by Anika Scott
“I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.”
“Oh, yes, I’m assuming that, Mother. I’d like to hear yours.”
“I really have no idea, and that’s the truth. Now, why don’t you have something to eat and then a bath. You know how grumpy you get when you’re hungry. Even as a girl. What a little beast you were.”
Clara was not going to let her off that easily. She followed her mother into the kitchen, little more than a cooktop and a table with four chairs, two Clara recognized from home, slender and regal, two Anne must have found in the ruins, scraped up and patched. Anne began opening cupboards and slamming them quickly shut after she’d snatched this can or that plate. Clara caught glimpses of empty space, a single package on a shelf, a cracked cup. She didn’t offer to help her mother perform this unnatural act—providing food for her daughter, a thing she had never done before. Watching her do it was sadly fulfilling, as if she finally had a loving mother.
“We can talk now, can’t we?” Clara asked. “We’re the only two left in the family who are alive and free. We don’t have to pretend anymore.”
Anne speared a can with an opener. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, darling.”
“It’s like me and Max. Too many years have gone by to keep pretending we weren’t together. We were, and you knew it. We don’t have to talk about that. But Elisa’s dress in the workshop. That’s different. There’s a reason it was there, and I think you know what it is.”
“Honestly, darling,” Anne said tightly, “I don’t know anything about a silly dress.”
Clara let out a frustrated breath. Her mother was going to make her build the case. “The first time I met Elisa, at that café over the river, you arranged it. Why?”
“Because I felt sorry for her, darling. She was a bit of an outcast, you know. Disgraced. I thought you two had something in common after that sordid episode at your school.”
Clara let that pass. “The night Elisa met her husband. It was also the night I met Max. You sent us to that flat. Elisa had never mentioned Reinhard before, but that night, she said she was going to marry him. Just like that. What did you have to do with it?”
“Why would I go around arranging marriages for our employees? Do you think I didn’t have better things to do?”
“We gave them a villa at Sophienhof as a wedding gift. We could have given them a set of crystal, but we gave them a house. That wasn’t just generosity. You aren’t going to go on pretending you did all this for Elisa because you felt sorry for her.”
“Darling, you’re really making no sense.” Anne slapped a tiny sliver of margarine onto a slice of bread and dropped the plate on the table. “Eat. Bathe. Sleep. You’ll feel better, and then you’ll see how muddled you are.”
“I’m thinking clearly, Mother. Really thinking about things for the first time. You always asked me about them, remember? You wanted to know what Elisa was doing. You wanted to know what kind of boy Willy was shaping up to be.” She wanted Anne to look at her, to take the conversation seriously. She grasped her mother’s arm. “You wanted them close. You were watching them. All those years. And it suits you now that they’re gone. They haven’t been home since the war. Did you know that?”
Anne’s lips formed a flat red line. “You’d do better to calm down, darling.”
“When you introduced me to Elisa, she was pregnant and alone. You knew who the father was.”
“Aside from your infatuation with Herr Hecht, you were a very dutiful daughter, Clara. Don’t start a rebellion now. It’s no use to anyone.”
“I want to know the truth.”
“If you really wanted to know, you would have demanded answers from that girl years ago. But you were sensible. You minded your own business. It’s one of your virtues.”
“It is my business. Elisa is my oldest friend. We both know that she was pregnant before she married Reinhard. I think she gave a piece of her wedding dress to a man she couldn’t marry. The man who was Willy’s father.”
Anne set her cigarette case, holder, and lighter in a row on the table and then folded her hands on the walnut.
“First of all, I do know that woman and her boy are missing. But I had nothing to do with it, if that’s what you are implying. My contacts tried to find them, but it seems they’ve covered their tracks well. We found no registration for them in the city since the war. They haven’t drawn ration books.”
“Did Willy fight?”
“If he did, there’s no record of it. No death certificates either. I assume they left for parts unknown as soon as they got the chance.”
