by Anika Scott
“He needs to rest. He hasn’t eaten.”
“Clara,” Max said, “it’s all right.”
“You see? He’s got a home of his own, darling. He doesn’t need to loiter in mine.”
“He’s a guest in your house, Mother. Where are your manners?”
“Where are yours? In the old days you wouldn’t have dared to bring him home. You knew his place.”
“Times have changed.”
Max put his hat on. “I’m going. I’ll check on you tomorrow, Clara.”
“Don’t bother, Herr Hecht. She’s in good hands now.”
Clara saw him to the door, a small gesture of thanks for his help. On the threshold, he took her hand. “I’ll see you soon. There’s so much I need to tell you.” He glanced uneasily toward the room where her mother was. “Good luck. Don’t let her get to you.”
Back in the parlor, Anne was banging into the furniture, almost knocking over the potted palm on her way to the little burn-all stove. A hole had been knocked into the wall for the flue, and badly plastered. Anne glared at it, and then down at her hands. She rubbed them over the weak heat given off by the stove. The bucket on the floor was empty except for black dust and some splinters.
“Don’t you have coal?” Clara asked.
“They’ll deliver it tomorrow, darling. It’s warm enough.”
Clara noticed that Anne wore a thick sweater and trousers under the morning gown, which partly explained the clumsy way she moved, so different from her former grace. Clara moved the coal bucket, then looked around for something else to feed the flames. Behind the settee she found a pile of what looked like chair legs. One had been sawed halfway through.
“The servant hasn’t finished that one,” Anne said. “You can’t find good help these days.”
Clara sawed the leg and began another. “At least they let you have this flat to yourself. I haven’t had a room of my own since the war.”
Anne sank into the chair by the stove. “This place is unfit for human habitation, darling. One bedroom, one bathroom containing a lavatory that is practically in the bath itself. I have to eat in the kitchen. Can you imagine that? It’s unhygienic.” She clapped her hands, a dry, papery sound. “Times have changed, you said. Well, times are bloody awful. You have no idea.”
“I think I do.”
Her mother looked her over with disapproval. “Where have you been all this time?”
“In Hamelin.”
“Good Lord, why there? Not for the rats, I assume.”
“I just ended up there. I’d walked most of the way from here trying to avoid the Allies. By the time I reached Hamelin, I couldn’t take another step. It was a quiet life. I almost married the local doctor until I found out some of the things he’d done in the war.”
“You’ve become so judgmental, darling. It’s not healthy, you know. Where did you get all those bruises on your face? You look like a battered wife.”
“That,” Clara said, ferociously sawing the wood, “was Captain Fenshaw.”
She told her mother about the train, the steel locker, and the close escape from Elisa’s house. Anne slapped the arm of her chair. “The cheek.” She went to her secretaire and walked her fingers through a rosewood box Clara remembered from her childhood. Her mother’s dossiers. Anne collected details about everyone she had ever met, likes and dislikes, secrets to use against them should she need to one day. She plucked out a card and settled her spectacles on her nose.
“Captain Thomas Fenshaw, born 1906 in London, family has been in Parliament for three hundred years. Not one of my cousins”—she glanced over her lenses—“I checked.”
“How the bloody hell do you know him?”
“I have my sources, darling. He apparently gallivants around the British Zone arresting Nazis, which makes him a throwback to the Stone Age. Someone needs to slap him and tell him to arrest a communist. Times have changed. Anyhow, he’s a widower and has one teenage son. He’s considered a know-it-all who always gets his man. One of his successes, I’ve heard, is that he supposedly tracked down the leader of one of those Einsatzgruppen, wanted for doing terrible things in Russia. He found him working as a carpenter in a village in the Harz Mountains. Rumor has it he made the fellow dig a grave and kneel at the edge, then held a gun to his neck for several minutes before arresting him properly. Apparently the man complained, but it didn’t come to anything. There was no proof, you see, no witnesses. The captain seems to have a flair for poetic justice.”
