Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  “I should like to have the use of a telephone,” said von Ewigholz. “This lady also. In privacy, if that is possible.”

  “Of course.” The manager ushered them down a corridor to a smaller and more spartan sitting area, a few chairs of indistinctly modernist style arranged before a fireplace over which hung the true glory of the room and perhaps of the City Hotel: an oversized photograph of Karl Kaufmann, Gauleiter of Hamburg, surrounded by what Oskar took to be the entire hotel staff. Near the center, at the elbow of the great man himself, beamed the day manager in his tuxedo, tiny and self-important. “Here,” he said, stepping aside like a master of ceremonies and indicating a closet with a chair and lamp table visible inside, “you find the telephone.”

  “Thank you,” said von Ewigholz. Something in his voice sent the manager bowing and trotting away. “I will go first, if you don’t mind. This matter of the car may be…The situation has become more complicated.”

  When he’d shut himself in, the others spread themselves across the furniture.

  “You think anyone will steal our luggage?” Clair wondered aloud, twirling a tasseled scarf end. His tone was faintly hopeful.

  Lena seemed to consider a response, and Oskar was relieved when she held back on it.

  “I’m sure the wharf is well policed,” he said. The hotels, too, he thought of adding—but Lena surely realized that.

  Clair said, “I suppose that’s meant to be reassuring.”

  Von Ewigholz was right, Oskar thought: this boy could easily become a danger to himself, hence to all of them. “Your aunt,” he said to Lena. “She’ll be happy to hear from you, I imagine.”

  “Well, I hope so. I imagine my parents will have told her the ship was due in today. But she may not be expecting a call like this, out of the blue.”

  Clair perked up, taking an interest. “What’s she like, this aunt? Another book person, like you two? Or no—I bet she’s a bit of a wild one. A rebel. Does she like Americans? Or does she think we’re all cowboys and G-men?”

  Oskar smiled. He was curious himself about this notional relative. Lena had been tight-lipped, saying only that the woman was “an old comrade,” one hundred percent reliable. It was his personal belief that the two of them had never met.

  “Oh, Aunt Tilde,” said Lena. “She does have a mind of her own, I can tell you that. You know, people used to say I’d turn out just like her. That may have been a warning—I’m not sure.”

  She was, Oskar realized, enjoying the spy game. He glanced at the door of the telephone closet, pulled shut with a stripe of amber light at the transom. He could hear von Ewigholz, speaking and then falling quiet, his voice just a murmur yet firm and steady even so. A voice confident of being heeded and indifferent to being overheard. With no precursory good-bye, the telephone earpiece struck its cradle and the door popped open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box. Von Ewigholz stood there for a moment, backlit, looking annoyed but triumphant.

  “They’re sending a car,” he said, stepping out and choosing a chair for himself. “So, it’s your turn,” he told Lena. “Take as long as you like. And don’t worry if the switchboard girl sounds upset. That would be my doing.”

  “Come, Stefan,” Lena said, glancing coquettishly over a shoulder. “Tilde will want to hear your voice, too—I’m not sure she believes you’re quite real.”

  —

  The automobile waiting on the Schillerstrasse was no gleaming black Mercedes. It was blue, and its paint had weathered in the North Sea air to a pocked and blistered matte. The growl of its once-powerful engine was interrupted every few seconds by the cough of a misfiring cylinder. The canvas top had been furled and lashed down like a sail, revealing bench seats covered in cracked, silvery leather. Its most durable and striking feature was its chromework, which was elaborate and, by present-day standards, excessive, extending to spotlights and mirrors and bulging headlamps and a trio of long, trumpetlike horns protruding from a monumental grille. At the brow of the hood, a bird of prey leaned into the wind, looking a bit too fat for actual flight.

  By the driver’s door, beaming proprietarily, stood a paunchy man in the mustard-brown uniform of the Sturmabteilung. He blanched noticeably as von Ewigholz bore down on him.

