Silence

by Mechtild Borrmann

  Rita stopped by the fence and waved to them. They answered her greeting with brief nods and went back to their work. That was always their way. They would never stop working to say hello to her. Not to her, nor to the customers who drove up in their four-wheel-drives to drop off or pick up their horses. When it came to the Hövers, whoever you were, you waited until one of them had time for you.

  At first, Rita had found their behavior arrogant, but she soon realized that it was not. They just had a very particular set of values. It seemed as if they followed a different clock. They would not interrupt a job in order to chat. Chatting was out of the question anyway. They were both friendly but reserved. They lived frugally, though they must have had a good income by now, and this frugality extended to the way they spoke.

  It was a good ten minutes before Hanna led the horse from the practice ground back to its pasture, came to stand beside Rita, and said, “Morning.” Then she waited. And that too was always her way. If people came to the farm, it was because they wanted something, so they should say what it was and then go away.

  Rita felt for the copy of the photograph in her denim jacket. “Hanna, I have a couple of questions about the people who lived in the cottage until the end of the war. Their name was Peters, wasn’t it?”

  Hanna gave a short nod.

  “It’s about Therese Peters.” Rita took the copy out of her pocket and handed it to her. “So, what I know is that her husband was killed in the war and was never found, and that she then went away too.”

  Hanna looked straight at her, unmoved, saying nothing. She barely glanced at the piece of paper. Rita swallowed. “It was Heuer, the photographer, who took the picture. Do you remember Photo Studio Heuer?” She cleared her throat. “At any rate, he said Therese Peters went away after that.” Rita began to stammer, annoyed that she was losing her train of thought because of Hanna Höver and her infuriating coolness. She was quite unable to work out whether it was stupidity that lay behind that gaze or calm wisdom. She decided not to mention Robert Lubisch or his father’s role in the story.

  “And?” Hanna asked at last.

  Paul came across the yard and greeted her with the same curt “Morning” as his sister.

  Wordlessly, Hanna handed the piece of paper to her brother, and Rita thought she saw a brief twitch in the man’s face. Surprise? Fear?

  “I thought perhaps you might know what became of her? I mean . . . you must have known her.”

  The cawing of rooks and the sound of a car engine approaching and then receding built up in the silence that followed. A horse snorted in the pasture. Paul folded the photocopied sheet repeatedly into smaller and smaller rectangles, scoring the edges between his thumb and forefinger as if he wanted to cut it up.

  “She went away,” Hanna said finally, “and nobody knows where.”

  Rita, relieved that Hanna had said anything at all, immediately asked another question.

  “Do you know when that was?”

  “No.” The reply was not unfriendly, but it came as blunt and direct as if Hanna had taken a potshot at her question with it.

  “Her maiden name was Pohl, wasn’t it? Did she have brothers and sisters who might be able to help me?”

  “No.” Once again, the reply was immediate and definitive.

  Paul said, “You know, it was a long time ago. One day she just wasn’t there anymore.” He ran his hand through his unkempt, gray-brown hair. “Where did you get the photograph?”

  Rita ignored the question. “The Pohls, were they from Kranenburg?”

  Hanna shoved her hands into the pockets of her corduroy vest. “I have work to do,” she said curtly, and went over to the stables.

  Suspecting that Paul would soon leave her standing there too, Rita asked hastily, “And this Wilhelm Peters, was he from here too?”

  He nodded.

  Rita took a deep breath and forced herself to be patient. “And . . . did he have brothers and sisters, perhaps?”

  “A sister.”

  “What about her? Does she still live here?”

  “The war kept her.”

  The choice of words left Rita speechless for a moment. Kept by the war. Why would someone say that? Did it mean that, for the dead, the war was still on?

  “But maybe you can—”

  This time Paul interrupted her: “I asked you where you got the photograph.” The firmness of his tone, coming from a man who was normally rather gentle, made her start.

  It took her just a fraction of a second. “The old table,” she said quickly. “You know I restored the old table. The picture was in the drawer.”

  Höver nodded. “Leave the dead in peace,” he said almost comfortingly, then turned and headed back toward the pasture.

  Rita Albers set off for home. It was not until she was almost at her front door that she realized Paul Höver had not given back the copy of the photograph.

  Chapter 6

  April 21, 1998, evening

  After bringing the telephone conversation to an end, Therese Mende spent a long time on the spacious terrace of her house. Her eyes wandered sightlessly over the bay and out to the Mediterranean. The sea was calm. Some waves were breaking against the cliffs far below, while others continued into the bay and lapped up onto a narrow sandy beach where there were now more holidaymakers than a few days before. The tourist season was approaching fast, and peace would only return, gradually, in October. Shouts wafted up to her, fleeting wisps of words that vanished before giving up their meaning.

  The calendar said late April, but this year everything seemed to be in a hurry. Summer’s plays of light were already dancing on the water; soon the shadows of the cliffs would move across the bay like the hands of a clock and, at noon, that shadowless moment, converge.

  Such urgency! With each passing year, the days seemed longer and the years shorter. Wasn’t it only yesterday that the winter almond blossoms had been on the branches, glowing like pink snow?

