Silence

by Mechtild Borrmann

  He did not say anything about Therese Mende and his travel plans. On the way to the airport, he decided to call Dollinger from Mallorca. Just in case.

  Chapter 29

  1943

  The winter of 1942/43 was icy. Old Höver brought Yuri and Fedir into the house in the evening and let them sleep on the kitchen bench. Wilhelm continued his checks on the Höver farm. He did not notice this breach of the rules on the accommodation of prisoners of war, but one day, at lunchtime, he found Yuri and Fedir eating with the Hövers. Wilhelm was beside himself. “You promised me you would abide by the rules. Eating with the enemy is forbidden.” He roared at Yuri and Fedir, “Out into the barn! Or you’ll be leaving here before you know what’s what.” Höver, unimpressed, said, “Stay where you are. We work together, so we can eat together.” He turned to Wilhelm. “If you think I’m going to turn communist because I eat with one, I can set your mind at ease. I’m not a Nazi either, even though I’ve had dealings with you for years.”

  Yuri told her about it during one of their secret rendezvous. They met once or twice a week, stood clinging to each other tightly for half an hour, then parted, frozen through. That evening, at the end, he had fallen silent and then whispered, “Therese, I’m worried. We’re a danger to the Hövers, to Fedir, and to your parents.” When she considered their fear-filled secrecy, his phrasing seemed absurd to her. They were standing in the freezing cold, concealed and shivering, and yet they were a danger to others. He talked about not meeting anymore, and her heart raced. “Less often,” she suggested, but after two weeks of seeing each other only once a week, they resumed their old routine.

  These half hours with him kept her going; the days without him seemed lifeless; they were time she had to put behind her, like an obstacle between them.

  He said, once, “When we haven’t seen each other for several days, I’m afraid you don’t exist, that I’ve only dreamed you.”

  She went to Heuer, the photographer, and smiled into the camera for Yuri and no one else. On the day after Christmas, in the evening, on the frozen lake, she gave him the picture. He lifted her up and whirled her through the air. They kept slipping on the ice, stumbling and catching each other. The night-black sky filled the gaps between the snow-covered trees. The twigs and branches glowed like a white spiderweb, shielding their high spirits. The only sound was the crunching of their shoes on the ice and, from time to time, a suppressed gurgle of joy.

  They were like children with a secret zest for life, dancing to unheard music. Once a squadron of bombers rumbled overhead, pushing onward to where the war was. It was not here; it was far away. It could not be where they were.

  Therese Mende sat in her armchair and felt weak. It was nearly noon already, and the sun was taking over the sky. Luisa had opened the sliding doors onto the terrace, and a light breeze filled one of the soft, cream-colored blinds. She called her housekeeper and asked for an espresso. She had missed her morning walk and wanted to make up for it.

  Sometimes she did not think about the war for days at a time, but simply forgot it. And in that peace that belonged to them alone, they would stand wrapped up in each other, one body, one breath. Hands whispering, searching, insisting, under their coats. When they released each other in the small hours, it was like a tearing apart, and the days that followed, during which they could not see each other, heaped the hours, minutes, and seconds into great towers that seemed insurmountable.

  And in the face of all the adversity, she had never in her life been so strong, with an energy that lifted her soul and carried all before it. Yuri told her once, “In my country we say, ‘True love is a circle. It has no end.’ ” She accepted the saying like a pledge. Like an ancient, incontrovertible truth.

  She went up to her dressing room.

  When one is young, one has no idea that love persists, even when the other person is gone. Like a phantom pain. And then that pain is like a ring. It has no end.

  In the factory office she had made friends with Martha and Waltraud, two colleagues of her own age. Waltraud’s fiancé was at the front, and Martha flirted with every man who came into the office wing.

  It was a Monday in mid-February. At lunchtime Martha asked her, “Listen, do you know Wilhelm Peters?” Therese was surprised. Martha told her she had met him at a dance that weekend. “He kept asking me to dance, but all he did was ask about you. Talked about you constantly, wanted to know who your lover was, claimed you were with someone from the factory.” She pouted. “I think he’s completely in love with you. So I don’t stand a chance.”

