Silence

by Mechtild Borrmann

  He crossed the terrace and went back into the house. From the door, he studied the damage.

  He took the two gardeners out to the front of the house. Leaning against his patrol car, he took their statements. What had they touched, he wanted to know. “Just the phone,” the older one said. “Oh, and one or two pieces of paper while I was looking for it.”

  “And the sink, for me,” said the other one. “I held on to it because . . . I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” Van den Boom nodded, uttering sympathetic uh-huhs from time to time and making notes while waiting for his colleagues from Serious Crime. He had hoped Manfred Steiner would be with them, but when they arrived, it was six-foot-six Brand, to whom he had spoken on the telephone, who climbed out of the car. Karl van den Boom watched them cordon off a large area around the crime scene, slip on latex gloves, and pull on white overalls; when flashbulbs started going off inside the house, he reflected that Rita Albers was now a big story in her own right and that she was witnessing her last photo session. He was reminded of how much in a hurry she had been the day before, and it occurred to him that when people hurried, they reached their end that much more quickly.

  Two hours later, as Rita Albers was being taken away in a plastic box, he got into his car and drove to Kleve. The Peters file lay on the passenger seat; it ought to be in its rightful place in the police archives when he told his colleagues the following morning that Rita Albers had been interested in this old case.

  Chapter 17

  April 23, 1998

  Therese Mende was in her study, going through her mail, when the telephone rang and Hanna announced herself. “The Albers woman is dead.” She fell silent. The study was on the first floor, and Therese could look down onto her neighbor’s property, at the swimming pool with its kitsch cherubs dispensing water from amphorae at the four corners.

  “How?” she asked after several seconds, leaning heavily against the windowsill.

  “People are saying she was beaten to death.” She could hear Hanna breathing heavily. “Paul should never have rented out the cottage. Father’s turning in his grave.”

  Therese’s thoughts came thick and fast. She did not hear the last few phrases. “Hanna, do you know whether that woman was working on the story alone?” Hanna did not hesitate for long. “I think so, yes. Yes, I’m certain of it. She was that kind.”

  Therese felt the tension of the last few days leave her. “Keep me up to date,” she said as she brought the conversation to a close. A light breeze ruffled the pale pink bougainvillea that grew over the walls of her property. She thought she heard a faint rustling sound.

  There had been a wind back then too, but it had been icy.

  February 1940

  SS officers were now housed in the town hall, the Brown House, and even in the pastor’s home. More soldiers kept arriving, and they were billeted in private homes. Her father was certain they were preparing for the invasion of Holland.

  On the afternoon she saw Leonard again, a blustery wind was driving dense clouds across the sky. The smell of damp cold lay in the air, a moisture that clung tightly to streets, houses, and clothes.

  At first she did not recognize him. He came toward her, the collar of his dark blue wool coat raised and a scarf wrapped protectively around his mouth and nose. They had been about to pass each other, when he stopped.

  “Therese?” She recognized his voice immediately. He removed the scarf from his face. The high cheekbones had always made him look somewhat gaunt, but now, with his high forehead, they dominated his face. His eyes, his mouth, his chin—everything seemed to retreat behind his prominent bones.

  She dropped her purse and, giving in to her first impulse, folded him in her arms out in the street.

  Later, when she remembered this moment, she could still feel his emaciated body. Although Leonard was taller than she was, she had felt as if she were holding a delicate little bird.

  “I’ve been discharged,” he said tonelessly. “I won’t be doing officer training. I’m not fit for service.” He emphasized the word fit with a hostility that was directed against himself, that branded him a failure.

  A few days before, she had received a letter from Jacob. About events in the camp, he wrote:

  When I got back here after my Christmas leave, some of our comrades had made sure Leonard was transferred to the sick bay. They had come in at noon one day and found him lying in his cot with a high fever.

  He had a serious inflammation of the lungs. As I was packing his things, I found some of his clothes completely soaked. Holger Becker, who had not been allowed Christmas leave either, told me Köbe had made Leonard go do exercises almost as soon as we had gone. He decided Leo wasn’t trying his hardest, so he emptied a bucket of water over him in the freezing cold; then he had to go on exercising in his wet clothes. So New Year’s Eve wasn’t a particularly happy celebration here, but not long after, on January 5, there was an unannounced health check for all officer candidates. Leonard was discharged immediately and sent to a hospital in Münster as a civilian. The doctor didn’t pay much attention to the rest of us at all. We had the impression he had come with Leonard’s transfer papers already filled out. So Father kept his promise.

  She met up with Leonard from time to time, and they went on long walks. He never talked about his time in the Labor Service, and yet his experiences lay between the lines of everything he said, everything he did. The sadness that had enveloped him since he got back never went away. Not that they did not laugh and joke with each other, but he never regained the confident self-belief with which he had climbed into the train alongside Jacob.

  Köbe, she realized years later, had ruined Leonard’s conception of humanity. For anyone else, this would have meant approaching the world with mistrust for ever after. But Leonard could not do that. Leonard turned away. And it was therefore unbearably lonely to walk beside him.

