The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  “It’s the . . . sixth of December. Or the seventh. I don’t know. Time is strange down here. But—all right, it’s 1946. December 1946. You with me?”

  Willy returned to the crate table. He poured nails and screws out of the cups into a heap.

  “Don’t drift away yet, kid. Tell me the year you came down here. The year.”

  The boy sorted the nails from the screws.

  “Willy.”

  The boy dropped a screw and turned his big eyes on Jakob. “You know my name.”

  “It’s 1946. You turned fifteen in September. You got to know that. You’re not thirteen, Willy. You’re fifteen.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “I’m not—” Jakob pressed his temples. If, and it was a big if, the Allies had missed this mine after the war, maybe—just maybe—it was possible the supplies had sat undiscovered for eighteen months. If a black marketeer had found the depot, he would have sold it immediately and retired to grow fat with a beautiful woman on the island of Sylt.

  “Listen to me. Listen, you poor idiot, you can forget about all this. The war is over. Go home.”

  “I will stay at my post until victory when I’m relieved of duty.” Willy selected a nail. “I was warned about people like you.”

  “Sane people?”

  “Defeatists.”

  Jakob clawed his hair. “I’ll say it slow so you understand. The. War. Is. Over. We lost.”

  Willy dropped a screw into one cup, a nail into the other.

  “Come back to me, kid.” Jakob threw his empty meal tin, and it glanced off the table. “Listen to me. US and British forces encircled us in April ’45, the whole Ruhr area. If you been down here since”—he could barely say it—“since the eleventh of March 1945, you came in before the pincer closed. But it did. The Allies squeezed and we surrendered. Three hundred thousand of us surrendered. It’s over.” He held out his hands in appeal. “Understand?”

  The last of the nails and screws clanged into the cups. Willy wiped his hands on a cloth, folded it according to the rules of geometry, and faced Jakob.

  “I can’t let this stand. You’re a thief and a defeatist.” He drew his pistol. “Another traitor.”

  “Wait, listen—”

  “The sentence for treason is death.”

  Jakob shook his head. This was a madhouse. Any minute now, Gertrud was going to start talking. Maybe his leg would grow back. If it did, he’d disarm Willy, the little prat, and throw him out of the mine by the seat of his pants.

  “You know where my father died?” Jakob asked.

  Confusion passed over Willy’s face.

  “Underground. Mining accident in the war. He was sent down to save the fellows who got buried and ended up dead himself. I was at the front. You know what I see, when I think about it? I see him wearing his Draeger on his back—it made him look like a beetle with a hose in its mouth—and he’s crushed under a pit’s worth of coal and rock. Most of us don’t get to choose where we die, kid, but I am telling you right now: I am not dying in a hole in the ground like Papa did. If you want to shoot me, take me outside.”

  The dull look was back in Willy’s eyes. “My papa fell in the war. For the Reich. But my mother . . .”

  “I’m sorry about that, kid.”

  Willy blinked. “What did you say?”

  “Nobody wants to die in the dark. Take me outside.”

  IT WAS DAY. After the darkness in the mine, the gray sky beamed down on Jakob like a spotlight. He shaded his eyes with an arm, let the light in slowly. When he looked up, he saw for the first time where he’d landed.

  Frost covered the valley and dusted the hills and brambles a gleaming white. Above him, the cliff jutted like the prow of some old sailing ship and curved away in both directions. The mine’s entrance used to be a rounded portal, but the stone had eroded from the hill above and slid down, hiding the space.

  In daylight, Willy’s skin looked the color of spoiled milk. Jakob remembered men like that, hidden in cellars and bunkers too long. Years ago, he had looked like that himself.

  “Down there.” Willy motioned down the slope toward the marsh. The river was a silver line behind the weeds.

  “Think about what you’re doing, Willy.” Jakob hopped toward him, one, two steps, and the shovel slipped. His good knee cracked on the ground as he went down on all fours, and he cried out.

  Willy aimed at his head, and Jakob went still. He didn’t feel the pain in his knee anymore, only a cold spot where the bullet could enter his skull if he made a sudden move.

