by Anika Scott
She didn’t know how long she’d been in the locker. She measured time with the pains in her muscles and joints. An hour? More? When she angled her head toward the holes in the roof, pain shot down her spine, drilled a hole in her back, and crackled down her legs. Her feet had gone dead, and she moved them slowly, gasping.
The dark was worse. As a girl, she used to have nightmares in which she’d been unable to open her eyes. Without wanting to, she took the darkness of the locker and deepened it into the same dark as when she was eight years old and slept with the lamp on. If she didn’t, if she closed her eyes without the red glow of light behind her lids, she feared she would never open them again. She used to thrash in her sleep, trying to wrestle her eyes open. She used to dream of picking at the threads sealing her lids. In the locker, she felt the same cold insertion of the needle into the tender skin, the tug as the needle slid through. Her eyes ached and were sticky and when she opened them—were they really open?—all she saw was the blackness and her papa, who had given her these nightmares, and cured them too.
He had summoned her via a servant to a room she had never before been allowed to enter. There were many at Falkenhorst, many locked doors. Her skin buzzed with anxiety as this one was opened for her. She stepped into a dim room with only one source of light: the lamp on the table next to her father.
“It’s all right,” he said, “come closer.” There was a strange rustling sound, and she halted in the center of the room. She noticed the thick glove on Papa’s left hand, and the towel bundled on his lap. She couldn’t see what he held there.
He pulled aside a corner of the towel and cooed in a voice she rarely heard anymore. “Calm down, little bird.”
Her heart surged with happiness—he hadn’t called her that since she was small—but then she realized he wasn’t talking to her at all. Out of the towel came the head of a young falcon, its beak snapping the air. It struggled and made high sounds she knew were screams of fright. A man hurried out of the shadows—she was so startled that she scampered out of his way and to the wall—and he knelt beside Papa and took hold of the bird so that its feet were pressed close to its body and its head held still. From a silver tablet on the table, Papa selected a fine needle, the thread reminding her of a strand of hair. He held the needle close to the falcon’s eye.
“Papa, what are you doing?”
“Just watch.”
She pressed her fists over her eyes. “No.”
“Clara.”
His tone made her shiver. She had told her father no. That was forbidden. After he made it clear she was not to hide her eyes again, he turned back to the bird. Tenderly he inserted the needle into the lower eyelid, drawing the thread outward. Clara bit back her tears and kept watching. The cries of the bird cut into her heart. Worse was the moment when it stopped protesting and endured the procedure on the first eye, then the second.
She didn’t know how long he took. By the end of it, when the falcon’s eyelids were stitched, and the threads tied and tucked under the feathers of its head, she wanted to scream and run. How could her father do something so cruel?
He set aside his needle and gestured for her to come closer. She obeyed, staring at the bird with disgust and pity. She wanted to pet it and knew she couldn’t. It was blind, but she was sure it would snap at her hand.
“It doesn’t look nice, I know,” Papa said. “But this was a humane thing to do. It’s a traditional technique, over a thousand years old, for taming a falcon.” He patiently explained about the medieval Emperor Frederick II’s book on falconry. She pretended to listen while she agonized over why he had not put a hood on the poor bird as others did. “Can you guess why we do this to her eyes?” he asked.
Her voice was stuck in her throat, wrapped in a fury and fear she was trying to ball up and contain as she had been taught. He shouldn’t see the rebellious feelings inside her.
“If she can’t see,” he said, “she won’t be so terrified of the strange new world around her. She will get used to my touch and my voice.” With great tenderness, he stroked a finger over the bird’s head, and it jerked to the side. “You see? She doesn’t trust me yet.”
Clara thought: Of course not. You just sewed her eyes shut.
“When she learns to trust me,” he said, “I’ll give her back her sight. She will be ready to see the world she’s going to have to live in from now on. Do you understand why I wanted you to watch this?”
