by Peter Watson
The song finished and Muhlman held up his hand. “Before we sing again, let’s have some of that French brandy you have tucked away, Reimer. To celebrate.”
While it was being brought out and the glasses readied, he turned back to me, beaming. “I thought … we thought …” He waved his hand across his face. “You know what we thought.”
I nodded and spoke quietly. I did feel quite winded. “I didn’t know the first song. I knew the words to the second but … it was—is—a favorite of my brother’s. For a moment there, you brought him back.”
It was a hammy lie. But they had all been drinking, were separated from their own families and so were inclined to sentimentality. There were morose nods from all around the table.
Then the brandy arrived and the group started drinking what the English call “chasers”—cognac “chased down” with beer. The singing went on for another hour and I joined in as lustily as I could. Or at least I seemed to. In fact, I kept a firm eye on the time and, at the earliest moment I felt it safe to do so, I said, during a convenient lull, “Gentlemen, we are on our honeymoon. Will you excuse us?” I held up my ring finger. “I have a wedding ring—see?”
The singing, not to mention the chasers, ensured that my announcement was greeted with loud cheers and applause. Allie did her best to play the part of the blushing bride and kissed each man good night in turn. She slipped her arm in mine and kissed my shoulder. They all stood and we went upstairs.
Inside the room, I fell onto the bed. Now that I was no longer “on show,” so to speak, the shaking started. My hands, my jaw, the backs of my knees especially, and all sorts of organs inside me, shivered and trembled, wavered as if with a life of their own. I could hear my heart thumping in my ears, going much too fast. Sweat streamed from my scalp and fell in cold trickles to my neck. Muscles trembled where I didn’t know I had muscles.
Allie was in much the same state and neither of us spoke for ages. I had promised her adventure—but not a close shave with the wrong end of Handler’s pistol.
I closed my eyes. The faces of Muhlman and Lammers swam before me in the dark, singing, drinking, leering.
But for me the fear—no, the terror—of the evening was not as bad as the humiliation. Those horrible, disgusting, ridiculous songs! I felt sick—my throat gagged and I had to sit up, choking and retching. It broke the silence between us.
“How did you know the words?” Allie whispered. “I was terrified.”
“That’s why it was so humiliating.” I pulled Allie toward me and put my arms around her, clinging for nourishment. “You see, my brother really is a Nazi. Or was. I despised him. I despised all Nazis. But because of him, because we were in competition all our lives as boys, because I wanted to understand him better, I got to know all about the Party—their arguments, their beliefs, their theories, their slang words—and, yes, their songs. Then, as an interrogator trying to recover looted art, I came across many people who denied that they were, or had been, Nazis. I sometimes found it quite effective to play some of those songs softly in the background. Germans are a sentimental race and it had an insidious effect on some prisoners—the songs, often so certain in their sentiments that Germany was right and bound to win the war, rubbed it in that Germany was losing. After they lost, it worked equally well. Those songs even made some people cry. I couldn’t join in straightaway tonight; I had to wait for the words to come back to me. What a humiliation.”
“But, under the circumstances—”
“I know,” I said quickly. “But it was still hard.”
Allie said nothing more, but kissed me. She understood that there was something corrosive inside me that night, a malignant mood that meant I was not yet ready for lovemaking. She closed my eyes and massaged my temples. She took off my shoes and my socks. She turned me over onto my stomach. She massaged my feet. She unclipped her hair and let it hang down over her face, holding her head so that the hair fell across the undersides of my feet. Slowly she pressed her fingers, through the hair, against my soles. The texture was smooth, cool, yet slightly grainy too. New, unexpected and quite unlike a normal oily massage. Unhurriedly, still swishing her hair back and forth across my feet, I felt her take off her shirt and brassiere. Now, in the most unexpected move of all, she held her breasts to the soles of my feet. She moved them from side to side, then pressed hard.
