Silence

by Mechtild Borrmann

  He had found the timer in an antiques shop in Nimwegen, and the owner had said, when he turned it over again after fifteen minutes, “So, now time runs back again.” The hourglass was nothing special, and perhaps he had only bought it because he liked this remark so much.

  As he was returning it to the shelf, he remembered. “Friday. Today’s Friday, isn’t it,” he said, adding a reproachful, “Why didn’t you say anything?” directed at the cats.

  He picked up his jacket and left the house in a hurry. If he was lucky, he would find Paul at the Linden Tree pub. And without Hanna.

  The pub was full of customers. The regulars were playing skat at the big old oak table, the bar was packed solid, and a couple of youths were playing billiards in the small adjoining room. A wide brass shade hung over the regulars’ table, and dense cigar smoke curled in its light. Some of the shelves behind the bar were glassed in, protecting trophies and medals from the local marksmen’s association, decorated with pennants and ribbons.

  Paul was sitting by himself, as he always did, at the small table next to the counter. He sometimes joined in the general conversation, but usually he just listened to the others, drank two or three beers, and drove home. Karl rapped his knuckles on the bar, said, “Evening, all,” and ordered a dark ale.

  Lothar, the owner, immediately started questioning him about the murder, though he did not use the word, referring instead to “the woman who died over there.” Karl was reminded of the saying, “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” and thought Lothar had chosen an interesting turn of phrase.

  “So tell me, have you caught anyone yet? Was it someone from around here?”

  “All in good time,” Karl replied evasively, looking over at Paul. Schwers, the painter and decorator, joined in. “Was it a robbery or what?” Karl shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not in charge of the investigation.”

  There was a roar from the youths at the billiards table, and Sebastian came over to the bar. “Six vodkas on Marius’s tab,” he said, grinning broadly. When he saw Karl, he said hello and left hurriedly.

  Sebastian had always been in trouble. At fourteen he had broken into his own school; he had been caught selling suspect cell phones, and, most recently, he had stolen a car. Karl caught himself thinking, What if it really was a robbery that went wrong?

  He watched Sebastian, skillfully placing the six shot glasses between his long fingers and avoiding eye contact with him. No. No, the boy would have run away. He would never have struck the woman from behind.

  He took his ale and sat down at the table opposite Paul. He came to the point immediately.

  “I went to see Theo Gerhard.”

  Paul did not look up; his eyes dived deeper into his glass of beer.

  “He told me Therese Peters was a slut, whereas he was a thoroughly upstanding citizen who had always done his duty. And no problems during the war. Everything by the book, he says, otherwise he would never have been able to get back into the police force.”

  Paul looked up at Karl calmly. “Is that what he says? Must be true then.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Paul, if you know something . . . I mean, tell me truthfully, do you think Gerhard had something to do with Albers’s death?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked past Karl at the regulars’ table. “He could have.” He took a sip of beer. “That table over there,” he said, “it’s pretty old—did you know that? Four years ago Lothar had a one-hundredth-anniversary party, and the table is probably as old as that . . . They’ve always sat there, all of them. When I was eight or nine, my father used to bring me in here occasionally. Gerhard and Peters sat there, and Hollmann, and the rest of them in their fancy uniforms. It made an impression on me. The flashes on their shoulders, the shiny buttons, the pistols at their belts.”

  Karl said nothing. Hermann Gärtner banged the table and laid down his cards. “The rest are mine,” he said triumphantly in his high, feminine voice.

  “We had two prisoners of war at the farm, and Peters used to come and check on them regularly. He seemed to respect my father, or at least he let quite a few things pass. The Russians ate with us, and in winter my father used to let them sleep in the house. Peters knew about it, but he never reported us.” He snorted with laughter briefly. “It wasn’t until long after the war that I found out his Aryan credentials weren’t all that clean. His mother, Erna, came from one of the neighboring farms. The farmer was her father, and he acknowledged her as his daughter, but her mother, that’s to say Wilhelm’s grandma, was one of the maids, and her background certainly wasn’t Aryan. They got Wilhelm his Aryan certificate by registering her as the farmer’s legitimate daughter by his wife. When Peters and Gerhard beat up one of the Russians, my father went to see Wilhelm in the town hall and said to him, ‘If you want to go on being an Aryan, I’d advise you never to lay a finger on any of my workers again.’ ”

  He fell silent, holding his glass by the stem and twiddling it back and forth. He shook his head in resignation.

  “When I came out of school, Peters would often pull up in that big car of his and give me a ride. ‘Hey, Paul,’ he’d say, ‘I’m going over to your place. Do you want to come?’ and the other boys would envy me. I was as proud as could be.”

  He raised his glass, looked over at Lothar, and nodded.

  “The Russians were taken away in the fall of 1943. I had no idea why, and when I asked at home, all I got from Hanna and my father was, ‘That needn’t concern a snot-nosed kid like you.’ I didn’t know Therese had been arrested too. I hadn’t seen her for a few days, and when I asked Hanna, she told me she’d gone away.

