by Ryan Graudin
The guards still had the wherewithal to stop her, check for papers. Yael obeyed, holding out Otto Gruber’s passbook, keeping her chin tilted to disguise the fact that she lacked an Adam’s apple. Only a few meters away, the official in the black coat was spluttering into the barrel of a gun.
One more step and she could melt away into Germania’s cityscape, borrow a dozen faces, find Reiniger.
One more step and she would live.
The guard pressed Otto Gruber’s papers back into Yael’s palm. Gestured her forward with a wave.
One more step…
Yael took it.
CHAPTER 55
The truth was in the signal.
The signal was everywhere.
Across the continents, television screens flickered and changed. From Führer’s face to Führer’s face. At first, most viewers couldn’t differentiate what they were seeing from the loop. It was a chair, it was a flag, it was a Führer giving a speech they could recite in their restless sleep.
Then the girl with the gun appeared. Volume knobs cranked from zero to ten. Silence to NOISE. Loud was Heinrich Himmler’s confession. Louder was Luka Löwe’s Victor’s Speech. Loudest, the shot meant to silence him.
The clip played only once. Not everyone saw it.
Not everyone saw it, but everyone heard. News of Adolf Hitler’s death—and the incredible deception surrounding it—spread faster than a wildfire in drought. It tore through air-raid shelters and Wehrmacht units, lighting up the ears of SS and partisans alike. Victor Löwe’s death followed, close as smoke, flushing out any illusions that blood kept them safe.
Momentum shifted. Everything changed.
It wasn’t just the resistance that rose up this time. Loyalist Wehrmacht no longer found themselves bound by the Führereid. Revolutionaries rose out of the population’s woodwork. General Reiniger’s army grew double, triple, tenfold as the remaining National Socialist leadership tore at one another’s throats—shredding themselves apart from the inside. The swastikas of Germania burned and burned until the skies went black and the New Order became a thing of the past.
General Reiniger’s bolstered forces made the push northwest, securing the Luftwaffe airfield and opening supply lines to the North Sea. Ammunition, fuel, heavy machinery, all the troops reborn Britain could spare… all came pouring in, carving out a new kingdom with the capital—reclaimed, renamed Neuberlin—at its core.
Out, out the indigo spread. The red bled away, away.
For months, the fighting raged. Scores more battles. Thousands more lives. Reiniger’s forces hammered the remnants of the National Socialists and the Waffen-SS south until their backs were to the Alps, and there was no more retreat. The last major battle was fought at the base of the mountains. The National Socialists were a wave dashed upon the rocks, and dashed and dashed, until, finally—surrender.
January 5, 1957. A snowy Innsbruck evening. General Erwin Reiniger met with Führer Martin Bormann, a man as ragged as his self-proclaimed title. Pen was put to paper. Bormann’s name was signed in ink.
The war was over.
What now?
PART IV
LAND OF PROMISE
CHAPTER 56
This tattoo session was different. There was a needle, yes, and there was pain (more than enough), and there were memories. Yael sat in the cracked leather chair in the artist’s back closet on Luisen Street. It had been almost a year since she saw the man last, yet he looked so much older. His glasses were too big on his face. There were lines around his cheeks that hadn’t been there before.
He wouldn’t take Yael’s money, even when she thrust two tattoos’ worth of marks at him.
“It’s the least I can do. After what you and the others did… I can sell art again,” he said in a quiet voice as he began prepping the needle. Gathering the ink. “What are two more wolves compared to a new start?”
Two more wolves. That wouldn’t do. Henryka’s memory belonged in the pack, but Luka… Yael’s thoughts filled with a brown jacket and cigarettes. Things Luka Löwe used to set himself apart because he wasn’t like the others. Never like the others.
Luka Löwe—the boy she hated, the boy she loved, the boy she lost—was not a wolf.
“Just one more wolf,” she told the artist. “Then I want a different animal.”
