by Anika Scott
“I know the exact house. After the Allies hired me, your mother stooped to talking to me now and then. She thinks I’m her spy.”
That wasn’t at all how Anne used to be. She would mumble and complain about the riffraff—Max and Elisa—who Papa and then Clara had allowed to rise at the Works. Outsiders were not to be trusted, Anne always said. Clara had ignored that. Her mother was the last person she looked to for advice about trust.
“Will you take me to her?”
“No.” The flare of light as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t think I will.”
Clara knew Max too well to argue. There was no need. She clicked off her flashlight and waited for him to finish his smoke. When he did, he kissed her in the inky dark of the workshop, his fingers pressing her skull, his teeth rattling hers. She remembered this too, how he could funnel anger into his kisses, how submitting to them could calm him and get him to do what she wanted. They separated, her lips numb from his, and he led her outside to where his bicycle leaned against the carriage-house wall.
12
Jakob Relling got home a little drunk but contented, as he’d been most of the time since the miracle of Willy Sieland’s depot dropped into his life. He deserved some luck—cripple’s luck, as he wasn’t afraid to call it—and since it had been a long time in coming, he was savoring it all the more. Even better, he was learning how one piece of luck could lead to another. Willy’s delicious depot had led him to Willy’s house, which had led him to the diamond ring worn by one Margarete Müller. Her mission to find an ex-Gestapo man was ridiculous, but his luck was holding out even there. He knew a fellow who knew a fellow who tonight had insisted he could set up a meeting with another fellow who might be the one. If that worked out, the diamond was his. Once he had the diamond, he’d have capital. With that, he could do anything. Buy clothes for the baby, shoes for his sisters, a new suit and a gold-plated prosthesis for himself. He might even get a half-crazy kid out of the mine while taking the food for his growing family.
The only problem, or rather a pleasant concern that had been nagging at the back of Jakob’s mind, was Margarete Müller. Talking to her, an odd feeling had nudged him toward . . . he wasn’t sure what. Somehow he associated her with damp leather and straw and wood smoke, smells that were comforting and so intense he’d smelled them in the cold air at Sophienhof. And so, as he’d been out working on her behalf, Jakob carried around with him the memory of her gray eyes, drained of color except for the black pricks of the pupils. He thought of the graceful black curves of her eyebrows. He wasn’t dumb. He knew an alias when he heard one. That woman was no Fräulein Müller. But if not her—then who?
Humming to himself, he hobbled into the dank foyer. His building had four walls and something like a roof and most of the time he could push away his fear of it collapsing. He lived with his sisters on the ground floor, which suited him, considering the upstairs neighbors had to climb a ladder. The Rellings had it easier, two rooms for three people, four until their mother passed on. The rest of what used to be their flat was occupied by the next-door neighbor and her daughters, whose apartment had collapsed in on itself. Their beds lined the narrow hallway, and as Jakob limped past them toward the kitchen—his sisters’ room—he considered how living at such close quarters was going to be even more awkward once he got the food from Willy’s mine. He wasn’t about to feed the whole neighborhood.
He paused in the hallway. The beds were empty. Strange for this time of night. For weeks, the neighbor’s girls had slept two to a bed, wearing wool hats and clutching each other for warmth.
He looked into the parlor, still and cold because it had no oven. He usually slept on the sofa, and his bedding was there, folded neatly. This alarmed him. If he was out late, his sister Dorrit made up his bed. He never asked her to do it. She’d taken over the task from their mother, just as she had taken over the household after her death.
“Dorrit?” He stumbled on his crutch to the kitchen. “Dorrit? Gabi?”
The heat in the kitchen surprised him, his face tingling. To conserve fuel, the girls usually didn’t feed the oven quite so much. But it wasn’t just the oven. Half a dozen thin girls occupied the bench and chairs at the table. These were the neighbor’s daughters, who had no business being in the kitchen this time of night. Their mother, Frau Kreuz, sat on the bed Jakob had installed next to the oven for his sisters. Dorrit was there too, her hands writhing on Mama’s old apron, a rose pattern that covered her bulging stomach. She was weeping in noisy gasps.