Clara rested on her knees, worn out by the sawing. If Fenshaw was looking for men who had committed massacres, why was he so determined to find her?
“He said something to me about a BUF rally in London in ’36. It was as if he was there. He claimed to have a rather good opinion of me, but the next moment shut me in that locker.”
“Bit of a sly fox, darling. On the whole, nobody in local military government likes him. Everyone claims he’s an awful bore. I must say, I agree.”
Clara climbed to her feet. “Wait—you met him?”
“He was here a couple of days ago. Left mud on the carpet. I had to have it scrubbed.”
“What did he want?”
“What do you think, darling? He said there were rumors that you had surfaced. Nothing about you slipping through his fingers, though. He didn’t strike me as the type to admit a mistake. He seemed very keen. Very keen indeed. He was determined to search my little hovel in case you were hiding in the kitchen cupboards. He would not be wrong, you know. He would find you, the bloodhound. How furious he was when he didn’t. He hid it well, but one knows. He looked shattered with frustration and fatigue. Serves him right, going after you like that. I had my own brush with the Allies too, you know. A great brute of an American arrested me at the end of the war. The most embarrassing moment of my life.”
“Why did they arrest you? You’re English.”
“Ask them how much they cared about that. I was the last Falkenberg left standing in Essen, so they took me in for questioning. They thought I must have dirtied my hands at the Works, but I assured them I was merely the social butterfly of our family, at least in Theodor’s eyes. You were the one he trusted with the factories, and you were gone. They thought I would know where, but of course I had no idea. You didn’t see fit to confide in your old mother. But would they listen to me? Now I ask you, how does one reason with an American? They’re not equipped. They’re like puppies with machine guns.”
Clara added wood to the fire and fanned it with a piece of cardboard as her mother went on about the Americans, the endless interrogations, the offensive personal questions. The blockheads had to be told everything two or three times, Anne said, all the while writing notes with a pen in their meaty fists, and chewing their repulsive gum. There was something soothing about listening to her mother rant. Her body had changed, but her spirit was still indomitable.
“Now, listen, darling, it really is a sad story.”
Clara knelt at the oven and let the fire warm her face. She was used to her mother’s drama and was genuinely interested in what Anne had told the Americans to get herself freed. Anne had had very little to do with the Works—it was not prudent, her father had thought, to have an Englishwoman too deeply involved in an industry so crucial to the war effort. But she was still a Falkenberg, and Clara didn’t doubt this was all that mattered to the Americans who’d arrested her.
“As a young woman,” Anne said, “I fell in love with your father, the great Theodor Falkenberg. I was honored to become his wife only to find—to my dismay—that his political views were contrary to my own.”
Clara shook her head in disbelief. Of course her mother hadn’t mentioned that hers were the views that had aligned most closely with the Nazis’. Papa was a nationalist who thought Germany the light of civilization, but he had privately grumbled about the violence of the Brownshirts, the Reich’s strict organization of society, the race theories, and, most of all, the control they exerted on the economy and on his business.
When he spoke at government functions or addressed his personnel, he focused on Germany’s cultural greatness and tried to avoid the other topics. When he worked in Berlin, he’d told her, he was doing his best to influence the regime’s economic policies. It was Anne who applauded the Nazi severity, as she called it, their gift for organizing the rabble.
“Now, as a good and dutiful wife, I was obliged to follow my husband in all things,” Anne said. “I told the Americans I was forced to socialize with those abominable people. To join the Women’s League. To attend those Fascist rallies. When the war began, I had to choose: my family or my country. As any wife and mother would do, I chose my family. With a heavy heart, I stayed here and watched as everything was taken from me. My husband imprisoned, all my sons fallen. My only daughter vanished, presumed dead.” Anne spread her arms. “Has any mother suffered more?”
“I’m sure it was a fine performance.”
