by Anika Scott
ON THE TRAIN, Clara longed to stretch her stiff legs, but there was no room in the cramped car. Out of the window was nothing but blackness, and it was hard to know how far the train had gone. By the ache in her backside, she’d been sitting on the hard bench at least an hour, maybe more. The woman opposite began reading Goethe’s Faust I out loud by the glow of her flashlight. She murmured the verses, the only voice behind the roar and creak of the train.
“In the currents of life, in action’s storm,
I float and I wave
With billowy—”
The brakes suddenly shrieked on the rails, and Clara was lifted off her seat. Everyone pitched forward with the momentum of the train as it slowed and rolled to a halt.
Passengers stooped to recover their bags and belongings scattered on the floor. The reader dusted off her Goethe. People whispered about the possibility of the boiler failing or the coal running out. They could be here for hours. To steady her nerves, Clara nibbled a small piece of bread.
Outside, lights strafed the train and were gone. Far off, someone whistled, and farther along the train, doors banged open. Clara turned with everyone else to look at the end of the carriage. A man climbed on board, backlit by the glare outside. His silhouette revealed his uniform, like a nightmare that had haunted her since the end of the war.
“Please stay calm, this is a routine search,” he said in German with a heavy English accent. The bread stuck in her throat.
Soldiers were crowding in behind him, their lights whirling over the passengers. Here and there, they examined someone’s papers. Women only.
She pressed the ends of her scarf to her mouth. They couldn’t be looking for her. If by chance they were, she was still safe. They would be expecting a proud-faced, curvy platinum blonde. Her old name was famous, her old face. She wouldn’t have dared go back to Essen if she doubted what a year and a half of defeat had done to her body.
“Fräulein?” The soldier had a ginger mustache and cold eyes set deep into his skull. He seemed, somehow, like the soldier who had spoken to her outside her boardinghouse. She’d been too upset about Blum to look at him closely, and couldn’t tell if she was imagining a resemblance.
Her temples pounded. “Yes, sir?”
“Your papers, please.”
She clutched the identity card in her palm. She was Margarete Müller. Without the card, how would anyone know who she was supposed to be?
“Fräulein.”
She let him examine it, her breaths puffing in the light of his flashlight. “Is there something wrong?” she asked, so quietly he didn’t seem to hear.
He reached for her elbow. “Come along.”
“But why?”
The other passengers drew away from Clara as she was pulled upward. She tripped over feet and bags down the aisle and out into the cold night. The soldier led her across a strip of dead grass to the road where several army vehicles were parked.
“There’s been a mistake,” she said, turning to the train.
More soldiers blocked her, forced her back toward the road. In the glare of the headlights was a folding table. Standing next to it, a British officer.
He was very still, his hands deep in his pockets. She knew he was an officer because he didn’t come to her; she was forced by the soldiers to stumble up the dirt road to him. He said something in German she couldn’t hear over the rumble of the idling vehicles. He repeated himself.
“Look at me, please.”
“Sir?” She tried to calm her voice. “There’s been a mix-up.”
He lifted her chin, a soft pressure she barely felt. He angled her face toward the light, this way and that. In the glare she could make out only the curve of his lips and the precise line of his mustache.
“You’ve changed,” he said with a hint of regret. “Except . . .” Gently, he traced his thumbs around her eyes.
3
The British officer introduced himself as Thomas Fenshaw and then paused as if giving Clara time to recognize the name. She didn’t. His rank came next—captain—mumbled as if it embarrassed him. She couldn’t decide if he was attempting to set her at ease by reminding her that a civilian existed deep inside his uniform, or whether he expected her to introduce herself in return. Say her real name. Just like that. She was off balance, she was shivering with cold and fright, but she was not going to give herself away that easily.
They were on the edge of a barren field somewhere in Westphalia. She sensed the wide, flat land in the darkness all around her. With a gallant flourish, Fenshaw led her to a stool at his folding table. “Reynolds,” he said to the ginger soldier who had taken her off the train. “Get the fräulein a tea. Black. She doesn’t like it sweet.”
“Oh, sir, but I do.” It was important to contradict him right away, to show him he had the wrong woman any way she could. “It would be so wonderful to have real, sweet tea again.”
Captain Fenshaw gave her an amused look, and said nothing else until Reynolds brought her a steaming thermos cup. The man had sugared it so heavily she felt the grit in her teeth.
“Good?” Fenshaw asked.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” As the meek Margarete Müller, she added, “You’re very kind, sir.”
His lips twitched, and he turned to the light to examine her identity card. He rubbed it between thumb and index finger like a tailor might to judge the quality of his fabric.
“Margarete Müller.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are you going tonight?”
“Essen, sir. I have a ticket . . .” She searched her pockets, but it was hard to make her fingers do what she wanted.
“Why are you traveling to Essen?”
“Just visiting, sir.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“Oh no, sir, I don’t know anyone there anymore. I want to go to the gardens.”