  “Then Peters started giving me rides again, even though he didn’t need to go to our place. He asked me if I’d seen one of the Russians with Therese, told me it was my patriotic duty to tell him everything. Therese had gotten involved with the enemy and had betrayed her people and the fatherland, he said. People like her were a threat to our final victory, and I would be doing Germany a great service if I had seen anything.”

  Lothar brought a beer and made a mark on the beer mat. Karl ordered another dark ale. Paul leaned forward, pushed his glass to one side, picked up the beer mat, and turned it over and over in his hand.

  “I told him I’d seen them together at the edge of the forest from time to time, and that they had hugged and kissed each other.” He snapped the beer mat in two and looked at Karl. “He praised me, said this was an important and secret matter, and that I shouldn’t discuss it with anyone.” He looked down and nodded to himself. “And I thought I was a hero. Me, little Paul. I was sharing a secret of the utmost national importance with SS Squad Leader Peters.”

  Lothar brought the dark ale and looked reproachfully at Paul’s hands, which were busy tearing the beer mat into smaller and smaller pieces. “Hey, what are you doing? How am I supposed to know what to charge you if you tear up the beer mat?”

  “Three,” said Paul, looking up at Lothar.

  “I know,” Lothar growled back, making three marks on a new beer mat and pushing it up to the far end of the table, out of Paul’s reach.

  Lothar had been back behind the bar for several minutes, but Paul had fallen silent.

  “What happened to Therese?” asked Karl cautiously.

  “She was released after a few days. Gerhard had beaten her half to death during questioning.” He pushed away the scraps of beer mat. “She never said. She never said she knew about my telling on her.”

  It took Karl a moment. “I don’t understand. She knew, and she married him anyway?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “She knew I betrayed her. But she thought I had told Gerhard. She didn’t know about Wilhelm’s part in the story until much later.”

  Karl was not given to agitation, but right now he was feeling slightly nervous. “So did she really do it? Did she kill Wilhelm Peters back then?”

&
nbsp; Paul fished for the beer mat at the end of the table and waved to Lothar. He paid, and Karl hurriedly put some money on the table too.

  Karl was on foot. He walked Paul to his old Mercedes.

  He made one more attempt: “Did she do it?”

  Paul unlocked the car. He shook his head slowly, and Karl did not know whether he was answering his question or refusing to answer.

  Chapter 34

  April 25, 1998

  Despite taking a sleeping pill, Therese Mende had had a restless night. It was not until the early hours of the morning that she dropped off, her sleep foggy, peopled with the old shadows circling round and round. Fragmented images lining up disconnectedly and declaring her guilty.

  When she woke up in the morning, she could not get the words Keep silent out of her head, and in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, she applied it for the first time not to her past but to herself. “I’ll keep silent till the day I die,” she whispered at her reflection, and the words struck her with such force that she staggered.

  Tillmann had known her story; maybe his death had been so distressing, and had left such a void in its wake, precisely because she had gone back to bearing the weight of her guilt alone afterward.

  A stabbing pain in her chest extended into her left arm, taking her breath away. The thought that her daughter might, like Robert Lubisch, go unsuspectingly hunting about after her death and find out that her mother had lied to her for her whole life was suddenly unbearable. And what would she find? The remnants of a time that had become foul and rotten over the years, handed down by people who had convinced themselves they were blameless.

  She took a heart pill. After breakfast she felt stronger again.

  Robert too had had a short night, but he arrived on time. Therese invited him to join her on her daily walk.

  They went down the narrow street, and she asked about his life in Hamburg. He spoke freely, telling her about his wife, Maren, his work in the hospital, and also about his father and his struggles with him when he decided against following him into the business and became a doctor. “I now think he was always a stranger to me. As a child, I sought out his company, his affection. I wanted him to like me. Later, my efforts went in the opposite direction—probably because they had been so fruitless—and now that I really think about it, I didn’t have his attention until I started to rebel.”

  The first swimmers of the day were gathering on the beach, spreading out their towels and picnic blankets, inflating orange armbands on children’s thin arms, dipping their toes in the water, and flinching away with a shiver.

  Once they had left the bay behind, Therese abruptly resumed her story from the night before.

  1943/44

  The days went by and there was no news from Yuri. Wilhelm came to visit, but he was wary and did not mention her promise to marry him. She avoided talking about Yuri and did not tell him she had seen him one more time, but when there was still no news after two weeks, she could bear it no longer.

  They were walking side by side through the town. It was mid-November.

  “I’m afraid. They’re bound to be looking for him. If they had caught him, you’d know, wouldn’t you?” She had thrust her hands deep into her coat pockets. He was pushing her bicycle with one hand and had his arm around her shoulders.

  “They haven’t caught him, because no one’s looking for him,” he said. He continued matter-of-factly. “The official report says Yuri made a break for it, and Gerhard stood him up against the van and shot him.” He stopped and looked at her. “He didn’t shoot him, of course. The dead man was someone else.” Therese clenched her fists in her pockets. She looked down at the ground, not daring to look at him, and heard Yuri saying, as if from far off, “There was another prisoner in the van.”

