The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  “Best I can do,” Jakob said when the poles were finished. “What you got there?”

  “I’m not sure.” She had been trying to weave the wicker through holes in the iron rail. “It looks like a cross between a snowshoe and a ski.”

  He looked doubtful. “Let’s try it out.”

  At the edge of the factory floor, she attached the ski to his shoe with extra wire. He wavered, ski poles stuck in the snow for balance. As he practiced, he fell over several times, but soon he was pulling himself over the snow more or less securely.

  “I’ll need to oil that ski before I go anywhere, Clara.”

  “I looked but couldn’t find any machine or lamp oil. We don’t have much left to eat either, so I think I’ll go out and see what I can find on the markets. No one will recognize me if I’m wrapped up against the cold.”

  “Nobody’ll be out in this weather. And anyway, I’m not letting you go alone.”

  She didn’t argue with him. She acknowledged his expertise when it came to the tricks used to survive in Russia. He was serious about them, even waking her overnight several times so that she would move her hands and legs, get her blood pumping. He didn’t want her to lose any fingers or toes.

  She supposed that was why he watched her as he did. He hardly allowed her out of his sight, studying her as she walked to see if she limped, or if she’d gone too stiff, showing signs of anything worrisome. He made her swear to tell him about any pains or numbness that didn’t go away once she warmed up by the fire or curled up at night with him.

  Nights were her favorite times when they settled in their shelter to sleep or to talk if they couldn’t sleep. He’d said he would help her look for Elisa, but when she lay in the dark on the fourth night making plans about where they might look, and whether the things the policeman had told them were true and what they could mean, Jakob didn’t respond.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Is something on your mind? It feels like I’ve been talking to myself the past half hour.”

  His arm moved over her shoulder—he was careful to avoid any intimate parts of her—and he rested his hand on the crook of her neck between her scarf and her skin. She didn’t move. She didn’t want to scare him away.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, his palm on her neck, not caressing it, just there.

  “Are you worried about your sisters?” she asked to get him to say something.

  “Always. I was like that on the front too. All that flag and country stuff. What good is it? I wanted my family to live and to hell with everybody else.”

  “Everybody? Even girls?”

  “Had my share till my leg. I slowed down after that. I needed to get myself together. Some fellows, they have a girl for that. But when you lost so much, you got to rely on yourself, you know, build yourself back up.”

  It was more than he’d ever said about his leg, and she was curious about the emotional wound, what happened inside him when he realized what he’d lost. “I imagine it’s like having a core inside of you made of glass, and it begins to splinter and crack. You don’t know who or what you are anymore. At least, it feels like that to me.”

  After a long pause, he said, “It wasn’t that gentle or gradual. One day I woke up and knew and it blew me to bits. Honest, if it wasn’t for my mama and sisters, I would’ve blown my brains out. A cripple? Me? No way in heaven or hell. I was going to be something. Run a big department store. Play midfield for Rot-Weiss Essen. I was going to be a credit to my family.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m just getting by. If I can see Gabi and Dorrit fed, that is a good day. It isn’t much in the world, but it’s everything too. I have to see they get through. It’s how I finally got off my backside and stopped feeling sorry for myself. Got tired of that. Being angry about stuff I can’t change.”

  “You’re still angry?”

  His fingers moved, a tender touch that made her shiver. “This one night in Russia,” he said, “we were sleeping in one of those log cabins they have, you know, in the villages. All of us packed into this one room. The family that lived there was just women and kids. They crawled up into a kind of loft above us to sleep. I don’t know how long we’d been on the move. We were a motorized unit, but try getting armored cars and trucks through that mud. I’d never been that exhausted in my life. I was glad of a roof even if I had to share it with ten other fellows. All I wanted to do was sleep.”

  He shifted against her a little, and she felt how fast he was breathing. “There were children up in the loft, like I said. I don’t know how many. They kept sniffling and whining. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but kids—you know? Hungry, cold, scared. Scared of us.” His voice tightened, as if he was struggling to get the words out. “We told them to be quiet, we needed to sleep. But the kids, they started crying. ‘Shut up,’ we said. We could hear the women trying to shush them, but they were children. They cried. And then”—he took a stuttering breath—“we said to hell with it, pulled out our pistols, and shot at the loft. It was quiet the rest of the night.”

  Clara’s throat felt too thick to say anything. She pulled his arm closer around her. He had listened to her talk. She would listen to him.

  “I did that,” he said. “I thought I’d never, ever hurt a child, and I did that. Sometimes I think . . . I think it was worth losing my leg to be pulled off the front. I couldn’t do something like that again.” He tugged at the blanket, and she imagined him wiping his eyes. “I never told anybody that before. I’m the nice guy, right?”

  “I’m the last person to judge you, Jakob.”

  He rested his cheek on her head. She thought he’d had enough of talking, but then he sighed into her hair. “Don’t be angry with me, Clara.”

  She shifted in his arms. “At least you realize what you did. You regret it, and—”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  She waited for him to say more, then wriggled out of his arms and switched on the flashlight. When she blinked the sparks out of her eyes, she saw how deep the grooves in his forehead had become.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “I should’ve told you earlier but I wasn’t sure about you after the club. You know. Trust.”