  Therese choked back her feeling of sickness and asked cautiously, “What did you tell him?”

  Martha laughed. “Well, that he needn’t worry. If she had anyone in the factory, I said, I’d know about it.”

  Therese could hardly breathe, and Martha’s voice sounded strange in her ears. “He’s good-looking, that one, makes a good impression. I could go for him,” she heard her say, and then it was just scraps of sentences: “. . . probably jealous . . .” and “. . . won’t give up so easily . . .” and “. . . often standing by the factory gates . . .”

  When they went back to the office, the metallic clattering of the twelve typewriters seemed to hammer at her, and she was unable to put together a single clear thought. She worked mechanically until the evening, and as she rode her bicycle home and felt the damp cold cooling her face and head, she slowly regained a sense of inner order. She had not forgotten Wilhelm in the last few weeks. Not Wilhelm. But his interest in her, which now felt like a curse. Her thoughts came thick and fast. Until now, he had thought his rival was to be found in the factory. Martha had seen him at the gates several times. Would he now start watching her at home too?

  That evening she went to see Alwine, whom she had neglected in recent months. Her friend welcomed her in a friendly, almost effusive manner, and at first she was uncertain how to go about asking after Wilhelm without reawakening Alwine’s old jealousy. But Alwine raised the subject herself.

  She smiled conspiratorially. “So tell me,” she said excitedly, “who is it?” Therese looked at her wide-eyed, not knowing how to answer. “Oh, come on,” cried Alwine happily, “the sparrows are chirping it out from the rooftops. What’s his name?”

  The questions caught her unprepared, and when she began to lie, she saw suspicion on her friend’s face. Therese lowered her head in embarrassment and asked, “What do they say?”

  Alwine laughed with relief. It was her old, infectious laugh, and it brought back their previous intimacy. “More than anything else, people say you’re making a big secret of it.”

  She thought it was important to Alwine that there was someone else, that she, Therese, was no longer within Wilhelm’s grasp. And there was this overwhelming fullness inside her, this urge to share her happiness. She took her friend’s hand. “You must never betray it,” she whispered. “Promise me.” Alwine’s eyes opened wide and round, and Therese called to mind all the secrets they had shared and kept as schoolgirls. She told her about Yuri. When she said his name, Alwine put her hand to her chest. She said, “You mean . . . a Russian?”

  Therese Mende remembered every detail of that moment; she felt, even today, how she had been gripped by fear, how her heart did not want to take the next step, and how her knees went weak.

  But then Alwine stroked her cheek and said, “Of course, that explains why you’re making a secret of it.” She looked intently into Therese’s eyes. “No one must find out, especially not Wilhelm.”

  Her relief was boundless. They sat together for two hours, whispering and laughing just like old times. It was Alwine, in her ingenious way, who suggested a solution. “The best thing is to confirm the rumor and say he’s a soldier.” And she went further: when they saw each other again two weeks later, she had made contact with a friend from her time in Cologne. “He’s an officer in France. He’s engaged, but one of his men has agreed to wr
ite to you regularly,” she said, beaming. Therese held her breath, close to tears; she thought her friend, with her high-spirited approach to life, had called attention to her secret. Alwine reassured her. “I wrote that you needed to protect yourself against an admirer’s unwelcome advances, and a lover on the front was the best way.”

  From then on, she received regular mail from France, and Alwine made sure Wilhelm found out about it. In one of his first letters, the soldier, a private, asked for a photograph. She could not afford a new one, and it did not feel right to give a stranger a copy of the picture that was intended for Yuri alone. In the New Year, she put it among the pages of the letter she wrote to thank him for his efforts.

