she was still a lovely child, polite and generous. And in her fondness for reading, so much like Franz. One person’s plovers were another’s princesses.

  Edith could hear Oskar’s low murmur and the occasional giggle from Sofia or Rosie as she climbed the stairs. She went into her bedroom, leaving the door open so that she could continue listening to those happy bedtime sounds, notes of peace and contentment, a kind of lullaby.

  How her body ached. A fitting companion to her mind, she thought, for inside her head, the thoughts were spinning around so quickly it was hard for her to grasp any one of them in order to make sense of it. The Führer’s visit tomorrow. A nightmare. How could Oskar have permitted it? He knew how she felt about that man. Did her husband not have any choice? She would ask him about it when he came to bed. Not that it really mattered, because what was done was done, but it might open the door for a larger discussion about Oskar’s relationship with the Führer. Edith put on her nightgown and lay down in bed to wait for her husband. At least she had finally seen Erich again, two days in a row. It was healing, having him back in her world. Edith was grateful that she felt absolutely no remnant of anger toward him. Five years ago, she had been furious. She had come downstairs from the makeshift nursery in their apartment in Berlin, and there Erich was, standing in the living room. He was wearing his cavalry uniform, his favorite finery, and gripping his riding gloves in his left hand. Marina had stood next to him showing off the newly born Rosie. Erich’s strong right hand, its large bare fingers splayed and slightly curved, tenderly cradled Rosie’s tiny head, and his face radiated wonder and awe.

  In that moment, Edith had known nothing but rage and hurt. The war had not yet taught her that it was critically important to forgive sooner rather than later. Erich had looked up dreamily when she entered the room, and that had infuriated her even more, that this man should experience any moment of rapture in her home, when he had, in her mind, undermined its foundation. She had walked briskly over to Erich and slapped him hard. He hadn’t said a word, but looked at Edith with grief-stricken eyes. He let go of the baby and put his gloves back on. Then he bent gently to kiss Rosie’s head, turned, and walked out the door. So much pain in that moment, Edith thought. So much pain since then. But perhaps the only way to forgiveness was through pain. If so, war was a great teacher of forgiveness. Though for some people, the pain it inflicted was insurmountable. Edith thought of Franz. Certainly that man had experienced far more pain in his lifetime than he ever deserved. Unfortunately, he was likely to experience even more. Edith settled into her pillow and closed her eyes. She pulled the down comforter more tightly around her body. She was not cold, but she wanted its protection. A swaddling of feathers, to hold her until Oskar came to bed.

  There he was, tall, golden-haired, reaching for her hand, holding her tightly as they waltzed over the smoothly polished floor and he swirled her through the music, through the spinning chandelier lights, the walls reeling and the ceiling sparkling with light and then dark and then darker, the lights exploding into thousands of shards, and still Oskar gripped her hand, not letting go as she spun around and around through the bullets and bombs and clods of dirt and mud heaving up, and shovels digging down and down, dropping a coffin so small, and she followed it, felt herself falling into its grave, a bottomless hole . . . but no, his hand pulled her back, fingers entwining around hers and pulling her up toward his body. His arms, thick, muscular, sure, reaching over her waist and under her shoulder. Oskar’s body, settling against her back, closing the distance between them. His form enveloping her completely, keeping them together. She settled into a deep sleep.

  – Twenty-Three –

  A quiet click at the back garden gate broke the hypnotic gurgle of the fountain. From her perch on the bench, Marina had a clear view of the approach to the arbor over the back lawn. Looking past the rose-draped trellis arch that informally marked the garden’s lower entrance, she saw Erich striding his way toward the arbor, a sense of purpose and urgency in each step. His white shirt reflected just enough of the fading evening light that she could see his face: mouth set in a firm line, eyes serious, slightly sad.

  Although Marina was partially concealed by the hazelnuts, Erich walked directly to her. She stood up at his approach and, wordlessly, he wrapped her into him. Marina could barely breathe, but she did not move, pressed against Erich’s chest and feeling the steady thud of his heart against her cheekbone. “You found me,” she whispered into the crisp cotton of his shirt, “even though I was hiding in the bushes.”

  “You can’t hide from me,” Erich said. He kissed Marina’s hair. “I always know where you are.”

  Marina looked up at him, careful not to dislodge his arms. “No, you don’t,” she said. “Much as I’d like to believe you.”

  “Ah, such a lack of faith in one so young,” Erich said. He released her and took a step back. “And so beautiful.”

  Marina blushed and frowned at the same time. She loved the way Erich looked at her: like a cinematographer trying to capture his subject on film. But she wasn’t accustomed to compliments about her beauty in her daily world, so she changed the subject. “You and faith,” she admonished. “Faith is a luxury of peacetime. There is no place for it in war.”

  “On the contrary,” Erich insisted, “faith is a necessity of war.” His tone was serious. “But I’d rather discuss your undeniable, infinite beauty. How is it that you grow more beautiful as you age, while the rest of us wither over time?”

  “If I am beautiful to you, you are besotted.” Marina smiled.

