Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  After Rima had cleaned up the floor—with a mop, not as she had feared with her tongue—she was given another liter of water to drink and told to resume the position. She was not allowed to remove her wet garments. In the dark, she smelled her own urine. Again she timed the intervals between moments when the lights were switched on. This happened every 180 seconds precisely. When in darkness, she held her arms above her head in a dancer’s O, fingers entwined, and one after another assumed the ballet positions she had learned as a child. Her movements were clumsy; she hadn’t danced in years and she had never been interested in ballet. Every few seconds she lowered her arms one at a time and let the blood rush back into them. Every 175 seconds she resumed the torture position and held it until the lights came on and then went off again. She understood that she might be caught and knew that she could not possibly predict the consequences if she was. In her mind, the worse had already happened when she emptied her bladder. As she danced, she formed a picture in her mind—she and Paul together in America, in a forest of very old trees with deeply creased bark. There was much more light in this vision than she had ever seen with her own eyes, even in Italy, and she commanded her brain to make it brighter and brighter, so that in the end Paul and his primeval trees seemed to exist in an overexposed photograph.

  After a time—Rima had no idea how long a time—Fleischer came for her.

  Back in Stutzer’s office, Rima again stood at attention before the bare desk. Her need to urinate was intense. Her stockings and underwear were still damp. She could smell them. She wondered why she had not been ordered to take them off. Now the major would be subjected to an unpleasant odor.

  He did not seem to notice. His manner was different this time, brusquer, more businesslike, perhaps because he had changed into a uniform. He now wore a pistol on his belt, the Iron Cross itself pinned to his tunic.

  Without preliminaries he said, “There are two charges against you so far—the theft of a purebred Pomeranian bitch which has a value of one hundred-twenty-five Reichsmarks, and contravention of the sexual laws concerning miscegenation between Jews and Aryans. These charges have already been proved. Their disposal is in my hands. If I were to sign an order for imprisonment, you would go to a camp to be rehabilitated. There would be no specific term of years of imprisonment. All would depend on the recommendation of the camp commandant. He could release you in a few years, certainly not less than two or three years, or keep you for the rest of your life. What do you have to say?”

  “I do not know what to say, sir.”

  “Address me as Major.”

  “Yes, Major.”

  “The charges are serious, as I have explained,” Stutzer said. “But there is another matter that is even more serious. We will discuss that now. On 16 June you were an accomplice in a vicious and unprovoked physical attack on a member of the Hitler Youth. This boy was seriously injured by his assailant, a foreigner who is a trained pugilist. You sympathized with the assailant and assisted him, true or false?”

  “He was injured in the fight. The others marched away. I helped him as best I could, as I have been taught all my life.”

  “We know that you took him to your father’s office and your father treated his wounds,” Stutzer said. “Your father is a Jew. The assailant is not a Jew. For a Jewish doctor to treat anybody except a Jew is strictly forbidden under the laws of the Reich.”

  Stutzer stopped speaking. He was awaiting an answer, a confession. Silence gathered.

  Rima said, “My father is a doctor, Major. It’s his duty to treat the injured.”

  “He’s a Jew. He has violated the law. This will not be tolerated. For him there will be no interview, no courtesies, no opportunity to apologize and atone, as there has been for you even though you are a quarter-Jew. Do you understand what will happen to him? I order you to reply.”

  “No, Major.”

  “He will go to Dachau. He will have no hope. He will never be released. His fate will be your fault.”

  Rima began to sob. She could not control it. She understood what this man was doing to her. She knew what he wanted. She knew that if she wished to see the light of day again, to see her father and her lover again, she had no choice but to agree to whatever he wanted.

  Stutzer said, “Earlier in this examination, when I asked you what you thought you were all your life, a Jew or an Aryan, you said you were a German, a Lutheran, a human being, in that order. Why did being a German come first?”

  “Because that has always been the first true thing about me. The fact that I am a German above everything else is what I have always been taught by my parents, my family, my minister, my teachers.”

