The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  It took two attempts to haul him out of the car. He was heavier than she’d expected, but the main problem was his height as he tried to unfold himself from such a small vehicle. His crutch under his arm, he needed a moment to catch his balance, to test the wind and the ground. The snow quickly whitened his clothes, a danger she hadn’t thought about. Without a coat, he would be damp to the skin within minutes. She wrapped the blanket around him like a toga, tucking in the ends to keep it snug. She knew he was ready to go when he gave her hand a strong squeeze.

  They struggled against the sharp chips of snow the wind blasted into their eyes, Jakob’s head down, concentrating on where his crutch hit the ground. She tried to help how she could, shining her flashlight in his path, searching for ice or deeper patches of snow or debris that could trip him up in the road. They oriented themselves by what little light penetrated the storm—a streetlamp, the glow of a lantern in a window—and focused on the road and the wall of blowing snow in front of them.

  “How much farther?” Jakob called suddenly, and it scared her, the winter expert asking her to orient him.

  “We have to be close.”

  They both stepped into a rut in the road at the same time; the snow was deeper there, her foot sinking to the slick and uneven bricks that paved the road. She grasped at Jakob to regain her balance, but he was off-kilter too. She felt him keeling over, pulling her with him, and she dug in as best she could, hugging him and shifting her weight until he could use his crutch to right himself again.

  “Are you all right?” She didn’t know what they’d do if he fell, or hurt his ankle, or any of the hundred other things that could go wrong.

  “We need to get there, liebling.”

  She held his hand tightly as they set off again. Finally, when she looked up, blinking the flakes from her eyes, she saw the end of the street blocked by something large and black. “It’s the southern gate,” she called.

  Padlocked, of course. They groped along the wall until it ended at a wide space Clara didn’t recognize. She dug down into the snow with her heel and hit the slick rail of a train track. They followed it to the locomotive shed, and from there, Clara led the way across the Works, her flashlight little help on the treacherous ground: bomb craters, pipes, and rubble, and all of it invisible under the snow.

  Finally, they made it to the factory, and stumbled in through the crack in the wall, shaking and crying out with relief. Snowflakes billowed through the window spaces, but there was a roof over their heads at last.

  “I told you we’d make it,” she said, brushing the snow from her coat.

  “Nobody likes a gloater, liebling.” She heard the smile in his voice, though it was too dark to see for sure.

  He followed her to the office where she’d built her camp, a kind of lean-to made of a large desk and an empty bookcase tilted on its side. The window was missing here as well, but she’d done her best to nail up shutters over the space. The room was free of snow, and the only wind blew through the open doorway to the factory floor.

  Trembling, they threw themselves into the shelter. She wiped the snow off him, and rubbed his arms and hands. Eventually, he swatted her away, and shuffled on his backside out of the shelter to the unhinged door leaning against the wall. She understood what he wanted, or thought she did. They lifted the door together, and as she tried to tilt it into the doorway to the factory floor, he said, “No, we need it over here. Let’s close up this shelter of yours.” After they crawled back inside, he pulled the door against the entrance.

  It felt like being in a cave. In the dark, she groped for her flashlight and illuminated Jakob fumbling to cover them with the blankets she had been using the past week. “We’ll build a fire after the storm passes,” he said. “And kill that light. Save the batteries.”

  He cradled her back, his arm tight over her chest, and they shivered together. It had been a long time since she’d lain with a man in the dark. She had forgotten how comforting it could be.

  With Jakob’s breath warming the back of her head, she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  THE STORM RAGED all night, and when morning broke, the winds had died but the snowfall continued, wet and heavy and endless. She did her best to fight it, shoveling the drifts that formed on the factory floor, clearing the hole in the wall over and over again. Jakob did the tasks he could without moving around too much: heating up the tins, tidying their camp, keeping the fire going. They hadn’t needed to negotiate who did what. The division was natural, and a little unexpected, him so domestic, her out scavenging for anything they could add to the fire. He seemed to accept the limitations of his missing leg.