“Of course it was. Playing the victim isn’t difficult. Any sensible person would have done the same. You should give it a try, darling.”
“I assume the Americans were too dense to believe you.”
“Even my own people questioned it, those miserable little men. But I am not without resources. Thank God for Uncle Henry in Whitehall. Eventually, I was released, but evicted from Falkenhorst. Evicted. From my own house. By my own people.” She lit a cigarette in the oven fire and sat back. “And that, darling, is why I’m reduced to living in a boxcar.”
Clara didn’t bother to point out that her mother was doing much better than most people, including her. “Are the Allies making you work for your ration like everyone else?”
“Yes, but actually I don’t mind it, darling. I’ve been able to improve my standing with the local military government. I am now a kind of cultural ambassador. I host events that build understanding and sympathy between the victors and the defeated. Isn’t that nice?” She patted her electric blond hair, the roots showing through, a white line along the parting.
“Have you heard from Papa?”
“Papa. Always Papa.” Anne crushed the cigarette into her ebony holder. “He’s hanging on in that horrid internment camp. The Americans aren’t nearly as good-natured as they’d like people to think.”
“I saw a photograph of him in a magazine. He’s very ill.”
“Poor Teddy. Takes everything to heart.”
“Is he getting a defense?”
“We’re a bit cash-strapped, darling, as you might imagine. But we’ve been calling in favors where we can. You know. Priests, nuns, orphans. Anyone who can testify to his good character. For goodness’ sake, he founded a hospital and a library. He sponsored the brightest working-class children so the poor unfortunates could stay in school. If that doesn’t melt the hearts of someone in his courtroom, I don’t know what will.” Anne gazed at the fire. “It’s been hard, darling. He’ll be so glad you’re back. So glad. He probably won’t believe me. He’ll think I’m trying to buck him up ahead of the trial. Why don’t you write him a letter? He’ll know it’s you when he sees those extravagant g’s and f’s of yours.”
“You’ve been to see him?”
“They won’t let me, and it may be a long time until he’s with us again. I’m told he’s likely to get ten years or more if he’s convicted.”
Ten years. For all his playacting the Nazi friend. Her father had been so deeply wrong about them pushing on through. They would have all been better off leaving, the whole family in exile. Clara remembered his distress as the war dragged on, tiny signs, the twitch of an eye, a hardened muscle in his face. The worn arms of his chair. “He told us to pretend with the government, with their followers. He took them all for fools, I suppose. ‘Hold your nose, open your wallet, and shake their hands.’ That’s all it was supposed to take.” Clara wiped hard at the soot on her fingers with a rag hanging on the edge of the coal bucket. “But even if we pretend to collaborate, we’re still collaborators, aren’t we?”
Anne gave her a confused look. “What do you mean, pretend?”
“You knew I hated all the Iron Fräulein nonsense but I went along with it. Maybe it helped protect me from the Nazis. I thought it did. I don’t know. Papa was the same in Berlin, making those stupid speeches, working on Speer’s committees. That was his way of cloaking himself. He didn’t want to do any of it.”
“Of course he did, darling.”
She didn’t expect her mother to understand. Anne had believed in Fascism, or so she’d said at the time. Clara wondered if that had been an act too, her mother riding the winds of power. In another age, she might have been a courtier devoted to her king no matter how mad or corrupt he might be.
“Papa confided in me, Mother. I know his conscience bothered him.”
“I was married to him long before you were born, so I think I might have a few more insights into Papa than you do, my girl. You’re right, he had a conscience, but he correctly decided that other things were more important than those few little pangs.”
“The family, the Works, the legacy, and so on. What’s left of it now? The whole system—the forced labor—was criminal. We went along with it thinking we were going to save Falkenberg for future generations. Well, how did that work out?”
Her attention on the fire, Anne took a long drag of her cigarette.
“At least a few of us tried to help people,” Clara said, trying to goad her mother into saying something. “Did you know about that too?”
