“How long, exactly?” Her china doll blue eyes narrowed.
“Until I return,” I said. “And there will be a sizable bonus for you then.”
She ran her hand over her sleek hair. “Very well.”
* * *
I drove Doktor Volonoski back to the flour mill, where most of the wounded and ill had been brought. I set arms broken by truncheons, bandaged heads grazed by thrown rocks, and helped make those who had suffered strokes and heart attacks comfortable.
Doktor Volonoski found doctors and nurses among the refugees and put them to work, too. I soon supervised three nurses, glad that someone would remain with the refugees after we left.
Even with help, by the time we finished, we could barely stand. Despair weighed heavier than the work. It felt so in the Great War when I worked in triage, consigning some patients to death so that others might live. Here, who knew what awaited the living. I feared that their troubles had only begun.
The weak autumn sun had already dropped below the horizon by the time we finished. Frigid air stung my cheeks when we stepped outside. I thought of Frau Warski making a dinner of our sandwiches. The stable would be a cold place for her and baby Esther to spend tonight.
“I believe that my driver procured us rooms at the inn near your house.” My breath formed clouds in the night air. “Could I offer you a lift home, Doktor Volonoski?”
“That would be most kind.”
“It would be my privilege.” He had worked hard and ceaselessly for hours without a trace of anti-Semitism. He might be more accustomed to working with the sick than I, but it had worn on him, too.
He opened my car door. I climbed in and pulled on my cold leather gloves.
He sat in the other side and closed his door with a soft thump. “You were very good in there. You should have stayed with nursing.”
“I could not stand watching people die,” I said.
He stared out across the hood at the darkened windows of the mill. “It’s not as it was in the war. Usually, the patients don’t die. If you’re good at your job.”
I mustered a smile. “You are good at your job.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t imagine you expected to spend your day like this either.”
“I had this idea I would research croissants with poppy paste for an article on Saint Martin’s Day.”
We both sighed.
I started the car and turned on the headlights.
“I can be good at my job only when it is possible,” he said. “I fear I have months of an impossible job ahead of me.”
“How long do you think the refugees will be stranded in Zbąszyń?” I pulled away from the flour mill and drove down the rutted dirt track toward town.
He stared at the dashboard for a long time before speaking. “Poland does not want them. Germany does not want them. I think it might take months to sort out.”
Months. Thousands of people living through the end of winter outside or in stables and a flour mill.
We drove in silence.
“It’s there.” He pointed to a modest wooden house surrounded by a wall and an arched entryway that probably supported roses in summer. I had left that house hours before, but it felt like weeks.
“Thank you, Frau Zinsli,” he said. “If your companion could not find rooms for you and your son, my wife can make up a room. You are in no condition to drive to Poznań tonight.”
“Thank you, Doktor Volonoski,” I said, touched. “If I do not have a warm bed waiting for me, my son and I shall knock on your door.”
I drove the few houses to the inn and turned off the ignition, but I did not get out. I rested my forehead on the hard steering wheel, trying not to remember the day’s events. Miriam. The baby. The wounded refugees. And Ruth. Cold cut through my coat. I shivered.
I raised my head and climbed out. Exhaustion dragged down my limbs, but I had to call in the refugees’ story to my paper and also telephone Bella. Only then could I sleep.
I stumbled into the smoky inn, grateful for its warmth. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist. At the front desk the thin clerk recognized me immediately.
“Your sister got you a room. She and the boy wait in the dining room.” He gestured toward the left, then pulled his arm back to adjust its too-short sleeve.
“Thank you,” I said. “Is there a telephone? I must make a few calls. Private ones.”
He pointed to a wooden booth in the corner of the lobby. I stumbled over, suddenly light-headed. I realized that I had eaten only bites of bread since I left the hotel in Poznań.
The telephone was an old-fashioned wooden box hanging from the wall. I had not seen one like it in years. It took a few moments for the Polish operator to understand me. Eventually she did, and the exchange rang through to Bella’s number. An unfamiliar male voice answered Bella’s phone. “Fromm.”
“Frau Fromm, please,” I said.
“May I ask who is calling?” The twinge of Berlin accent gave me pause. Bella’s servants tended to speak perfect High German.
“Frau Petra Weill.” I used a variation on my pseudonym from my days as a reporter for the Berliner Zeitung before I had fled in 1931. Bella would recognize it, and there would be no record of that name that the Gestapo might trace, as Petra Weill was never a real person.
“Frau Fromm is engaged.” The butler’s deep voice was impassive. “Where may she reach you?”
I paused. I hated to give the name of my Polish hotel, but surely the Gestapo’s reach did not extend all the way to Poland? And if it did, Petra Weill was not wanted by anyone. Even if the name was noted in my Gestapo files, it seemed unlikely that it would be linked to Bella or that someone would bother to look it up. Bella had literally hundreds of troublemaking friends. She and I had spent little time together where we might be observed. Still, there was a risk.
“Frau Weill?” His voice rumbled patiently.