  Therese had not gone back to the lookout for months. The Pohls’ house was continually watched, and in May her father’s prediction was fulfilled. Holland capitulated after only five days. Germany was in an ecstasy of victory. It was a contagious frenzy from which she could scarcely escape. The newsreels showed German soldiers in the occupied territories. Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium had capitulated, and German troops were in Paris. The screen showed beaming soldiers in conquerors’ poses, welcomed by jubilant crowds in every nation.

  Leonard stayed home all summer, convalescing. After that, in accordance with his parents’ wishes, he was to study law in Cologne. Therese visited him often, and would find him reading in the Kramers’ garden as soon as the weather permitted. He would often get up early in the morning and hike in the Klever Reichswald for hours, alone. Occasionally, when he was lost in a book or exhausted after his walking, she felt as if she saw the Leonard of old again. She could sense the serene joy he seemed to feel when he dived into the world of his books, when a poem moved him, or when he had spent a day in the midst of nature, far from human beings.

  One Sunday in June, she walked over to the Kalders’ with Wilhelm and Leonard. She and Alwine had passed their school-leaving exams. They wanted to spend the afternoon in the company of old friends, and Alwine had invited them over for coffee and cake.

  They sat on benches in the yard, separated by the rectangle of the rough wooden table with its tablecloth. Therese was pouring coffee and Alwine was bringing out some cake, when Hanna joined them. They welcomed her happily.

  They chatted about this and that, and Leonard told them what Jacob, who had begun his officer training, had written in his most recent letter. Hanna asked, almost casually, “How often do you write to each other?” He answered immediately, “Every week.” Hanna flinched, as if struck by a whip.

  For three gossamer-thin seconds, there was silence—a membrane of time that could not endure.

  Then Wilhelm leapt to his feet and shouted at Leonard, asking whether he
didn’t notice what he had been doing for weeks. “You’re coming between Jacob and Hanna and between me and Therese.” At this his voice cracked and took on an almost tearful tone.

  The remaining images of that afternoon were without color, the friends’ faces waxen. Even the red blooms of the rambling rose against the wall of the house were pale and translucent.

  Leonard, staring at Wilhelm in disbelief. Hanna, jumping to her feet and running away. And Alwine, eyes flicking incredulously from Wilhelm to Therese and back, turning away as if in slow motion and disappearing into the house.

  Later, Therese would often wonder whether everything began with that afternoon, or whether there was a kind of inevitability about it, whether they had been heading that way for years, perhaps since they were children setting off for school together for the first time.

  On that Sunday in June, Therese went back to Kranenburg with Wilhelm and told him she did not love him. He walked alongside her in silence, his hands in his trouser pockets, and she was relieved at how calmly he took it.

  Three weeks later, Jacob came back on a visit, and one evening he told Hanna—undoubtedly more skillfully and with more tact than she had used with Wilhelm—the same thing. During that summer, the devastating power of rejected love took form.

  Chapter 18

  April 23, 1998

  By the time Robert Lubisch came on duty at the hospital at eight o’clock, his stay in Kranenburg, his conversations with Rita Albers, and his anxious fears seemed like some distant nightmare.

  She had greeted him curtly on the Wednesday afternoon, telling him at the door that she was going to write the story anyway and that no one was going to stop her. Then she had gone into the kitchen, and since she had left the door open, he had taken it as an invitation. He asked what she might get for such a story, and she burst out laughing. “Yesterday,” she said, “it would still have been a local-interest story, but today it looks quite different. The price has shot through the roof in the course of a day.”

  He flinched, but he did not allow himself to be sidetracked. He was determined not to leave without a satisfactory result.

  She offered him tea, and they sat down at the kitchen table again. Her movements were agitated, and she fumed that she was not to be bought off, and why did the whole world suddenly believe she was? He reflected that he had found her attractive two days ago, and that it was because of the way she moved that this was no longer true. When at last she sat down, she said, “Your father’s story doesn’t interest me, and if it’s important to you, I can promise it won’t appear in my article. Your father took the papers from Peters while he was still alive—we’ll never know whether knowingly or unknowingly—and it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m interested in Wilhelm and Therese Peters.” She went on to say she had found Therese Peters. That she had gotten married in Frankfurt in 1956, using her maiden name, and that Wilhelm’s disappearance had never been explained. But Robert Lubisch was only half listening; he was busy feeling relieved and wanted nothing more to do with all that.

  As he drove back to Hamburg, he listened to a Ravel piece for oboe, bassoon, and piano, and let his thoughts wander, as he liked to do when the motorway was not crowded. He was relieved, not only because Rita Albers would not be writing about his father, but also because the legend of the quick-witted young hero who had made his way through the confusion of war, unerring and untarnished, had been recalibrated. A crack had appeared in the facade of the larger-than-life Friedhelm Lubisch. Uninteresting for Rita Albers, but important for him, his son.

  It was past midnight by the time he got home. Maren, who worked as a freelance interpreter, was in Brussels for a week, and he went straight up to bed.

  Having finished his rounds in the children’s ward around midday, he was heading for the canteen when a nurse came running after him. “Dr. Lubisch,” she called out. “Wait. The police are in your office. They want to talk to you.”