She nodded, though it was a lie. She had no idea what he was trying to teach her. That night, the nightmares began and continued for weeks. She wandered around Falkenhorst shattered, her eyes bruised from lack of sleep. When Grandmother Sophia asked her what was wrong (her mother never did), she said she didn’t know. The family doctor gave her a tonic she spat out when no one was looking.
This was long before she met Elisa. Friedrich was the only one she could talk to. Home from school at last, Clara had jumped into his arms and made him carry her, laughing, out into the garden. She asked him if Papa had ever shown him such terrible things. Why had he done this to that poor bird, and to her?
Almost twelve at the time, Friedrich had thought deeply and said, “He was trying to toughen you up.”
“Why?”
“You’re a girl, dummkopf. He was making sure you didn’t run away screaming and crying.”
“I didn’t scream or cry,” she said with a trace of pride.
“Once he made me go down into one of our coal mines.” Frie-drich fumbled the binoculars around his neck. Back then, he always wore them, ready for bird-watching in the family forest, where he spent hours under the trees and the sky. Clara was horrified at the thought of him going down into a hole in the ground. It was against his nature.
“Why would he do that to you?” she asked.
“I think he wanted to know if I would actually do it. If I really trusted him, you know?”
Friedrich had given her a clue about what made Papa tick. From then on, Clara watched their father as he stroked the falcon on its perch and spoke to it as gently as he’d once spoken to her. She saw this noble creature begin to eat out of his hand. Her nightmares faded. What did she have to fear? Her father had the subtle, awesome power to tame what was wild and dark in the world. This certainty remained for years. It shattered the first time she saw him raise his arm to a regime they both despised.
REYNOLDS WAS STILL calling to her from outside the locker. “Do you have enough air?”
Clara opened her eyes. Her lips were cracked and tasted of blood. Her tongue felt thick and prickly, as if it had grown hooks.
“You’re all right, aren’t you?” An edge of worry in Reynolds’s voice. Maybe Fenshaw had told him to make sure she didn’t suffocate. “Miss Falkenberg, say something.”
She didn’t answer to that name anymore, and anyway, she was not about to give him the reassurance of a response. Soon he was cursing, and the padlock clanged, and then, in a rush of fresh air, the doors swung open. She fell out reaching for water, and drank the canteen dry. On the bench, she stretched her legs until the needles and aches faded. Moving, breathing, she felt alive with energy, more than she had in a long time. Maybe the men who had endured the locker in the war felt like this. They came out stronger because the damned thing hadn’t beaten them.
The canvas over the back of the truck was lashed to one side, and in the moonlight, the jagged remains of buildings sped by. “Essen?” she asked as Reynolds secured the locker doors. The truck took a quick turn, and he keeled over and caught the chain that held up the locker. His shoulder slammed against it, a hollow boom.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He sat next to her on the bench and held out a cigarette. She took it out of politeness, surprised at his offer. “Think nothing of it,” he said. “I’d give a cigarette to my worst enemy.”
He was much younger than Fenshaw and maybe a decade younger than her. Early twenties, she guessed. It was possible he hadn’t seen much of the war, or none at all, o
nly the aftermath. Sometimes those boys were worse than the men who had been in combat. More zealous, regretting they’d missed all the “good” stuff. “Where did you fight, sir?” she asked in the careful, heavily accented English of Margarete Müller.
“I was in school.” He sat stiffly and took quick puffs of his cigarette. He kept rubbing his bare hand on his knee. “What’s it like?” he asked.
“Sorry, sir?”
“Being a war criminal.”
She decided he was trying to be clever. “I’m not.”
“Captain says you are.”
“The captain is wrong.”
“He’s never wrong.” Said with the total faith of a schoolboy.
She didn’t know what to do with him. Normally she could count on appealing to a young soldier’s lust or greed. Not with Reynolds. She sensed that he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the trust Fenshaw seemed to put in him. But then, he had let her out of the locker. She doubted Fenshaw had wanted that.
“Why was I pulled off the train, sir? You could have arrested me in Hamelin.”
“Captain wanted to keep things quiet.”