The man’s fingers were a ballad of movement, setting the needle down, picking his sketch pad up. He grabbed a charcoal pencil from behind his ear and brought it to the page in a skillful rendering of Henryka’s wolf. Lines that would cross the skin of Yael’s elbow from the fangs of Vlad’s wolf into…
“What’s the second creature?”
Not a wolf, not a wolf, not a wolf.
Luka had always reminded her of something else. Predatory and proud, lounging across floors and desert sands. Looking at Yael with a dangerous, fierce emotion in his eyes. (Love, she knew now, love that was still clawing her heart raw.) Fighting when it mattered the most.
“A lion,” Yael whispered.
The artist continued drawing—all concentration—his tongue poking out of the corner of his lips. Stroke by stroke, the lion took shape. Big mane, long lope, muscles of power—all conveyed by a collection of elegant lines. The creature would flow seamlessly from Henryka’s wolf into the blank skin of Yael’s left bicep, leaping between the old life and the new.
“Will this do?” The artist held up his sketchbook. Final wolf and only lion.
Yael didn’t trust herself to speak. She nodded and offered out her arm one last time. The tattoo needle hurt like it always did, sliding deep into the layers of her dermis. The artist copied his lines from paper to skin with perfect precision. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Tails, torsos, heads. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Pain with every line. Pain that meant life.
Some hours passed before the needle finally fell silent.
It felt very much like an ending.
The shapes of the wolf and the lion glowed hot as Yael sat up and examined the artist’s work. The wounds were raw, red, exposed, but Yael could see what they were to become. Dozens of delicate, spidery lines connected the memory of Luka Löwe and Henryka to her other ghosts.
Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad, Henryka, Luka.
The living and the dead.
The remembered.
The artist took just as much care in bandaging up the tattoo as he had in making it. The stinging smell of witch hazel wafted through the closet as he wrapped the gauze around Yael’s arm.
“Make sure you change the bandages and clean it regularly,” he instructed her. “It will take time to heal. Just like all the others.”
CHAPTER 57
It was a warm morning—holding more than a few hints of spring, even some strokes of summer to come. Felix rolled his coverall sleeves as high as the auto shop entrance. He was elbow deep in a Volkswagen engine; its grease claimed every available part of his skin—cuticles, life lines, pores—some of it ingrained so deep not even a shower could lift it off. The only truly clean patch was Felix’s right hand. Wound gauze and antibiotics were long gone, replaced by a black fingerless glove. Adele had stitched its last two openings together to cover the whorled scar.
It had taken Felix months to retrain his maimed hand to hold a wrench again, and even then the grip of the three remaining fingers wasn’t what it used to be. His left hand grew stronger out of necessity. He and Adele had to eat, and food prices weren’t kind—two fixed engines to a decent dinner. There’d been several weeks, in the thick of the war, where Felix felt as if hunger pains had flipped his stomach inside out.
It had ended, once the battles moved south and Frankfurt settled back into a routine as normal as any routine could be in the wake of the Third Reich’s destruction. People brought their broken things to Wolfe Auto Shop, and Felix fixed them. There was bread on the table, cheese, too, sometimes. Some rare days, Adele managed to barter their measly marks for meat or eggs.
Felix ate his meal every night wondering if it would be his last.
/>
Yael was alive. He’d seen her on the television—tattoos hidden, unchanged face—flanking General Reiniger while he addressed Neuberlin and Germany proper on their future as a republic. All details of elections and restructuring a parliament were lost to Felix. He watched Yael and knew Miriam’s mercy had only delayed the inevitable.
The wolves were coming. One of these days, they’d show up at Felix’s door, demanding blood for the blood that was taken.
Every time a new customer ducked into the auto shop, every time he heard Adele scuffing her shoes against the doormat, Felix was certain his reckoning was at hand. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t. And it wasn’t. Winter thawed into spring, which flirted with summer.
Felix kept working. Always, the dead leaned over the engines with him. Martin, Mama, Papa. Luka Löwe (he missed the Arschloch, more than he’d ever imagined he could). Henryka and those radio operatives. Anne Weisskopf. Today’s heat made their presence extra weighty.
