by Anika Scott
He stopped at a blanket hanging from the ceiling and spoke in a whisper. “Take it easy. Let’s not startle him. He can be a little jumpy.”
She eased the curtain aside. “Willy? Anyone home? It’s your mother’s old friend Clara, remember me?”
Darkness, a rasping breath. The first thing her light hit was the row of tin cups sitting on a crate. Moving the beam slightly higher, she found a map she recognized instantly. She had pored over an identical one in the war, the Reich a nightmare of logistics, crisscrossed in her mind with rail lines stretching east and then farther east into occupied territory where the gauges were different. Closer to the map, she saw Willy’s tiny notes and arrows: troop movements.
“Willy?”
From her left, a soft cheep.
“Gertrud!” Carefully, she touched the canary’s head. Since the episode with the falcon, she had always been a little nervous around birds.
“Bring that light over here, liebling.”
On the way, her foot grazed something large on the ground—her flashlight found a footlocker—and then she saw the bed. Her beam moved over the crumpled blankets and stopped at the leather sheen of a boot. She peeled the blanket aside and saw matted blond hair, then the whole boy balled up like a baby.
“Willy . . .” She dropped to her knees and touched his forehead. Damp, warm. He was only sleeping, curled into himself, conserving heat. He was alive, and he was here; he was really here.
She didn’t like the sour odor in the air: sweat and urine. She patted the bed—dry—and then her leg brushed a bucket. It sloshed a little, the smell pungent. “He’s been ill.” She knew nothing about nursing, and regretted she hadn’t picked up any experience in the war. “Is there water?”
Suddenly, there was light. Jakob hung a lantern on a wall hook and then hopped to an army jug where he tapped water into a cup. She tried it—stale, but it would do—before dribbling some onto Willy’s lips. His brow wrinkled, and he puckered his mouth, a glimpse of the little boy he had once been.
“Hello, Willy.” She dampened the end of his blanket and rubbed his cheek firmly, as she had seen Elisa do when he was younger.
He surfaced, his limbs moving slowly on the bed.
Weakly, he said, “Stop.”
“So you are awake.”
His eyes opened. Wide, wider. They were pale and unfocused.
“You’re not dreaming,” she said. “It’s me. Clara. Clara Falkenberg.”
A slow blink, his tongue wetting his lips, then each word forced out of his mouth. “No, you’re not. She’s blond.”
“I dyed my hair all those years. Shocking, I know. How are you feeling?”
He touched his forehead and glanced at his fingers as if they belonged to someone else. Then: “You.” He looked past her at Jakob, who was stroking Gertrud’s back.
“Yes, me. Good to see you alive, kid. Bet you didn’t expect me back, eh? Good thing I came. Not nice being sick when there’s nobody around to care for you. We all got to watch ourselves this winter.”
Willy struggled onto his elbow. “It snowed. I have to ventilate. Clear the air shafts—”
Gently, Clara put the water cup to his lips again. “You cleared the entrance to the mine already. The air is fine. Look at Gertrud.”
As if she had heard her name, Gertrud chirped. Willy immediately relaxed and closed his eyes. When she was sure he had gone back to sleep, Clara left his bed and threw her arms around Jakob. “I owe you so much. You have no idea.”
He had stumbled against the wall and clutched her to keep his balance. “I like you being in my debt. Let’s start with . . .” He pretended to think about it. “. . . a coat. Willy had one the first time I was here. Army, but I can’t be picky. I could sure do with one if you could find it.”
While he rested on a stool and rubbed his back, Clara searched gladly. The footlocker first, setting aside the blanket, folded neatly, the gas mask with its regulation pamphlet, the military identity card Jakob had mentioned, Elisa’s name and address there as he’d said. The ledger was next. She set it on the crate and leafed through, Jakob pointing out the inventory, the list of meals, his calculation about just how long Willy had been using the supplies. There were no dates, but the sheer number of meals convinced her Jakob told the truth.