  The fire was small, barely enough to heat what was left of the food she had brought from her mother’s house. She choked down some dried bread while he ate lukewarm carrots in the can. He kept gazing around him, at the hole in the wall, the empty window spaces, the roof. “Reminds me of Russia, camping out in a damaged building. All that’s missing is artillery, a few snipers, and it should be about twenty degrees colder.”

  “At least nobody is shooting at us.”

  “I could handle being shot at. Could shoot back until we ran out of ammo. But the cold. We couldn’t do anything about that except crawl into a hole and try to survive. We had a saying: ‘Patient with our fate we sit, for we got ourselves into this shit.’”

  She laughed, wanting something to laugh about to keep back the cold and the creeping despair as the snow kept falling. They started trading wartime jokes, the things people told in secret, or when they were drunk, or more openly later when they were fed up.

  “You know the most useless thing that was ever airlifted into Stalingrad?” Jakob asked.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “One of the biggest. Guess.”

  “No idea.”

  “Condoms.” He lit his cigarette in the fire. “I mean, what the hell did Berlin think we were doing out there?”

  She was laughing again, this time with regret. It brought back all the futility of her own acts in the war, trying to help but doing the wrong things, or not enough. “I don’t know. What were you doing out there?”

  “Eating our boots. I mean, we were living like this”—he gestured at the hall—“worse than this. We were living in cellars and bunkers, holes in the ground, right? Now, if you could eat a condom . . .”

  “No, you didn’t—”

  “Why not? You can boil up pretty much anything if you put your mind to it. Add a pinch of salt. A touch of marjoram. And let me tell you what you can do with nutmeg. A fellow in my unit dragged a supply of kernels all the way to Russia. He grated a big mound of it, mixed it with whatever we had on hand—lemon is best, but it’s not like we had that, so we just choked it down with the last of our schnapps.”

  “Why?”

  “For the high, to escape reality. At least, that’s what my mate told us. It worked for him, I guess, but the rest of us just got sleepy or were sick to our stomach. And we stunk like nutmeg, but hey, it was better than how we usually smelled.”

  She was laughing more than was called for, given the deep tragedy of all of this. She looked at Jakob sitting on the opposite side of the fire, the flames lighting his face as he talked. He’d lost the polish he’d shown in the South Sea Club, his hair over his forehead and his jaw prickly. He needed a wash—as did she—and the cold had given him patches of red around his nose and the edges of his eyes. His manner was easygoing, yes, he was enjoying the stories he was telling, but there was something a little distant in him. He’d be better off if he sat closer to her. It had been almost warm in their shelter when they had lain chaste and close in the dark.

  “Do you believe what that magazine said about me?” she asked. “Clara Falkenberg, the Iron Fräulein?”

  “I know propaganda when I see it.”

  “But . . . you do know I ran this place. I was director of the Works for two years.”

  “Keeping the chair warm for your father.” He said it warily, looking at
the fire. The topic was making him uncomfortable, and she felt the same, but she suddenly needed to know who he thought he was dealing with.

  “You think I was following my father’s orders? That he was telling me what to do all the time? Like I was his little poodle?”

  He was looking at her curiously now. “Were you?”

  “It would’ve been easier if I was. I really wish I was the type of person who pushes responsibility on to other people.” She thought about that. “Maybe I am like that, a little. When it comes to my father, anyway. It’s very easy to blame him for . . . most things. He was always a difficult man to understand. His motives weren’t so clear to me. When it suited me, I could always say, well, he wanted me to do this or that. The things I did in the war.”