  She sat up on her elbow, forcing her voice to stay calm. “You can trust me.”

  He gave her a look full of hope and doubt. “You’ve been searching for your friend, and I’ve been keeping back a fact or two that might have helped you.”

  “What fact?”

  “It’s not so easy to explain. I don’t know where to start.”

  He’d worried she would be angry with him and, in a flash, she was. “Were you Elisa’s lover? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Is that why you’re looking for her?”

  “No—”

  “You miss her? She owes you money?”

  “No. Hey, Clara—” He caught her arms and pulled her back onto the blanket, and he swore on Jesus, Maria, Joseph, and all the saints that he had never met Elisabeth Sieland in his life.

  She stopped struggling, prepared to hear him out, but only just. “Then why are you looking for her? Why would I be angry at you?”

  “Listen till the end, all right? You can scratch my eyes out after I’m done.” He began to talk. At first about meat from a pig at a black-market slaughter, a deal he’d made with a farmer in the southern district of Heisingen. Then a mugging on the hills overlooking the Ruhr.

  She had no idea where he was going with this, why it should upset her. She stayed tense under his hands.

  He talked about seeking shelter in an abandoned coal mine, and as he described in detail the food he’d found there, she began to think he was making it all up.

  “Jakob, this is a dream, a bedtime story for hungry children.”

  “It’s true. Every bit of it. If I could give you a quarter of what’s down there, you’d be fat in a year.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it. But we�
��ve only got two tins of beans left, so let’s go to this magical coal mine and stuff ourselves until Christmas.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me.” He fell quiet, his face filled with apprehension. “Willy is down there.”

  “Who?”

  “Willy. Your friend’s boy.”

  Snow shifted on the factory roof, sliding from the eaves and pounding the ground outside. When the echo died, she said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Willy Sieland, born on the twenty-seventh of September 1931. I saw his military identity card, or one he took from somebody else and filled out himself. Had his address on it. That’s how I knew his mother’s name and where they lived in Sophienhof. That’s why I was trying to find your Elisa. She’s supposed to convince him to leave the mine.”

  He was going too fast. She needed to know what this Willy looked like, and Jakob’s description was perfect, right down to the freckles and the bulging blue eyes. And he had his birth date. Who else could it be?

  “Willy?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. He won’t come out of the mine. Got it into his head the war is still on. He’s guarding the place—”

  “Wait.” She sat up, close to him in their shelter, and grasped the ends of the tie he’d wrapped around his neck as a kind of scarf. “You know where he is. You knew I was looking for his mother and him too and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Trust, Clara. There’s a fortune down in that mine. Enough food to feed an army. Look at us. In a few days we won’t be good for anything if we don’t eat. Food is life.”

  “This isn’t about the food. It’s about a teenage boy living . . . is that what you mean? Living in an abandoned coal mine? And you just left him there?”

  “Your friend’s precious boy is armed. He’s not right in the head.” Jakob told her how Willy talked, wolfish and crazed, delusional, the conflict still raging in his mind, the Reich preparing for the last great victory. “He shot at me. Sentenced me to death because I told him we’d lost the war. I told him the truth and he answered with a bullet.”

  It was impossible. Willy had such a gentle nature: the other boys heckled him and punished him because he was small and shy and clumsy. When doing marching drills he would turn the wrong way. “I can’t believe this. It’s really him? Willy Sieland?”

  “It’s really him.”

  “Is Elisa down there too?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see her.”

  “So he’s alone?”

  “He has a bird. A canary.”

  “Gertrud.” Clara’s eyes grew moist. On his birthday, when Willy had removed the cover from Gertrud’s cage and saw her for the first time, Clara had known she’d given him something he would never willingly be parted from. Whatever the Hitler Youth had been teaching him, whatever the war had forced upon him, dissolved from his posture and his face. He was a boy again, looking in wonder at a small, vulnerable creature, something he could love and protect. That boy did not long for the war, talk of treason, or shoot at men. It was impossible.

  She pushed Jakob onto his back. “You should have told me. How could you know all this time and not tell me?” She was balancing on his chest, her hands knotted in his hair. She hoped she was hurting him.

  “I’m sorry, Clara. I wanted to, but I had to keep the mine secret. It could mean everything to my family. Survival.”

  “And Willy doesn’t matter?”

  “He wouldn’t listen to me. What was I supposed to do? Carry him out of there?”

  “You should have told me before.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now. And I’m going to take you down there. First thing tomorrow, no matter how cold it is.”

  She heard the edge of the same fear he’d had after they’d left the club in the storm. Her anger drained away, replaced by the first prickles of happiness. Willy was alive. Her nephew, Friedrich’s son, was alive and she would see him tomorrow.

  Jakob shut off the flashlight and tentatively wrapped his arm around her. “It’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”

  Clara lay awake most of the night, trying to make sense of it. Who could have put Willy in an abandoned mine—and why? How could he still be down there after all this time? When she finally did sleep, it was with an image of him from long ago, tenderly cradling the bird in his hands for the first time, its tiny heart beating in his palm.