“God,” she said. “Almost two years. Who ordered him down here? What demented Hitler Youth leader? I’ll skin him alive.”
“Willy acted like he was waiting for somebody. He said he had to be relieved of duty.”
She slammed shut the ledger, and the corner of a photograph slid out from between the pages: Elisa, Willy, and Reinhard at Sophienhof. She took the picture to the lantern, tried to see something in Elisa’s face. She didn’t know what. Happiness. Misery. A sign of the secrets she had kept so deep inside not even Clara had seen them.
“Elisa isn’t here.” Clara replaced the photograph and put Willy’s things back in the footlocker. “Maybe Willy has some idea where she is.”
“He came down here when she was arrested. The same day.”
That fact unsettled her. It raised the possibility that Elisa had told him to come here, but Clara couldn’t imagine her wanting her son to live underground like this even given the alternatives. She concentrated on her search for Willy’s coat, tearing through crates filled mostly with tins and cutlery. Everything was stacked and dusted. The tins, she noticed, were in alphabetical order. She approved and would have done something similar in his situation.
She looked under Willy’s bed and spotted a bundle of field-gray wool. Tugging it out, the coat seemed heavier than it should. Unfolding it, she found something wrapped up inside.
“Jakob, look.” The wooden leg gleamed, polished, and so precious it was something only Jakob should touch now.
“Holy Mother of God.” He ran his fingers down the wood and tugged gently at the straps. “The kid fixed it.”
He began to wriggle out of his trousers, and she felt an odd sense of unreality when she saw his bandaged leg stop at the knee. Embarrassed, she turned her back, and he said, “Yeah, it’s still strange to me too. I don’t blame you for looking away.” The comment offended her. She wasn’t so delicate as to recoil at what the war had done to him. But she caught only a glimpse of Jakob’s pale thigh and the brownish scars before he rewrapped the bandage quickly up his leg, bending over as he did so, blocking her view. Then he pulled on the prosthesis and busied himself with the straps. When he was finished and dressed, he held out his hands to her. She hauled him onto his two feet.
“My shoes don’t match,” he said. One slow step at a time, he hobbled to the opposite wall.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Chafes. I’ve lost weight. But it’ll do.” Once Jakob had found his sea legs, as he called them, he began to hum a tune she didn’t know, held out his hand to her and they did a lurching dance in the corridor to a waltz beat—one-two-three, one-two-three. She was proud of Willy. Proud he’d done this kindness for a good man.
FOR THE REST of the day and into the next, she cared for Willy as best she could, never leaving his side except when Jakob took over the more intimate tasks involving what he called man stuff. Willy was fifteen and she didn’t want to embarrass him. She waited outside the curtain, hearing Jakob say, “Come on, kid, you’ll feel better after a good piss.” Listening to them reminded her painfully of her brothers.
Once he was on his feet again, his head brushing the ceiling, Willy was as cautious and reserved with her as he used to be. Hat in hand, little bows of respect. Yes, fräulein. No, fräulein. I’ll get that for you, fräulein. Not servile exactly, but the well-mannered boy Elisa had raised. Now Clara noticed it for what it was: a reflection of the distance between them. It was as if Willy still saw her as some kind of a princess up in her tower at the Works. She didn’t want that. He was her nephew. By the way he treated her, it was clear he had no idea.
“Willy, I think you’re well enough to leave now,” she said on her second mor
ning in the mine.
“I won’t desert my post.”
“You’re not deserting. The war is over, remember? Jakob—Herr Relling—explained it to you already. I’ve explained it. We can walk out of here right now.”
His respectful demeanor cracked a little. “You never neglected your duty, did you, fräulein?”
“Nobody ever asked me to live in a coal mine.”
“You lived at the Works.”
“That was different.”
“How? You slept in the bunker under headquarters, didn’t you?”
Now he was annoying her. She wished Jakob was there to support her, to help cajole Willy into action, but he was somewhere in the mine stuffing an army bag full of goods to take home to his sisters. “The war is over, Willy. There is nothing keeping you down here. No one is going to punish you for neglecting your duty. It’s over.”