“Dorrit.” Jakob dropped beside her, his balance slightly off from the schnapps he’d drunk. “Little mouse. What’s wrong?”
“She’s been crying for the better part of an hour,” Frau Kreuz said with disapproval.
Dorrit wiped her sleeve over her nose. “That is a lie.”
Affronted, Frau Kreuz gathered up her daughters and left the room. Jakob put his arm around Dorrit, and reached down to touch Gabi’s head. She was kneeling on the floor, leaning against Dorrit’s knee. With a familiar pang, he noticed how thin they were, how bony Dorrit’s shoulders had become, how Gabi’s hair wasn’t growing as a girl’s hair should.
“All right. What’s going on? What happened?”
“Nothing.” Dorrit wiped her face with the apron and struggled to calm herself, as he’d seen her do often the past few months. He didn’t have the heart to tell her she shouldn’t wear their mother’s things. He suspected it made her sad but somehow brought her closer to Mama, though Dorrit wasn’t about to admit it. She aimed her moist eyes at him and gave him a weak smile. She was seventeen and a soldier’s dream, which was her downfall. Soft blond curls over her shoulders, honey-brown eyes like their mother’s, a habit of smiling at strangers. All of that and a dash of poor judgment got her in the situation she was in now: her belly growing and the rest of her wasting away.
“Come on, you were crying about something. Does something hurt? The baby?”
“No, it’s not that.” She put her hands to her cheeks. “I forgot to make your bed.”
“You don’t have to make my bed.” The blue veins under her skin seemed darker, more prominent. The pallor of her face was getting worse. She looked ghostly, and it scared him. The extra rations she was due as an expectant mother weren’t enough. She was crying because she was hungry, but she would never tell him when she knew he was doing everything he could for her already. He kicked himself for leaving the mine without food, but what choice had he had with Willy pointing a gun at him?
“If you’re hungry, eat. You can take some of my rations. You know that.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Liar. You have to feed him too.” He tapped her belly, and she smiled.
“He can feel that.”
“Eat, Dorrit. We’re going to be all right. I told you about the coal mine, didn’t I?” He gathered his sisters in his arms and told the story of Willy’s stash all over again. They listened with big eyes, as they’d done when they were little and he’d spun tales about princesses who lived in castles made of diamonds and coal and all the things you had to dig for.
“We aren’t going to be hungry much longer,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything.”
AFTER HE FINALLY left his sisters, Jakob retired to the parlor. He was sober now, and exhausted. Three months ago, their mother had died of one of those summer colds that turned into pneumonia. She had left a hole in him he still didn’t know how to fill, a silence in the room where she used to iron or sew at night when the electricity was on. She probably knew about the pregnancy before Dorrit did herself, but Mama took it in her stride, as she had everything else. Not much could shake her. And there was Dorrit, trying to walk in her footsteps, hungry all the time as they all were, and worried—Jakob had overheard her anxiously telling Gabi—about the baby and how to get the simplest things like cloth diapers or a sweater. He was going to get her what he could, on the black market if necessary, but she needed so much. He had quietly traded Willy’s gun for a pr
am, the little mattress and bedding to go with it, and the deal showed him that babies needed things he hadn’t even dreamed of. He hardly knew where to begin, or how he would pay for it if he didn’t get Margarete Müller’s ring or the food from Willy’s mine to trade soon.
He didn’t bother to make his bed, just stretched out in his clothes, still wearing his coat, and piled on the blankets. “Good night, liebling,” he said to the calendar on the wall. Miss December, a smiling American girl with a plump thigh displayed prominently under her short Christmassy skirt. Usually, she cheered him up. Tonight she was only paper.
Once the lamp was out, his mood darkened further. He wasn’t high enough in the world of the black market to lay on a feast for his family whenever he wanted. Food was scarce, and winter had begun. The cold always made him think of Russia, of being wounded, of what it had been like when he finally came home, his leg left behind in a pile of amputated limbs in a field hospital he barely remembered. He used to think constantly of air bubbles and syringes, of throwing himself under a train or down a flight of steps. Eating poison, or a bullet. A merciful bullet.