  Shaking her head, she turned away. A red-tiled roof, supported on four pillars of natural stone, extended the entire breadth of the house, plunging the terrace into shadow to half its depth. She went to the sideboard, took out the bottle of sherry and a glass, and sat down in one of the wide wicker chairs.

  It was age. Time sped up with age. So one clung fearfully to every moment and hoped to see the next day too. A certain lack of moderation. A thirst for life that did not desire a longer life. A thirst for life that feared death.

  She poured herself a generous glass and ran her left hand through her pageboy-style gray hair.

  “The tenant,” Hanna had said on the telephone. “The tenant has a photo and is sniffing around.”

  So that was how simple it sounded, when the past caught up with a person after nearly fifty years.

  The sherry was dark and mild, leaving only a slight burning sensation on the tip of her tongue.

  For the first moment or two, she had not understood what Hanna was talking about at all. In a way that was quite unplanned, the life of Therese Peters had receded over the years. Whenever she had filled in a form and entered Therese Mende, née Pohl, it was as if she were drawing a line through Therese Peters’s life. The words piled up more and more densely over the images, and sometimes, in Rome and London, where she had spent the early years with her second husband, Tillmann Mende, she had stopped in the street and asked herself whether the seven years of being Therese Peters had really happened.

  And now they were back, those drab and meaningless years, and she did not even feel surprise.

  The woman claimed she had found the photo in the cottage, in the kitchen drawer, but that could not be right. Why did she say it? How had she really come by the picture? “A journalist,” Hanna had said. Someone like that would go on digging. She would collect a whole suitcase full of verifiable facts, interpret them as she wished, and then talk in that a
rrogant way about truth. And none of it would be true.

  Therese drank the rest of her sherry in one gulp and poured out some more.

  All these years she had worked hard and, together with her husband Tillmann, built up the Mende Fashion label. It had not always been easy. Tillmann had a creative mind, but his recklessness had often brought them to the brink of ruin. It was not until he handed over the management of the business to her, and her alone, that things had started to go uphill. Today, Mende Fashion was a presence throughout Europe.

  Tillmann’s sudden death three years before had thrown her into a deep depression. Without his recklessness, at a stroke, nothing had any meaning; everything was pointless, empty. But she had not understood that until months later. She had handed the management of the company over to her daughter, Isabel, and retreated here.

  Her husband was the only one who knew about her life as Therese Peters. Isabel had no idea.

  She sat there motionless for a long time, her thoughts wandering aimlessly. The sun migrated inland. On the horizon, the line between sky and water grew indistinct. Soon it would disappear, and only the narrow band of spray where the waves broke would show that there was an above and a below.

  Luisa, her housekeeper, was standing in the entrance to the living room, clearing her throat in that cautious manner of hers. Therese started.

  “Excuse me, but dinner is ready,” said Luisa, vanishing as silently as she had appeared.

  Therese was not hungry, but she went in and made her way to the dining room. Her loose-fitting turquoise silk robe rustled at every step. She took only a few bites. As Luisa cleared the table, she looked at her with concern. “Didn’t you like it? Should I bring you something else?” Therese smiled and patted her hand. “The food is excellent, Luisa, but I’m not hungry today.” The housekeeper’s face relaxed. Deftly, she put the plates and cutlery on a tray and disappeared into the kitchen with it. A short while later, she came back one more time and said, as she did every evening, “I’ll be going then, Frau Mende. Is there anything else you need?” and Therese replied, as she did every evening, “No, thanks, Luisa. Have a good night.”

  Then she was alone. With a woolen blanket around her shoulders and a glass of red wine in her hand, she sat out on the terrace again. The beach had emptied; the only sound was the constant, regular murmur of the sea.

  Fragments of recollection came back to her, unchecked, swirling in her head like the remnants of a time that had collapsed in on itself.

  Her mother kneeling among the pews, swathed in the bitter, musty scent of old incense.

  Leonard, standing in the field of stubble and demanding her promise of eternal friendship, then later, his eyes wide with terror, impermanent as a ghost.

  Yuri, who wanted to believe in God, pressing himself against the plank wall of the barn to stop himself from wavering.

  Her father, with the eyeglasses in which one lens was shattered, wordlessly stroking her cheek with the back of his hand and trying to smile.

  And Wilhelm. Wilhelm, pacing agitatedly up and down in her room and saying, at last, “Marry me.”

  The strangeness of the images soon fell away. The intervening years shrank to minutes.

  Chapter 7

  April 21, 1998

  At about ten o’clock, Rita Albers rode her bicycle to Kranenburg. The red-brick facade of the town hall was almost completely overgrown by a wild grapevine. The young leaves lay against the masonry as if they had been waxed in place, glowing with the rich green of spring. The young woman at the residents’ registration counter greeted her pleasantly. A plaque on her desk read, “You are being served by Frau Yvonne Jäckel.” Frau Jäckel frowned with irritation when Rita introduced herself as a journalist and told her she was researching an old missing-persons case.

  “Well, I don’t really know. Such old dates. We have everything after 1950 in the computer, but before that . . .” She looked helplessly at Albers. “What were the names again?”

