Silence

by Mechtild Borrmann

  “The worst thing,” she whispered into her coffee cup, “was that my memory of him faded. His features, his body, his smile, the way he walked. It all melted away, like snow on the first warm days after the winter. Only his voice is left to me. The way he rolled the r in my name: I can still hear it today.”

  By the summer, the last few halfway battle-fit men had been conscripted too, the red swastika banners hung faded and tired in front of the town hall, and the Western Front was coming relentlessly closer. She proceeded through the days, her feet heavy and dragging, and when the factory sirens wailed and they all ran into the basements, she would stand up quite slowly, walk casually along the empty hallways, and think, Now. Now, at last.

  By August the front was at Eindhoven, and at night there was a red glow on the horizon. The rumbling of artillery was a distant thunderstorm beneath a starlit sky. Her father did not come home anymore; he lived at the military hospital, and her mother, it seemed to her, at the church.

  Wilhelm was organizing the home front. One Friday he said to her, “Therese, please let’s get married. You promised, and I’ve given you nearly a year. I don’t want to wait any longer.”

  And she had nodded. She had nodded because he had done everything to save Yuri’s life. She had nodded because she owed it to him. She had nodded because a life after the war was unthinkable.

  Therese pushed her cup into the center of the table. “We got married on August 25, 1944, in the town hall. Not a big ceremony. My mother and Wilhelm’s parents were there. Martha and an employee from the administration were our witnesses.”

  She fell silent for a long time. Then she ran her hand over the tabletop, as if to erase the picture, and stood up. Robert stood up too, and went over to the bar to pay for their drinks. Therese held him back. “No, no. I have a cup of coffee here every day, and I pay at the end of the month.”

  As they set off on their way back, he asked, “And your father wasn’t there?”

  She shook her head. “No. I went to Bedburg-Hau and asked after him, but all they could tell me was that he was in one of the many temporary hospitals that had been set up: schools, pub function rooms, public buildings. I didn’t find him.” She paused briefly. “I don’t think I even wanted to find him.”

  Chapter 35

  April 25, 1998

  The station was officially not staffed on Saturdays, but Karl van den Boom was on-site at nine o’clock nevertheless. If something within his sphere of responsibility happened at night or on a weekend, the calls were automatically transferred to headquarters in Kleve. He called there to ask. A female colleague told him that eight-year-old Moritz Geerkes had been reported missing late in the evening, but he had been picked up in a park three hours later, with a friend. And a car had been reported stolen. “Otherwise, all quiet your way,” she said, and hung up.

  Then he called Kalkar and reached Manfred Steiner. “Hard work,” Steiner said. “The ex-husband can be eliminated—he has a watertight alibi.” Karl could hear him hammering away at his keyboard. Steiner paused and said, “Forensics found some fingerprints on the desk that we can’t identify. For comparison purposes, we need prints from the two gardeners who found the body. If you’re in the office anyway, can you take care of that?” Karl thought for a moment, then agreed.

  He called Schoofs, the landscape-gardening company. Both men were there.

  “What do you want from them?” asked Matthias Schoofs.

  “Fingerprints,” Karl replied. “We found some, and now we need to know whether they belong to your employees or perhaps to the perpetrator.”

  “I see. In that case, all right.” Schoofs promised to send his men over within the hour.

  Over a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich, Karl thought about his evening with Paul. He had always been an odd character. Karl had been born here, and even when he was a child, the Hövers were surrounded by this aura of being out of the ordinary. He could still see old man Höver in his mind’s eye. He had died in the early sixties, and Karl remembered him as an imposing figure well into his old age. The farm had been partly destroyed during the war; the two eldest sons had had to join up right at the beginning and had been killed. The agricultural side had never really recovered, even though the father, Paul, and Hanna were all hardworking. They lived a life apart: they were seen only on Sundays, at church, and after the old man died, Hanna moved to Kleve and became a nurse. Paul inherited the farm and married Sofia. She was not a farmer. After two miscarriages, she was unlikely to have any children, and she was never really healthy. Paul leased out and sold off more and more of the arable and pasture land because he could not cope with it all on his own. “Managed downward,” people used to say when they talked about the Höver farm in those days. At least, that was the gossip and barroom chatter that Karl had heard all these years.

