Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  His voice was patient, almost gentle, and Clair must have been as surprised as Oskar, for he only stared back as if this SS man was a being from another universe. Hagen’s eyes were like drops of northern sky, frozen and set in his skull. Placid, beautiful, opaque. Oskar found it impossible to tell or even to guess what he was thinking. Which made von Ewigholz, he supposed, ideally suited for his job. And now those empty eyes turned on Oskar.

  Once already, he’d sensed that von Ewigholz was peeking though his cover—seeing him, for a moment, not as Stefan Sinclair but as someone a little closer to himself, a proper opponent. That feeling now returned as the Nazi officer studied him unhurriedly, dispassionate as a scientist contemplating a specimen that had turned up unexpectedly in the field. What do you say, gentlemen—shall we pop this one in a bottle and have a closer look at it?

  Well, that was the SS. Oskar was a Wehrmacht man, and the German army had its own methods of sorting things out.

  “So…you’re his minder?” he said, in Sinclair’s mincing style, and gestured toward Clair, who’d slumped once more into a sulk. “What does that mean, please?”

  The question irritated von Ewigholz, so much so that he responded in German. “That’s a foolish term, ‘minder.’ I’ve been chosen this year to be a Sippenleiter. You belonged to the Movement?”

  The half-lie came easily: “The Young Lutheran Bund.”

  “So then you know the term.”

  Oskar did. A Sippenleiter, in the old days, was the senior member of a “kin group,” a band of brothers. Not a minder. Not a teacher. Not even a leader, in the ordinary sense. Probably nothing Clair had a word for—an elder brother not in blood but in spirit. How strange that such an outmoded, Romantic concept should live on in Himmler’s SS.

  Von Ewigholz nodded; he was glad Stefan understood. “Our young Mr. Townsend has been accepted into a special program for ethnic Germans and other…sympathetic foreigners. It’s an honor to be invited. We use the facilities of an Adolf Hitler School—the newest one, Ordensburg Vogelsang. An amazing place, like a private castle for the boys. A magnificent settling in the Eifel, with a lake below where we can swim every day. And of course an outstanding faculty, the most highly regarded experts in every field. There’s more than just hiking and sport involved, you must understand that. Over a hundred thousand of our German boys apply for these schools every year. Those few selected are truly the elite, the leaders of tomorrow. It’s not usual to get someone who…doesn’t want very much to be there.”

  He glanced at Clair, not unkindly. Oskar could read nothing more sinister there than zeal, the kind you expect from true believers. Von Ewigholz bore watching, he decided, but seemed to pose no immediate threat.

  Clair had meanwhile taken an interest in the musical program; he’d refilled his champagne flute and now busied himself scribbling requests on a linen napkin. The ink from his fountain pen bled into the fabric, but Oskar made out “Minnie the Moocher,” “The Man from Harlem,” “One O’Clock Jump.”

  “I’m sorry, boys,” said Lena, rising from her seat, “but I need to freshen up before dinner. Thank you all so much for your company.”

  The men stood—even Clair, into whom the social niceties had clearly been hammered.

  “I’ll go also, with my wife,” Oskar said. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” he told von Ewigholz. This time he got a handshake and one last probing glance. You could practically hear it bounce off, like a sonar ping. “That was excellent,” he murmured to Lena as they crossed the platform. “Absolutely perfect timing.”

  She might not have heard—something had distracted her. Pausing by the stairs, she said very quietly, “Who is that man? The one in the awful blue suit, over there by the band.”

  Not whispering—that was good. Whispering drew attention. Oskar slapped his pockets as though missing something, a wallet, a watch, then finally shot a glance toward the bandstand. “I must have left it in the stateroom,” he said, turning away. They went down the stairs. The lift and plunge of the ship, the sound of crashing water, gave him a feeling of vertigo.

  Lena slipped her arm through his. “Come, darling. We’ll have a little rest before dinner.”

  Oskar barely heard, his thoughts swirling as he allowed himself to be led onto a narrow deck running outboard of the dining compartment.

  Lena halted there, turned to look at him. “What’s the matter?” Her voice was gentle, but there was something hard beneath it. “Who is that man? Someone you know?”