I had to leave a message. If Ruth had not been rescued by Paul or by neighbors, she had been locked in a cupboard for three days. Every minute mattered. I told him the inn’s name and telephone number and hung up. She would know that my message was urgent. We had not spoken in over two years. She knew I would not telephone unless I needed to.
Next, I called a Jewish physician friend in Berlin, Frau Doktor Spiegel, but she did not answer either. Perhaps she had fled Germany, or perhaps she simply attended a patient.
The reedy desk clerk seemed occupied paging through a thick green ledger, but his attention looked staged. I wondered if I was being paranoid. I was in Poland, after all, not Germany.
Finally, I called the newspaper in Switzerland. Lucien Marceau answered. Smart, fast, and liberal, he would not censor my words, but he would not be pleased that I was on the scene reporting this story. He fancied himself the top political correspondent at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and had been cool toward me for the past month, ever since my first political piece came out.
I quickly explained the situation. I told him what I had learned of the deportations, Ada and Esther Warski, and the wounded patients I had treated. I finished with Miriam, dying with her unborn child inside her in the icy stable.
“Good god,” he said. “Come home.”
“I intend to stay here a few more days to cover the story.”
“Of course you do.” Disapproval permeated his words.
“Tell Herr Knecht that he will have to wait for his Saint Martin’s coverage.”
“He will rail about it,” he said. “But he will be happy that you have such a solid story. And perhaps a trifle worried about you. Perhaps he should assign someone more experienced.”
By which he meant himself. “I am no fashion reporter. I shall be fine.”
He snorted. “How could anyone doubt that you might have troubles going up against the Polish army?”
“It is not the entire army,” I said. “Just a few soldiers.”
“Oh, god,” he groaned. “Herr Knecht will be unbearable if something happens to y
ou.”
“More so than usual? Impossible!”
“He sent you to Poland to write about saints and cakes, not refugees and Nazis,” he snapped.
“He sent me here to find news,” I retorted. “And I found some.”
“The police called today about your last letter.” His words dripped vile glee. He enjoyed the amount of trouble the letters had caused.
I groaned. Ever since a secretary at the paper had accidentally opened the first threatening letter to me a month before, Herr Knecht had turned into an overprotective mother bear. “He sent the letters to the police?”
“Of course he did.” I pictured him shaking his finger at the telephone, as he would a naughty child. “The police recovered fingerprints. You are to stop by the station to give yours up for comparison.”
That was a disaster. If the Swiss ever shared fingerprint cards with the Germans, they might discover that I was wanted for kidnapping Anton and, perhaps, in connection with the murder of four Gestapo men in 1936. “I certainly shall not. He never sends the letters that the men receive to the police. Some of theirs are as bad as mine.”
“They’re not as bad as yours.” He huffed with indignation. “Even if they were, you are not a man. Herr Knecht does not want responsibility for a woman being injured because of his paper. This brings me back to my original suggestion: Come home.”
“Tell Herr Knecht—”
“I imagine you’re tired,” he said. “So I shall stop fighting Herr Knecht’s battles for him and ring off.”
He disconnected so quickly, I had no time to reply. Let him be angry. I did not have time to have it out with him anyway. My stomach rumbled, and my eyes ached. Tomorrow would be another long day.
I asked the clerk to be alert for messages for Petra Weill, explaining it as newspaper business, and asking to be notified immediately if a call came, to wake me even in the middle of the night. Hopefully Bella would call soon.
I visited the washroom off the lobby. Icy water sputtered from the tap. I scrubbed my hands again and again with their hard soap, trying to scrape the blood of strangers from under my nails. My dress looked fairly clean, but mud, blood, and who knew what else spattered my coat. At least the coat’s black color made it look clean.
I dried my hands on the rough towel, then smoothed them across my face. The bulb’s harsh glare showed my exhaustion. Dark circles stood out against my pale skin, a tracery of red capillaries filled the whites of my eyes, and my hair hung limp. My brother’s voice echoed in my mind: I hope you had a good time to earn a face like that! I smiled at the memory and hung up the towel. As usual, I had not earned my face by having too much of a good time.
5
I trudged to the dining room. It held four dark wooden tables and a bar with a handful of stools, most occupied. At one table a group of men played cards and smoked foul-smelling Polish cigarettes. Two tables were empty. Anton and Fräulein Ivona occupied the fourth.
Anton leaped to his feet when he saw me. He still wore the satchel with the strap across his narrow chest. “I waited to have dinner with you.”
I embraced him and held him a second longer than usual. He was almost as tall as I. I reminded myself to lecture him for entering the flour mill without my permission, but after dinner.
Fräulein Ivona stood. “I will have them prepare a meal for both of you.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “I have had nothing since lunch.”
“Which you did not eat.” She flounced across the room to the bar, skirt and jacket rumpled, but still shapely enough to draw the men’s eyes from their card game. She stopped at the bar and began an animated conversation with a tall handsome man seated there. Was he her lover? He was attractive enough to cause many women to forget their better judgment.
I chose a chair with a view of the front desk so I would be ready if the call came. What if Bella did not call? Berlin lay only three hours away, but I dared not chance a trip. Still, Ruth was alone. As a mother, how could I leave a two-year-old child to die alone in a cupboard? As I had left her mother to die alone in a stable.