  “And at this moment, you are still a German above all?”

  “Yes, Major.”

  “Good,” Stutzer replied. “Then we can go ahead.”

  He rapped sharply on the desk—twice, this time.

  Fleischer entered instantly, carrying a chair and a cup of soup.

  “Sit down, eat a little something,” Stutzer said to his prisoner. “Then we will talk.”

  THREE

  1

  While Rima was learning what Stutzer wanted of her, the Christophers were driving to Rügen. Hubbard had been saving gasoline for months for this journey. Their old Horch phaeton, olive-green with black fenders, crimson leather upholstery and gleaming chrome headlights and trim, moved smoothly over narrow country roads. Hubbard loved this machine, the baritone purr of its engine, the mellow ah-OO-ga! of its horn, the many smells of it. He liked also the look of the world as the Horch rolled through the Prussian countryside with the top down. To Hubbard, always ready to transform nature into art, this automobile was a time machine bearing them past peasant villages and fields in which women with stout chapped legs were yoked to cows and helped pull the plow or cultivator through ruler-straight rows of potato plants and cabbages and turnips that grew in the chilly black muck.

  “Gustavus Adolphus saw these same folks three centuries ago when he marched through Pomerania during the Thirty Years War,” Hubbard said. He possessed the gift of enthusiasm. Every single thing in the world interested him, and despite his agnosticism, not a few things beyond it. At this point in the journey, Hubbard always made the same remark about Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In fact, he had a familiar saying for nearly every crossroads. Paul smiled fondly, happy to hear the well-worn words. In the backseat, Lori, her auburn head resting against the red leather upholstery, did not open her eyes. She was pale, inert. She seemed to lack the energy to smile. Hubbard had been watching her face ever since they left Berlin. Now he stole another glance at her in the rear-view mirror. Her expression had not changed all morning long, nor had she smiled or spoken a word. When they stopped by a lake to picnic, she ate little—half an apple, a bite of cheese—and said less. Hubbard was unbothered by his wife’s withdrawal. Lori was entitled to her moods.

  After lunch Hubbard let Paul drive the Horch. Paul had been driving since he was twelve, and now that he was bigger he handled the machine almost as easily as Hubbard. He kept an eye on the mirror, checking to see if they were being followed. Hubbard noticed this.

  “On the lookout for the enemies of mankind?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s always a good idea, but they have no need to follow us. They’re everywhere. All they have to do is sit in a window and watch us drive by, then phone the guy who’s sitting in the next window a few kilometers up the road. The minute we arrive in Rügen they’ll call Stutzer in Berlin.”

  In this flat country the roads, mostly unpaved, ran straight, and there was little traffic apart from farm horses hauling wagons. These were huge chunky animals. Hubbard identified them by breed—Rhenish, Westphalian, Schleswig-Holstein. He told his son, not for the first time, that eight million horses belonging to the German army had been killed in battle in the 1914-18 war.

  “The astonishing thing,” he said, “is that two and a half million wounded horses were treated at the front in G
erman veterinary hospitals and returned to duty.”

  Hubbard had gotten this information from Paulus, the old lancer. Today’s Wehrmacht boasted of its modernity and its mechanization, Paulus said, but if there was another war, horses would drag guns and ammunition and rations into battle just as they had always done and be blown to smithereens by enemy shells, exactly as before. They would die in even greater numbers, unimaginable as it seemed that more living things, human and animal, could be possibly killed in a new war than were slaughtered in the last one.

  A dozen or so interesting facts later, the family arrived on the island. Hubbard had grown up among mountains and he had always thought that Rügen needed a more dramatic landscape. Granted, the island itself was a prominence, with chalk cliffs rising hundreds of feet above the leaden Baltic. But the place needed some reworking, nothing major, but why not add a knob or two, as in a landscape by Giotto, to put it in perspective? Instead of sheltering in its beech groves, Paulus’s house, Schloss Berwick, should stand on a hill, with lines of sight from its windows taking in all the rest of the island and the panorama of the sea. True, the wind would be an inconvenience, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear it moaning and howling in the night and see ships and sails and whitecaps?

