A Good German

by Joseph Kanon

  “A moment,” she said, waiting until Lena was in the other room. “I don’t like to say. What will be. It’s not my place.”

  “What is it?”

  “Her cards are not good. You cannot hide everything with hearts.

  Some trouble. I tell you this because I see your cards mixed with hers. If you are the protector, protect her.“

  For a second, flabbergasted, Jake didn’t know whether to laugh or be furious. Was this how she got them all to come back, time after time, some worrying trick? Thoughts that go bump in the night. A hausfrau with a waiting room full of anxious widows.

  “Maybe she’ll meet a handsome stranger instead. I’ll bet you see a lot of those in the cards.”

  She smiled weakly. “Yes, it’s true. I know what you think.” She glanced toward the other room. “Well, what’s the harm?” She turned to him again. “But who’s to say? Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes the cards surprise even me.”

  “Fine. I’ll keep an eye out-looking both ways.”

  “As you wish,” she said, dismissing him by turning her back.

  “What did she want?” Lena said at the door.

  “Nothing. Some American cigarettes.”

  They started down the stairs, Lena quiet.

  “Well, there goes fifty marks,” Jake said.

  “But she knew things,” Lena said. “How did she know?”

  “What things?”

  “What did she mean-close to death, a woman?”

  “Who knows? More mumbo-jumbo.”

  “No, I saw you look at her. It meant something to you. Tell me.” She stopped at the doorway, away from the glare of the street.

  “Remember the girl in Gelferstrasse? At the billet? She was killed the other day. An accident. I was standing next to her, so I thought she meant that. That’s all.”

  “An accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. It was just an accident.”

  “Frau Hinkel didn’t think so.”

  “Well, what does she know?”

  “She knew about the children,” Lena said, looking down.

  “Two.”

  “Yes, two. My Russian child. How could she know that?” She looked away, upset. “A mother’s cards. And I killed it. No hearts for that one.”

  “Come on, Lena.” He put his hand to her chin and lifted it. “It’s all foolishness. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know. It was just the child. I don’t like to think about that. To kill a child.”

  “You didn’t. It’s not the same thing.”

  “It feels the same. Sometimes I dream about it, you know? That it’s grown. A boy.”

  “Stop,” Jake said, smoothing her hair.

  She nodded into his hand. “I know. Only the future.” She raised her head, as if she were physically pushing the mood away, and took his hand in hers, tracing the palm with her finger. “And that’s me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Such a line. In a man,” she said, doing Frau Hinkel’s voice.

  Jake smiled. “They have to get something right or people won’t come. Now, how about the bath?”

  She turned his hand over to see his wristwatch. “Oh, but look. Now it’s late. I’m sorry.” She leaned up and kissed him, a peck. “I won’t be long. And what will you do?” she said as they started for the square.

  “I’m going to find us a new place to stay.”

  “Why? Hannelore’s not so bad.”

  “I just think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why?” She stopped. “There’s something else you’re not telling me.”

  “I don’t want you to be bait anymore.”

  “What about Emil?”

  “Hannelore’s still there, if he comes.”

  She looked up at him. “You mean you don’t think he’s coming. Tell me.”

  “I think it’s possible the Russians have him.”

  “No, I won’t believe that,” she said, so quickly that Jake looked over at her, disturbed. Two lines.

  “I said it’s possible. The man who got him out of Kransberg had Russian money. I think he was selling information-where Emil was. I don’t want them getting to you.”

  “Russians,” she said to herself. “They want me?”

  “They want Emil. You’re his wife.”

  “They think I would go with them? Never.”

  “They don’t know that.” They started again across the square, where the women were still sorting bricks. “It’s just a precaution.” She looked up at their building, standing whole in the stretch of damage. “It’s not safe anymore? I always felt safe there. All during the war, I knew it would be all right.“

  “It’s still safe. I just want something safer.”

  “The protector,” Lena said wryly. “So she was right.”

  “Come on, get in,” he said, swinging up into the jeep.

  She glanced again at the building, then climbed in, waiting for him to start the motor. “Safe. At the hospital they wanted me to be a nun.