He hadn’t done any of these things because, once the surgeries were done and the pain bearable, he had woken up to find himself the last man in the house. His father was dead, his two brothers gone, Claus fallen on the Eastern Front, Hansi to follow soon after. As his mother had pointed out, Jakob could keep feeling sorry for himself, or get off his backside and do something useful instead of lying around being served like a prince. Didn’t he know there was a war on?
That had shamed him enough to get out of bed. As soon as he was moving, as soon as he was useful to his family again, the darkest parts of him retreated. He was still a man. He would provide.
He turned to lighter, more pleasant thoughts, which took him back to Margarete Müller. She was a puzzle he longed to solve. Something about the way she carried herself, the way she talked, didn’t fit her shabby clothes and the bruises on her face. Behind those bruises, he thought he’d seen . . . he wasn’t sure what. Not a pretty face. It was too intense for that, battered and suspicious. But if he wiped those flaws away in his mind, if she healed, relaxed, cleaned herself up, and ate her fill, she would be something else altogether. A chilling beauty. It was her eyes. They reminded him of the winter sky over the Volga. They reminded him of frozen ponds, their sunken depths unknown. They reminded him once more of Russia.
Perhaps he had seen her in a photograph? On the front, the men passed pictures around, of wives, girlfriends, daughters, sisters, mothers. This is Käthe. Married her right before I came here. Look, that’s my littlest one, Ursula. Just turned two. Ever seen anything so sweet? The front made them sentimental. They said things to each other they’d never have said at home.
Now and then, if they knew they’d be staying put awhile, the men tacked their photographs from home onto the wall of whatever house or shed or barn they happened to be sleeping in. Made for a homey feeling, all those women and girls—some film stars too—in a collage in front of them. There was one kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen. Everybody teased him for pinning up a picture he’d ripped from a women’s magazine.
Jakob bolted upright. He tore away the blankets, knocked over the lamp in search of his crutch, and limped into the hall. He hammered on the neighbor’s door.
“Herr Relling?” Frau Kreuz squinted in the light. “It’s the middle of the night, are you mad?”
“Tell me you’ve still got that collection of the NS-Frauen-Warte you always displayed when you had visitors.”
She peered at her bare wrist. “What time is it?”
“Those magazines. The ones you hid from the Tommies so you can use them as toilet paper. Any left?”
“You drunk? What do you want a women’s magazine for?”
He searched his pockets for a cigarette and held it out to her. She stuck it behind her ear and lumbered into her bedroom, rummaging quietly under the bed where two of her daughters slept. She emerged with a moldy cardboard box full of the magazines. For another cigarette, she carried them into his parlor.
Quietly he inspected the NS-Frauen-Warte, the National Socialist women’s magazine. A typical cover from the early years showed a fat-cheeked baby in the arms of a young woman in a field of daisies. Caption: Mother, you carry the Fatherland. He examined every picture, then shifted to the next one, and the next, sure that when he saw the woman he was looking for, he’d know her instantly.
In 1944, the propaganda machine was well into Total War mode. No plump baby now, but a girl in a bomb factory and not looking too happy about it. German women didn’t exactly line up to build bombs. Jakob searched every page for Margarete Müller, then tossed the issue aside.
The cardboard box was nearly empty. He lifted out one of the remaining few, and there she was. On the cover, the last ’44 issue. It wasn’t the same photograph he’d seen in Russia, but it was the same woman. She posed at the open door of a Mercedes. The landscape behind her was smokestacks and brick factories. Her platinum-blond hair was straight out of a bottle and the wave from a Hollywood poster. Her eyes were as pale and hard as that diamond on her finger.
Caption: Clara Falkenberg—the exceptional duties of the German woman at war.
“Jesus, Maria, and Joseph.” He stared at that picture. That name.
Clara Falkenberg, the Iron Fräulein, the former Reich’s most eligible heiress.
