“It’s as if he’s already in the afterworld,” Rima said. “The world of the living is still visible to him. He looks out the window and sees people going about their business. Every now and then he sees someone he knows on the street, but they don’t see him or hear him. If they do, if they used to be his friends, they don’t know him. He’s a phantom.”
All this Rima whispered to Paul as they stood together on a streetcar. No matter where they were, the two of them conversed in whispers. They told each other everything. They hardly knew each other, after all—glimpses in the Tiergarten, minutes in each other’s arms in the pitch-black night in the park, an hour in the church, a kiss in a cinema. Not only was Rima Paul’s first love, she was also his only friend. Otherwise, he lived in quarantine and so did she.
Now, however, Rima had a plan. They would be together, alone. “We will become each other,” Rima said. “We will have time. It will be wonderful.”
That word, as she spoke it in English, meant what it had originally meant, full of wonder. All of her words about love sounded as if she had just invented them. She would come early in the morning, Rima said, while it was still dark. The window of Paul’s bedroom overlooked the courtyard at the back of the building. If his mother was absent and his father was writing, he would turn on a light in his room, then go to the kitchen and unlock the door on the back stairway. Rima would run up the stairs, he would let her in, they would be together in his room until eleven o’clock. Then she would leave by the front entrance.
“You will be seen,” Paul said.
“It won’t matter,” Rima said. “I have a plan.”
By mistake or as a sign of their contempt for him—what harm could the former Professor Doctor Kaltenbach possibly do now that he was nothing but a Jew?—the authorities had left her father’s medical records with him. Rima had examined them. She had found the file of a rich German woman on whom her father had operated several years before.
“He saved her life, or anyway cured her pain,” Rima said. “Afterward, in her gratitude, she kissed every one of his fingers.”
“How do you know that?”
“You’re not the only one with a father who writes everything down.”
“So how does this affect the plan?”
“She lives in your building. Miss Hulda Wetzel.”
Paul knew the woman, had always known her. She lived in the apartment below the Christophers. She had been the companion to her sickly mother before the old woman finally died; now she was alone. She was deeply shy and nervous, never married. She had told Paul many times, but Lori never, how beautifully his mother played the piano, especially Liszt.
“Miss Wetzel is part of the plan?” Paul said.
“She is essential to it,” Rima replied. “Miss Wetzel has a dog, a Pomeranian. I have observed her walking the dog. Miss Wetzel doesn’t like poop. I will volunteer to walk her dog. She will be overjoyed. I will then have a reason to be on the back stairway.”
“What if she says no?”
“Why would she do that? I’ll tell her who I am—the daughter of the famous surgeon who saved her life.”
“Does she know what has happened to your father?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Miss Wetzel is a timid person. She may be frightened to be involved.”
“No, my darling. She’ll remember Papa as he used to be. As long as we leave her in innocence she’ll understand. Not everyone we ever knew is a hateful wretch.”
Paul longed to kiss this beautiful girl with the electric mind and the wide-open brown eyes in which he saw his reflection, but on the streetcar such behavior was strictly forbidden.
5
The plan did not work out exactly as Rima had designed it. Miss Wetzel wanted her snow-white Pomeranian, Blümchen, walked for an hour three times a day—at seven in the morning, at noon, and at dusk. She and Rima discussed this over cups of chocolate in Miss Wetzel’s apartment while the dog sat on Miss Wetzel’s lap and nibbled treats.
“How is your dear father?” Miss Wetzel asked.
“He is less active than he was.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. So many people need his genius.”
Rima smiled, sipped her chocolate, and ate a butter cookie. She wanted to wander no farther down this path. They talked about the dog and the deal was struck. Rima would walk Blümchen three times a day, seven days a week, for a weekly fee of ten marks-fifty, or fifty pfennigs per walk, plus a Sunday bonus of one mark.