  During the seventies and eighties, a lot of people had shown interest in the cottage. It had a lovely position, and the house, with skilled work, could be renovated. People from the Ruhr had come and, so it was said at the time, offered good money. But Paul had not sold. When Rita Albers turned up, he was probably up to his ears in debt, and he agreed to the lease.

  Karl positioned himself by the window of the guardroom and looked out at the parking lot. The linden tree that kept the office pleasantly cool in summer was showing its first new shoots, and within a few days they would be lending a greenish-yellow hue to the light of the room. When that happened, he was particularly fond of installing himself here, sitting by the door whenever he could. A swift had just flown by, with its high-pitched srii, srii call, when a car marked “Schoofs Landscape Gardening” parked under the linden.

  Klaus Breyer and Jan Neumann, wearing their green overalls, strolled in.

  While Breyer’s fingerprints were being taken, Jan grumbled to himself, wanting to know whether the prints were stored and might end up in some card index somewhere. Van den Boom reassured him. He pressed Breyer’s fingers onto an ink pad and then paper, and asked, “Why were you there, in fact? I mean, what was the job?”

  Jan exploded again. “See?” he said to Klaus Breyer. “I told you. If they don’t find the guy who did this, they’ll pin it on us instead. That’s the way they work.”

  Van den Boom shook his head. “Calm down, son. Nobody suspects you. I just want to know whether you were supposed to be planting flowers or cutting down trees or mowing the lawn.” Breyer wiped his fingers with a tissue. “It was about the well. We were supposed to install a new well.”

  Van den Boom waved Jan over. He was hesitant at best about offering his fingers.

  When the two men had gone, Karl decided to take the prints to Steiner himself. He could have another think in peace on the way. Something the gardeners had said was going round and round in his head, and he wanted to discuss it with Steiner.

  Chapter 36

  April 25, 1998

  Therese invited Robert in for a bite to eat, and they sat down on the covered part of the terrace. Luisa served sherry first; ten minutes later, she brought roasted mushrooms and peppers, Manchego cheese with red onions, olives, Serrano ham, and a baguette. They ate in silence for a while, and Robert enjoyed the taste, the appearance, and the fine aroma of the food. Therese seemed lost in thought, and he had already learned that he must not push her, that she would go on with her story when she was ready.

  He took another piece of Manchego, and she took up the thread.

  1944

  Hell began in September. German troops were fleeing in confusion across the Dutch border. Anyone who could handle a spade or shovel was ordered to report to the playing field. They were transported to the border in trucks to dig antitank defenses. Therese worked side by side with Hanna and her father-in-law, Peters, the pharmacist.

  Sunday, September 17, was the Feast of the Cross. Mass was to be said in the morning, with the procession to take place in the afternoon. Therese and her mother were on
their way to church with the Hövers, when fighter bombers came flying low over the plain, firing machine guns and tossing out hand grenades. Whenever the sound of the engines came close, they would throw themselves into the ditches at the edge of the fields. The dirt around them would spray up, then fall back to earth like black rain, and as the staccato sound of the machine-gun bursts moved away again, she would feel a moment of astonishment. A floating deafness. It was not until the others started moving, crawling out of the ditch, that she understood she was still alive.

  A little before they reached Kranenburg, several bullets struck her mother. No tears. An immobility in her mind, blocked by a single no. Always just no. Never known another word. An instinctive mobility in her limbs, which followed never-conceived laws. With Höver’s help, she carried her mother as far as the church wall and stopped there, sitting with her mother’s head resting in her lap. She rocked her upper body to and fro, saw all that blood on her clothes, thought it was her own, heard the singing in the church: “Holy God, we praise thy name.”