  Her clandestine happiness with Yuri seemed unthreatened. The mild evenings allowed her to meet up with him for as long as two hours, sometimes in the nearby forest, sometimes by the lake, and now in the fading light of day. That they were no longer surrounded by darkness was perhaps the greatest gift of that spring. Along with the bittersweet scent of the elderflower bushes, which they could almost taste, it was the colors, above all else, that gave them optimism.

  The whispered news made its contribution too. Underneath the official bulletins on the radio and in the newspapers, beneath the shrieks of “total war” and “final victory,” there was another flow of information that passed by word of mouth. “The war is coming to an end. The war is lost.” Her father listened to the BBC at work, with his colleagues, and he knew how the front was changing. When she told Yuri about it, he crossed himself, gave thanks for the news, and covered her face with featherlight kisses. Then he pulled her toward him, and they did not dare to talk about the future. They sat close beside each other and willed peace to arrive. They sat close beside each other and feared peace.

  Chapter 30

  April 24, 1998

  The Long One was not in. Manfred Steiner, with whom Karl used to go out on patrol as a young policeman, was sitting at a desk in Homicide. He greeted him with the words, “You’ve made yourself unpopular.”

  Van den Boom rubbed his balding pate and feigned remorse. “But Köbler came last night after all and was going to show up here today.”

  Steiner frowned. He was gaunt and wore his thick, now-gray hair short; he carried reading glasses on a cord around his neck and was in the habit of clacking his arms against each other the moment he sat down. “He didn’t show up here, and he’s taken leave from the editorial office for the next two days.” Steiner stood up, went over to the coffee machine, and filled two cups. He held one out to Karl. “So, what did Köbler tell you?”

  Karl shook his head. “He was stubborn, wanted to know what Rita Albers had found out about Peters. He’s probably doing his own research now.”

  “You mean the suspected-murder case from the early fifties?” Karl nodded. Steiner opened up a file. “So . . . for the moment we’re not assuming there’s a connection. Even if Rita Albers found the Peters woman, there’s nothing in the old file that could be awkward for her today. Even at the time, there was nothing to substantiate the charge. So why, nearly fifty years later, would she kill Albers?” He leaned back in his chair. “We’re checking out Albers’s ex-husband and her private life. It looks much more like something to do with a relationship. The head wounds are massive, and the perpetrator struck several times. I can’t see an old woman as the perpetrator.”

  Van den Boom took a sip of coffee and wondered whether he should tell Steiner about his visit to Gerhard, but decided against doing so. It could only be a good thing if they investigated in different directions and did not get in each other’s way. That gave him some breathing space. “Have you found out anything about the murder weapon?” he asked casually.

  Manfred Steiner snapped the arms of his glasses together. “A meat hammer, aluminum, surface area two inches by just under three. Probably came from the kitchen; at least, there was a rack of kitchen utensils of the same material there.”

  “Hmm,” rumbled Karl, “but you haven’t found the thing.”

  The telephone rang. Steiner picked up the receiver. Van den Boom tried to glean something from his responses.

  “In the archives? . . . No, he can’t . . . I have it here, and it’s part of an ongoing investigation . . . Then he can be so good as to come here.”

  When Steiner hung up, Karl grinned at him. “Let me guess: Köbler’s in Kleve and wants to see the Peters file.”

  His colleague put on his reading glasses. “Could it be that you know more than you’re telling me?”

  Karl shook his head. “Nothing concrete, honestly. Just inconsistencies, but lots of them. Too many, if you get me?” He told him about Hanna and Paul, and now also about Gerhard and his reaction to the question about the last years of the war. As he laid out this information, he remembered again how Hanna and Paul had reacted to the name Lubisch. “This Lubisch,” he asked. “How come he was interested in the Peters woman in the first place?”

  “Our colleagues in Hamburg interviewed him.” Steiner leafed through his papers. “Here.” He pushed a computer printout across the desk. It was a photograph of a young woman. Karl was surprised. The young woman was not pretty in the conventional sense, but in this picture she was beautiful. He remembered Gerhard’s remark that she was a slut.