He shook his head as if she was one of those poor people who had lost their minds. At his crate table, he dumped out the screws and nails from several cups and began to sort them. She recognized the boy who used to play quietly alone sorting blades of grass by length. In a few moments, he’d be far away, unable to hear any more from her.
She clapped her hands close to his ear as she had seen Elisa do sometimes when he was little. “I’ve been looking for your mother. Do you have any idea where she is?”
He dropped a screw, bent to pick it up. He blew off the dust, set it on the table.
“She was arrested in the war and nobody’s seen her since,” Clara said. “I know you came down here at the same time they took her away. Did she tell you to come here?”
He continued to sort, dropping the nails and screws into their cups. She had lost him for now. She would wait him out, wear him down with patience. She busied herself making his bed, folding the blanket with precise creases. After a while, he began to talk.
“Have you ever felt like things are planned for you, fräulein?” Willy was on round two of his sorting now, the nails and screws poured out of their cups again. “Like the whole universe or a god or something planned everything before you were born? That it was all decided for you? And that you don’t have a say in any of it?”
This was a delicate moment. What she said next might tip him back into silence or allow him to open up to her. She picked up the folded blanket, shook it out gently, and began to fold it again. Maybe her movements soothed him as much as they did her.
“It seems like a lot is planned for us, yes.” Thinking of her father, she added, “But not by gods.”
He held a screw up to the light and scraped it with his fingernail. “I happened to be on my bicycle at a certain time of night, checking the blackout. I was supposed to pass by her window at the warehouse at the docks, that little office she used when there were shipments coming in on the canal. Except there weren’t any. I knew that. You didn’t have any more ships, fräulein. In fact, Mama had said she was working at headquarters that night. So what was a light doing on in an empty warehouse when there was no work to do?”
She hadn’t heard Willy say so many words at once . . . ever. “I’m not exactly following. What night do you mean?”
“The night I saw them. In January.” Smiling strangely, he dropped another nail onto the pile.
January 1945. It had to be. She wiped her clammy hands on the blanket and began again, edge to edge, fold, crease. “Who did you see?”
“The warehouse at the docks was this big empty space. Sound traveled. Echoed loudly. I followed it all the way down the empty hallway to the door. Maybe she was only whimpering a little, but it really carried. I heard something creaking, someone breathing. Everybody has lungs and throats and we’re all basically the same, so how did I know that it was her in there? I knew it was. I knew it here.” He tapped a screw at his chest.
She sat listening, without moving.
“I opened the office door,” he said. “Wide open. They didn’t even notice. He was sitting in the chair and she was on his lap. He had his hands all over her. It was disgusting.” Now he was scratching the crate table with a nail, little scratches over and over. “Disgusting.”
“They?” Her throat was clogged. Dust. Words. “Your mother. And who else?”
He kept scratching, scratching.
“Willy, who was she with? Someone you’d seen before at the Works? A Russian?” She was ready to hear about Elisa’s Russian lover and yet she still couldn’t actually believe it.
Willy was looking at her sideways, cautious. “He was old. Barely any hair left. My father was away fighting and Mama was at home betraying him with an old man.”
Old? It wasn’t possible. Clara hadn’t employed old men, not the Russians anyway—she had needed strong backs. Willy had to be mistaken.
“What was he wearing? Did he have the badge on his shirt, the one for eastern workers, or POWs? Do you remember?”
Willy was gouging the wooden crate with the nail. “A tie.”
“What?”
“He wore a tie. A suit and tie.”
Impossible. An old man in a suit and tie was not possible. She got up and grasped the table, rattling the cups, his orderly sorting ruined. “Who was it?”
Willy started, and she fought to calm her voice. “Willy, please tell me who the man was.”
He shook his head. The knot of panic in her grew.
“I think you knew him. Why won’t you tell me?”