  “Wait, kid. Listen.” He eased himself slowly into a sitting position so he could see the pistol while looking Willy in the face. “The war is over. We’re free to tend to our own business instead of bleeding for the Reich. Tend to our families. Our gardens. Some philosopher wrote that, right? Some Frenchman. Help me out.” Jakob realized it wasn’t the best moment to bring up the French to a Hitler Youth boy with a gun. “Nobody survives alone, Willy. You need your family. I guarantee they need you. You got brothers and sisters?”

  The gun shook in Willy’s hand. “No.”

  “All right, it’s just you and your mother. Think about that. She needs you. Go home. Or wait, you know what? I’ll go to your house for you. I know your address from your identity card. I’ll break the good news to your mother. When she hears you’re alive, she’ll probably—”

  The shot boomed through the valley, and Jakob was on the ground, body pressed into the cold grass. The echoes built in his head, rolling through him like machine-gun fire and artillery. When it faded, he moved his leg. He touched his chest. Nothing. He was okay.

  The kid aimed again, muttering, “Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate.”

  Somewhere around the bend in the cliff, men were shouting. Jakob couldn’t see them yet, but he guessed who they were.

  “Miners, Willy. Lots of mines around here, you know that, right? They heard that shot of yours. They’re coming. They’re coming to raid your depot and there’s nothing you or me can do about it.”

  Willy tripped backward and recovered his balance, swinging his pistol from the cliff and back to Jakob. The kid’s hesitation, the miss at point-blank range, had to mean he wasn’t a killer or a soldier, despite the uniform.

  “Miners got big families,” Jakob said, “lots of mouths to feed. They won’t waste a thought on us. You’re just a boy even with that gun and I’m just a cripple. Our kind always get the short straw in this world. If we work together, we got a chance. Not only to survive. There’s enough in that mine for us both to really do something with.”

  “I won’t desert my post.”

  “Leave me the gun, kid. Quick.”

  Willy swayed.

  “No fainting.” Jakob snapped at him in the voice he hadn’t used since the war: “Achtung.”

  Willy straightened.

  “Drop the gun.”

  It thudded to the grass.

  “Run.”

  Willy scrambled up the slope and through the crevice in the rock as the miners rounded the bend, three men in baggy trousers and shirts streaked with black dust. They waved at Jakob and shouted “glück auf.” They would have a horse-drawn cart, maybe. A way to get him home. It was only a question of explaining the shot.

  He picked up Willy’s gun. The Walther P38 reassured him because he was used to it, not because he liked it. He had fought in the war too long to be sentimental about weapons.

  When the miners were close enough to see, he raised it to his temple and waited for them to run to him, trying not to tremble and blow his brains out in the meantime. He calmed himself by repeating the address of Willy’s house in his head over and over. He thought about Elisabeth Sieland and what she would do when Jakob told her about Willy. He imagined she would fly down here to fetch her son out of the mine. In her gratitude, in all that motherly joy, she would leave the depot and all its delicacies to the good man who had helped bring her boy home.

  9

  The
old man was sitting on the toilet in Elisa’s yard—clear-as-glass proof to Clara that the order of things had been turned upside down.

  Herr Berger didn’t seem to notice. He sat with his back straight and hands clasped on his knees, his coat draping over the ground and his worn shoes planted in the brown grass. He used the toilet only to rest, so his trousers were where Clara preferred them to be, securely belted high on his waist. He was watching the street for her. In the days since she had arrived at the cellar, he’d insisted on guarding her himself. An honor, he said, and of course he was healthy enough to do this sacred duty. And truly, when he kept watch for her, his hands didn’t shake and he dribbled a little less than usual. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that he looked suspicious to anyone who might pass by. If Fenshaw saw him, that would be the end.

  She was grateful for Herr Berger’s dedication, but even the dignified way he sat couldn’t erase the fact that the scene was ridiculous. Toilets were not to be in yards. Intimacies were not to be made public. Every time she left the cellar, poking her head out like a rabbit sniffing for a fox (or whatever ate rabbits; she was a city girl), she couldn’t accept what she was seeing: the bomb-blasted street, her grandmother’s beloved work destroyed, Elisa’s ruined house.