It was the first lie that came to mind, and she rushed to embroider it. “I’m not sure if you know Essen, sir. The Grugapark? I used to go to the gardens every season. To see how everything had changed. I wanted to go in autumn to see the leaves, but the trains are so unreliable. I thought I’d try now. The gardens are beautiful in the frost.”
“Do you see that field over there?”
He pointed. The far edges of the field were invisible in the dark, but in the beams of the headlamps from the road, she could see footprints all over the furrows, random piles of dirt, holes in the ground. She imagined people from the city had been over it like locusts digging up whatever they could eat.
“That,” Fenshaw said, “is what the gardens in Essen have looked like since the war.”
He held her gaze a long moment, then he bent her identity card in his hand and continued to ask questions. Her birth date, how old she was, where she was born, her current address. This was on the card; he was testing her. He branched out into things like her current employer and the number on her ration card. She didn’t know it by heart and reached into her coat to take it out. She had to concentrate to keep her hand steady as she passed it to him. Her knees, though, were trembling.
“While you’re at it,” he said, “please empty your pockets.”
It was humiliating to stand by and do nothing while he pawed and poked her things: the coin purse emptied, the slips of paper read. He turned his attention to her backpack, piling everything on top of the files that already filled the table. He examined each can of food, opened her matchbox, sniffed her toothpaste. At least she’d burned her family photograph. Captain Thomas Fenshaw would not get his hands on that.
“Is there something you’re looking for, sir?”
He gave her a brief smile, and continued with her clothes, shaking out each item, reading the label if it had one, then folding it carefully and moving on to the next. When he touched her underclothes, she bit her cheek to keep herself from saying something she would regret. She wound her arms around her waist, holding herself together. She was Margarete Müller. She couldn’t let him shake her out o
f that certainty.
He finished putting her belongings back into the rucksack. “Why do you think I stopped your train, fräulein?”
Half a dozen soldiers were posted between the road and the carriages behind her. They were smallish men with the wiry build she’d seen in many British soldiers since the war. She could imagine them working long hours in the factories in their hometowns, twelve hours sweated out of them, but returning again and again because they needed to eat; they needed a job. They were tougher than they looked.
Carefully, she said, “You must be looking for a dangerous person, sir. Very . . . violent.”
“There are many ways to be dangerous.”
“I don’t know anyone like that, sir. You’ve confused me with someone else. Please let me back on the train. It’s so cold.”
Fenshaw tapped a file. “Do you know what this is?” There were six files, all of them thick, their spines worn. “This is you, fräulein. Your entire life. Go on and have a look. Aren’t you curious? I would be if I were you.”
So many files just for her. She didn’t seem old enough or important enough to warrant so much paper. As curious as she was, she didn’t touch any of it.
Fenshaw opened a file in the middle. “This one is about that school you attended in Switzerland. Old classmates said you were the odd one out. Standoffish. Didn’t really fit in. Good at math and languages, though.” He was languidly peeling through the pages, not reading them, but summarizing from memory. “They said you were expelled because of a sordid little incident with”—he gave her a disappointed look—“the French master?”
Rubbish. The thing with the French master—that was a lie. She couldn’t say it to Fenshaw, and she flushed with the indignity of having that old slander used against her now. She hadn’t been expelled. Not exactly. Truth was she hadn’t cared a fig about that mausoleum of a school or the girls she had been forced to live with. Their posturing, their shifting allegiances, their small cruelties. She had three brothers. What did she need with those girls? But that was her mistake. Not needing them. They had invented the incident with the French master, a circle of them testifying they had seen Clara slipping into his room at night.
And worse, her mother had sided with the school, refusing to defend her or even listen to what she had to say. “A scandal,” Anne called it, blaming Clara for being involved in such unpleasantness in the first place. Back at home, she lectured Clara about her station, her reputation. Papa had thought the whole thing was a coordinated intrigue against his beloved daughter and sent stern protests to the school. But her mother . . . She couldn’t be trusted. That was what the incident had taught Clara.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve never been to Switzerland—or anywhere else, really. I’d like to travel, but it wasn’t possible—”
“You’ve never been to London?”
“No, but I’d like to. I’ve heard it’s very nice.”
He dug to the bottom of the files, opened one that seemed older than the rest, worn at the edges, stained with what looked like splashes of tea and the fingerprints of someone who had been eating chocolates. As he turned the crackling pages, she had the feeling he was excavating some ancient manuscript. How long had he been watching her? Years, it seemed. “You were in London regularly up to the war, but let’s take one visit,” he said, “in 1936. Your mother took you to a rally of the British Union of Fascists.”
Ten years, then. She could hardly believe it, that the file might be that old and showing its age, one-third of her life. Why would Fenshaw have a file on her so early? Back then she had been nothing special; at least, nothing of interest to the British. A twenty-year-old heiress might rate the society pages, but was surely beneath a government’s notice.
“You didn’t seem to be enjoying yourself up onstage,” Fenshaw went on. “You kept picking at your fingernails during the speeches. Yawning behind your hand. Counting the light fixtures. Eventually you slipped out to have a nip from your flask in the cloakroom. Remember that foul little room? Smelled of mold and wet dog.”
