A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  “Have one,” she said. “You as well, Anton. Although it looks by the crumbs on the corners of your mouth that you started early.”

  He wiped his mouth. “My apologies. I didn’t know how many people there would be to share it with.”

  She busied herself setting out teacups, a pot of cream, and a sugar bowl, all made of the same peculiar glass. “Just me.”

  “Where is Herr Spiegel?” I asked, surprised.

  “Dead,” she said. “They arrested him a year ago. He didn’t last a month in the camps.”

  A memory of Herr Silbert’s emaciated frame flashed in my mind. “You have my condolences.”

  “Thank you.”

  I poured tea for the three of us. She sat and put a rugelach on her plate. But, although I knew it was her favorite pastry, she did not take a bite.

  “Does that glass glow?” Anton pointed to a collection of green glass plates lined up on a shelf above the sink, similar to those she had set on the table.

  “In some lights, it does,” she said. “It’s called Vaseline glass. Uranium makes it glow under certain lights.”

  “I’ve heard of that!” He walked carefully over to the plates, as if afraid his mere presence might break them. “Isn’t uranium poison?”

  “In larger doses,” she said. “These days, I think I will die of other causes long before uranium poison would do me in.”

  He studied the plates.

  “My husband used to buy them for me. I kept them crated up because they’re expensive, but after he was taken away, I found I wanted to see them every day.”

  “Do not touch,” I said. He would not, but I could not help myself. Sometimes my mother’s voice spoke from my mouth.

  He swallowed a retort.

  “Why are you here, Fräulein Vogel?” she asked. “Not for emergency medical care, I see.”

  “A social call?” I used the silver tongs to add a cube of sugar to my tea.

  “Strange time to be sociable. Vom Rath lingering on the edge of death. Broken windows and new graffiti last night. If he dies, it’ll be worse. You’re here for something else. As always.”

  I thought of concocting a story, but decided to try the truth. “Do you remember Paul Keller?”

  She patted my shoulder. “I heard about his suicide. You have my condolences. I know that you were close.”

  I blinked back surprise tears. “We were.”

  Anton turned from the plates, eyes sad. He sat next to me again and pushed away his plate of rugelach.

  “So were you the mystery blond woman and child seen at his apartment when he died?”

  My breath caught. We had been seen, too. It had been a close escape on many levels. “Unfortunately, too late. But I am here on his behalf.” I explained about Ruth’s disappearance and finished with, “Do you know the doctor who might have carried her away?”

  She stared into her translucent teacup, as if reading the tea leaves on the bottom.

  “Frau Doktor Spiegel?”

  “Of course I know him,” she said. “He took over my practice, didn’t he?”

  “Why did he do that?” Anton asked.

  “Someone had to. As a Jew, I haven’t been able to practice medicine since July twenty-fifth. Another Nazi law. They’re trying to starve us out, and most of us would go eagerly if we had a place to land.”

  I drew back. “About this doctor—”

  “I’ve nothing against him. I’m grateful that he treats Jews. Precious few Aryan doctors do anymore.” She slugged her tea like whiskey.

  “Could you give me his name?” I asked. “I wish to ask him about Ruth today.”

  “No.” She set the teacup down with a clank. “I think I’ll leave him out of this.”

  “But I heard that he has been offering to buy babies.”

  “Just one baby, I should think.” She turned the cup around on the saucer. “And he has since sorted that out.”

  “So, one baby is acceptable to sell?”

  “He wanted to adopt a baby.” She picked up the empty teacup. “His wife is infertile.”

  “And he cannot formally adopt? Surely an Aryan doctor would have no trouble legally adopting a child.”

  “The Party wants all good German mothers to bear many children, so they can send them into the new Lebensraum.” She splashed tea into her cup and onto the table. “He worried that if his wife’s infertility were known, it could be used to disadvantage them. As it would if they started formal adoption procedures.”

  “So, he asks pregnant Jewish women if they will give up their child to him?” I asked. Horrified, Anton clamped his mouth closed.

  “I know you think it sounds horrible, Fräulein Vogel, but be practical.” She set down her full cup of tea and shook her finger at me to emphasize her points, as she used to when she taught. “If he can identify an adoptive mother before she delivers, he can send his own wife out of the country for the pregnancy and birth and she can come back with a baby, and no one the wiser. The baby will be much better off with a German physician than being raised as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. And that is where we all live. Hitler’s Germany.”

  I sat back in my chair and studied the eerie green dishes. If I did not find out what had happened to Ruth today, I would never know. I tried to formulate a better argument, but once Frau Doktor Spiegel made up her mind, she was rarely swayed.

  “I will help you,” she said. “Don’t fear.”

  I sat forward so suddenly, my chair legs clacked against the floor. “How?”

  “I’ll give you the name of the girl’s father.”

  I gaped at her. Anton did, too.

  “Don’t look so surprised. Doctors talk, although we were both discreet about this, and not only for poor Paul’s benefit.”

  Poor Paul, indeed.

  “His name is Heinrich Stauffer.” She scratched the address on her old prescription pad and handed it to me. “Here’s his office address. He’s married and in the Party, so don’t expect a warm welcome.”