“I didn’t think you’d be here.”
Felix dropped his wrench. It clattered through the engine. He didn’t bother picking it up. His fate stood just outside the auto shop, by a stack of spare tires. Dark hair, sleeves short enough to show the left arm pack. He hadn’t heard Yael approach. Of course he hadn’t. She was a feather-footed spy. How easy would it have been for her to whisk behind Felix, slit his throat?
He took little comfort in the fact that she hadn’t. A debt such as this could only be settled face-to-face.
Felix straightened. He knew Yael had weapons hidden on her person, and he kept waiting for her to reach for one. She didn’t. Instead she crossed her arms and craned her neck, reading the letters Felix’s Papa’s father had painted there in the thirties. WOLFE AUTO SHOP, white against black-coated cinder block. Time and weather had peeled most of the finer edges away. Papa always meant to refresh the sign, but it was a chore that kept getting bumped to the bottom of an ever-growing list.
Felix wished he’d thought to touch it up. He doubted Adele would once he was gone.
Yael stepped through the garage door. Her arms stayed crossed. “I thought you sold this place to Herr Bleier for an Axis Tour bribe.”
“I did.”
After the map room, the twins had spent several weeks in Germania, hopping from air-raid shelter to air-raid shelter as the street skirmishes would allow. They made their way to the capital’s outskirts, where Adele’s flat sat untouched. Felix and Adele stayed only long enough to pack valuables, photographs, canned food. Frankfurt, he’d convinced his sister, was where Mama and Papa would return if they were still alive. Frankfurt was their only chance to be a family again.
A journey that should’ve taken less than six hours lasted over a week. The roads were so bad that they were forced to go on foot, and, more than once, war interrupted their path. War had interrupted Frankfurt, too: houses abandoned, stores looted, families gone. Felix and Adele found the garage clammed shut, milk bottles crowded on the house stoop.
Herr Bleier never came to claim his real estate holdings. Felix found out later it was because “Herr Bleier was killed in the uprisings. With no family and no government to collect his property, the deed fell back to us.”
Yael grunted and gave the place a twice-over, her gaze landing on the oil patch shaped like a lopsided heart. The one Felix used to sit on while he watched Papa work. “Looks just like the photographs.”
Felix kept waiting, waiting for the bullet, the blade, but there was no stab, no sudden shot, and he couldn’t stand just standing here anymore. “Have you come to kill me?”
Yael’s eyes snapped up from the floor, holding all the elements Felix had expected: sharp anger, the flinch of the betrayed. Felix wondered what they saw in turn. (Not on the outside; mirrors told him often enough how unkind the months had been. Skipped meals had hollowed out his cheeks, grayed his lids. Even his hair had taken an ashen tinge.)
Could she see the dead crowded around his shoulders? The nights he couldn’t sleep because he felt Henryka’s curls coiling around his thyroid? The days that felt too long because Felix knew they were taken from those unwilling to give? People who had faces?
“I’ve thought about it.” Yael’s gaze broke from his, fell to Felix’s glove. “We’ve been hurt enough, don’t you think?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know how to breathe. “Then why—why are you here?”
“Is Adele home?”
She was. Felix knew if they entered the Wolfe house, they’d find his sister in the family room, trying to budget out the week’s marks.
“Why?” he asked again.
“I made you a promise, back in Molotov,” Yael said slowly. “I was only able to keep half of it. Today I’m going to see it to the end.”
Is this real? The garage was going dizzy blue. Felix blinked, took a breath to push the sparks away. He thought it was. He hadn’t had a dream this good in a very long time.
“I’ve come to take you and Adele to your parents.”
Yael led the way on her motorcycle, another Zündapp KS 601. Adele drove, her fingers tapping nervously against the Volkswagen’s steering wheel as they wound through the countryside. Felix stared out the window. The day was so pleasant he half expected to see families out picnicking. Baskets brimming with cheese, rolls, figs, and bottles of mineral water, blankets spread out over the grass. But most families had neither the time nor the extra food to spend on a picnic lunch. As for grass…
War had wrought its ruin on the land. Kilometer after kilometer of torched orchards and crater-pocked fields streamed through Felix’s reflection. These scars were months old. Even the full force of spring wasn’t enough to mend them.