He wouldn’t look at her, focusing instead on his screws and his nails as they rolled out of their cups and onto the table. She thought of late January ’45, the last time she saw her father. He was in his fifties and still a handsome man even if his skin sagged and the lines around his eyes and mouth were deeper than they had once been. He’d lost his secret smile. He didn’t smile at all in the three days he was in Essen for meetings. He sat like an immovable pillar and spoke little, giving instructions in a weary tone. Before he left for Berlin, he didn’t touch her, no hug or kiss on the cheek. Not even a handshake. He had unmoored himself from the world, and from her.
“Was it my father, Willy? Was it Theodor Falkenberg?”
Abruptly, Willy fetched his steel helmet from the shelf. “The door,” he said. “When I left the warehouse, I didn’t shut the door. What do you suppose they thought after they were done? Did they think they had left it open? Or it was a draft? A spy?”
Her father. And Elisa. She had worked for the family for fifteen years, she had been Clara’s friend, and not once did her father so much as mention her unless Clara had done so first. In the rare times when they had been in the same room—an assembly of headquarters staff, for instance—he had never spoken to Elisa or even looked at her. Clara had always had the impression he was embarrassed about their friendship, yet tolerated it, knowing the good it did her. During the war, he and Elisa would not have had the time to develop a relationship. She had been in Essen; he had worked mostly in Berlin. And Elisa? She wouldn’t have slept with her best friend’s father. That was out of the question.
“Willy, it couldn’t have been my father. It was a Russian after all, wasn’t it? It shocked you; maybe you were ashamed. They taught you so many terrible things in the Hitler Youth. But, Willy, you’ve got to tell me the truth about this.”
He was rubbing the helmet, polishing it with the palm of his hand. In a small voice, he said, “I did.”
In her coat pocket, Clara grasped the soft roll of Elisa’s silk. The wedding dress, the white square hidden far back on a shelf in the workshop, a place her mother would never go. Only Father.
But Friedrich too. Maybe all of this was a mistake; it was Friedrich whom Elisa had loved, who got her pregnant, who stayed away from her all of those years, keeping the secret as she did, while she married another and claimed legitimacy for Willy. Friedrich. Not her father.
But the chain of reason collapsed in the face of what Willy had seen. If she had really loved Friedrich, Elisa would never have had an affair with his father. Even at the end of the war, in the madness and
chaos—the Americans coming, the Russians coming—she wouldn’t have done that.
And so. It was her father all along. All those years ago when Elisa was practically still a girl . . .
Clara groped along the timber walls to Willy’s bed and sat heavily. She remembered Elisa at the café over the river when they had first met, how vulnerable and lonely she had been. Had he taken advantage of her? It was despicable. It was filthy. He was married with four children and he was old enough to be Elisa’s father. How could he have put his hands on a teenage girl, get her pregnant, and then deny the child? But of course he could. Her dear, beloved papa. Of course he could have done this. He was morally bankrupt, through and through.
Willy cradled his helmet in his arms, watching Clara with wide and wary eyes. He had the same powder-blond hair as her father and brothers in photographs of them at the same age. His eyes were his mother’s, but Clara saw something familiar when he turned away from her gaze, something in his profile that reminded her so much of her father, it cut her in two.
“Oh, Willy. Willy, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
Still hugging the helmet, he backed away from her to the map. He looked frightened, confused. He must have no idea what she was talking about, what he’d truly seen in the warehouse that night. If Elisa had never given him so much as a clue to his parentage, Willy could not have guessed who his real father was. She must have kept the secret all his life.
“We need to find your mother, Willy. She has a lot of explaining to do to the both of us. Do you have any idea where she could be?”
“At home.”
“She’s not there.”
“She has to be.” He fetched a rag and began to polish his helmet properly, scrubbing furiously. “They said they’d take her home when they were done.”
She knelt beside him in the dirt. It was the only way to see his face and, besides, her knees had turned to water. “Who’s they?”