“That’s pretty good money,” Rima said to Paul, reporting the conversation as they walked through a museum. “We can buy Benny Goodman records and dance. Do you have a gramophone?”
“An American Victrola,” Paul said.
“Benny won’t disturb your father?”
“Nothing disturbs my father. The secret police may come and arrest us for listening to decadent music.”
“How will they know?”
Paul explained about the microphones in the walls. Rima’s eyes widened as they always did when she was told something interesting.
“Dear God, they do hate you,” she said. “What have you done to deserve this?”
Paul loved Rima, but he could not trust her or endanger her with a truthful answer to this particular question.
“It’s just one of those things,” he said.
“Ah, you Americans,” Rima said, snapping her fingers. “‘Just one of those things, baby.’ We’ll go on whispering.”
They were in a room full of classical sculptures. In a whisper Rima sang a bar of “And the Angels Sing.” Hearing Benny Goodman, they danced a few steps among the marble nudes. Rima’s English had become much more idiomatic since she had been speaking the language with Paul. She had learned it from books and from a succession of young English tutors who had been expelled from the country one after the other on morals charges. Her accent was a mixture of the accents of these tutors, Londonian in one part of a sentence, Etonian in the next, West Country in the third. This was because her ear was so keen. What she heard, she spoke. She sounded more like Paul every day.
Rima began her duties as a dog walker the following morning. Because the Tiergarten was close and because there were lots of other dogs there to keep Blümchen company, she walked in that direction. She set out, as her agreement with Miss Wetzel specified, at exactly seven in the morning. At that hour there were already a good many people in the streets. Some were dog walkers like Rima. Most were dressed for the day—men in suits and felt hats, women in frocks and sturdy shoes. There were few workmen in this neighborhood, but some whirred by on bicycles. Yesterday’s horse manure had been cleared during the night by Berlin’s efficient street-cleaning force so that Rima as she walked could smell flowering shrubs and trees rather than the overpowering scent of animal scat. She was lost in a daydream of Paul, imagining their first morning together in his room. She saw them dancing, talking, listening to music, dancing again. As she danced in her daydream she wore a sheet wrapped around her body, like a toga. She hummed as she dreamed, American songs that Paul had taught her—“Flat-Foot Floojee,” “Oh, Look at Me Now.”
She was inside the park before she knew it. She woke from her daydream on a path that ran between the bridle path and the sidewalk. Blümchen barked shrilly at everything and everyone. Long ago her breed had been large working dogs. The fact that Pomeranians had been bred down into lap dogs over many generations evidently had not registered on Blümchen’s brain. She thought that she was as large and ferocious as her ancestors. Though she was actually no bigger than a ball of yarn, she barked at the horses, at other dogs, she growled and showed her teeth. She yapped at squirrels and leaped against the leash, trying to chase them. Well-dressed matrons picked up their own small dogs and carried them safely away from this shaggy little bundle of noisy aggression.
The sun strengthened. Workmen watered the bridle path to keep down the dust. Miniature rainbows formed in the spray. When horses came by, the men turned off the hoses and
the big lathered animals cantered or trotted by. Rima had never ridden, but she liked the sight, the sound, the scent of sweated horses. She walked along the bridle path, Blümchen barking all the while. The dog was tremendously excited. Rima wondered if it was the smell of the horses. What a treat for Blümchen’s Pomeranian senses, Rima thought. It must be the equivalent of a person, born like herself in the twentieth century, being dragged across a savannah and suddenly smelling a herd of mastodons.
“Suppose dinosaurs were covered with feathers, like birds,” she said to Paul later on, when they were together. “Suppose they sang like birds when they woke in the morning. Imagine the sight of that, the sound.”
In the moment itself, however, something broke this chain of thought. Standing at the curb was a woman whom she knew, though she had never met her. She knew at once that she was Paul’s mother. The woman, wearing jodhpurs and boots and a tweed hacking jacket, looked like him—the same face that Rima had thought was unlike anyone else’s, the same bottomless eyes, the same musician’s hands.