  Wear the robes, you know? ‘Put this on, you’ll be safe,’ they said. But

  I wasn’t.“

  Pastor Fleischman had lost whatever flesh he’d had-rail thin, with an Adam’s apple jutting out over his white collar. He was waiting in front of Anhalter Station with a handcart, so that in his clerical suit he looked, oddly, like a porter.

  “Lena. I was getting worried. See what I found.” He pointed to the cart. “Oh, but a car—” He looked eagerly at the jeep.

  Lena turned to Jake, embarrassed. “You wouldn’t mind? I don’t like to ask-I know it’s not permitted. But they’re so tired after the train. It’s such a long way to walk. You’ll help?”

  “No problem,” he said to the pastor, then extended his hand and introduced himself. “How many are you expecting?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps twenty. It’s very kind.”

  “We’ll have to take them in shifts, then,” Jake said, but the pastor merely nodded, unconcerned with details, as if the Lord would multiply the jeep, like the loaves and the fishes.

  They waited on the crowded platform, open to the sky through a rib cage of twisted girders. Fleischman had brought another woman to help, and while she and Lena talked, Jake leaned back against a pillar, smoking and watching the crowd. People sitting around in clumps, dispirited, holding on to rucksacks and bags, the usual station clamor slowed to a kind of listless stupor. A pack of teenage boys, feral, looking for something to snatch. A Russian soldier wandering up and down, probably after a girl. Tired women. Everything ordinary, what passed for peace. He remembered his going-away party, the platform alive with champagne and crisp uniforms, Renate winking, getting away with something.

  “How is it you speak German?” Fleischman asked, something polite to pass the time.

  “I used to live in Berlin.”

  “Ah. Do you know Texas?”

  “Texas?”

  “Well, forgive me. An American. Of course, it’s a large country. There’s a church, you see. Fredericksburg, Texas. A Lutheran church, so I think maybe German people once. They’ve offered to take some of the children. Of course, it’s a chance for them. A future. But to send them so far, after everything-I don’t know. How do I select?”

  “How many do they want?”

  “Five. They can take five.” He sighed. “Now we send our children. Well, God will take care of them.”

  Just as he did here, Jake thought, looking at the scorched wall.

  “They’re orphans?”

  Fleischman nodded. “From the Sudeten. The parents were killed during the expulsion. Then Silesia. Now here. Tomorrow, who knows? Cowboys.”

  “I’m sure they’re good people, if they offered.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. It’s the selection. How do I select?”

  He moved away, not expecting an answer, before Jake could say anything. Names in a hat. Outside, the light was fading. People were sti
ll milling aimlessly. The train was now an hour late.

  “I’m sorry,” Lena said. “I didn’t know. Do you want to leave?”

  “No, I’m fine. Here, sit. Get some rest.” He sank to the bottom of the pillar, pulling her down with him, her head against his shoulder.

  “It’s boring for you.”

  “No, gives me time to think.”

  But what he thought about, his mind drifting in the half wakeful-ness of waiting, was the cards, eyes facing in two directions. Deception. Nonsense. He wished he had a crossword puzzle, where one clue led to another, rational. A man gets on a plane, one across. With no baggage but a piece of information, the one thing you didn’t have to carry. Worth money. Russian. So information to a Russian. In Potsdam. Where he’s dead by nightfall. How did he spend the rest of the day? Not looking for Emil. But neither was the Russian at Professor Brandt’s. A possibility, Gunther had said, they already know where he is. But then who wanted Tully dead? Not the paymaster, presumably, or why pay in the first place? Maybe he just got in the way. Whose?

  His head dropped onto his chest, nudging his eyes open. For a second he wondered if he was really awake. The station had grown black, dotted with harsh little pools of light from a row of bare bulbs strung between the pillars, a dream landscape where things crept in the dark. Lena was still leaning against him, breathing softly, safe. He closed his eyes. You couldn’t solve a crossword without the key. No matter which way he worked it, the central piece was always Emil, who knew where the columns met. Without him, it was just tea leaves, the chance arrangement of cards. Sometimes they surprise even me. But people heard what they wanted to hear.