  “Why don’t you go back inside, Herr Berger? You must be freezing.”

  He kept his face to the street, unbearably serious. “I won’t leave my post, fräulein.”

  “Only fools stay at their post when they’re sure to get frostbite or pneumonia, and you’re no fool.” She took his arm. “Come on. Up you go.”

  He was stubborn. He refused to be moved, and she was surprised by his weight, or her own weakness. “Please,” she said, “even sentries take breaks sometime. I’ll be fine alone for a little while. And if the enemy comes”—they’d taken to calling Fenshaw the enemy—“I’ll hide in the ruins. All right? You’d really like a nice hot drink, wouldn’t you? Come downstairs.”

  Finally he let her lead him to the cellar door. She noticed him swallowing pain as he limped gingerly down the stairs, one step at a time, leaning against her. She deposited him next to the oven and went back outside to assess the ruined house.

  There was nothing to be done about the toilet. It was too heavy for her to move to a less conspicuous spot. And so she began to do what the Bergers hadn’t done, to tidy the house’s frontage, which faced the public street. She lifted bricks from the rubble and stacked them as she’d seen the cleanup crews do, her banged-up hip and shoulder twinging as she stooped down. Once she had a small, wide wall of bricks, she paused with satisfaction at the bit of order she had wrestled from the chaos.

  It wasn’t enough. She climbed over the rubble, deeper into what used to be Elisa’s foyer, and pulled out of the broken stones the mangled remains of Elisa’s telephone. Altogether, they’d carried on years of conversation on this thing. When they were younger, they had telephoned so often that it had driven Papa to distraction. “Should I invite her over, then?” Clara had asked, knowing her mother wouldn’t allow it, through maybe Papa? But he had poured himself a cognac to the top of the glass and drank it down in one swallow, then promised to have a private line installed for Clara at Falkenhorst.

  She carried the telephone to the lawn and set it on the grass. She returned to the house, found the shattered frame of the foyer mirror, and remembered checking her hat and her face after a meal or a drink or an evening of games with Willy. She set the frame next to the telephone, and continued to salvage bits of furniture, a rusted iron, a cigarette case. The wind was creeping into her joints, and to keep warm, she kept rooting around in the debris. She was, as far as she could tell, in Elisa’s bedroom, which had been upstairs but was now at ground level and part of the general destruction. She concentrated on a charred bit of the wardrobe, digging down under stones and plaster until she felt the slightly soggy yet firm form of a good-sized box. It took her a while to free it, but eventually she carried it out to the front lawn.

  The box was light but not empty. The moment Clara lifted the lid and saw the snow-white silk, she knew what it was. Elisa’s wedding dress, a summer frock she had altered to fit snugly under her bust and expand over her growing stomach. Now it was damp and smelled of lavender and mold. Elisa had insisted on white, which was a bit of a stretch, considering she’d been eight months’ pregnant when she showed up with her groom at the registrar’s office. Clara hadn’t gone. She had been forced into visiting extended family in Vienna, a spur-of-the-moment trip she suspected her mother had arranged to stop her from attending the ceremony. Clara had only seen a photograph of Elisa and Reinhard Sieland standing stiffly side by side. It had vanished from the house as soon as he went to war.

  She spread the dress next to the other things, and waded through the rubble to what used to be the kitchen. Searching on her knees, she found a piece of porcelain in the debris—half a cake plate, blue flowers on a white background. Elisa had used this set for her husband’s funeral coffee. Or tea, rather, since coffee wasn’t to be had near the end of the war. Elisa had made it out of acorns and roots and it had tasted like mud, even with a splash of precious canned milk.

  It had been an odd gathering held in mid-February of ’45, a few weeks before she left Essen. When Clara arrived, Elisa had thrown open the blue door dressed in a delicate flower-print frock. Clara remembered the shock of seeing Elisa’s freckled arms in short sleeves when she herself wore several layers and was still shivering in the cold. But then, these were the last mad months of the war. Oddness was tolerated.