Anne looked sour. “Herr Hecht informed me after the war. It was extremely foolish of you, you know.” She sat up straighter and said with indignation, “You endangered all of us with your little schemes. Did you think about that? Hm?”
“All the time. I never said anything to Papa but I think he guessed. He was doing what he could as well. He tried to convince those scoundrels in Berlin to make things more bearable for the workers.”
“What in the world makes you think he was doing that?”
“He told me. He talked to Speer, he talked to Sauckel, he—”
“He talked to them all the time, of course, but he wasn’t on a crusade to save anyone, darling. He told you such things to make you feel better. He was always very concerned about your well-being. You had to be pacified so that you would carry on doing the work he set for you.”
Clara took a couple of breaths before speaking, careful, afraid of the raw cracks in her voice. “Are you saying that he was perfectly fine with what we did? The transports, the labor camps, all of it?”
“Clara. Do you have any idea how much money we were making? What plans we had? Papa wanted to buy you a castle if you ever managed to marry a suitable man, preferably a nobleman.”
Clara collided with a chair on her way to the wall. Hanging there was Papa’s sketch of the bird. She had thought it some kind of a sign, something that might help her remember who he was before all of this. But now . . . “You didn’t answer my question, Mother. Did he or did he not care about the terrible things that happened on our watch?”
“Oh, darling, Papa would lay waste to continents for his family. Especially for you, his baby girl. You do know that?”
Something splintered in Clara’s chest, a cherished truth about her father she wasn’t willing to see destroyed. “I didn’t want any of it. I went along with it because he explained to me, he assured me, there was no alternative.”
“Quite so. Why are you tearing yourself up about it now? The family was of the utmost importance to you too, as it should be. It mattered more than the foolish little voices in your head—or a few silly girls in the carriage house. Now I want you to stop all this nonsense about conscience. You and Papa did the right and proper thing in the war. A few foreigners might have benefited from your softer nature, but that’s neither here nor there. You served the family and the Reich well. We were all very proud of you.”
Clara snatched the sketch off the wall and flung it down, wanting the glass to smash, but the frame merely cracked on the rug and then tipped against her mo
ther’s sideboard. The drawing was as cheerful and whimsical as ever. Her father’s little bird for his little girl. If he had been here, if he had been sitting in his old armchair, she would have . . . she didn’t know. Screamed at him for the first time in her life. Demanded he explain himself. Called him filthy names, every one of them true, because he hadn’t playacted with the world, he had done it with her, in their closest moments, for years. Stupid as she was, needy, starved of his love, guilty about the danger she’d put her family in, she had wanted to believe what he told her, against the evidence of her own eyes and heart.
Anne stooped painfully and picked up the sketch. “You might have smashed it, girl, what is wrong with you?”
Clara’s fury ebbed to a steady pulse at her temples. She approached the warmth of the stove’s fire and watched the shadows flicker on her mother’s face. Anne had talked about Papa as if he had calculated what his conscience could bear, and it was almost anything. Where did that leave her? What had been her line in the sand? She had thought they were so close. That they had been walking that line together.
She took the scrap of silk out of her coat pocket and crushed it in her fist. She needed to talk to Elisa about all of this, about what they had done and hadn’t done and tried to do and why. About the man she had always thought her father to be. And the man she was being confronted with now. Her friend would understand. Clara balled up her rage as she had learned to do as a child, and set it aside for later. She needed a clear head.
“Do you know where Elisa is?” she asked, dampening the anger in her voice.
“No, darling, I don’t. Why should I?”
Clara spread the piece of silk on the coffee table. Anne used the end of her cigarette holder to lift a corner. “What’s this? A handkerchief?”
“It’s a piece of Elisa’s wedding dress. I found it high up in a cupboard in the workshop at Falkenhorst.”
“Well. That’s odd.”
“Very odd, I’d say. It was Papa’s place. And Friedrich’s.”