  The shriek of the train whistle woke everybody. People scrambled to their feet, the dim rails growing brighter as the engine headlight inched its way toward the platform, as if the weight were too much for the engine to pull. People covered the roofs of the cars and hung along the sides, perched on running boards or just holding on to whatever piece of metal was available, like the trains he’d seen in Egypt, bursting with fellaheen. A few boxcars with feet dangling from the open sliding doors. Everyone worn and stiff, so that when they dropped onto the platform they moved slowly, awkward with cramps. A hiss, finally, of exhausted steam, and a clang of brakes. Now the platform crowd moved forward with their bundles, shoving to get on even before the train had emptied. In the confusion, Pastor Fleischman was running back and forth, trying to locate his charges. He waved Lena over. Frau Schaller, the other helper, was already lifting children off the train.

  Their heads had been shaved for delousing, skeletal. Short pants, legs like sticks, slips of paper hanging on strings around their necks as makeshift IDs, faces dazed. As people pushed around them, they stood fixed, blinking. A few had dark blotches on their skin.

  “Look at that. Have they been beaten?” Jake said.

  “No, it’s the edema. From no food. Any sore will bruise.”

  Pastor Fleischman began loading the smaller ones into the handcart while the others looked on blankly, huddled together. No luggage. A little girl with mucus crusted under her nose. Another story Collier’s would never run-who had really lost the war.

  Jake leaned over to help with the loading, reaching for one of the younger boys, but the child reared back, screaming, “ Nein! Nein!” Some of the platform crowd turned in alarm. Lena stepped between them, bent down, and spoke softly to the boy. She looked back over her shoulder at Jake.

  “It’s the uniform. He’s afraid of soldiers. Say something in German.”

  “I only want to help,” Jake said to him. “But you can go with the lady if you like.”

  The boy stared at him, then hid behind Lena.

  “It’s like this sometimes,” she said, apologetic. “Any uniform.”

  Jake turned to another child. “Are you afraid of me?”

  “No. Kurt’s afraid. He’s young. See how he wet himself?” Then he pointed to Jake’s pocket. “Do you have chocolate?”

  “Not today. I’m sorry. I’ll bring you some tomorrow.”

  The boy looked down-too long away to imagine.

  Frau Schaller had opened a bag and was handing out chunks of bread, which the children held to their chests as they ate. They began moving down the platform, Pastor Fleischman pulling the cart, the others straggling behind, Lena and Frau Schaller herding from the rear. The older children were looking around, eyes wide. Not the Berlin they’d heard about all their lives, Ku’damm lights and leafy boulevards. Instead, swarms of refugees and fire-blackened walls and, through the arches, dark mounds of brick. But the grown-ups were reacting in the same way, literally staggering through the doors. Now that they were here, where did they go? Jake thought of the weary DPs in the Tiergarten that first day, just moving.

  They managed to squeeze the youngest group into the jeep, Lena holding the boy who’d wet himself. The nursery was in a church in Schoneberg, and before they were halfway there the children had begun to nod off, back in the rocking motion of the train. No sense of where they were, the streets a maze of moonlit ruins. What about the people who hadn’t been met? Jake remembered walking out of Tempelhof that day, as confused as the refugees tonight, getting lost in the streets on the way to Hallesches Tor. And he knew Berlin. But of course they had been met, Breimer bundled into his official car, Liz and Jake piling in with Ron, everyone taken care of. Except Tully. How was it possible? A hasty trip, as if he’d been summoned, Brian thought. Left to find his way through the debris, someone who didn’t know Berlin? He must have been met. Berlin sprawled. Potsdam was miles away. No taxis here, Ron had said. Certainly not to Potsdam. Someone in the crowd at Tempelhof. He thought of Liz’s picture of Ron, a fuzzy background of uniforms. Why couldn’t she have taken one of Tully, made everything easier? He must have been there somewhere, one of the blurs in the doorway. While Jake had been staring across the street at rubble, missing it. Take another look. Maybe it was there, the connection. No one just arrived in Berlin, except refugees from Silesia.