“Mother,” Anton asked, and the tone of his voice told that it was a serious question. “Is Sweetie Pie dead?”
He never asked about his real mother. I was grateful for that, because she had been a drug-addicted prostitute. She abandoned him with me when my brother’s death stopped him from delivering money for Anton’s care. I tried to decide what to tell him and what to spare him. “Yes. She is.”
“Are you certain?” He brushed his fingers through his tousled blond hair, and it stuck up crazily. I resisted the urge to stroke it back into place.
“I read the police report of her death, and also saw it verified by a different policeman.” Lars had added it to the file he compiled on me. Thorough, he had researched Anton back to his birth.
I put a hand on his shoulder, but he shifted it off. “How did she die?”
She had been found dead in the public toilets at Wittenbergplatz subway station. I had to tell him the truth, but I would omit what details I could. “Of a drug overdose.”
“Cocaine?”
He had been only six, but he knew. Shocked, I answered. “How do you remember that?”
“I wasn’t a child,” he said indignantly. “I remember a lot from those years.”
He had been a child, indeed he still was one, but I did not contradict him. “I see.”
“Will you rescue the little girl in the cupboard?” he asked. “As you rescued me?”
He, too, had spent time locked in a cupboard. That was where his mother put him while she transacted business with her clients, probably when he was as young as Ruth. I gazed into his serious blue eyes. “I will try. I called two friends in Berlin to see if they can find her.”
“If they can’t, what then?” He fidgeted with his latest carving, tapping what looked like large webbed feet.
“I hope they can. If not, I think there might be a Jewish orphanage I can call.” Although how I could find them in Poland was an open question.
“If none of them will help her, will you go back to Berlin?” He leaned forward in the round wooden chair, clearly ready to leave right now.
I did not lie to him, but in this case I did not know the truth. “It would be complicated for me.”
“Because of your trip during the Olympics?” He folded his arms.
How much did he know or guess of my actions there? More than I wanted him to. “Because of that, too.”
“And because you took me away,” he said.
“You are too smart for your own good.”
He smiled, and I noticed how grown up his face had become. He had lost the softness of his early boyhood. His features were sharpening toward the face he would wear as a man. “So, why can’t you go back?”
He never relented. He would make a fine journalist, or a prosecuting attorney.
“Because.” I chose my words with care. “Near the end of my last Berlin trip, the Gestapo arrested me and a colleague. We managed to escape, but I might not be so lucky again.”
I did not tell him that I had a clean passport, one that identified me as Hannah Schmidt. I had it made to escape Germany in 1936, but had not needed it. Since then I kept it sewn into the thin lining of my satchel. If I had not been with Anton, I would already have cut it out and risked a quick trip into Berlin to find Ruth myself.
One of the men won the card game, to a loud roar from the others. He smiled bashfully, clearly unused to winning. Anton smiled back at him before firing another question at me. “Do the Gestapo have a file on me?”
“Yes.” I gave him a stern glance. “You could not get in and out safely, if that is what you are thinking.”
His surprised expression told me he had been thinking exactly that. “But if they don’t know who I am—”
“They know who you are,” I said. As Anton Röhm, he was still a liability to the Nazi government. “And in any case, you cannot cross the border alone. You are only thirteen.
They would never let you through.” At least not without a sheaf of papers I had no intention of filling out.
He set his chin mutinously, a bad sign. Anton never stopped searching for wrongs to right.
Before I could marshal an argument, someone tapped my shoulder.
It would have to be a convincing argument. I turned to see who it was.
My breath caught in my throat.
It was Lars Lang.
His eyes looked dazed. Mine probably did, too. Anton’s face swung from me to Lars.
I stared at Lars. Relief flooded me. He was alive. I wanted to throw myself in his arms. But doubt burnt away the relief. For two years I had mourned his death. Where had he been?
A new scar intersected his right eyebrow. His dark hair was longer than I had ever seen it, and a strand curled into his forehead. His face, always sharp featured, was thinner than I had ever seen it, almost gaunt. Seems he had not enjoyed the last two years much. Neither had I.
He clicked his heels and bowed, as he had so long ago in the police station at Alexanderplatz when we met for the first time. He stood erect, hands clasped behind him, like the military man he had once been. His posture reminded me of my father’s. I went still inside.
“How do you do, Frau Zinsli?” I felt his wedding band when he shook my hand. Was it the one he put there on the day we pretended to marry, or from a more recent, and equally faithless, liaison?
I dropped his hand and sat straight in my chair, too shocked to speak.
He touched the back of the chair next to mine. “May I?”
I had many things I wished to say to him, to shout at him, but not in front of Anton. I stared, unable to think of a single appropriate word. Without waiting for my permission, he sat.
Would he try to explain his absence? How? I tried to imagine what could constitute an adequate explanation, but my mind came up with only one: He had lied to me in Berlin. He had never intended to rejoin me in Switzerland. It had been a trick to get me into his bed, and I had been completely taken in.
Anton gave me a worried look.
“Struck dumb?” Lars said. “I know how difficult that is to achieve.”
A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel) Page 4