All my adult life I had been an anti-Nazi. That’s why I had eventually arrived in America, and become a professor of art history there. My two great teachers, Erwin Panofsky and Bernard Berenson, were both Jewish. Panofsky had sent me to Berenson, in Italy, when the political situation had become too uncomfortable for him in Hamburg. I had been glad to get away, relieved to have an excuse to leave a Germany I no longer cared for. But even in Italy I had been too obviously an anti-Fascist and had been escorted to the railroad station and put on a train for Genoa, where I caught the boat for America. By then it was 1938. I did not return to Europe for a number of years. In America I had been content at first to ignore Europe and get on with my work as a professor. But when your brother is a Nazi you can’t ignore evil forever. By the time my naturalization papers came through it was Christmas 1941, Pearl Harbor had been bombed and I enlisted. The Allied invasion of northern France, in 1944, and the advance northward through Italy had given me greater satisfaction than anything else in my life up to that point, my marriage included. To have been part of it was for me, an ex-German, a privilege. To have missed it would have been unthinkable. So, although it was necessary, that night in the mountains, to pretend that I was actually enjoying those offensive songs, I still felt deeply humiliated.
Allie’s massage was relaxing. In other circumstances it would also have been highly erotic—but not that night, not in the mood I was in. Allie sensed it and, before long, I felt her come around to the side of the bed and fumble with my shirt. She was undressing me. Then she got into bed, put her arms around me just above the waist and pressed her body against my back. In that way, like two spoons side by side in a drawer, we fell asleep.
Sleep releases all but the heaviest of my moods, so we were both cheerful enough the next day when we awoke. We got dressed and went downstairs. Everyone else was already up and any doubts that Muhlman or the others might once have felt now seemed to be a thing of the past. There were one or two honeymoon-type jokes and Reimer produced coffee and a little cheese with some bread.
But if the others were relaxed, I was not. My snooping was not yet done.
I had noticed, on our way downstairs, that once again all the bedrooms were closed. There was something they had to hide, even from Nazi sympathizers. Could it be linked in any way to that Worms newspaper with the unusual ad? I was as certain as I could be that it was this group who had left it behind in the other hut. It might be a link between one of them and von Zell. But how could I broach the subject before we left without appearing to pry? I nibbled my cheese slowly.
I thought back to the paper itself and all those classified ads. There was something there I could use, I thought. It might rock the boat and make them suspicious again, after we had gained their confidence, but, on reflection, I thought it worth a try. In any case, I had to make up my mind quickly—we were coming to the end of our breakfast and it might seem curious if we didn’t move off soon. Trying to appear casual, I spoke with my mouth full of cheese.
“Before we leave,” I mumbled. “I wonder if any of you gentlemen, Herr Doktor Lammers, perhaps, or Herr Handler, here, can give me some information. About Worms.”
Muhlman was superb. That I remember. Everyone else—Lammers, Kerschner, Handler, even Reimer, who was just bringing more coffee into the room—stopped what they were doing. They just stopped. Lammers was spooning sugar into his coffee and, as his hand stopped, the sugar spilled on to the table. Kerschner, about to take a bite of cheese, stopped and looked up. I don’t remember what Handler was doing, but I know he stopped whatever it was. Only Muhlman carried on smoothly as before. He had balanced a lump of che
ese on his bread and, when I dropped my bombshell, propelled it neatly into his mouth.
He smiled at me as he chewed. Whether the menace had reappeared in the grin I couldn’t say. As he finished he wiped his lips with the back of his hand—there was no such thing as a paper napkin in the mountains in those days. “I don’t follow you, Dr. Wolff. Why on earth should George or Oskar or indeed any of us know anything about Worms?” He turned his head and, in the most relaxed manner, smiled at them. “Well? George? Oskar?”
They both shook their heads.
Movement had returned to the table as Muhlman had spoken. Lammers was scooping up the sugar he had spilled, Kerschner was chewing his cheese. Handler was busy again with this or that. Muhlman looked back at me, a definite glint of something other than casual friendship in his smile. He didn’t say anything but he didn’t need to. It was again my turn to explain.