  Still, Clara remembered turning in astonishment to Max, who had arrived with her directly from the Works. Max had been Reinhard’s friend, and was shaken by his death but not shattered. Too many had fallen already for that. He gave Elisa a cold glance as he swept past her into the house. Clara wasn’t sure what his look meant, if it was a continuation of the latest battle the two of them were fighting at work. Elisa was as determined as Clara to scavenge supplies for their workers, while Max now urged caution. As the Allies swept closer, the Nazis grew more violent, more out of control. If any of them wanted to survive, he said, they had to be sensible and keep their heads down. Sometimes Clara refereed shouting matches in her own office. This too she laid at the door of the defeat that was grinding swiftly toward them.

  And so at the tea, Clara observed them carefully: Max avoiding Elisa yet watching her coolly over his cup; Elisa chatting and smiling as if this was a cocktail party.

  “What is wrong with you?” Clara said, whispering.

  Max shook his head, and she let him be. By then, things had changed between them too.

  She tried to talk to Elisa, to warn her she was giving a bad impression.

  “I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” Elisa said.

  “You don’t lighten the mood at a funeral.”

  “This isn’t a funeral. It’s a remembrance.” She chimed her spoon against her teacup. “I’d like to thank all of you for joining me to honor my beloved husband.”

  Max bristled on the other side of the room, a tiny twitch of the dueling scar on his cheek.

  “Let’s not be sad,” Elisa said. “Let’s remember Reinhard as the man he was”—she aimed her smile at Max—“in the good times. When he wasn’t drunk, he was one of the best husbands a woman could have.”

  After the shock—and thank God Willy was outside kicking a ball around the garden—Clara steered Elisa into the kitchen. She’d known the marriage wasn’t a happy one, Elisa had told her that for years, but airing it now, in front of the guests?

  “What is going on?” she demanded.

  “You don’t expect me to put a halo on my dear departed husband, do you? It’s a little late in the war for hypocrisy.”

  “All right, but you still have to keep up appearances.”

  Elisa leaned against the sink and put her face in her hands. Clara had rarely seen her cry, and it melted her instantly. She gathered her friend up in her arms. Elisa squeezed her back and gave a li
ttle sniffling laugh. “Do you know you’re always right, Clara?”

  “I am not.”

  “Most of the time. It’s really annoying.” Eyes wet, she primped Clara’s hair as she had often done when they were younger. “Will you go out there and smooth things over for me? You’re good at that kind of thing. Tell them I’m bad at mourning. You know.”

  Clara rejoined the guests to apologize on Elisa’s behalf. Later, out of the window she saw Max in the garden showing Willy how to balance a ball on his shoe and kick it straight up in the air. Willy couldn’t manage it, the ball always slipping off or bounding toward the shed. He kept trying, determined in his single-minded way, and she knew he would be out there until well after dark kicking that ball over and over. Max knew it too. He caught the ball and spoke to Willy as he always did, man to man, nodding toward the house. Willy followed Max to the back door without protest, a mix of adoration and something like caution on his face. Maybe he sensed the change in the old friendship between his mother and his beloved Uncle Max, as he called him.

  Clara set the cake plate next to the other artifacts from the ruins. Laid out on the grass, everything she’d found looked like rubbish, nothing worth coming back for. Sighing, she held up the wedding dress, and the wind filled the wide skirt, revealing a square hole in the silk the size of a hand. The edges were clean, as if the square had been snipped away by sharp scissors.

  A man’s voice disturbed the quiet. “You’re holding up about a thousand marks right there, liebling.”

  He was leaning on a crutch, his face crisscrossed with cuts as if he’d fallen into a rosebush. He had only one leg. Clara had been raised not to stare at infirmities, but she couldn’t help locking her eyes on to the space where his other foot should have been. With his crutch, his whole body was unnaturally tilted. She wondered how much of his leg was missing under his long overcoat.

  Then she flushed. “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Everybody stares at first. Doesn’t offend me. I stare at the guys with one arm.” He was smiling at her, quite a feat. On his jaw was a bluish contusion the size of a small egg. Her jaw twinged in sympathy, and she touched it to see if she hadn’t grown one of those eggs herself.