  The church basement had been fitted out with a few cots and rows of mattresses scavenged from bomb sites. In one corner an old wood-stove was heating soup. The room was bare-no crayoned drawings or cutouts, no piles of toys. As he watched Lena settle the children, he saw for the first time how exhausting the work must be, keeping them busy with imaginary games. Kurt still clung to her, burying his head whenever Jake caught his eye, but the others raced for the stove. “I’d better get the rest before the soup goes,” Jake said, relieved to have an excuse to get out.

  The return trip took longer. Fleischman insisted on bringing the cart and hanging it over the back with his body wedged against it for support, so that each bump in the road threatened to dislodge it with a crash. They seemed to move by inches, as slow as the train. At the church, it finally did fall, then needed a heave to turn it upright. “Thank you. It’s for the wood, you see. Otherwise, the stove—” Jake imagined him working his way through the rubble in his white collar, picking up splintered pieces of furniture.

  They had to carry the sleeping children in, dead weight, even the thinnest of them heavy. When he got to the basement doorway, a boy’s head against his chest, Lena looked up and smiled, the same unguarded welcome as at Frau Hinkel’s, but softer now, as if they’d already been to bed and were holding each other.

  The soup was watery cabbage thickened by a few chunks of potato, but the children finished all of it and sprawled on the mattresses, waiting for sleep. A line for the one toilet, some squabbling, refereed by an exhausted Fleischman. Lena washing faces with a damp cloth. An endless night. The girl with the mucus was crying, comforted by Frau Schaller stroking her hair.

  “What will happen to them?” Jake asked Fleischman.

  “The DP camp in Teltowerdamm. It’s not bad-there’s food, at least. But still, you know, a camp. We try to find places. Sometimes people are willing, for the extra rations. But of course it’s difficult. So many.”

  The few children still awake were given books, the old
bedtime ritual, Lena and Frau Schaller reading to them in murmurs. Jake picked one up. A children’s picture book of Bible stories, left over from Sunday school. His German could manage that. He sat down with the chocolate eater and opened the book.

  “Moses,” the boy said, showing off.

  “Yes.”

  He read a little, but the boy seemed more interested in the picture, content just to sit next to him and gaze. Egypt, exactly the way it still was, everyone’s first imaginary landscape-the blue river, bullrushes, a boy on a donkey turning a waterwheel, date palms in a thin strip of green, then brown desert running to the top of the page. In the picture, women had come down to the water’s edge to rescue the floating wicker basket, excited, in a huddle, just the way they had pulled Tully out in Potsdam. Drifting toward shore.

  But Moses was supposed to be found, set into the current toward a better future. Tully had been flung in to disappear. How? Thrown from the bridge leading to town? Dragged in until the water took him? Dead weight, a grown man, much heavier than an emaciated child, a struggle for someone. Why bother at all? Why not just leave him where he’d fallen? What was another body in Berlin, where the rubble was still full of them?

  Jake looked at the picture again, the excited women. Because Tully wasn’t meant to be found. Jake tried to think what this meant. Not enough to get rid of him; he had to vanish. First simply AWOL, then missing, a deserter, then finally irretrievable, a file nobody would follow up. Nothing to investigate, permanently out of the way, every trace, even the dog tags, supposedly at the bottom of the Jungfernsee with him. But the riding boots had slipped off, not held by laces, and he’d floated, carried by the water and the wind until a Russian soldier had fished him out, like Pharaoh’s daughter. Where he wasn’t supposed to be found.

  He looked up to find Lena watching him, her face drawn, so tired her eyes seemed weak, almost brimming. The boy had fallen asleep against his shoulder.

  “We can go. Inge will stay with them.”

  Jake moved the boy gently onto the mattress and covered him.

  Pastor Fleischman thanked him as he walked them to the door, a formal courtesy. “About the climate? It’s hot there. So perhaps I should send the healthiest.” He sighed. “How can I select?”