  Her hair was redder in this light. The wind played with the loose strands, and Oskar felt like pushing them back into place. “That man is called Toby Lugan,” he said. “I met him in Washington, just the once. He’d been drinking. He might not have recognized me.”

  “He was staring at you the whole time. That’s the only reason I noticed.” She grasped his wrists, firmly, as if planning to give him a shake. “Stefan”—protecting their cover, even now—“tell me, Stefan, are we in trouble? What do we need to do?”

  “The same as before. Get back to Germany. Then disappear.”

  She seemed to consider this. At the far end of the passage, a party of Americans was noisily crowding the walkway. Oskar turned to leave, to go on to the cabin. But Lena held his wrists, and he was more or less obliged, by a kind of tactile inertia, to turn back, to face her again.

  “I’ve never seen you rattled before,” she said. “I thought…but now, like this, you seem more normal.”

  Rattled? He opened his mouth, but the Americans were here, pushing to get by. Lena pulled him closer, making room. An expensively dressed plump woman—a banker’s wife, perhaps—bumped into Oskar from behind. He felt the length of Lena’s warm body as the two of them were pressed against the bulkhead.

  “Pardon me!” the banker’s wife said jovially, catching his eye, giving him a horrible, knowing wink.

  He found himself staring into Lena’s face, inches away. There was really nowhere else to look. The freckles on her nose seemed very large, very near. He felt her breath, softly, on his chin. Maybe it was a question of cover. She raised her face to his and kissed him. Right there on the side deck, as though they truly were newlyweds or had been rehearsing this for months.

  For Oskar, it was new. But as with many new things, it wasn’t hard to pick up. Her tongue was narrow, like her chin. It made him, for no good reason, want to laugh.

  Then the Americans were gone and the kiss was over. There followed an interval of shyness, like a cloud that appeared without warning in an open sky. They stepped apart. Wordlessly they strolled back to the cabin. By unspoken agreement, for appearance’s sake, they continued to hold hands, but now this point of contact seemed to draw all of Oskar’s attention. He felt that his palm was sweaty and he was doing it wrong and everybody on board would notice. From what he could tell, though, they did not.

  —

  Lena sat on the lower bunk, her usual place. Oskar stood by the door with his fingers on the burnished handle, as if physically unable to let go. He couldn’t figure out how to break this ludicrous impasse. The room was too small for pacing. There was nothing he could plausibly busy himself doing. They needed to talk, that was certain—on operational grounds alone, they should debrief each other—but he wasn’t sure that tactics was what he wanted to talk about.

  “You know,” Lena said, “Stefan and I…” She paused, looked up at him. “I mean the other Stefan, the real one.”

  She didn’t go on. Oskar realized then that he’d been wondering about this, without really thinking about it. Another empty slot in his understanding of the world. How a gasoline engine works. What the food is like in China. Whether Lena and Stefan were, in bodily fact, husband and wife. Just one more thing he didn’t know. Only now he knew that unlike gasoline engines, this particular topic had been wriggling there, just out of thought, for some time.

  “It’s none of my business,” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes—maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; that depended. “I’
ve had lovers,” she told him matter-of-factly. Sitting up straight, as though this had become a business meeting. “I’m a modern person. Don’t feel you have to treat me like a…”

  What had he been treating her like? A colleague? A co-conspirator? A cabinmate? He couldn’t think beyond that, though he guessed there were other possibilities.

  She sighed. “Well yes, all right, we did, Stefan and I, a few times. It was just—I don’t know. We were together, we were married, for God’s sake. And having an adventure, going to America. Making love, that was another part of it. After a while we just…stopped. I don’t know why. The adventure was over.” She paused, completely unembarrassed. A modern person. “What about you, then?”

  “What?”

  She didn’t laugh, for which he would long be grateful. “Here, come sit with me. Please. Otherwise this is getting awkward.”