“That wasn’t easy. I got out on foot like a refugee with a bundle on my back. For all I knew, I was walking straight into Allied lines. If Elisa and Willy left even a day later, they’d have found it almost impossible to get out before the Allies closed in.”
“Maybe they left after the Americans came. Or in the transition to the British. Maybe your Elisa found herself an Allied officer. She was good at that kind of thing. I don’t know, Clara.” Anne tapped her cigarette holder near Clara’s plate. “You do realize I occasionally don’t know things.”
“The people in Elisa’s house told me the Gestapo came for her. Maybe you know something about that?”
“My contacts heard the same thing, but they found no documentation to support it. Hardly surprising, considering the whole world was on fire. If she was taken in at all, she was probably questioned and let go. It happened to Herr Hecht and he’s still alive and well.”
Quickly, before she lost her courage, Clara said, “Willy is one of us, isn’t he? He’s a Falkenberg. I’m right about that.”
Anne lit another cigarette and snapped the lighter onto the walnut. A single blue vein pulsed at her temple. “Yes, darling. You’re right about that.”
Bats
The bats were sleeping. Willy couldn’t see them, but he sensed them rustling in the tunnel over his head. The bats and him, they had an understanding. They left their droppings in the tunnels he rarely went into, and he never disturbed them with light or noise. They were his ears, so to speak. They flew out into the night and over the world and listened—blind, like him, in the dark. Sometimes when they flew back, when they swept into the tunnels, he heard a kind of chatter and clatter and he understood it. They were bringing him news from the outside world.
The war is over.
The war is lost.
If he closed his eyes and thought hard, he was home, in Mama’s kitchen. He was eating a thin potato soup. It was dark, the blackout curtains all around them and the lantern burning because the electricity was gone. Mama ate nothing. She watched him with her knuckles on each side of her face. She almost always had red welts on her cheeks and around her eyes and a little downturned curl on the left side of her mouth. Whatever was wrong with her was his fault. It always was, or why else did she look at him like that?
He squatted in the tunnel as the bats breathed in the dark, their hearts beating in their furry chests. He wished he could be like them. He wished he could sleep.
14
Early morning, long before dawn, Clara was trudging up Alfredstrasse, the wide street named after the patriarch of the Krupp Steel family. As a young man, Clara’s grandfather used to ride here just like old Alfred, but Heinrich Falkenberg had kept a leisurely pace so that his horse had time to relieve itself somewhere along the route of the family rivals. Remembering that made her smile, though the wind was so cold, her teeth ached. The street was now silent, empty, a layer of glittering frost on the pavement. No soldiers, no Fenshaw.
She hadn’t expected to sleep at her mother’s, but Anne had left the flat abruptly after cutting off their conversation about Willy and Elisa. She’d quickly changed into a deep blue evening gown, insisting she had an urgent social engagement. After she’d gone, Clara had the flat all to herself. It contained so many things she had missed—privacy, heat, running water, clean clothes—she luxuriated in it all. After dozing in the bath and changin
g into her mother’s trousers, blouse, and jacket, she had filled her backpack with tins from the kitchen cupboard and clean clothing from her mother’s dresser, along with a new matchbox, candles, batteries, even toilet paper. Lastly, she’d rolled up a blanket and then hesitated at the door, regretting that she’d no longer have the comforts of this place. She had been happy to leave, though, disturbed by the knowledge of how rotten the core of her family had been all these years.
At the last moment, she had written a note on light blue paper and left it on the secretaire. Thank you for the food and supplies, Mother. —C.
As she walked, she kept her head down and avoided the main streets when she could. In five days, she would meet Jakob Relling as arranged. She was looking forward to seeing him more than she expected. She still longed to speak to Elisa, of course, but there was an allure to a clean start with a person who had no idea who she really was. But until then, she would hide out in a place so large and deserted and full of chaos that even Fenshaw couldn’t find her there—the iron works.