  Rita smiled winningly. “Therese Peters, née Pohl, and Wilhelm Peters. If I’ve understood correctly, Wilhelm Peters was killed at the end of the war, and Therese left town shortly afterward.”

  The young woman shook her head. She entered the names into her computer, as if by force of habit, and Rita rolled her eyes.

  “Look, the war ended in 1945. Do you have an archive, maybe? I mean, could I have a look?”

  Frau Jäckel was fully occupied with her screen and asked, without looking up, “Do you have the birth dates?”

  “Yes, Wilhelm Peters’s.” Rita took out the copy of the SS card. “Born June 22, 1920.”

  The young woman looked back and forth between the document and the screen. “I don’t understand this,” she said pensively. “I have Wilhelm Peters here, but he wasn’t killed in the war. He was removed from the register in 1951, with the comment, ‘missing.’ ”

  Rita sat absolutely still for a moment. She asked, “Does it say when he went missing?”

  The young woman turned the screen toward Rita. “Look here. Wilhelm Peters, born June 22, 1920, removed from the register March 18, 1951. And down here there’s a comment: ‘Reported missing August 15, 1950.’ ” She scrolled down a little. “And then here. Therese Peters, née Pohl, marriage certificate dated August 25, 1944. Likewise taken off the register March 18, 1951, this time with the comment, ‘Moved to unknown destination.’ ”

  Rita’s thoughts came thick and fast. What was this? The journalist in her scented something. The story that Robert Lubisch had told her could not be true. Had he lied to her? Why would he do that? No, that was unlikely.

  “What does that mean? I mean, why were they both taken off the register on March 18, 1951?”

  Yvonne Jäckel leaned back in her chair, visibly pleased with herself and her database. “There’s an official procedure. They wait a few months, try to find out where the woman has moved, or in case she deregisters in the proper way so that she can register somewhere else. As far as missing people are concerned, I don’t have any personal experience, but I think the procedure is similar.”

  “Can you check for parents or siblings?”

  The young woman tapped at her keyboard. When another visitor, a woman, came into the office, she hurriedly swiveled the screen back into its proper position and gave Rita Albers a brief, apologetic smile.

  “I’ll have another look later if I have time,” she said, almost conspiratorially, “but I don’t think I’ll find anything here. The records of immediate relatives are linked, but I don’t have any more entries here. If the people died first, or deregistered . . .” She shrugged helplessly. “You’d have to get in touch with the municipal archives, or ask at the church. The trouble is, Kranenburg was almost completely destroyed at the end of the war.”

  Rita pointed at the printer sitting on a filing cabinet behind Yvonne Jäckel. “Could you print out the data on Wilhelm and Therese Peters?”

  Equipped with two further documents on the Peterses’ life, she stepped out into the square. She pushed her bicycle down the main street and stopped at an ice-cream stand on an impulse. Four small tables had been put out on the cobblestones for the first time that year. The sun, pleasantly warm, still had the mildness of spring. She ordered a cappuccino and tried to bring some order to this new information.

  Wilhelm Peters had not been killed in the war. Why had Friedhelm Lubisch served up this story to his son, and, above all, how had he really come by the papers? And if Wilhelm Peters didn’t go missing until five years after the war, then it must be . . .

  She finished her cappuccino hurriedly, paid, and rode out into Waldstrasse.

  When she entered the police station, two officers were sitting at their desks behind a counter. A portly man in his late forties, with prematurely thinning hair, came over to her.

  Rita introduced herself, took out the printouts from the residents’ registration
office, and laid them on the counter. She came straight to the point.

  “I’m a journalist, you see, and I’m researching a missing-persons case from the year 1950. Wilhelm Peters is the name. He lived in the Höver cottage with his wife and was reported missing here in Kranenburg. His wife disappeared a few months later.”

  “The year 1950,” said the man sonorously, having thoroughly examined the printouts in silence. He looked up and added laconically: “That’s when I was born.” He did not stir from the spot.

  Rita took a deep breath. “Look, I’m not assuming you worked on the case back then. I’d just like to know where I can inspect the files.”

  The younger policeman at the desk seemed to be following the conversation with amusement.

  “In the archives,” said the fat one at length, in his rather ponderous way. “But first there would have to be a search, and that takes time.”

  “Oh, I’ll wait.” Rita smiled broadly. “I have time.”

  The younger policeman leaned over his desk to hide his grin. The older one examined her with his small brown eyes, as if she were some rare beast.

  “You don’t have that much time,” he said, “or have you brought food with you?”

  At this the man at the desk spluttered with laughter. This did not bother the fat one, who looked steadily at Rita as the other one left the room.

  “Look, your archives can’t be that big, and if they’re arranged by year . . . I mean, I could help you.”

  “I see. You want to help,” he said, again in his ponderous way, and Rita grew more and more annoyed. Was this fellow making fun of her joking, or was this just the way he was? And if he searched the way he spoke, then maybe the comment about food wasn’t such a joke after all.

  He glanced to his left across the counter and pointed at the clock hanging there. “Midday soon.”