  Steiner quoted extracts from the file: “ ‘Lubisch has a private interest . . . Found the photo among his late father’s papers and wanted to know who she was. There was a note about Photo Studio Heuer, here in Kranenburg, on the back of the photograph . . . which led him to Rita Albers.’ ”

  Karl stood up ponderously, thanked Steiner for the coffee, and made to leave. “Karl.” Steiner stood up too. “I suggest we keep each other informed.” Van den Boom nodded with satisfaction. “If you keep the Long One off my back, it’s a deal.”

  Steiner laughed. “Interesting. This morning he said to me, ‘Just keep that small-town sheriff off my back.’ ”

  As Karl was leaving the station, he thought about the expression “small-town sheriff.” He saw John Wayne in a rocking chair on the porch, dozing in the sun, with his feet up on the balustrade. People said friendly hellos to him, and he put thumb and forefinger to the brim of his hat and said hello back.

  Small-town sheriff was a fine thing to be called.

  Chapter 31

  1943

  They saw each other less often in the summer. There was work to be done on the farms from early in the morning till late at night. The systematic bombing of the Ruhr had begun. American long-range bombers flew over the lower Rhine during the day; the British took over at night. Wailing sirens and rumbling in the sky became routine, and perceptions became reversed. Several hours of silence now felt somehow ominous.

  They met on the edge of the clearing with the lookout tower where she had dropped off and picked up identity papers, four years before. The space formed a long green oval; an old copper beech with a substantial crown stood in the center. Ruby red against slowly fading blue. One Sunday afternoon was of that particular silence that seems to originate in some other reality. They clung to each other and wanted to stay so forever, lying wordlessly in the grass amid such peace. Hands, light as wings, aroused trembling and then powerful shuddering, and they wanted each other totally, clothed themselves in a naked summer skin, bridged the gaps of unfamiliarity. On the first night, she did not experience it, but later she did. A sensation of floating and rising, and she learned with astonishment that the peak came as she fell. And when she opened her eyes, the ruby red of the beech was always there, with the blue of the sky behind it. These were the colors of happiness.

  Her parents accepted her evening walks. Sometimes, as she set off, her father would say, “Be careful, child.” He said it quite casually, quite quietly, and with it he whispered a secret about the secret. The letters continued to arrive from the private in France, and she wrote back with the same regularity. Once he wrote, One of my comrades found your
picture. I told him you were my fiancée. They all envy me.

  On September 28, 1943, she went to the Höver farm, as she did every Wednesday, to fetch milk. Everyone was busy with the turnip harvest, and there was a trailer in the yard from which Hanna and Fedir were unloading turnips. Therese said hello and went on into the covered yard. As she was using a ladle to fill her little can, suddenly Hanna was standing behind her. Avoiding Therese’s eyes, she pushed a few strands of hair that had fallen over her face back under her kerchief. “Wilhelm asked Father how often you come here in the evening,” she said without preamble.

  The ladle fell to the ground, and Hanna stared at Therese. She bent down, picked up the ladle, took the can from Therese, and filled it mechanically. “Be careful,” she said warningly. She passed Therese the milk can and left the hall in a hurry.

  Therese Mende paused on the top step of the short staircase that led between two cafés to the beach. The previous night’s rain and wind had left the sea in turmoil. The water was still greenish brown, and seaweed lay drying in a broad line on the sand.

  That evening, she had left the lid of the can on the floor, and the milk had repeatedly sloshed over the rim as she made her way back to the cottage. Tears ran down her face, and she talked herself into thinking she was crying because of the spilt milk, rejecting the premonition that this was the beginning of the end.

  The days that followed were indistinct, and when she did remember specific images—she did not realize this until years later—they were gray, as if the color had drained out of her life that autumn evening.

  The very next morning, at about six o’clock, Theo Gerhard and two Gestapo men came and picked her up. They took her to Kleve—her and her parents. Her mother was allowed to go home the same day. Her father after two days. They were reluctant to let him go, but he was a doctor, and people in high places had insisted on his release.