  Strangely enough, it didn’t feel awkward. It felt almost natural to slide onto the bunk beside her, no more than an extension of the role he’d been playing for days, a role he’d internalized. It was as though their make-believe intimacy had turned real, at least in a limited way, without ever passing a milestone to mark the change. She smiled at him, and he laid a hand on hers. She squeezed it, lightly. They’d come to the edge of something and now paused there, holding on. The feeling was surprisingly comfortable.

  “What about you?” she asked again.

  What about Oskar? Well. “There were a few times…when I was at the academy. Once before that, at Gymnasium. A bunch of us would go out together, you know, drinking, and—”

  “Oh, God.” She held up a hand, shaking her head, her eyes closed. “I don’t want to hear. Drunken schoolboys and what, prostitutes? Somebody’s sister’s older friend? A party in the woods somewhere? That’s all it was, something like that? You can keep your secrets, then.”

  Oskar was relieved—one more thing to thank her for.

  “So no lady friends. No real lovers.” There was a methodical quality to her voice, as though she were placing objects in a certain order. “But anyway you’re not…all new.”

  Oskar felt pretty new. He could barely remember any of those furtive, grappling encounters. “I guess not.”

  “That’s good, don’t you think?”

  He had no idea what she was asking. “Is this how you all are?” he said. “Is this a point of Socialist doctrine? ‘All party comrades shall be open and free in their expression of physical desire.’ ”

  She tittered. “Maybe. Something like that. You should have seen our camps—or come to the Leuchtenburg, you know, before—but you were probably some kind of straight-arrow type, a Pathfinder.”

  “Deutsche Jungenschaft,” he corrected her.

  “Oh God. Are you queer, then? We thought you all were queer. And very beautiful.”

  “Not all of us,” Oskar said dryly.

  She laughed. She gave his hand another squeeze, then released it. And just like that, it was over. Now back to business—the whole tangled and frightful business of resistance and spying and reinfiltrating the Reich under the eyes of the SS. Why it should fall to Lena to decide such a thing—how Oskar even understood that this was so—remained altogether mysterious.

  “Tell me about your Mr. Toby Lugan,” she said, “and I’ll tell you what I learned about Senator Bull Townsend. Maybe together the stories will make sense.”

  —

  And so it was not until hours later—after dinner and a prolonged joint appearance at one of the nightly folk-singing sessions (Oskar had insisted on this, believing it was important to seem relaxed and unconcerned, to play newlyweds for all it was worth), with no further sightings of Clair, his father, Lugan or von Ewigholz—that they were able to pick up a certain dropped thread. Moving down the quiet ship’s corridors, they finally reached the door of their cabin and briefly stopped there. But it was only a door, the same door, and the familiar cramped quarters within.

  Oskar switched on the tiny desk lamp, and Lena began to undress. Previously he’d averted his gaze while she did so, reckoning that’s what an officer and gentleman ought to do. Tonight he found himself looking away again but with less conviction. For Lena, the sight of a young man in his underclothes seemed to neither alarm nor especially interest her. Oskar guessed there was some Socialist doctrine about that, too. All limbs being equal, perhaps. Folding his trousers—a military habit, protecting the crease—he caught her watching, and her expression made him smile.

  He crawled up into the top bunk and willed himself to go to sleep. He felt time passing, heard Lena’s breath, wondered if she was sleeping or instead pretending to sleep or not even bothering with that. He thought for a while about her lying there, imagining her body in this or that position. Then his thoughts turned upon himself. What was he doing here? Was he expecting anything? Waiting for something? It was a muddle. But the same was true most of the time. This, in fact, had been part of his training at Lichterfelde: Everything in war is a muddle. Your intelligence is never adequate, the terrain never matches the map, too much is happening at once, and anyway it’s not as if you have the field to yourself. There’s another party out there, intentions unknown, slinking around like a weasel. You need to take that into account, but you can’t, not properly, so in the end you must simply decide. Advance, retreat, hold your ground, open fire—just do it and hope for the best, because you’ll never be any more certain than you are right now.