  Höver came back with two neighbors. “Give her to us,” he said, and they took her mother from her. She watched, motionless, as they carried her to the cemetery chapel. Sheltering behind the church wall, she watched the men throw themselves and the body to the ground as fresh rounds of machine-gun fire came rattling out of the sky and struck the wall. She saw Höver’s face over her, lifting her up, and it seemed obvious that they were going to carry her to the chapel and lay her down beside her mother. But he took her into the church with him and sat her down on the pew, between him and Hanna. Hanna was crying, and it was not until the service was over that she felt an increasingly powerful trembling come over her, beyond control, and it finally shook her out of her daze. They buried her mother the next day, hurriedly, along with four other casualties. No funeral shroud, no coffin with a pillow and a beautiful cover. A rough wooden box, a short prayer, a hurried blessing.

  The days that followed were nights. The skies black with the smoke of burning villages, farms, forests, avenues of trees. The whole country seemed to be in flames, blazing red and roaring with pain. Wounded and dying soldiers in the houses, animals perishing in fields and roads, the land torn up, bombed beyond recognition, and the people deaf from the noise of machine guns, bombs, shells, and aircraft. In October, Kranenburg was officially evacuated. Therese went to Bedburg-Hau, along with the Hövers. A horse cart, drawn by the last ox, carried the Hövers’ scant remaining possessions along the road. Therese had only a suitcase. She and Hanna were assigned to care for the wounded. There were no medicines and no painkillers. In truth, they were there only to hold the hands of dying men. A few days later, she saw her father again for the first time, and at first she did not recognize him. He was a shadow of his former self; his eyeglasses were held together with tape, and one lens was broken. When she told him about her mother’s death, he nodded mutely. No questions. The next day too, when she told him she had married Wilhelm, he reacted in the same way, nodding and stroking her cheek absently. His fatigue was eating him up from the inside, like a flame beneath a glass bulb consuming the last of the oxygen.

  Luisa came to clear the table, and Therese asked for two coffees. She leaned back in her chair and ran her hand over the massive tabletop. “It wasn’t until the war was over and we went to see Mother’s grave that he cried and asked how it happened. There was no time for mourning in the winter of 1944/45, and sometimes I think that was one of the tragedies of that war, perhaps of every war. When we don’t have time to mourn, we lose a dimension of our humanity.”

  Luisa brought coffee in two delicate white porcelain cups and placed a matching sugar bowl on the table. Robert stirred a spoonful of sugar into his. A small dog yapped excitedly on the property next door.

  The Hövers and Therese did not return to the cottage until May, and they took with them Wilhelm’s parents, whose house had burned down along with the pharmacy. Peace. There was peace at last, but the word was still fragile. At first, as they traveled through the shattered towns, passing bomb craters and the black ruins of trees along the road, she could not work out why the voices of other people, their footsteps, and the creaking wheels of handcarts seemed to be the only sounds. Not until the next day, when she was alone for a moment, did she understand. An infinite silence. The spring sky high and blue, and not a bird to be seen for miles. She could not even hear the cawing of the usually omnipresent rooks, and she realized she was still listening for the sound of approaching aircraft. For years she continued to listen like that, seeking, though the birds had long since returned, the distant rumbling of engines beneath their song.

  The Höver farmhouse was badly damaged, and the barn had burned down. The six of them moved into the cottage, and, every morning, they would go over to the house first thing to clear rubble and break rocks. After four weeks, Hanna, Paul, and old Höver moved back into the part of the house that was now more or less habitable.

  They had news of Wilhelm late that summer. He was a British prisoner. Frau Peters and her husband lay in each other’s arms, weeping with joy. Therese too was glad that Wilhelm was alive. He wrote: I was burned on my arms and legs in the battle of the Reichswald, but I’m now on the way to recovery. And on the back of the sheet of coarse gray paper he complained: Many soldiers have already been released, but we from the SS are interrogated again and again. They call us war criminals, and we have to prove where we served during the war. They don’t understand that we were all just doing our duty.