She didn’t like how he told it, as if it was his own memory, not information gleaned from talking to people who had actually been there. She tried to remember if she had, indeed, seen him before, but that rally had been one of many, and she used to drink cognac, quite a lot, to get through all that pompous political talk. On her visits to Britain, she had been dismayed at the marches of the Blackshirts of the BUF, how eagerly they copied what was happening in Germany and Italy, their leader, Mosley, saluting from his moving car, men and women marching in lockstep, people on the streets raising their arms. Back then, Fascism was a disease that was spreading everywhere.
She looked past Fenshaw, past the soldiers to the train. It was still and quiet. She sensed the people inside, invisible in the dark, blaming her for the delay. He had not let the train move on yet. She still had a chance.
“Sir, please, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t know what I can tell you to make you see.”
A sigh of disappointment. To the ginger soldier, he said, “She has an English head and a German soul, Reynolds. She assumes the government fouls things up. That’s her English side. Comes from her mother.”
“What about the German side, sir?” Reynolds asked.
Fenshaw tossed the file onto the stack. “Denial to the bitter end.”
“My name is Margarete Müller, sir. I live in Hamelin. I got engaged today.” She took off her glove and showed him her grandmother’s ring, reversed on her finger so he wouldn’t see the diamond. He shouldn’t look at her and think of wealth. “My fiancé, he’s . . . he’s a . . .” A monster she hoped to see again only as a photograph in the papers under the label Convicted. “This is all a mix-up, sir. Nobody has questioned me before. I’ve never been in trouble with the authorities. Please, let me back on that train.”
“I’ll give you one thing, fräulein. Once you bite into a lie, you don’t let go.”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Right. Let’s play a little longer if it makes you feel better. What did you do during the war?”
“I was a secretary, sir.”
“Where?”
“Krupp’s.”
“Reynolds, get me the female wartime employee list for the Krupp Steel Works in Essen.”
She watched Fenshaw examine it, dismayed he had it there at all.
“There we are.” Fenshaw tapped the list. “Worked at Krupp headquarters.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It says here the Margarete Müller in question—so you—died of injuries sustained in an air raid in October 1944.” The papers fluttered back into place. “I have to say, you’re the loveliest corpse I’ve ever seen.”
“The records near the end of the war were so unreliable, sir. Someone must have made a mistake—”
“Do you remember who Clara Falkenberg is?”
The wind gusted around her, sweeping off the field and bringing the smells of damp ground, rotting leaves, and the hint of smoke from a fire lit nearby and not so long ago.
“Of course I’ve heard of her, sir. She was quite famous. In Essen.”
“In all of Germany, I hear. The Reich’s rather mysterious heiress. The last living child of the Falkenbergs. The last head of the family iron works. Do you know what they used to call her?”
Clärchen. Theodor’s daughter. The Falkenberg. That bitch.
“The Iron Fräulein,” he said. “Goebbels thought that one up himself. What did you think of it?”
She nearly corrected him. Goebbels didn’t think of it, Himmler did. At least, that was the story her mother had told her. Clara had hated that Wagnerian nickname and all it represented. The Nazis had labeled her, used her name and image, and there had been little she could do to stop them.
“I always thought the fräulein must be proud of that name,” she said. “It implied she was a strong person.”
“She was. Strong, sensible,
a mind of her own.”
The praise surprised her so much, she didn’t know what to say. How could he talk as if he knew her?
“Do you agree?” he asked. “Do you think Fräulein Falkenberg was a strong person?”
She had no idea what Fenshaw was getting at, couldn’t guard herself, prepare her answers in her head. “Well, yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“She . . . she ran those factories all alone. It’s not work for a woman.”
“Remind me again what she built?”
Her cheeks warmed despite the icy wind. “If I recall, she was involved in iron production and the manufacture of vehicle parts.”
“And the assembly of vehicles, wasn’t it? Such as . . .”
She coughed a little to buy time to think, but there was no use lying about things he obviously knew. “Airplanes.”
“And?”
“Some armored vehicles.”
“Tanks, you mean.”
“I believe so. Like I said, it was no work for a woman.”
“Fräulein Falkenberg should have spent the war knitting scarves for the boys on the Eastern Front, is that what you’re saying?”
“Everyone did their bit.” She couldn’t keep the flint out of her voice. He was making fun of her. Captain Thomas Fenshaw presumed to make fun of her. Who did he think he was? Not some distant cousin on her mother’s side, she hoped. For generations, her English kin had produced armies of lovely daughters who married into every family fool enough to take them.
Fenshaw patted his files into a tidy stack. “I’ve been tracking you for a very long time. It wasn’t easy. You really did vanish in a puff of smoke until . . .” From another file, he revealed a thin blue paper folded into an envelope. It was the letter she’d written to Elisa two months ago. She nearly lunged for it, and it was everything she could do to restrain herself, to pretend the letter meant nothing.