  19

  They rested on the remains of a wooden fence overgrown with snowy brambles. She was afraid it wouldn’t take Jakob’s weight, and the wood creaked when he eased himself down with a groan she knew she wasn’t supposed to hear. The snow had stopped for good, but it lay with a slick crust on the ground. It had taken most of the day to cross the city; the long route along the river to avoid some of the steeper hills and cliffs was now at their back. Jakob had preferred the security of his crutch along with the support of one ski pole, but she’d had to hold on to him to keep him from losing his footing on the hills. His nose ran and his face was chapped but he’d cracked jokes all the way, things that were only funny in the war, and maybe not even then. She guessed his chatter was supposed to distract her from thinking about what she’d find in Willy’s mine.

  They were everywhere, the mines. She had seen the mouths of some, filled in or overgrown. She had seen the land dented where some tunnels must have collapsed. That worried her, though Jakob had said Willy’s mine was reinforced. She’d never been inside one like Friedrich had—down underground—but knew enough to know these were old, these black mouths in the hills and cliffs. There were no pit towers, just rusted rail tracks showing here and there through the snow.

  “You got your breath back?” Jakob asked. They had rested at least half a dozen times on the trek south, and he always made it seem as though it was her needing the break more than he did.

  “Are we almost there?”

  “So close that if Willy was outside and you shouted his name, he’d hear you. But let’s keep this quiet.” He began to lay down the rules of entering an abandoned mine, the dangers piling one on top of the other in her imagination. The dark like no dark she’d ever known. The unreliable ground that could give way at any moment. The uniformity of the tunnels that fooled you into thinking you knew where you were. Most of all, the “weather.” She knew how important this was, and what miners meant by it, from her time working at a Falkenberg shaft. The air quality, the gases, the signs that the weather was good or bad. No fire, Jakob told her. No wandering off without him. Did her light still work?

  She tested her flashlight, shining it in his face, and only then did he gather his crutch and ski pole and lead her the rest of the way to Willy’s mine.

  “Good boy,” Jakob said, poking his pole at the snow packed into an orderly drift outside the entrance. “He ventilated.”

  At the cliff face, she felt a sensation of weight, of what was straining down on the tunnels Willy lived in. She still couldn’t believe he was in that crack in the earth, hidden by folds of rock. Nobody could live there. “You’re sure this is the right place?”

  “He’s here. Glück auf, Clara. For luck.”

  “Glück auf.”

  Also for luck, she assumed—miners needed lots of it—he gave her a peck on the cheek. She barely felt it on her skin, but the kiss set off tiny explosions in her chest.

  Since Clara had the light, she went in first. Timbered walls, damp but somehow tidy. She’d expected cobwebs, grime, insects, and rodents bedded down for the winter, but the timbers looked scrubbed clean. An electrical cord spanned the wall near the ceiling. She stood upright and felt a little more space over her head. She hadn’t expected that.

  “The older tunnels have lower clearance,” Jakob said.

  “Which way?”

  “To the dead end, then take a right. That’s the reinforced side.”

  Deeper in the tunnel, the natural light failed completely, and she knew why Jakob had been
so anxious about her flashlight. She held it high so he would see the light too. The air seemed thick with particles in the beam.

  “Is that normal?” she asked.

  “We’re still getting fresh air from outside. Keep going. To the right.”

  Since he’d warned her about the ground she took careful steps even here, when she saw the concrete all around. The corridor was wide enough for Jakob to hop beside her as he told her what was behind each door. Coffee, sugar, chocolate. She thought she heard sounds from beyond the light, scratching noises that sent a chill through her. “Rats?”

  “Probably. There’s bread in there.”

  She couldn’t stand the thought of Willy with the rats. She headed toward the sound, turned a corner, entered the first room she came to. Paper packages were stacked on top of a row of crates, a small path cutting between them. Something crunched under her shoe. Her flashlight found white grains, and she dropped to her knees, peeled off her glove, and poked a hole in one of the packets. She licked the grains off her fingers. Sugar. Packets and packets of sugar. She had never tasted anything so good.

  “Where’s that bread?” she asked as she cupped her hand under Jakob’s mouth. He lapped the sugar out of her palm like a puppy.

  She cried out in delight at the boxes of dark bread stacked wall-to-wall. She tore open the nearest one, pulled out a fat can, dug in the box for an opener. Her hands were too numb and sticky to use it. She threw everything down in frustration and looked in the next room. Packets of dried bread. She tore one open with her teeth and ate the whole thing. The edge taken off her hunger, she went back into the corridor. Jakob stood in tense silence.

  “Where’s Willy?” she asked.

  “His camp is in a short tunnel not far from here.” His voice sounded strange.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Just feels . . . quiet. It was quiet before, but this is different.”

  She rubbed her throat. He had said bad air hit quickly and if it was really bad, the earliest symptoms meant it was too late. Dizziness, queasy stomach, trouble breathing. She had them all. She couldn’t decide if it was bad weather or fear or both. She picked up a chunk of coal, and as Jakob led her down the corridors, she numbered and labeled the doors and marked the turns they took in the passage. She was putting her stamp on this place, establishing some kind of order she could understand.