“Why? Where is he taking me?”
“I’ll tell you if you’re straight with me. I’ve been nice, haven’t I? I let you out. It’s not right, locking up a human being like that, even knowing the things you did.”
“I was a secretary, sir. I typed. I made telephone calls and took dictation. Hardly crimes.”
“Don’t you get tired of lying all the time?”
She was talking to a child. She lied, yes, she lied about her name, her past, her life, but the motive, the reason she did it . . . that was the important point. That was what the schoolboy Reynolds couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. He would think the same as Fenshaw, that she was the Iron Fräulein, the machine-woman the Nazis had supposedly loved and the Allies loathed. But this was nonsense, an image, a piece of propaganda that all of them used for their own ends. Why would the Allies try to understand that there was a difference between the real her and the woman they thought she was? This was why she lied.
“Just admit who you are and things’ll go much easier for you,” Reynolds said. “The captain doesn’t go for those shabby prisons. He’ll make sure you’re treated well. Comfortable, just like he said.” Reynolds was close to her, his breath a warm cloud of tobacco against her cheek. “You can tell me, fräulein. It only takes a start. You’ll feel better telling the truth.”
“I have to know where we’re going.”
He considered it a moment, then stubbed his cigarette out on the bench. “Captain wants some old boyfriend of yours in Essen to identify you. Maybe convince you to cooperate.”
Max—they were taking her to Max. The truck rumbled over a pothole, and she gripped the bench. She didn’t want to see him. Nothing he could say would convince her to collaborate with Fenshaw.
On the other side of the canvas, the landscape had changed. They were going through the sad and dark remains of a working-class neighborhood. Some of the black houses looked intact but most were heaps of rubble. It was impossible to know if this was Essen or one of the other industrial cities nearby, one dreary, identical block of brick and stone after another. Between the train and the truck, it felt as though she’d been traveling long enough to be close to home.
“What do you say?” Reynolds’s voice was taut with anxiety and hope. She had no doubt he was trying to raise his value in his superior’s eyes. The boy was ambitious. She wondered what he would do if he got what he wanted.
“If I talk to you, I don’t want to be put back in that locker.”
“You won’t be. That’s a promise. You are Clara Falkenberg, aren’t you?”
Outside the truck, the anonymous, ruined city. If she was home, it would be easier to admit who she really was. A simple yes would be good enough for Reynolds, but there was so much more. She was the daughter of Theodor, in prison, and Anne, presumably in the empty, rambling halls of their family home. She was the sister of Heinrich, Otto, and Friedrich, taken in the war. She was the youngest child and the only one to survive. Reynolds couldn’t possibly know what that meant, what it was like to see the pillars of her life crumble around her and find, in the end, that she was the only one left standing.
Still gazing out at the passing buildings, she said quietly, “You caught me, sir. Congratulations.”
With a shout of triumph, Reynolds sprang to his feet. The truck careered around another corner, and the force threw him off balance. His head knocked with a deep bang into the locker doors. He stumbled, grasping at the tarp. In a moment, Clara had seized her bag and was over the truck’s tailgate. The pavement was rushing away below her, there was no time to think, assess risk, be scared. She jumped, landing on her backpack, then her shoulder and hip. She was spinning in the street, and then she was on her feet, heading for the dark and silent ruins.
5
Jakob came to on his stomach, awakened by sharp pains tattooing his back. His body—yes, he still had a body, he knew that because it hurt—was sprawled in the bed of wet moss and leaves that had broken his fall. He opened his eyes to the inky dark of the valley. He sensed the rock looming behind him, the cliff face whose folds he now knew intimately, since he’d rolled down each and every one of them. High up there was the village, and the farmhouses, and the voices still laughing and mocking him.
Hello, cripple. Still alive?
The pain in his back stopped, and then it started up again. It felt as though somebody was tapping Morse code on his spine. Jab—jab—short pause—jab—long pause—jab.
“You can stop now,” Jakob said, moaning, “I’m not a pincushion.”