At daybreak, she was still crossing the city, hours when the cold wind and the exertion scoured all thoughts from her mind. To be on the cautious side, she stayed away from Falkenbergstrasse, though it would have been a more direct path to the Works. She detoured around whole blocks of rubble and streets barricaded for safety. When she reached the western gate, she knew it instantly. The black iron, the beauty of the work, arabesques entangled in the family symbol: the wing and the flame.
The gate was padlocked. She pulled at the chain with numb hands, but this was good weighty iron and it would not give. She rattled the gate and the sound echoed in the empty street. She had the vague image of some Allied lackey locking her out on purpose. This was her place. She had run it in the war, her father had run it before her, and his father before that. She would not be kept out.
There was no one else around. She followed the wall, whole sections of it crumbled, but she didn’t try climbing; she couldn’t feel her toes and, after the long walk from her mother’s flat, she didn’t have the energy to get over that mountain. Eventually she came to a section of the wall which had been blasted away, automatically adding it to the list she used to keep in her mind of what needed to be done to keep this place going.
On the other side of the wall she recognized the locomotive shed. The ceiling had collapsed and the blasts had tossed the trains around like toys. She remembered that bombardment, the dismay she’d felt when she saw the damage, the chaos. They had tried to clean it up, and now she saw how badly they had failed. All of that work—she had even gotten herself a shovel and joined the men and women forced to clear the rubble—for nothing. At the time, she had thought her father would have wanted her to do it. Preserve the Falkenberg legacy at all costs. Preserve the family. She had taken that duty as seriously as he did.
She left the shed and wandered the deserted factory roads, some blocked, the pipes down, the power lines snaking in the frost. She was too far past the western gate to see headquarters, that tower of her pride. Ten stories and she’d felt as if she was flying, hovering high over their domain. During the war, she’d looked down on it thinking she could be everything at once: the loving daughter conscious of her duty, the director of the Works with an iron spine, and the most secret part of her, the dissenter who listened to her conscience. As if it was possible to be all of these things, and still hold herself together.
She came to one of the older factories, a real beauty, blond and dark brick in patterns up the walls, a great entrance sealed with iron doors. Again they were padlocked, so she circled the building until she found a gap in the wall—what a rat she’d become, scurrying through holes—and she entered the factory floor. This would do. It had a roof and the window spaces were high enough that no one would see her light. The floor was swept, leaving only the tracks in the concrete where the machines had been bolted down. In the war, the foreigners had worked here with sheets of iron and steel. They had done it without gloves or safety glasses, items that were scarce later in the war, though she had plundered the supply depots at the Works looking for more and finding none. She crossed the factory floor aware of the workers accusing her from the shadows. What a slippery thing conscience could be. It had driven her in two directions. To her father, with all the duties of family and work. She could have refused this, lived out the war in comfort abroad, but what kind of guilt would she have carried for abandoning everyone and everything she knew? And then she had been driven to help the workers, an act that put everything else at risk. One side of her conscience undermining the other. And still she had listened to both. She had thought she could do justice to both.
Clara settled herself into the corner of the factory where the walls looked most solid and intact. It was dim enough inside that she needed her flashlight to find materials for a fire: brittle scraps of paper, a wooden crate. On her knees, she balled up the paper and built a little pile of it on the floor. She was not her father. She had helped those she could, but did it really matter compared to the crimes she had allowed to happen? She looked up at the great spaces of the factory windows. Right here, thousands of men and women from many nations had worked for her against their will. They had crowded into camps and barracks. After the worst bombardments, they had lived in trash bins, under bridges, in filth. They had begged for food and worked to the limits of endurance. They were forced to live without dignity. She remembered Galina eyeing Clara’s food with longing, like a dog. What Clara had to give was a tiny drop in the sea of human misery that she had helped build and maintain right here. She had feared the consequences of speaking out. Accusations and arrest, imprisonment or exile. Betraying the family. Disappointing her father.