  “Besotted with love for you? Yes, to that I will always plead guilty,” Erich said. He placed his forefinger on her mouth to stop further protests, then drew it gently down her chin and under her jawbone to tip her head back slightly for a kiss. Erich’s lips were soft and warm, and Marina felt, not for the first time, her entire being melting into his mouth and tongue. It was a blessing to dissolve like this, however briefly, to let go of the anxieties and fears that inhabited her, to relinquish the feeling of wariness and dread that had hung over her since the war began. It was a gift to be able to inhabit this moment fully, without thoughts of before or after. It was a relief, just for a short time, to trust that things would be all right without her. Being with Erich was as close as she came to faith.

  They sat down on the bench, and Marina intertwined her fingers with his. Twenty minutes earlier, she’d had so many questions, about his sudden departure from lunch, the uneasiness she saw in his eyes. But now, as they sat together in silence, listening to the fountain, she wanted nothing more than to extend this moment of peace and comfort for as long as possible. The war was there, right there outside the gate, sending bullets across the yard and coming for tea in her living room tomorrow, but it was not in this garden right now, and she was not going to invite it in. Marina laid her head against Erich’s shoulder and looked at the statue of Daphne. The lower half of her bluish-gray marble body was already partially transformed into the tree trunk dictated by myth, and the water for the fountain ran from those roots. The upper half of her body, still human, was twisted clockwise, and the statue had been placed in such a manner that Daphne’s head was looking back toward the house.

  “A look of regret,” Oskar had said the day the statue was installed in the garden. “It makes perfect sense. The moment Daphne realized she would spend eternity as a laurel tree, of course she regretted her decision, especially when the alterna
tive was one night with a handsome god.” Edith had given Oskar a gentle slap on the back of the head and admonished him for making light of Daphne’s principles. But there was more than regret in that look, Marina thought. There was anguish. Daphne had been torn, not just between two loves, for Apollo and for her father, but between the passion she felt and her sense of responsibility and loyalty, her dedication to virtue and family. Marina understood the anguish of loving two men simultaneously, in different ways. Hearts were expansive organs, capable of holding more than she had imagined. And Daphne’s position here, looking back to the house beyond the garden, reminded Marina of the torment she felt when she abandoned her own heart, every time she saw Erich and had to let him go again. And the torment she might feel if she made a different choice than the one she was living now.

  Six years ago, Marina had come very close to choosing Erich. At the time, she had been married to Franz for seven years. They had two children together. She wouldn’t have said that her marriage was unhappy. She had never thought about its happiness, preoccupied as she was with the births around her: first of Lara and Sofia, and then of the Third Reich. For seven years, the demands of those creatures consumed her. She fulfilled their needs and lost sight of her own. On her twenty-fourth birthday, because Franz had been called to military training and could not celebrate with her, Erich invited Marina to go horseback riding with him. Edith encouraged her to go, insisting that Marina take a break from the girls, get some exercise and fresh country air. They went to Ludwigsfelde. Erich took Arrakis, his majestic Arabian; she chose Sakina, a gentle bay partial to peppermints. They rode bareback. Marina felt the smooth movement of the mare’s back and shoulder muscles against her legs, and the unexpected early-spring sun on her face. She was amazed by the chocolate ganache birthday torte Erich had managed to pack into a saddlebag. When they returned their horses to the barn, Erich had looked directly at her and rubbed a trace of ganache from the corner of her mouth. Offered his finger to her lips. Leaned in to kiss her. It happened quickly and slowly. Time metamorphosed into something unpredictable. In that afternoon in the Ludwigsfelde barn with Erich, and in the stolen afternoons that followed over the next few months, Marina experienced the expansion of time. Each hour they lay together in the hayloft was not an hour. Each hour chafed insistently against the strictures of its sixty-minute barrier, while they took off their clothes and took each other in. Erich’s hands traced her skin, dipped into her curves, sculpted every inch of her body, for days, not minutes. And the shifts in her breathing took weeks, not seconds: first slow and deep, drawing in oxygen, letting her lungs fill completely, and holding it as if she might never breathe again, then short, quick, sudden gulps, grasping at air again and again, while time pulsed and pounded and throbbed against its limits until at last it exploded its dimensional boundary, leaving her and Erich floating, suspended.

  Eventually, however, the boundaries of time always reestablished themselves. One such afternoon, lying on the woolen blanket Erich had spread over the hay, Marina looked out the hayloft window at the sky and saw the sunlight waning, a signal that it was time to return home. She wasn’t ready to leave, to return to the relative asceticism of her marriage. She loved Franz, but she didn’t long for him with hunger and desire. Flush with the experience of acting on a love she had long buried without knowing it, Marina wasn’t ready to give it up. Not now. But could she leave Franz? How could she not? “I will leave him.” Perhaps saying it aloud would make it feel more real, more plausible.

  Erich was propped on one elbow beside her, picking bits of hay out of her hair. “Think carefully, Marina,” he cautioned. “God knows, I would love to have you in my life for good. But it would be complicated. Your parents. Your children. I know how you love your children. Leaving Franz might mean losing Lara and Sofia.” Erich tossed the hay he had gathered over the edge of the loft. “If you were to divorce . . . The law doesn’t favor the adulteress.”