  A troubled look had settled onto Jakob’s face, but he didn’t say a word. She rushed to fill the silence, compelled to tell him about the moment the transports of human freight had begun to arrive. The train doors rolling open, releasing a stench so overpowering, her eyes had watered. Gray, shriveled faces squinting out at her from the cars. Dozens of faces, hundreds, an impossible number in so small a space, as if the people had forgotten their bodies in the occupied lands. They were corralled into lines so they could be examined and allotted work assignments in the factories and mines. She told Jakob how she had watched, stiff with horror, unable to look away, stunned by her own failure. She knew the Nazi goal to enslave the Slavic people. She had never wanted to be a part of that. But as her father had pointed out, Falkenberg needed men to fulfill the government contracts and quotas. Staying in production was not a choice, it was a matter of survival. And so she had stayed on the platform as the trains rolled in, watching what she hadn’t been able to prevent.

  She gestured at the factory walls. “Once my father handed the Works to me, it wasn’t his sin anymore, it was mine. I let it happen.”

  She studied Jakob’s face in the firelight. His war stories had been peppered with black humor, avoiding the difficult truths. Some of the POWs who had worked for her might have been men Jakob had captured in battle. He on one end of the system, she on the other. Did he think about that?

  She didn’t linger on the things she and Elisa and even Max, for a time, had tried to do to help these people. It was such a small part of the larger, grimmer picture of her past. But she told Jakob some of it. She wanted him to know she had tried.

  His troubled look had deepened into what she sensed was pain at some terrible memory of his own. She wanted him to know she of all people would not judge, and scooted around the fire to sit next to him, to show him she was there to listen if he wanted to speak. But he flinched away, silent.

  Clara rested against the wall, its smell of damp concrete mixing with her body odor, so strong it wafted from her scarf and coat and embarrassed her, even if Jakob was in the same condition. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to talk about all this.” She smiled thinly. “Nobody does. But I can’t help it. I keep trying to find that one turning point in my life when I could have changed things. One moment where I could say: There, if I’d done the exact opposite, everything would have been better. I wouldn’t have hurt people.”

  Her legs were cold and stiff, and she tucked them under her blanket. “I don’t know what that moment was. I might have listened to my mother and married a nobleman and had babies all through the war. That’s nothing to feel guilty about, is it? Having babies, even if the Reich would have sent them away.” She sadly remembered Willy in his Jungvolk uniform, so proud of the tie and the sig rune on his sleeve. “I was nineteen when I started working for my father. Maybe that was the moment. I shouldn’t have been so interested in production schedules or logistics. Should have kept up my ballet lessons instead. Or run off to Paris to be an artist. Something harmless . . .”

  Jakob smiled faintly, the first sign he’d been listening to her. “We all think about this, you know, about what might have been.”

  “I could have emigrated when the war started. I could have gone to England and written pamphlets to be dropped over Germany. Resist the Reich. Sue for peace. Why didn’t I do that? What’s the sorrow and anger and guilt about abandoning your family compared to a clean conscience?”

  “Nobody gives up their life so easily. We put up with a lot to try to keep it going how it always did.”

  “I’m not talking about what I put up with. I’m talking about what I did. Or didn’t do.” She looked up at the new snow drifting from the windows. “I could stand up and tell everyone how I resisted the regime; I could make it sound like I was some kind of a hero. What risks I took. How courageous I was. I might even fool some people. But I’d know. I’d know how utterly inadequate I was.”

  “Come on, liebling. You tried. That’s more than most of us can say. It’s all right to acknowledge that. You’re not a devil just because you could’ve done more.”

  She wasn’t so sure. It was hard to know how to weigh the contradictions inside her. She reached for his hand and he let her take it. “You said yourself, the Collapse is the chance for us to be someone new.” She thought of Blum and her life in Hamelin. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted that.”

  He smiled, wide, spontaneous, warm. And something kindled inside her, deep, where the fire couldn’t reach.

  Air

  Finally.