The woman stood beside the open door of a black Daimler. An SS trooper in uniform held the door. Another sat at the wheel. A large beautiful Alsatian dog lay on the floor of the backseat at the feet of a man wearing burnished black riding boots. Blümchen barked frantically at the Alsatian. The woman, lovely but profoundly sad, looked for a brief moment into Rima’s eyes, as if she recognized her, too, and then got into the car.
Rima was farther away from the Daimler than Paul had been when he had witnessed a similar scene a few days earlier, so she was able to see inside and recognize Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the entire secret police apparatus, as the man who lifted Lori’s hand, peeled off its glove, and kissed the palm.
6
After dropping off Blümchen at Miss Wetzel’s back door and declining a cup of chocolate and a bun, Rima ran up the back stairs, pushed open the Christophers’ unlocked kitchen door, and slipped inside. Paul awaited her. They kissed. For long moments, all was silence. Then, in the middle of the kiss, Hubbard uttered a loud guffaw. Rima leaped in her skin.
“I warned you,” Paul said. “He does that when he’s writing. But if we walked into his room he wouldn’t know we were there.”
They were whispering as always. Paul led her through the reception rooms—strange misshapen sculptures, a grand piano with music open on the rack, bright upholstery, Persian carpets that looked very old. Expressionist paintings and drawings that looked like cartoons hung on every wall. A large studio drawing depicted a young nude, a girl not much older than Rima, who looked boldly at the artist and seemed to be in the very early stages of pregnancy. She was the woman who had gotten into Heydrich’s Daimler.
“My mother when she was nineteen,” Paul said. “And me before I was born, I’m told. Does it shock you?”
“No. It’s beautiful.” She went closer and read the artist’s signature. “Who is Zaentz?”
“He was well-known in Berlin not so long ago. Most of these pictures were made by friends.”
“But these friends no longer come here?”
“No, they’ve all left Germany.”
“So the Christophers are alone.”
“Not quite,” Paul said, touching her.
They walked down the hallway to Paul’s room. He had turned off the electric light and closed the curtains, so it was dark.
“Can we have a lamp?” Rima asked. “I must be able to see you.”
He switched on his reading lamp. The room, half in shadow, took form—shelves of books, stacks of magazines, record albums, photographs taken in America, in France, in the Alps, in Rügen, all showing Paul in the company of his parents and what Rima took to be other relations. The stuffed head of a wild boar hung over his desk.
“What in the name of God is that?” she asked.
Paul explained. Schloss Berwick, the house on the island of Rügen in which his mother’s Uncle Paulus and Aunt Hilde lived, stood in a grove of beech trees. When Paul was twelve, his great-uncle had taken him on his first boar hunt. They rode out before dawn, hoping to catch the animals unawares as they fed on the beechnuts that had fallen to the ground. They found half a dozen pigs feasting on the nuts and, on Paulus’s command, charged them at the gallop through the morning mist, smooth gray tree trunks whizzing by. A boar charged Paul’s horse as he charged it. He killed it with a lucky thrust between the shoulder blades. Paulus dismounted, bled the trophy, and smeared Paul’s cheek with the blood of his first kill.
“Charming,” Rima said. “And this is the lucky boar?”
She inspected everything, then wound up the gramophone, chose a record, put it on the turntable, and lifted the needle onto the spinning wax record. This time the band was not Benny Goodman’s but Tommy Dorsey’s, playing “Getting Sentimental Over You.” They danced in stocking feet so as not to make Blümchen, whose play room was directly below, start barking.