But there were places the war hadn’t touched. Where the road itself became more suggestion than fact. Where the trees grew with a rugged consistency that reminded Felix of the Muscovy taiga. Where the mountains rose into grand things: rock, rock, snow, peak.
Their Volkswagen engine churned against growing slopes. The turnoffs became fewer and the drive longer. Felix began to wonder if Yael was leading them toward the end of the world. They’d certainly come close to the top of it: The sky’s blueness looked near enough to touch. Felix rolled down the window. Was air supposed to smell this sweet? Was his chest supposed to feel so light?
The safest place in Europe sat at the top of a hill. Vlad’s farm. Felix leaned forward to look through the windshield for a better view. He could make out a barn, a house—simple wooden structures. The first person he saw was… Mama! Alive. Out of bed. Gardening. She knelt among rows of infant seedlings. Her hair was wrapped in a plaid kerchief; she held a spade in her hand. When she glanced down the drive and caught sight of Felix’s face pressed to the Volkswagen window, she started running.
Papa appeared next. He stood at the barn door, holding a pail of milk. This dropped, sloshed everywhere, when he realized whom his wife was dashing toward.
The car hadn’t yet pulled to a stop, but this didn’t keep Felix from opening the door, stumbling into the gravel, falling on his hands, pushing himself up again, running to his parents. The meeting was a sobbing embrace. Papa smelled like straw; Mama was all earth. They hugged Felix with a strength he didn’t think they still had, pressing him against their chests until his earlobes hurt. Adele wasn’t far behind, joining the tangle of arms. She didn’t try to squirm away until her hair was practically soaking with their mother’s tears.
“We thought you were both dead!” Adele said through tears of her own. Her eyes crinkled together, as if she was trying to squeeze the emotion back in. “We were in Frankfurt, waiting and waiting! Why haven’t you come home?”
“We tried,” their father explained. “A few times. But Vlad convinced us it was safer to wait here while the resistance tracked you two down.”
Is this real? Felix had to be sure. These could be doppelgängers for all he knew.
“Mama, what color was the blouse you cut up for Adele’s doll? The Christmas Papa came back from the
front?”
“That was so long ago.” His mother was taken aback by the question. Her soft eyes blinked several times before she answered, “It—it was blue? Wasn’t it?”
It was.
Felix turned to Papa next. “What did Martin get that Christmas?”
His brother’s name drew a veil across all their faces—something somber and gray. Something that made his family themselves, and Felix knew even before his father answered that the Wolfes were together again. As together as they’d ever be.
“A pocket watch,” Papa answered. “He didn’t put the thing down for a week. Even tried to bathe with it. Do you still have it?”
Felix plucked the timepiece from his coverall pocket. It sat, silver and shimmering, over his glove. Mama and Papa noticed his amputated fingers and gasped at the same time.
“Safe and sound.” Felix handed the watch to his father, but it didn’t stop beating.
You remember what you did, don’t you? Don’t you?
He looked over his shoulder to find Yael standing in the middle of the gravel drive. It was colder here. Felix’s coverall sleeves were back to their original length, but Yael had already removed her riding gloves and jacket. Her arms were bare again, still crossed. Mountain light brought her wolves into finer sight. He now noticed there were more of them—no, just one more wolf.
Felix had never asked Yael what the tattoos were for, but as soon as he saw the lion, he knew. At least, in part.
The farm’s third inhabitant appeared on the porch. Vlad. It must be. Even holding a cup of tea, the man looked dangerous: a gallery of gashes and missing body parts. When he caught sight of Yael, he raised his cup in greeting.
She began walking toward the house.
“Yael.” Felix broke away from his family—three steps and pause.
Yael paused, too.
Sorry would not bring back the dead. Sorry would not fix things. But it was all Felix had to offer. “I’m sorry.”