Back at the crate, she raised her foot as high as she could and stomped, enjoying the noise of splitting wood so much, she stomped on it again and again and again, thinking of her father, the greatest actor she knew. So perceptive, so sure of how to handle her, to tame her. He was a complicated man, she’d always known that. A hard man to understand. Loving, warm, generous, indulgent with her and her brothers. But also set in his ways, in his beliefs, with iron-edged clear-sightedness. Now she knew just how ruthless he was. Two-faced. Morally corrupt. As the wood split under her feet, she felt something splinter at her core. She didn’t know who or what she was anymore. Her father had built the foundations of her world, and they were crumbling away within.
She stopped, panting, and then bent to collect the slats of wood. Her hands were still numb, and something, a noise, rumbled deep inside her—or from far away. She knelt to arrange the wood with the paper, the noise growing louder in her head until she paused to look up at the empty windows, listening. A thick silence lay over the factory hall. But the rumbling sound was real, its echoes penetrating the brick walls from somewhere outside. It was an engine.
She kicked the wood, scattering it quickly, randomly. She stowed her pack under a pile of debris and then scurried through the factory looking for a hiding place.
The engine was close, and she heard a man shout. She scrambled into the nearest place, a crack in the wall just big enough to squeeze into. Crouching, she had a view of the entire hall, her only advantage, but it was too late to find anything better. She doused her light.
Outside, men were talking softly in English. Someone rattled the padlock, and she recognized the voice of Fenshaw’s officer, Reynolds. “Over here, sir. There’s a hole.”
Their flashlight beams crossed the factory floor, and she drew back. She pinpointed Fenshaw only from his voice. “Jennings, you’re skin and bones. That ladder should take your weight. See what’s up on that landing.” His light swung past her hiding place, and she flinched. Scuffling sounds, the whine of iron, and a man—presumably Jennings—called from above her head. “She’s not up here, sir. Nothing but rubbish.” Men were emerging from farther away, the offices and break rooms, she assumed. They each reported the same thing. She’s not there.
“Right. Move on to the next quadrant
.”
She dared peek out of the hole. Fenshaw deployed his men, pointing to areas on what she assumed was a plan of the Works. She tried to remember if she’d left some clue, had said something to the Bergers or her mother about where she might hide. Then again, maybe Fenshaw was simply relying on instinct, searching all the places from her old life.
When the soldiers left, he stayed.
He was so close.
He fumbled with the plan, pinning it under his arm as he took a pen out of his pocket. He looked around, presumably for a table, and finding nothing, he spread the plan on the floor. He stretched out on his stomach, the light angled into the paper, and began to write, annotating the layout before him. All he had to do was shine his light at a different angle and he’d see her instantly.
But he didn’t, too busy with the energetic scratches of his pen, too focused on his mission. This was a man who knew what he was about. Single-minded, blessed with authority, chock-full of convictions. She envied him all that. If she could somehow take half of the self-assurance he showed in the tilt of his head, she would. Gladly. His task was clear and easy. He was hunting a war criminal.
He truly was.
And it was her.
Her sight blurred. A pressure built up inside her, a need to cry out, and she struggled to keep it in, to keep quiet. She saw her father in his internment camp, and there was no injustice in him being there, no overzealousness on the part of the Allies. The camp was precisely where he was supposed to be. And what did she deserve? Was she as guilty as him, in her own way? She had the sudden urge to stop all of this right now, the running, the hiding. All she had to do was move. Cough. Fenshaw would look up, and all of this would be over. And yet a sense of self-preservation held her back. And fear. It quaked deep in her gut at the thought of what Fenshaw would have in store for her.
He folded his plan, a complex undertaking he did perfectly. Then he took a swig from his flask, set it on the floor, and lit a cigarette. He sat cross-legged, smoking, looking at nothing in particular, close enough for her to see in his flashlight beam the well-rubbed plating on his flask. After a while he took something out of his pocket and angled it to the light, a small paper she instinctively knew was a photograph—her. Next he drew out another paper, light blue—the note she’d written her mother. Clara imagined he’d dropped in on Anne this morning unannounced and had seen it before she did. He studied the note, then the photograph as he finished his cigarette.