I smiled back. “You must know what Worms is famous for, Dr. Muhlman. Wood. Teak especially. Teak floors from Worms are known all over Germany, Alsace, Switzerland—even Vienna.” This is what I had remembered from the newspaper. There had been a big section of ads for timber yards, job ads mainly, as these businesses got going again after the war. And what I said was true up to a point: Worms floors were widely known for being very good. “I am renovating old buildings and the floors in many of them have been very badly damaged, burned from the bombing. Even though the war is over, in Vienna good wood is still hard to come by. Herr Lammers is from Augsberg, you said, and Dr. Handler is from the Mosel—neither is very far from Worms. I thought you might know someone in a timber yard, arrange an introduction perhaps …” I trailed off and refilled my coffee cup from the jug Reimer had now placed on the table. “In business, it’s who you know—not what.”
I couldn’t tell if Muhlman, or the others, were taken in by my explanation, which may have been overelaborate. However, Allie, bless her, once more, came to my rescue. She linked her arm in mine and kissed my shoulder. “Walter!” she hissed loudly. “We are on a honeymoon. Switch off, please. You can be an architect tomorrow, but not today.”
She was masterly, her intervention coming at just the right moment psychologically. Muhlman may not have been entirely convinced by what I had said, and he knew, of course, that I had seen the reaction that the mention of Worms had produced in the others. So he knew that I knew that Worms was, in some mysterious way, special. Which was probably grounds for detaining us. On the other hand, he may have judged that to do anything to Allie or me would inflict more harm than good in calling attention to his group here in the mountains. If I was more than I seemed, then my nonappearance after a day or so would be just as alarming and inconvenient to him and his group as if I went back to wherever I had come from and sent out a larger patrol. If I really was what I seemed, an architect from Vienna, there was no harm in letting me go.
If Muhlman’s group was connected with von Zell, then they were also connected with the conduit of leading Nazi war criminals to South America. Which meant they would almost certainly have intended to move on soon anyway. A group like that was too important to stay in any one place for very long. The safest course for Muhlman now, as far as his treatment of me was concerned, was to make sure that I left soon, and really did leave so that I was not in a position to follow them; and then they would evacuate the hut and disappear into an even more remote region of the mountains.
So my question about Worms wouldn’t kill me, but it did mean that Muhlman and his gang would stay free for a little bit longer than they might have done if I had played things differently. I would alert the military authorities in Berchtesgaden, of course, but it would be largely pointless by then.
I turned to Allie, rubbing my fingers through her hair. “Sorry,” I said. “You’re right. Would you like to stay here this morning and get some sun?”
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a jab of agitation flicker through Muhlman, exactly as I had hoped it would. If my reasoning about him was correct, and he half-suspected me, he would now want to get rid of me—us—as soon as possible. If I pretended we were going to stay, he would be the more ready to see us leave. I wasn’t going to find out why Worms meant so much to them, nor did it look as though I was going to have a chance to poke about their rooms. But it couldn’t be helped. I had gone as far as I could.
Fortunately, Allie was playing her part, though unscripted, to perfection.
“No, Walter, we can’t stay. You are forgetting—we have to pick up the ring.”
Muhlman relaxed and we got to our feet. The others did so, too, and followed us outside into the sun—I had not noticed until then that it was another very beautiful day. I went to retrieve our skis from the shed and Allie said her good-byes. Then I shook hands with the men. Muhlman, on guard to the last, could not let me go without one final dig. “Sorry we couldn’t help you with Worms, Doktor Wolff. But good luck with the renovations. If you run short of ideas, have a look at Hitler’s plans for Linz. They are too good to be wasted.”
I smiled weakly but said nothing and stepped into my skis. He had had the last word and it was probably safer that way.