  Willy poked his fist through the hole he had made in the snow. He wiggled his arm around until the hole was the size of a ship’s porthole. He put his eye to the hole and his eye watered and the water turned to ice. It felt as though somebody was piercing needles into his eyeball. His head was aching, his hands were cold—the mine had everything but gloves, imagine that—but he had to ventilate. With a shovel, he made the hole bigger and the light became sharper and whiter and brighter until it cut into the tunnel. The wind swept in—at last! The tunnel was windy again. This was a good thing, a very good thing, and he sucked in breaths of fresh air. But the odd, cloudy feeling in his head didn’t go away.

  He jabbed the shovel at the snow again and pushed it outward, and when the hole was the right size, he climbed out of the mine. His lungs swelled up. He dropped the shovel and grasped his knees. Every breath hurt, and the light, the hot light in his head . . .

  And there was snow. Snow all the way down the slope and over the marsh and onto the river over the still, flat surface of the river, and out to the opposite bank and over the hills way over there. Snow on the tall grasses and hanging from the trees, on the cliffs, clumped in the rock and on the clean, flat ground at his feet. It shone like a mirror, all that snow.

  If he went home, he could build a snow fort in the garden. If he went home, he could make a tiny ball of snow and melt it in Gertrud’s bowl. He could drink something warm at the window and look at the snowy world, if he went home.

  But he couldn’t go. Not after what he’d done.

  He scrambled back into the mine, the soothing dark of the mine, and when his eyes adjusted, he went to Gertrud who was waiting for him on the footlocker. He was shaking with cold and didn’t lift her up because he didn’t want her to freeze in his palm. He knelt and let her flutter onto his shoulder and then he went to the weather board, the slate and chalk the miners left behind. He was going to note the weather conditions and air quality. This was useful information.

  He began to note the date: March 11.

  He wiped it out, wrote: March 12.

  Which was it? His aching brain didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. March? It couldn’t be March. Not with all that snow. There could be some snow in March sometimes, but that much? What was it Corporal Relling had said?

  Willy rubbed out March and wrote: December.

  He sat back. What day in December? He tried to remember how many days it had been since Jakob Relling was there. He was tingling, sweating, hot now but still cold. If Jakob Relling told the truth, it was the middle of December. Maybe.

  And the year?

  The tingles were jolts now, thunderbolts straight through his temples. Corpora
l Relling had said it was 1946.

  Willy couldn’t believe it was true. He hadn’t been down here that long.

  Had he?

  18

  On their third day at the Works, Jakob got it into his head that he would make himself ski poles. Clara supposed he was inspired by her stories of Winterberg and the Swiss Alps, though as Jakob pointed out, ski trips were not the kind of thing people like him went on. But she had, and for lack of any other entertainment, she and Jakob had been talking about everything they could think of that might amuse the other. If most of her stories were about her privileged upbringing and his about scrounging in the shadow of a pit tower, then so be it. That was who they had been. His stories interested her, and hers seemed to interest him, and if that time she nearly burned down the ski lodge inspired Jakob to make his poles, she was glad. She was even more grateful for the break from the serious things they had talked about yesterday. She felt lighter, as if some of what had been weighing her down had floated away.

  He worked on the factory floor, a wonderland since the storm had stopped and the temperatures plummeted even further. Every surface shimmered with ice and snow. Frost swirled on the walls, and when Jakob exhaled, his breaths glistened and curled away. Two broom handles he’d scavenged lay beside him next to several foraged nails. He was musing out loud about the best way to attach them when she remembered seeing a hand borer somewhere. When she gave the rusted thing to Jakob, he smiled up at her—his lips chapped, his face pale, and his eyes deeply tired—and whatever had been cracking up in her cracked some more. She was letting new things in.

  She wanted to help him, knowing how hard it was going to be for him to make it back to his house in the frozen wastes the whole city had become. As he got to work boring a hole in the end of a broomstick, she kicked aside the snow on the factory floor until she found an iron rail where one of the machines used to be. It took her ages to prize it up, and then she tried to fashion a kind of ski using wicker from a battered office chair.