  “What is this?” was his demand.

  “It’s a Gatsby car!” said Clair.

  “I think it’s a Horch,” said Oskar, who, like most German boys, had been enamored of automobiles. “Maybe a ’28 or ’29.”

  The chauffeur, mildly terrified, looked from one to the other. “It’s…it’s from the Deputy Kreisleiter’s own garage. There was…at such short notice…it was the best we could manage. The best!” Seeing that no one challenged this assertion, he puffed himself up and went on: “And look at her—a splendid old girl, when all’s said and done. Get her out on the autobahn and she’ll fly, she will. Believe me, I know how to talk to her. Just let me—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said von Ewigholz. “If this is the best you can offer, then it will have to do. Give the Deputy Kreisleiter our thanks.” He climbed into the driver’s seat, bumping the SA man aside.

  “But…this is—”

  “That will be all.” Von Ewigholz, not bothering even to glance at him, concerned himself now with the confusing array of levers and knobs on the dashboard, sliding his gloved hands experimentally around the steering wheel. “All right, this should be no problem. Get in, everyone.”

  Only then—after the old motorcar was coaxed and bullied into motion and their luggage was retrieved and they were finally out on the newly completed highway linking Bremerhaven to its mother city like a smoothly curving umbilicus—did Oskar finally feel himself to be back home. The land on either side had the raw-shaved and brutalized look of recent road building, but it gave an unimpeded view of the river Weser and the marshy, windswept countryside. If not a gentle landscape, it was a strongly German one: a stubborn place that after centuries of being drained and plowed and replanted still had an air of wildness about it. The wind smelled of salt and new grass and gasoline. The engine grew louder as von Ewigholz thrust it into higher gears, and for the first few miles they rode along without speaking, apart from one brief exchange, von Ewigholz to Oskar:

  “Have you come here before?”

  “Just once. Lena and I, on our honeymoon. And yourself?”

  “Never. I prefer the mountains.”

  They’d seated themselves according to the unwritten conventions of road travel: the lady in back with Clair, Oskar in the passenger seat up front next to von Ewigholz, the chauffeur having been abandoned at the wharf. Oskar felt he should be holding a map, even though there was no need for one—the road ran straight to Bremen, and the drive should take less than an hour.

  “You know, Clair,” Lena said after a time, her voice unnaturally strident so as to be heard above the wind and the engine noise, “there’s an old story about four travelers on the road to Bremen. Maybe you’ve heard it. Over here it’s called ‘Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten.’ ”

  Clair laughed, for no reason Oskar could understand. “I don’t believe I know that one.”

  “Yes, well.” Lena turned sideways in the seat, bending closer to his ear. “They were a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster. It’s complicated, but each of them was about to be killed for one reason or another, so they set out to become street musicians in Bremen.”

  “Sounds perfectly logical.”

  “Well, in a way it was. You see, Bremen was a Free City, not under the rule of some aristocrat, so it was a refuge for…for anyone, really.”

  “Even animals.”

  “Even musicians!” said von Ewigholz, loudly—which surprised Oskar so much that he gave an involuntary laugh. The two men exchanged looks and for that instant were something like companions. Oskar glanced quickly away.

  “Okay,” said Clair, “so what happens?”

  “They come upon some robbers,” said Lena. “This is the scary part if you’re a child. These robbers have taken ov
er a nice little house, and they’re inside there with heaps of food and all the nice things they’ve stolen. The donkey and the dog and the cat and the rooster are very hungry, of course, after walking all day, so they make a plan for how to get the robbers out. I can’t remember how it went. But anyway, they end up singing or, rather, making their animal noises, which for them is singing. And this frightens the robbers into running away from the house.”

  “They climb one atop another,” von Ewigholz said pedantically. “They stand just outside the window, and the dog hops up on the donkey, the cat crawls up on the dog, and the rooster flies up on the cat. When they start singing, the donkey puts his hooves up on the windowsill and they all crash through the glass. That’s what scares the robbers.”