  I puzzled out the address. Her handwriting, never good, had not improved with age. “Wilhelmstrasse? He works—”

  “At the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment,” she interrupted. “The irony is not lost on me.”

  Ruth’s father worked, probably indirectly, for Joseph Goebbels. I could see how a relationship with a Polish Jew would be complicated. How could he care for Ruth? I folded the scrap of paper and handed it back to her. I could not take the paper with me; it had her name on it. “Do you think he has her?”

  She shrugged. “With Miriam and Paul gone, the doctor would have taken her there. What happened after, I can’t say.”

  I finished my tea in one gulp. “We must be—”

  “Leaving now that you have what you needed?”

  Half standing, I stopped.

  She laughed heartily. “The expression on your face, Fräulein Vogel.”

  “I … that is we … this evening—”

  “I quite understand.” She handed Anton his half-eaten rugelach. “As always, you are on a tight schedule.”

  I sat down again. “What are your plans? Will you stay here?”

  “Not a second longer than I must.” She wiped her hands on her napkin. “Which appears to be many more seconds than I would like.”

  “You would leave everything behind?”

  She gestured around the empty apartment. “What everything?”

  Perhaps I could help her as I had not helped Paul. Lars’s compartment was big enough for her and Anton. “Will you be here this evening? I can make no promises, but I might have a solution to your problems.”

  “Better than Paul’s?” she asked.

  So she believed the suicide story as well. “I hope so.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said. “I have nowhere else to go.”

  26

  Back at the lorry, I checked to see that Lars was still there. Feeling ridiculous, I paused to make sure that he was breathing, taking nothing for granted since Paul’s m
urder.

  Anton and I piled into the front seat, and I eased into the busy street. It hurt to shift with the cast, but I hated to ask Anton to shift for me in this kind of traffic.

  “Are we going to see Ruth’s father now?” Anton asked.

  I was not certain if he was coming. “I am.”

  “Did you love Paul?”

  “Yes.” I gripped the wheel. “We were close friends for many years.”

  We had left the Jewish quarter. The absence of graffiti made everything feel safer.

  “Did you love him more than Lars?”

  I halted to let a group of girls dressed in the brown uniforms of the League of German Girls cross the street. Every one of them was younger than Anton.

  “Did you?” he asked again. Sometimes, he reminded me of myself.

  “I loved him longer than Lars.” The girls reached the cobblestone sidewalk. We lurched forward again. I gritted my teeth and shifted into first. “I almost married Paul twenty years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  None of the reasons I had listed twenty years ago made sense now, especially knowing that Paul would have been protected from the Nazi government if I had. He would have known the parentage of his children. I would have insisted that we emigrate years ago. And he would still be alive. “I do not know.”

  “How can’t you know something like that? Do you know why you agreed to marry Lars this morning?”

  I shifted into second and hoped I could stay there for a while. “I think I understand that less than why I did not marry Paul.”

  He groaned. “How am I supposed to ever understand?”

  I shook my head. “I do not think you are supposed to. I cannot claim that I do.”

  He crossed his arms and stared moodily out the window. I resisted the urge to tousle his hair and instead drove straight to the government offices in Wilhelmstrasse. The buildings here were cleansed of graffiti and soot. They looked clean enough to eat off, despite the filth that they contained.

  Not wanting Lars to be caught sleeping next to a government office, which might have more thorough police sweeps, I drove past the Ministry of Propaganda and parked several blocks away, in a residential district.

  I left my old Hannah Vogel and Adelheid Zinsli passports, and the Vis, in the glove box. The only identification that my satchel contained was my, now properly stamped, Hannah Schmidt passport. Venturing into a Nazi edifice without proper papers was suicidal. But the passport would hold up. Herr Silbert’s work had always been reliable.

  I brushed my hair and applied a fresh layer of pink lipstick while trying to decide what to do with Anton. In the end, I decided to take him with me, so that I could watch him. He would probably tail me if I left him alone in the lorry.

  “You are Anton Schmidt,” I said. “If anyone asks, your passport is at your aunt’s house. You are Swiss, and not Jewish.”

  “I am ready.” He used the accent he had acquired in Switzerland and immediately lost when we returned to Berlin.

  “It is no game,” I said. “Do exactly as I say.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “No. That is why I am making the point.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  Together we walked to the new Ministry of Propaganda. Its stark lines said that its purpose was serious, with no time for frills, and the sharp angles told of the importance of order to the new regime. The eagle topping the walls looked ready to drop his stone swastika on our heads.

  I presented my papers to a stern-looking man in uniform whose bushy eyebrows looked weighted down with invisible rocks. Beetle-brown eyes sized me up and found me wanting.

  “I am here to see Herr Stauffer.” I stood as straight as I could, acutely aware that I was much shorter than he. “On personal business.”

  The man’s eyes flicked from my breasts to Anton. “Upstairs, second office on your right.”

  He had a visitor log, but did not ask me to sign it, and I did not mention it. Instead, I hurried up the imposing stairs. Did Herr Stauffer entertain so many women in an average workday that they no longer bothered to keep track of them? That gave me something to work with.