When the song ended, Rima took the pins from her hair and shook it out, then took Paul firmly by the hand and led him to the bed. Sex was not a mystery to him. His parents had always been frank with him and he had read descriptions of the act in novels and looked at the cartoons and photographs that were passed around at school. Rima, however, had technical knowledge. She had read her father’s medical books, and of course she knew her own body as no one else, not even Paul, ever could. She was the initiator, the guide. She was nimble in bed as in everything else. She had no shyness. She asked for what she wanted. She made rapturous noises that astonished Paul as much as the pleasure of the act itself, but not as much as the way in which the passionate love he already felt for this girl expanded within him until he felt nothing else, thought of nothing else, wanted nothing else, and finally was aware of nothing else. Rima trembled, she wept, she cried out. She amazed him.
All morning they lay in bed, whispering. They completed Rima’s daydream by dancing, but in this perfect real world with no sheet wrapped around her body. She drew Paul back to the bed. They made love. They fell asleep, awoke, they made love again. They were enclosed in an atmosphere of their own mingled scent, each other’s skin, each other’s senses.
“Nothing like this will ever happen to us again,” Rima said.
Had anyone but Rima uttered these words they would have sounded to Paul like a line from the movies, but he knew that what she said was true, that he would never make love again, no matter how far in the future, without remembering Rima. Whatever happened, this hour would haunt him for the rest of his life. He wept. Rima, dry-eyed now, smiled down at him. She said softly, “Oh, my love.”
At noon precisely, Rima knocked on Miss Wetzel’s kitchen door and heard a volley of soprano barks on the other side. Miss Wetzel threw open the door. “See her little tail wag?” she said. “Blümchen is waiting for you. Already she likes you.”
Rima followed the same route to the Tiergarten as before, and as before, Blümchen scolded every living thing she encountered. Rima did not try to stop her. She was wrapped in contentment. Her heart was peaceful, she had never been so happy, she saw no end to this overwhelming bliss as long as she and Paul could be together. To feel like this every day—imagine! She had been warned by women and by books that the first experience for a girl was painful, ugly, bloody and brutal. They had lied.
7
Just as she reached the park, at eleven minutes after noon, Rima was arrested. She was standing on the sidewalk near the bridle path, more or less on the spot where she had observed Lori getting into the gleaming Daimler earlier in the day. Blümchen attacked the Berlin policeman who took Rima into custody, yapping and nipping at his boots and wrapping her leash around his ankles. The portly cop lifted his feet as if stepping out of somebody else’s underwear and cursed loudly.
“Under arrest?” Rima said. “For what?” It was a pointless question. Everyone knew that no one in the Reich had a right to know why he or she was being arrested. But for a moment, snatched so rudely from her reverie, Rima thought that the policeman might be taking her
into custody because he had been attacked by Blümchen.
“Control your dog!” the policeman said.
She gave the cop an astonished grin. Ear-tips to toes, Blümchen was no more than seven inches tall. The policeman took Rima by the arm and set off down the sidewalk. Blümchen continued to dance around the two of them, barking incessantly and lunging at the policeman. The policeman kicked at the dog. Blümchen counterattacked, sinking its needle teeth into the burnished leather of his boot. Despite the desperation she felt, or maybe because of it, Rima was overcome by giggling. She was only sixteen, after all, and whatever she had said to Paul in the American church, she did not really think, especially on this particular morning, that she was going to die. Not at her age, not when she had just learned that human happiness was so deep, so sweet, such a surprise.
At the police station Rima was booked and made to hand over the contents of her bag and pockets, and also Blümchen. “That dog belongs to Miss Wetzel of number eleven Gutenbergstrasse,” she said. “I am only the dog walker. If the dog is not back on time, the owner will be frantic.” No one in the police station seemed to hear anything she said.
In another room, Rima was stripped and searched by a gaunt unsmiling female with a man’s gruff voice who smelled of decaying teeth and strong antiseptic. This woman put a finger between Rima’s legs, shook it disgustedly and washed her hands. Then she pointed to the sink and shouted, “Wash yourself!”
After Rima was dressed, the woman marched her back to the booking room. To the elderly policeman in charge she said in a loud voice, “No contraband discovered! Evidence of very recent fornication noted!”
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