  He climbed down into the lower bunk and found that Lena had made room for him. It was remarkably warm under the covers, and the feeling of her pressing against him was not likely something he’d ever forget. He found her mouth with his and she moved around him somehow, not quite embracing, sliding over and under him, as though trying to touch every part of him with every part of her. Their nightclothes became superfluous. He marveled at the texture of her breasts. Had he ever felt a breast before? Not that he could remember, certainly not like this. There were many places, up and down her, that seemed important for him to kiss, and urgently, but she drew him back up to her mouth and looked deep into him and held his cock in her hand, guiding it, pressing herself down, adjusting, pressing harder. The room was dark, but enough light passed through the crack beneath the door for him to make out her expression, which was almost funny: her jaw clenched, her lips held tightly together, her brow furrowed in concentration, as if she couldn’t get enough of him inside her all at once yet had resolved to try. Suddenly he couldn’t bear it anymore. He flooded her once, breathed hard for a while, found himself erect again and still inside her, and the second time went on much longer. The third—waking at some hour for which no number suitably magical has been thought of—lasted longer still, deep, deep into the night.

  In the morning, he skipped calisthenics, as they seemed unnecessary. He’d learned everything he needed to know about strength through joy.

  SETBACK THEORY

  BERLIN, FASANENSTRASSE: LATE MAY

  The crowd at the von F—— salon had dwindled noticeably, its numbers thinned by emigration, by the transfer of several officers to the Czech frontier, by a growing reluctance among certain public officials to be seen with certain others, by typical inconveniences, including the protracted “interrogation” of a young cleric—How terrible! He had such a lovely countertenor, like a choirboy!—and the rumored but unsurprising arrest of the cabaret artist Stav, who was said to have gotten up the nose of Reinhard Heydrich. And so it was a smaller and rather more sober group that occupied the old leather armchairs of the late Baron’s private study.

  “Have you noticed that our friend Greimer is working again?” said a Kriegsmarine officer known to his friends as Jaap, widely thought to be close to Admiral Canaris, head of military intelligence. “They’re printing his stuff in the Morgenpost. Fluff pieces, mostly. But apparently he got a voyage to New York out of it.”

  “He went to New York?” exclaimed Cissy, the White Russian princess, as though the man had robbed her of her dreams. “And he came back?”
/>   “Why not?” said Guido, the former art dealer. “It sounds like he’s in with the right people now.”

  “Hard to fault him, really,” said an elderly brigadier, a holdover from the long-defunct Prussian army. “Nothing sadder than a writer not allowed to write.”

  “I don’t know,” Jaap said, smiling ruefully. “Erich Kästner seems to be doing all right.”

  The princess gave a mirthless laugh. “Erich’s got enough money to wait it out. The royalties from Emil und die Detektive alone—”

  “It’s not about money,” Guido insisted. “It’s about your calling, your gift.”

  “Greimer has a gift?”

  “It is about money,” said the princess sadly, “if you haven’t got any.”

  Only one man in the room took no interest in the conversation: the slight, dark-haired and intense Hans-Bernd, who stood beside the desk slowly turning the Baron’s giant globe in its complicated mounting, as though attempting to correct a misaligned Earth. The green patch that was Germany, as its borders had stood in the Kaiser’s heyday, rotated slowly to the top. Hans-Bernd stopped it there, looking down on it from his Jovian perspective.

  “I hold out,” he announced, as though his fellow guests and the world itself had been waiting for this, “little hope for our esteemed Generaloberst.”

  Conversation came to a full stop. No one needed to ask who or what he was talking about. Ludwig Beck, a four-star general of unquestioned brilliance and integrity, had served since 1935 as chief of the General Staff. While he commanded not a single combat division, his post made him, in effect, the senior member of the world’s most illustrious officer corps. As such, he was the focus of a great deal of hope on the part of the nascent Resistance. He represented—so it was widely felt—both a moral and practical counterweight to Adolf Hitler. The army, surely, wouldn’t act in defiance of its Chef des Generalstabs. And Beck, hardly a pacifist, had made it known that Germany, in his view, would on no account be ready to undertake major armed conflict before 1940, at the earliest. So let Hitler huff and puff over Czechoslovakia. Beck would keep the army in its barracks long enough for the Resistance to achieve—in the jargon of that season—a “political solution.”