  Marina cringed at Erich’s choice of words, though she knew it was deliberate. “But Franz will understand. He understands true love,” Marina answered, feeling desperate. “He knows it from firsthand experience.”

  “He knows it by loving you,” Erich reminded her. “And his love for you has a tenacious hold on his heart. I have seen the way he looks at you. He won’t let you go easily. He’ll make you choose.”

  “But I have chosen,” Marina said. “I will choose. I choose you. I’m sorry he will be hurt, I really am, but—”

  “No,” Erich interrupted. He turned her face toward him so that she couldn’t avoid the truth of what he was saying. “The choice won’t be between him and me. It will be between them and me. Franz, Lara, Sofia. Oskar. Maybe even Edith. Marina, if you do this, you must do it knowingly. You must be clear about who you’d be giving up.”

  In the end, the choice was taken from Marina before she could make it. First, she learned she was pregnant with Rosie. Then, several months after Rosie was born, their country was back at war. The outbreak of war preempted everything. The Führer’s indefatigable ego, his insatiable desire for power and land, forced Germans to return to a mentality of belligerence that so many had gladly cast off twenty years earlier. Marina’s instinct, like that of her fellow citizens, was to keep her family close. In the end, with the onset of war, with both Erich and Franz away fighting, there was no choice but to stay with her family.

  It had been five years since then. And the fact was that now the Allies had invaded Normandy, and French troops were marching around southern Germany somewhere. Wasn’t it possible that the war would be over soon? Here in the arbor, Marina felt that possibility. She was ready to reconsider.

  Erich’s shoulder pressed against her cheek as he took a deep breath. “It is so peaceful here,” he said, holding her hands more tightly.

  “I imagine there is quite a hub of activity down the road,” Marina said, “in preparation for tomorrow evening’s concert. Will you be going? Are you invited?”

  “I’m not sure I would use the word ‘invited,’ but yes, I am going. I have been assigned to the Führer’s protective detail.”

  Something in Erich’s tone made Marina look up at his face. She didn’t know how to interpret the look she saw there, some combination of pensiveness and agitation. “Is there a reason to expect trouble?”

  “No more than usual,” he said quickly. “You know enough about the Führer, Marina, to know that he considers himself under threat at all times. And I suppose one has to admit that his paranoia about being the target of countless assassins is partially justified, in light of the attempts that have been made on his life.”

  Marina thought back to the previous fall, when the Führer’s chauffeur discovered a bomb in the engine of a car scheduled to take the Führer from Munich to Fürchtesgaden. Erich was to have been a passenger in that vehicle. Had the chauffeur not investigated a strange noise coming from the fan belt as he was retrieving the car from the garage, they would all have been blown to bits before they reached the Austrian border. She closed her eyes and nodded. “He is lucky to have such men as you looking out for his safety,” she said.

  “We aren’t the ones keeping him safe, not in his mind,” Erich corrected her. “According to the Führer, he is the anointed one. He is under the direct watch of the Divine.”

  Marina laughed aloud at this inconsistency. “I thought the man didn’t believe in God! Doesn’t he dismiss religion as the crutch of the weak and infirm? And if his life is divinely protected, why worry about assassins? Won’t they all be hit by lightning bolts before they get to him?”

  To her surprise, Erich didn’t even smile at this. He appeared to be weighed down by something heavier. “Marina,” he began. “I must tell you, though I know I have told you countless times before, how I feel. My heart is yours entirely. If anything were to happen to me . . .”

  “Nothing will happen to you.” Marina put her hand on his mouth to cut him off. She refused to consider a world without him.

  Erich no
dded slowly. “Of course not. I am indestructible.” He hesitated and closed his eyes. “If only we had peace.”

  Perhaps he was seeing peace in his mind’s eye. Perhaps he could still remember what that looked like. Marina couldn’t. She occasionally tried to envision peacetime—and her future life after Franz’s return—but her efforts were unsatisfying. She found that when she imagined her future, all she saw was what she consciously forced upon a blank canvas: a picture of Edith; visions of Lara, Sofia, and Rosie; rooms in a house. Even these were only fleeting shadows. Perhaps the future was too uncertain to reveal itself. Perhaps its uncertainty was a product of her own indecision. In this moment, incited possibly by Erich’s words, or by Daphne’s look of regret, or by the way the fireflies blinked intermittently but inevitably, offering tiny beacons of light against the descending night curtain, Marina realized that whatever shape her future took, she wanted Erich in it. “Erich, what will you do when the war is over?”

  Erich sighed deeply. Marina saw him blinking back tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. She reached up with the back of her hand and gently wiped them aside.

  “The moment we are done with this war, my love, I will return to Ludwigsfelde, and I will ride Arrakis for hours and hours until we are both exhausted and fall down in a lush green meadow.” He smiled at the thought. “And then I will return to Niebiosa Podlaski.”