  Tall ceilings swallowed the sounds of our steps. I put a hand on Anton’s sleeve. “When we get to his office, I will go in and sit down without being asked. If there is a second seat, you sit as well. Otherwise stand directly behind my seat with your hands on the back. Do not move from that position or say a word unless I tell you to. Understood?”

  “Yes,” he said. He looked serious, and grown up.

  We turned right at the top of the stairs. I opened the second door without knocking and strode in as if someone expected me. The room contained a small metal desk, lines of gray filing cabinets, a typewriter, and a rooster of a man with a barrel chest and a cockscomb of red hair cut bristly short. The man from the locket. His fingers hung motionless above typewriter keys.

  I dropped into the chair in front of his desk uninvited. Anton stood behind me, as it was the only free chair in the room.

  The man swept his report into a drawer and stood. As I suspected, he was barely my height.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I said nothing and kept my face stony. Let his conscience tell him.

  He studied my face, then Anton’s. “He’s not mine,” he said. “I don’t remember you.”

  I clenched my teeth, angry for Miriam, and for Ruth. They were only two in a long line of women and abandoned children. “Fortunately,” I said icily, “that is true. I am here for a child who is.”

  “Preposterous!” His face reddened.

  “A Jewish child.”

  He sat down. The flash of terror in his eyes told me that Frau Doktor Spiegel had named the correct man. Then he deserved everything he got.

  “We can discuss this here.” I spoke slowly so that he would feel the weight of each word. “Or we can discuss it at the courthouse. I believe that the Nuremberg Laws were fully in effect when you impregnated a young Jewish woman in early 1936.”

  He gulped. “That is—”

  “A crime punishable by prison or hard labor, which might include a stint in a concentration camp.” Let this Nazi think about the consequences of his own laws.

  “You have no proof,” he said weakly. “No proof at all.”

  “I do,” I lied. “Eyewitnesses, diaries, papers, medical statements.”

  He dropped his face into his square hands. “How much do you want?”

  “Knowledge,” I said. “To start.”

  Anton’s hand twitched on the back of the chair, but he said nothing.

  Herr Stauffer raised his head to look at me. His freckled face had gone blank. I was glad that he had his hands where I could see them.

  “Where is the child now?” I asked.

  “An orphanage.” He bit his chapped lips.

  “Aryan or Jewish?” I spoke like an interrogator.

  “I’ll not tell you that.” He glared at me.

  If it was a Jewish orphanage, he would have told me the name. So he must have delivered her to an Aryan one. At least he had done something to make things easier for her. “Another law broken, I suspect.” I did not keep the disdain from my voice. “But for the sake of a child.” It had been for his own sake.

  “What do you want?” He sounded calmer now. He had adjusted to the situation. I had to keep him off guard.

  “Why did you take her to an Aryan orphanage?” I stressed the word Aryan, to remind him that I knew it, and if I turned him in, things would go even worse for him.

  “There was nowhere else to take her.” He worried his lower lip. “I couldn’t find that Jew that Miriam married.”

  Paul.

  “What about keeping her? You are her father.” She was better off in an orphanage than with him, but someone should remind him of his responsibilities.

  “Impossible! I tried to explain that to the damn doctor. I told him what I would have to do, where I would have to take her, but he didn’t car
e.”

  Because there were no better options for Ruth than an Aryan orphanage, with her mother dead in a refugee camp, and Paul nowhere to be found. The doctor must have told Paul where Ruth was on the night that he tried to commit suicide. Paul, too, had thought an Aryan orphanage would offer her the protection that he could not.

  In the end, Paul had changed his mind and fetched her home. And his killer had her now. The man in front of me had not killed Paul. Stauffer would have been thrilled to dump his illegitimate child on Paul. But what about Miriam?

  Herr Stauffer fidgeted with a piece of blank paper on his desk. The watermark looked familiar. Government paper, the same as on my notes. And Miriam’s.

  “I have a letter typed on this stationery, threatening the mother of the child.” I clipped out each word.

  He scooted his chair back from me.

  “Would a police investigation find that it came from that typewriter?” I knew it would, as did he.

  His eyes shifted down to the typewriter and back up. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “The letter threatens to end things,” I said. “And now she is dead.”

  His freckles stood out in sharp relief in his suddenly pale face. “Miriam, dead?”

  “In a refugee camp in Poland,” I said.

  Tears welled up in his eyes. “The baby?”

  “Dead, too,” I said. “A stable is no place to deliver a baby.”

  He lowered his head. He seemed genuinely upset over Miriam’s death, in spite of his bold talk earlier.

  “What did she want from you that you would not give her? Money?”

  He shook his head.

  “You are Aryan, are you not?”

  He did not raise his head. “Completely.”

  “She wanted you to claim your daughter.” I did the horrific Nazi calculation in my head. “If the child had two Aryan grandparents, then she would be classed as a Mischling, not a Jew.”

  Paul had only one Aryan parent, Miriam had zero. Not enough to save Ruth.

  “She was born one month too late.” He directed his words down at his desk. He still would not look at me. “If she had been born before the end of July in 1936, then she would have been a Mischling, but she was born in late August. I tried to tell Miriam. I could not help her. But she would not listen.”