The jabs stopped. He thought he heard labored breathing behind him, but that couldn’t be. The voices were still high up on the cliff. He fought to stay conscious, stay alert, ready to fight again if he had to. But his mind was clouding, drawn to sleep in order to forget the pain. He couldn’t let himself be dragged under. Sleep meant freezing to death. During the long marches in Russia, when men fell in the road, Jakob had kept one foot moving in front of the other, through the white wastes and the biting wind. His feet ached. Tomorrow, he would look for a freshly dead Russian and steal his boots.
Where are you, cripple?
He shook awake again. Not Russia. He was not in Russia anymore. He was in the valley below Heisingen, part of Essen, his home. Those bastards up on the cliff had called him a—
Groaning, he rolled over and patted his left leg. His skin was slimy and prickled with goose bumps, and that’s how he remembered they had stolen his trousers for the fun of it. He touched the sutured skin on his left knee. Four years since the amputation and sometimes it still came as a shock. In his head, Jakob was a whole man. He could run and kick, duck and dodge. In his head.
We’re coming to get you, cripple.
Light flared in his eyes, and he threw his arm over his face. “So you found me, you miserable shits. What you going to do now, huh? Steal my underpants too?”
Whoever held the light hiccoughed when he breathed, but Jakob couldn’t see him behind the glare.
“Well?”
No answer, only the hiccoughs. Jakob used the light to check his body for damage. Right leg—stiff but functioning. Head—worse than a hangover on the South Sea Club’s illegal schnapps. Right arm—check. Left arm—ow. He worked the elbow, the shoulder. Nothing broken, but the arm felt like a bruise that went to the bone. He looked for his portable lamp or his prosthesis, but they weren’t inside the pool of light or the weeds he pawed outside it.
“You just going to stand there or are you going to get this over with?”
The light vanished. He heard the familiar ring of nail-soled shoes retreating a few steps in the dark. Army boots?
“Wait. You’re not with them, are you?” Jakob patted the ground, found a stone, then a thick branch. After several tries, he pulled himself onto the only foot he had left. The branch held, the world didn’t. His head spun and he was fall
ing.
The stranger caught him, gasped at his weight, buckled and then stabilized. His smell hurtled Jakob back to days he didn’t want to remember. It was the smell of the front, of damp wool and oiled leather, of bergamot and citrus eau de cologne that didn’t quite cover the stink of a soldier’s fear. Whoever it was, he was thin, and he was shaking, and for the few moments Jakob had his arms around him, he felt the stranger’s wildly beating heart.
He propped the branch under Jakob’s arm, and dashed up the slope, his light bobbing until it vanished into what looked like a crevice in the cliff. Jakob staggered toward it, blind in the dark again. He fell onto his bare knee and pitched chin-first into the brambles. The ground turned to paste under his hands. Behind tangled vines, he found the crevice in the rock. He climbed through and landed, shaken, in a cave. His hand brushed something on the ground beside him, and he felt the cold, familiar shape of his portable lamp. It puzzled him for a moment until he realized the stranger must have dropped it here. He clipped it to his coat and switched it on.
Brick and timber walls around him, timber beams overhead. He rubbed the black paste on his hands. A coal mine. His father used to talk about coal as the black fortune under Essen, the whole Ruhr region. Here in the south, by the river, old mines dotted the cliffs. The coal veins were a scratch under the surface compared to the deep shafts up north. But they were getting coal out of the south before they knew what deep mining was. This mine could be hundreds of years old.
“Glück auf,” Jakob said. Nobody returned the traditional miner’s greeting.
He knew what Papa would say in that ghost-story voice he got when he talked about his work. A mine is a living thing. It’ll kill you if you let it. Jakob tapped the wood fittings. Dry, in good condition. Yet the ceiling sagged, the cliff’s weight pressing on the tunnel. Close to collapse? He couldn’t tell. He crawled to the dead end, Papa in his brain now. One false move, one misstep and you’ll drown in black waters or hurtle deep into the earth.