  “Got it,” said Clair.

  “But the robbers come back,” Oskar pointed out.

  “After the animals are asleep,” said Lena. “But everything goes wrong for them.”

  Von Ewigholz surprised them with an Americanism, delivered with comical precision: “All hell breaks loose.”

  “Exactly,” said Lena. “The robbers get kicked and bitten and clawed and pecked at, but they don’t understand why and think they’ve been attacked by an evil witch. So they run away and are never seen again.”

  “And the musicians never make it to Bremen,” said von Ewigholz.

  “They don’t have to, because they’ve got this nice little house.”

  “No, but—well, that’s right, but doesn’t this bother you?” He twisted around in the driver’s seat, dangerously so in Oskar’s view. “The story is called ‘Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten,’ but where is Bremen?”

  “Straight ahead,” said Oskar, “up the road.”

  Von Ewigholz turned his attention back to driving but added, “It always bothered me, as a boy. I wanted to hear more about this magical place where animals sing in the streets.”

  Lena looked fleetingly sorry—for the disappointed child this black-clad SS man had been? It was too ridiculous.

  “Is there a moral to this story?” Clair asked after a few moments. “Is it supposed to teach you some lesson?”

  “It’s just a story,” said Oskar, now annoyed.

  “I always thought…” Lena glanced at him, sensing his mood. “I always thought it was saying, Be true to yourself, whatever you are. Use whatever gifts God’s given you. If you’ve got claws, use them to scratch the robbers. If you’ve only got hooves, kick with them.”

  “I like that,” said Clair. “But I was thinking maybe something about strange bedfellows. Joining up with other people even if they’re different. Like cats and dogs.”

  “And the donkey!” said Lena. “He was the funniest.”

  “What do you think, Hagen?” Clair asked. Oskar couldn’t tell if it was meant to be a goad.

  “It’s a simple folktale. You read it to children at bedtime. They laugh at the pictures. I don’t know why we’re talking about it.”

  Oskar agreed, which further annoyed him.

  They hadn’t encountered much motor traffic, and the landscape had been pleasing but monotonous. As they drove on, the highway curved gently eastward, away from the river and onto firmer and higher ground. They sped through pockets of woodland that yielded to well-ordered fields and at last a couple of tiny villages, the first signs of the idealized German country life that featured so prominently on government posters and in sentimental movies and other approved expressions of the national Volksgeist. And here there finally were other motorcars, on little farm roads beside the autobahn and then on the highway itself. None of the other cars were as ornate as the Horch and few were as old; mostly they were late-model DKWs or Opels or Fords, the last having been given a kind of dispensation on account of the Führer’s special regard for Henry Ford, whose portrait (so they said) hung on his wall. Altogether Oskar got a sense of forward motion and modest prosperity, with none of the startling affluence of Washington or the furious bustle of Berlin.

  It was not long after—indeed, much too soon—that Oskar began to recognize local landmarks, a tower here and a steeple there, an old fortification rising improbably from the tidal moraine, sights he remembered from his brief and somewhat perfunctory training only a few months ago. He’d come straight from the Christmas holiday with his family to find this landscape swathed in fog, so now his memories had a blurred and dreamlike quality. He’d made a pro forma appearance at Kriegsmarine headquarters, then been spirited to an overgrown manor with sizable grounds north of the city. He remembered looking out in the morning over the fields—these same fields, or ones very like them—and marveling at the spiky tips of larches where the mist had frozen overnight, glittering like a million tiny daggers in the sunrise. The sun was getting lower now, falling behind them as the highway swept east and Bremen proper rose to meet them on the right, a collection of dark shapes arranged along the riverfront like a child’s wooden blocks.

  “Your aunt lives where?” said von Ewigholz.