And that, for the time being, was that. We saw no one else in the mountains and, in the afternoon, descended first on skis and then by cable car to Königsee, a pretty village with trees and a bandstand at the northern end of a lake. We strolled into the town around three o’clock and had just a short wait before a red and yellow train took us back to Berchtesgaden. It was getting dark, past five, as we walked up the dead-end road to Allie’s father’s house.
During the train ride Allie had sat next to me, close by, her arm in mine, watching the lake go by.
Judging the moment just right, I asked her about von Zell. “What sort of man was he?”
“Quiet. Strong. With two parts to him. One part was the efficient Nazi. His briefcase and his room were always incredibly tidy, and he always finished all his outstanding work before going to sleep.” Allie shifted on the seat. “But when you could persuade him to talk about his wife and his son, he was quite different.”
She squeezed my arm and rested her head on my shoulder. “He had a wonderful skin; that I do remember.”
I looked down at her. The lake slipped by outside.
“Only once,” she said softly, in reply to my glance. “Only once. He regretted it, I think.” She squeezed my arm again. “He had invited me out to lunch—father was away—one Saturday. We ate fish and ice cream and red wine. I told him that I didn’t realize he had French habits—red wine with almost everything. But he said he didn’t know France very well. He had been there on his honeymoon, to the Loire. He laughed. The first days of the honeymoon had been spoiled by an electrical storm which had brought on the mosquitoes. Both he and Mrs. von Zell had erupted and been covered with scores of bites. At night they couldn’t make love and they couldn’t sleep: it was very warm, and in any case they were itching and scratching so much. So they had talked. In fact their talking got them thrown out of their hotel since they couldn’t stop laughing at their spotty appearance and kept waking up everyone else. Rudolf loved looking back. After two or three days of putting cool cream on each other’s skin, and yet not being able to make love, they were I think all the more ready when the rashes died down.”
Allie looked up at me. “Telling me that story obviously had an effect on Rudolf. And remember, we had drunk quite a lot of wine. We went back to the house and—just the once. It was lovely, but he wasn’t really unfaithful. He was, I think, thinking of her. I hope you weren’t thinking of anyone, Walter.”
I smiled and shook my head. Then she had slept with her head on my shoulder. Or at least she had pretended to sleep. We had both felt sad, I think, that our adventure was nearly over, and any more words would have been out of place. As the train had rocked and clanged into the station at Berchtesgaden and we got to our feet, she had given my arm one last hug and had kissed my shoulder. We never touched again.
“I won’t come in, Allie,” I said
softly as we reached the house. “I must get to Salzburg tonight.” She nodded.
“But may I ask a favor?”
“Ask it.”
“Those books of sheet music, the ones von Zell left. May I take them?”
“Of course,” she whispered. “You start your lovely car. I’ll fetch them.”
I did as I was told. She reappeared with half a dozen wafer-thin booklets. Printed during wartime, the paper was pathetic and off-white, as if it had been made from scorched trees. She handed them to me with a melancholy smile. “It was an adventure, Walter. A real honeymoon. I shan’t forget it.”
“No. Nor shall I.”
“Will—would you ever come back?”
“No.”
But I held out my fist, cupped upward. In it was the gold ring I always wore on the little finger of my left hand. “This belonged to my father; my mother gave it to him. You could have the size changed. I’m told that Laurin’s here in Berchtesgaden does a good job.”
She frowned. At first I think she thought the gift too personal. But, when I kept my arm outstretched, she suddenly beamed and accepted it. She took it with her, back into the house, without once turning around.
PART TWO
THE LETTERS
CHAPTER THREE
1
I had lied to Allie when I said I had to get back to Salzburg that night. I had to do no such thing. I was very largely my own master, and, up to a point, no one really cared where I was. I had said that because I felt a need to get away from her; the episode was over—it was time to move on. However, after I had been to the office of the military government in Berchtesgaden, to report Muhlman and his cronies, the response was so depressing that, coming so soon after my good-bye to Allie, I suddenly became rather morose and was filled with an urge to return straightaway to the Goldener Hirsch, as if it were home.