  Paul steered the Horch up the drive “Look, darling, it’s just the same,” said Hubbard over his shoulder. Lori gave him her first faint smile of the day. It was mid-afternoon. Among the pale gray beeches with their pale green foliage, Schloss Berwick floated in watery light, feeble sun twinkling in its window glass. “On the first day I saw this house and this grove, coming down the path from the cliffs, I thought it was the most romantic sight I had ever seen,” said Hubbard. He reached behind him with his long arm and took Lori by the hand. “And then, Paul, I saw your mother and knew what romance really was,” he said. Lori lifted Hubbard’s large hairy hand to her lips and kissed it. Watching in the mirror, Paul remembered her own gloved hand being lifted and kissed by a different man in the back seat of a Daimler.

  Paulus and Hilde came out of the house. Hilde carried a bouquet she had picked from her garden for their arrival.

  “So, Paul,” said Paulus, eyeing the boy’s half-healed injuries. “You’ve been wounded. Did you make the rascal pay?”

  Paul knew that no reply was needed. He leaped from the car, shook his great uncle’s hand and bowed like a Prussian, a silent click of the heels, a snap of the head. No hugging for Paulus.

  “You should see the other fellows—seven of them, no less,” Hubbard said. He offered no details, Paulus asked for none.

  “Favorable odds,” Paulus said. “Strike first, strike hard. That’s something to write on your shield, as long as the enemy understands it’s a warning, not friendly advice.”

  It was four in the afternoon. The sky was bright and at this latitude would remain so well into the evening. Lori went immediately to her bedroom and shut the door. Hubbard and Paulus went for a walk along the cliffs. Paul was not invited, so he supposed they were going to decide his fate between them. He carried the bags upstairs, then drank the cup of chocolate and ate the cakes that Hilde offered him. From the kitchen window he saw suits and overcoats and Turkish carpets airing in the backyard on taut wire clotheslines. Like the Christophers, Hilde and Paulus had no live-in servants, but two ruddy sisters with Popeye arms came once a week to clean the house. This was their day and Paul could hear them upstairs, shouting to each other in the hard-edged local dialect he had learned from them. Paul had known these women, Lena and Philippina, all his life. They had cared for him when he was an infant. Their cousin had been the midwife who delivered him. Their chief interest in life was village gossip, not national politics. However, this was the new Germany and he wondered what gossip about the family they passed on to the police when their day’s work was done.

  Certainly they would be expected to report. “Oh, Paul, I forgot,” Hilde said. “There was a phone call for you.” She pinched his cheek. “So grown up now, receiving phone calls from young ladies. Bold young ladies. From Berlin!” Hilde had to search for the slip of paper on which she had scribbled the number. She found it at last in her sewing basket, pinned to a scrap of cloth. “She gave no name,” Hilde said. “She spoke proper German, which was a surprise considering that she seems to have had no upbringing. Did you give her this number?”

  “I gave it to no one, Aunt Hilde.”

  “Then I wonder how she got it. Our last names are not the same. How could she know whose number to ask for?”

  Paul said he could not imagine. But he could, and the sour taste of suspicion rose in his throat. Paul asked permission to use the telephone. Hilde granted it, but by the look on her face it was plain that she did not approve of this business of young girls calling her great-nephew, and cared even less for what such a breach of modesty implied. Hilde did not like supernumerary females. Paulus had always had girls hanging on him, so had his brothers, especially Lori’s father. So had Hilde’s sons, all of them so good-looking but all of them dead now. Was Paul going to be another one?

  Even though the doctor was a Jew, the Kaltenbachs still had a telephone. It was not for personal use. The authorities had made that clear. It was for use in connection with Dr. Kaltenbach’s medical practice, and only that. If all of his patients were Jews, did this mean he could not speak to Aryans on the telephone? Dr. Kaltenbach did not know; this had not been explained to him. Perhaps his tormentors hoped that he would make an innocent mistake that would turn out to be a crime punishable by worse humiliations than he had already suffered. Whatever the explanation, it was better to assume that something was forbidden than to assume that it was not, so the doctor never touched the receiver unless he was sure that a Jew was on the line. It was Rima’s job to answer during office hours and make sure that this was the case before she called her father to the phone.