  Robert Lubisch raised his eyebrows and turned back. He had regular dealings with the police in cases of child abuse, but he did not have any such cases on the ward at present.

  A man and a rather young woman were standing in his office. He shook hands with them both, then looked at them expectantly. The man, who had introduced himself as Söters, asked, “Dr. Lubisch, do you know a Rita Albers?”

  Robert heard the name as if with a delay. In this room it sounded strange, out of place.

  “Yes,” he said. Then, innocently, “A journalist in Kranenburg.” He paused for a moment and added, “Why do you ask?”

  Söters pursed his moist, fleshy lips and replied with a question of his own: “When did you see her last?”

  Lubisch became uneasy. He did not know whether it was due to the police officer’s mouth, which he found repellent, or his question. “Yesterday evening,” he said, truthfully, “but what’s this about?”

  The female officer—he had not caught her name—took over. “What was the nature of your relationship with her?”

  “Relationship?” Robert shook his head. Then, for the first time, he realized she had used the past tense. “What do you mean, was?”

  “Answer the question,” said the moist mouth, and Robert Lubisch sensed an inexplicable menace.

  “I first met Frau Albers three days ago, and I last saw her yesterday evening.”

  “When?” Again the thick, wet lips, like a dog snatching at something.

  He was suddenly gripped by anger. “All right, that’s enough now. If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll ask you to get out of my office. I won’t be treated like this.”

  The officers exchanged a glance. “Frau Albers is dead,” the woman said. “She was murdered yesterday evening.”

  Lubisch took a step back and leaned against the windowsill. “But that’s impossible,” he whispered.

  The officers looked at him expectantly.

  “Look, I left Frau Albers at about eight o’clock, and she was alive.”

  He sat down at his desk and invited the two officers to sit down too. He gave a truthful account, mentioned the photograph and his interest in it. He did not mention the identity papers. After all, Rita Albers herself had said they were not important.

  They asked whether he had noticed anything the previous evening, but he could remember only that her movements lacked fluidity. “She told me she had found Therese Peters,” he recalled. The woman took a notebook from her jacket, wrote something down, and asked, “Where would we find this Frau Peters?” He shrugged. “She didn’t say.” The woman looked at him suspiciously and, as if closing the conversation, made a note. “We’ll pass that on to our colleagues in the lower Rhine,” she said, and Lubisch, somewhat absently, took this as a request for his permission. “Yes. Yes, do that,” he said, nodding, but he was already thinking about something else. “Tell me, how did you find out about me?”

  The man smiled, and indicated with a nod to his female colleague that she could answer. Lubisch wondered whether she liked Söters’s mouth, red and naked as it was, rather as if he had licked it raw.

  “The dead woman,” she said, “had your business card in her trouser pocket.”

  Robert nodded. “I gave it to her the first time we met.”

  Söters stood up. “Keep yourself available,” he growled at Robert Lubisch, then signaled to the woman that she should follow him. At the door, she turned to him again. “Did you give Frau Albers the photo? The original, I mean. Or have you still got it?”

  He stood up, went to the closet, and took the photo of Therese Peters out of the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “Can we keep this?”

  Robert Lubisch nodded; he was almost glad to give it away. Once they had gone, he remained in his seat for a while. What had he gotten himself into? Could it be that Rita Albers had had to die because she had been looking for Therese Peters? But that was crazy.

  He stood up and
went down to the canteen. Rita Albers, with her demanding style, must have made many enemies. It occurred to him that the police would find not only the copy of the photo in her house but also the scanned documents on her computer.

  In the cafeteria, he placed a cup under the coffee machine and pressed “Cappuccino.” He would say it had not seemed important to him.

  He helped himself to a cheese sandwich and sat down alone at a table. He felt uneasy. “Keep yourself available,” that Söters had said. Was he suspected of murder? And what if Rita Albers really had had to die because he . . .

  Chapter 19

  April 23, 1998

  Therese Mende stood on the terrace and watched the cirrus clouds gathering in the west, piling up against one another and heading for the island. The wind had freshened; the beginner surfers were being brought back to shore in a boat, while the advanced ones were looking optimistically up at the sky and rigging smaller sails.

  1940/41

  Wilhelm was on a six-month course in Stuttgart, and Therese was doing her labor service with the cattle on the Kruse farm. The Kruses were simple, kindly people. They often gave her a jug of milk in the evening, or a bag of potatoes or vegetables.

  Alwine was studying history in Cologne. After that afternoon, Therese had written her a letter and tried to explain that she felt nothing for Wilhelm, but Alwine did not react. A week later she left.

  Leonard was to take up a university place in Cologne too, but he could not start until the summer semester. He spent the winter at home, helping his father out in his chambers in Kleve.

  SS Captain Hollmann kept an eye on Siegmund Pohl. At times he had the medical practice watched so visibly that the few patients who had remained loyal to him were forced to notice, and they would only rarely dare to come to his door. In September, Siegmund Pohl stopped taking down the “Practice Closed” sign that normally hung in the window on Sundays.