13
The villa in Bredeney was a powder-blue confection, just the place for her mother, who was far too fine to share an attic room or a cellar. But then, in the doorway, Clara saw the list of names on bits of paper or scrawled directly on the wall. The villa had been divided into flats, and by the look of it, not enough to fit the number of families who lived inside it. Her mother’s name wasn’t there, but Max assured her they were in the right place. He pushed open the door without ringing, and she saw in the narrow foyer that someone had cut away the wires to the buzzer.
Max deposited his bicycle under the stairs and then led the way up, moving stiffly and gripping the banister. There was something alarming about seeing him like this, worn out after the frozen ride across the city. Energy was the one thing he had always counted on, even in the war when they worked devilish hours and hardly slept.
“Are you eating enough?” she asked.
In the stairwell, he paused by the strip of painted flowers, chipped and worn, that ran along the wall. “I’m better off than most. They feed me at Falkenhorst, but I skipped it today.”
Nobody skipped a warm meal. As she followed him up the next flight of stairs, she guessed what he hadn’t told her. He had packed up his food to take home to his family.
He led her to the second floor, and they paused in the hallway to catch their breath. A bulb burned on the ceiling, shaded by a thick round of paper. The door on the right was badly scuffed at the bottom. Clara tried to imagine her mother kicking it open every time she went in. After knocking, she waited, feeling that this must all be a mistake. Her mother couldn’t possibly live in a place like this.
Anne Heath Falkenberg opened the door, and then stood there as if frozen. Her face was pouched and sagging, the eyelids, the mouth, the chin. Clara didn’t recognize the wattle of skin, and the creases in what used to be Anne’s proud neck. She felt disoriented, as if she needed to eat something immediately, and then it passed and her mother was still standing there. She had opened the door with her own hands instead of waiting for a servant to do it for her. It was nighttime but she was still in her morning gown. A tear had been badly sewn at the shoulder.
“Darling,” her mother said. She grasped Clara’s arms, kissed the air at her cheeks—one side, the other—and then vanished in a cloud of perfume and blush tulle.
Clara felt a pressure on her arm, Max shoring her up. “I’ll come by tomorrow to see how you’re getting on.”
“Where are you going?” She suddenly didn’t want to be alone with this unfamiliar woman whom she hadn’t spoken to in nearly two years. “S
tay, Max.”
“She won’t want me here. You don’t want me here either.”
“Warm up a little. Maybe she has food.”
They entered the small foyer where a coat and hat hung on the wardrobe, two pairs of shoes on a mat beneath. It was so common a scene, Clara assumed these were the servants’ things. She doubted her mother had ever lived without one. But then she passed into the parlor, an impossible jumble of furniture no maid would tolerate. Her leg bumped the arm of a settee, teak, draped with indigo cloth. That was from the winter garden at Falkenhorst. The cloth and the fan on the wall were relics from Anne’s childhood in India. Near the stove hung a picture that made Clara smile, the framed sketch of the bird Papa had drawn for her when she was a girl. By the settee was an ottoman, then a teak chair, and then the statue of Artemis Clara also recognized from the house’s park. She wondered how on earth her mother had gotten it here, and why. Between all the furniture, there was hardly room to move.
“So it is true,” Anne said. She faced the tall window—it had glass in it, a luxury—and her hands were flat on the sill. “You’ve come back, darling.”
“It’s good to see you too, Mother.”
“Is it? Is it really?” Anne turned enough to show her profile, one of the over-the-shoulder looks that used to make young men shoot themselves to get her attention, or so her mother used to tell it. When Papa proposed to her, he’d set a pistol on the table between them and said he would point it at his heart and pull the trigger if she refused him. This was unacceptable to Anne, of course, until he admitted with one of his secret smiles that it had no bullets. This convinced her mother he was the one. Handsome men willing to maim themselves for love were ten a penny. But a man who wasn’t a complete fool? Priceless.
“I know, darling. I’m an old hag.”
“Of course not, Mother.”
“You’re a dear to say it, but don’t lie to me. Herr Hecht brought you here, and for that I thank him”—she gave him a curt nod—“and now he may go.”