  The Hövers were allotted four half-starved cows. Therese replanted the vegetable garden, and when her father came back, she took care of him. He seemed to be dwindling away before her eyes, as if a monstrous effort of strength was now at last taking its toll. It was not until a few days before he died, in 1946, that he asked her why she had married Wilhelm. She told him. He stroked her cheek with his hand, now bony and lined with blue veins, and nodded. His touch was of such tenderness, his eyes so full of understanding, that she perceived it as a kind of absolution. Three days later, he lay dead in his bed, and painful as the loss was, she also felt gratitude when she saw the peace in his features.

  They buried him beside her mother. More than a hundred people came to the funeral to offer their condolences. They included all those who had avoided her and her parents in the years just past. They did it as a matter of course. Therese, who hesitated in front of the first hands held out to her, thought herself petty; these people had all made a new beginning, and only she had not.

  The sun had migrated across the bay, and the tall palm trees that stood on the boundary of the neighboring property cast their shadows over the uncovered part of the terrace. In this new light, the blooms of the hibiscus bushes in their large clay pots changed from reddish orange to bloodred. Therese Mende stood up. “Come. Let’s sit down in front, by the water. The sun has lost its heat, and the breeze will feel good.” They stood at the balustrade and looked out over the sea. Swimmers’ voices floated on the wind, and Robert occasionally thought he caught a name being called out. “When you think how millions of people died appalling deaths at that time, my story seems a bit foolish. But pain doesn’t stop just because you know others have to bear much greater pain.” She fell silent for a moment and ran her left hand through her hair, as if she wanted to wipe the thought away.

  Back then, she shook all those hands, listened to their words of sympathy, saw them avoiding her gaze, ashamed, and she thought for the first time that she could not stay. It was as if all her losses were piled up here, among all these people. Her mother, Leonard, Jacob, Yuri, and her father. Even Frau Hoffmann, who had been selling groceries in her shop since the end of the war, demanding extortionate prices from those without a ration card, offered her condolences. She did not show a second of embarrassment. Quite matter-of-factly, she said, “I’m so sorry, child. He was a wonderful man. His death is a loss for us all, but in these difficult times you have to look ahead.” And then, after th
e burial, Theo Gerhard was waiting for her in front of the cemetery. He was wearing an armband that indicated he was a police officer, and she could not believe her eyes. He said he had to do it, back then, that he had orders as to how—and he actually said it—enemy whores were to be treated. When she said nothing, he became uneasy. “You shouldn’t forget that I saved that Russian’s life,” he said quietly, and then he shuffled off swiftly.

  Therese Mende pushed a strand of hair away from her face and looked at Robert Lubisch. “Wilhelm’s parents stayed another full year, and then they moved in with relatives in Schwerte. In the spring of 1948, Wilhelm came back, released from captivity. He had a document that described him as a follower, and he showed it to everyone. In some absurd way he was proud of it. Three months later, he got a job in the planning department, provisionally equipped as it was. Our marriage wasn’t happy. He loved me, he was considerate and hardworking, but I couldn’t return his feelings. He felt it. And then came the summer of 1950. For the first time since the end of the war, the Marksmen’s Club held its annual fair.”

  Chapter 37

  April 25, 1998

  When Karl arrived at headquarters, there were only four cars in the parking lot, and a Saturday-like silence reigned in the hallways of the building. He laid the envelope with the fingerprints on Steiner’s desk.

  “I thought I’d come myself and ask whether there was anything new.”

  Steiner smiled with satisfaction. “And how,” he said amiably. “We know who Therese Peters is.”

  “Hmm,” said Karl, waiting. Several seconds passed, and then he said, “And? Who is she?”

  Steiner looked at him. “Therese Mende. She’s worth millions, and she lives in Mallorca.”