  It was the first time anyone had spoken in a while, and Lena seemed startled by the question. Answer, thought Oskar, for God’s sake. It’s not something you’d need to think about.

  “The Eastern Vorstadt,” said Lena, probably soon enough. “Here, I’ve copied down the address.”

  She made a little business out of finding a piece of paper in her handbag and passing it up front, where Oskar made a similar show of reading it. All unnecessary—both of them had memorized the street number and the directions that came with it—but the practice of taking notes, of being seen to consult them, was a bit of fieldcraft the Abwehr drilled into you. It had never been explained, so Oskar was left to his own surmises: that it made you seem forgetful and therefore unthreatening; that it provided a physical distraction, like a film actress lighting a cigarette. These might have been true, but as with any game, you only needed to learn the rules, not understand them.

  “Celler Strasse 49,” Oskar read. “Near the St.-Jürgen Hospital. Enter off Lüneburger Strasse. She suggests you approach from the Breitenweg, which will take you to the Bismarckstrasse, and turn when you see the hospital on your right.”

  “Well, it can’t be too hard.”

  The afternoon was turning into evening by the time the old Horch left the autobahn and began snorting and lurching along the streets of Bremen, which narrowed as the travelers progressed from the leafy northern suburbs to the crowded Altstadt. They passed a complex of athletic fields where boys in brightly colored jerseys ran or huddled or marched, holding sticks for rifles, their chants competing with the growl of the unhappy engine and the sounds of city life. Oskar felt a touch of sadness, though whether it was for those boys and whatever doom awaited them or for his own vanished youth, he couldn’t have said. Beyond the fields lay waste ground, then warehouses, then a sprawling railway yard whose many tracks they sped over on a bridge, and at last they entered the old Free City, a medieval thicket of heavy-timbered buildings enlivened with gilt signs and flower boxes and red banners showing the swastika.

  The traffic slowed to a walker’s pace. Oskar scanned kiosks posted with show bills, advertisements, civic notices in Gothic type and the latest news headlines: Porsche unveils its newest model, a “People’s Car” for just RM 990. Sweden affirms her neutrality. The Kriegsmarine launches a new battle cruiser, the Prinz Eugen. Switzerland slams England, 2–1.

  They reached a busy intersection, blocked by foot traffic, and by the time Oskar spotted the Breitenweg street sign, it was too late to make the turn. Irritated, von Ewigholz stomped the gas pedal and released the clutch too quickly, the car lurching and stalling and rolling slowly into the crossing. He then stomped angrily and seemingly at random on the various pedals at his feet. By now the engine was flooded. A traffic policeman approached, spotted the SS uniform and stiffened into a pose of either martial attention or mortal fear.

  “Here!” Oskar called, waving to a small group of university students, probably, dressed in the sort of bright-hued, cheerfully shabby clothin
g you never saw in Berlin. “Help us, would you? Come give us a push.”

  The youngsters—there were just four—took counsel among themselves and seemed to decide the fun on offer outweighed the risk. Or perhaps, in their naïveté, they thought an entanglement with the Black Knighthood was not at all alarming. They weren’t Jews, were they? So they loped over, grinning, and took up positions around the flanks of the old car.

  “Now!” Oskar said, and they started to push.

  At first the old Horch barely rocked forward a notch, but after a couple of tries they managed to get it rolling; it cleared the intersection so the traffic on the Breitenweg could flow through. The students cheered and the traffic policeman saluted, then pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow.

  “Wohin geht’s du?” one of the boys asked Clair, who’d climbed onto the seatback for a better view of the unfolding embarrassment.

  He seemed to understand, if not the words, at least the general spirit of the question. “I haven’t the foggiest notion!” he said cheerfully.

  This seemed to amuse them. “American?” one of them asked.

  “That’s enough,” snapped von Ewigholz. His pallor had flushed to a dangerous red, as though some chemical reaction were occurring beneath it. “Thank you—your help is appreciated. Now go on with what you were doing.”