  Paul had expected it to take a couple of hours for the call to go through to Berlin. However, the Kaltenbach’s number rang almost immediately. On hearing her voice, Paul said, “Rima.”

  “My love. You are safely there?”

  “No broken bones. It was an easy drive. We hardly saw another car.”

  After a pause—for a moment Paul thought that the connection had been broken—Rima said, “I want to come to you, Paul.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, I must. Tonight. On the eleven-forty train.”

  Paul didn’t hesitate. It was too late for hesitation. His curiosity was too great. Besides, he longed for her. And whoever was listening had heard enough. They should hear no more.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll be at the station to meet you.”

  “Your family will not be upset?”

  “They’ll understand. Take the train. What about your father?”

  “He doesn’t know. I’ll leave a note.”

  It was not love but deathly fear that Paul had heard in Rima’s voice. He felt what she was feeling as if he were the one who was afraid. But he was not afraid—not for himself, anyway. He had never in his short life been afraid—not of bullies even before he learned how to fight them, not even of Stutzer. His father said that he got this from his mother and her family—look at Paulus—but Paul had never seen his father show a sign of fear, either. Hubbard watched, he listened, he smiled. Then he wrote everything down and this act seemed to cure everything, even the instinct for self-preservation.

  When Hubbard and Paulus returned from their walk, they were silent and withdrawn, rare behavior for either of them. Paul had planned to tell the family his news one at a time, Hubbard first, Lori last, so as to give them the opportunity of consulting each other and making a decision. However, Hubbard and Paulus seemed determined to remain together, and Paul needed time to stop Rima if the answer was No. In that case he would take a train to Berlin. He would go to her.

  Paul told the two of them about his phone call. As usual, Paulus’s taut face showed nothing. Hubbard absorbed Paul’s words, then smiled—but faintly. Paulus let Hubbard, th
e father, ask the questions. There was only one.

  “This is the girl who helped you in the Tiergarten?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then of course she can come,” Hubbard said. “Paulus, is that agreeable?”

  “Certainly. Is she pretty, Paul?”

  “More than that, Uncle.”

  Paulus gave him a long look while his smile, beginning in his eyes, peeled off the expressionless mask that he had been wearing since his walk with Hubbard. More than pretty? More evidence that Paul, this splendid boy, was like his maternal grandfather, like Paulus himself, like all of his Prussian forebears. “Wunderbar!” Paulus said.

  Hubbard had similar manly feelings. He threw a heavy arm around Paul’s shoulders and squeezed. His eyes glowed. Paul could see that his father was imagining the meeting of Paul and Rima at the station—Paul waiting on the platform, Rima alighting from the train, their proper public hello, the longing in their eyes. Hubbard was not, however, imagining the watchers in the shadows. He saw no evil unless it tapped him on the chest.

  2

  It was well after midnight when Rima arrived at Schloss Berwick. Hilde greeted her at the door with a heart-chilling demonstration of old-fashioned good manners. She was kind but distant, hospitable but not welcoming. She spoke all the right words without uttering a kindly one. The girl had brought her overnight things in a rucksack, as if she were on a Wandervögel hike. Her large, intelligent and beautiful brown eyes—Hilde immediately admitted these obvious qualities to herself—touched everything in the entrance hall. As if on tiptoes, Rima looked from object to object as if checking an inventory, which in fact she was doing because Paul had told her about the Arras mille-fleurs tapestry with its unicorn at the turning of the stairway, the suits of armor, the stuffed boars’ heads, the giant-size swords and spears, the huge Kilim rug that one of Paulus’s brothers had sent home from Turkey before being killed by a British shell at Gallipoli while advising the Turkish infantry.