  Therese Mende and Robert Lubisch sat on a bench that served as both resting place and viewpoint at a widening of the path. She said, “Look, that’s how it is with the truth. I could say I just wanted to save Yuri’s life, and it’s the truth. I could say the other one would have been shot anyway, and that’s probably a truth too. But it’s also true that my request for Yuri’s life extinguished another life.”

  Robert Lubisch leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. They looked out to sea. Therese’s words came softly, mingling with the rhythm of the waves as she went on with her story.

  They never touched on the subject again, and life went on so unquestioningly that sometimes she could scarcely bear it. She waited for news from Yuri, thinking he was probably in Holland, but the only mail came from the private in France. At the end of 1943, she wrote to him one last time. She thanked him for his trouble, and explained that circumstances had changed and he should no longer write to her.

  Alwine’s father had fallen on the Eastern Front during the days Therese spent in jail, and Alwine’s grief was boundless. It was Frau Kalder who received Therese’s delayed condolence visit, and she apologized on behalf of her daughter. Alwine withdrew entirely: not only did she avoid contact with Therese, but she also stopped speaking to Wilhelm. Shortly before Christmas—by now, the last of the livestock had been requisitioned from the farms and the Kalder estate—they met by chance in the street. Alwine was almost unrecognizable. She had lost a lot of weight, her eyes were dull, and her finely shaped mouth, in Therese’s memory always laughing, was pinched with bitterness. They stood facing each other, like strangers. Alwine said, as if to herself, “We’re moving in with relatives in southern Germany after Christmas. A manager’s being put in here until the war’s over.” Abruptly, she said, “So you’re going to marry him?” Therese lowered her head, ashamed. She told her, her words at first halting and uncertain, then in a torrent sprinkled with constant apologies, what had happened after her arrest. Alwine interrupted her before she had finished. “You’re lying, Therese,” she hissed. “Why are you lying to me? Gerhard told me, well before you were arrested, that the two of you were getting married.” She turned and left. Therese stood motionless in the cold for a long time. When at last she moved, her limbs were stiff, and she staggered home on unsteady legs. The suspicion that whispered in her head at first, then grew louder and louder, seemed monstrous.

  Wilhelm had invited her out to a pub in Kleve the following evening. She did not want to talk to him about it until they were there, but she could not hold it back. While they were still in the car, she asked, “Why did Theo tell Alwine we were getting married before I was even arrested?” Wilhelm reacted immediately, with an easy laugh. “Oh, Theo! He can’t understand why I don’t give in to Alwine. Why I don’t propose to her.” He pulled over on the right-hand side of the road, stopped the car, and looked at Therese. He caressed her face. “I told him there was only one woman I would marry, and that was you.” He sighed. “Theo’s a clumsy oaf. He told Alwine.”

  How relieved she was. Suddenly, her suspicions seemed absurd. “It’s worrying about Yuri,” she told herself. “Worrying about Yuri is driving me mad.”

  Robert Lubisch and Therese Mende went on walking. They reached a place where the cliff path narrowed and led down to the next bay. They had to walk in single file. The sun stood high and white in the sky, and a gentle, salty breeze wafted in from the sea, bringing with it a pleasant coolness. There was a pine forest immediately behind the small beach. There were no hotels or holiday complexes here, just a rudimentary wooden hut for a beach bar and a handful of swimmers.

  Therese turned to Robert Lubisch. “They make excellent coffee,” she said with a smile, and headed straight for a table under a straw-covered sunshade. The young man behind the bar greeted her with a wave and, without being asked, brought two double espressos and a jug of water.

  The fragrance of the pines mingled with the salty smell of the sea. It was pleasantly still, and Robert seemed to feel time passing more slowly here, more deliberately. He looked straight at Therese and asked her the question that had been preoccupying him since t
he previous evening. “The private,” he began cautiously, “the private who wrote to you from France was called Friedhelm Lubisch, wasn’t he?”

  She avoided his gaze, but nodded in confirmation. The next question made his spine tingle, but it seemed quite natural. “Did he visit you? Did my father come to Kranenburg after the war?”

  Therese Mende stirred her coffee. “Let me tell you the story in order,” she said deliberately, and patted his hand reassuringly.

  By early 1944, only the fanatics still believed in the “Final Victory.” There were whispers of a wonder weapon everywhere. A wonder weapon that would turn the tide. At the same time, news of fallen husbands, sons, and brothers reached homes every day. Death became normal. Those months were insubstantial in her memory. She hurried ahead from one day to the next, closing her eyes and ears, and raced home on her bicycle in the evening, ruled by one thought alone: Today! Today there would be news of Yuri.

  Her day-to-day work in the factory, her encounters with Wilhelm, taking care of the house and garden—these were just actions and words that followed, one upon the other, because they had to. They belonged to a realm of shadows lurking quietly beneath her hope for a sign of life from Yuri.

  But hope dissipated, dropping soundlessly away at the margins of those deadened days. First it happened during the nights, when she counted on her fingers the weeks that had passed, then on Sundays in church, when she asked God’s forgiveness for having bought Yuri’s life with that of another man, and finally in broad daylight, when she woke up from her trance in shock and knew with sudden certainty that she would have received news long since if he had been alive.