by Anika Scott
“Hey, kid, it’s me. I know you’re here.” As he went deeper into the mine, he glanced into each room, raising his lantern, seeing only the tidy boxes and packets his light could reach.
“Halt, thief.” The command ricocheted off the tunnel walls.
Willy’s voice was as rasping and wolfish as the first time Jakob had come to the mine. The voice was a sign. Willy moved backward in time instead of forward like everybody else.
Jakob tried to locate him in the deep dark outside the glow of his lamp. Two tunnels, one broad and straight, the other jagged rock barely broader than his shoulders. Willy’s order had come from one of them. He was hiding in the dark, the special, total dark of the mine that Papa had whispered about under the covers when Jakob and his brothers were boys huddled together, flashlight off. Nothing but their excited breathing and their papa’s voice. Retrace your steps in the dark. Go on and try. You can, but did you pay attention to all the side tunnels? One wrong turn leads to another. And another.
“Willy? You still there? I’m not a thief. We went through that already, right? I’m here to help you.”
“Where’s the fräulein?”
“I don’t know.”
Willy was still keeping himself hidden, but he had moved closer. Not into Jakob’s light, but near. “Why don’t you know?”
“The British arrested her.”
A long pause. “That isn’t possible.”
“I brought some presents for you, Willy. Christmas presents. Want to see?”
The silence lasted so long, Jakob finally swung the lantern into the next tunnel. Empty. The next, empty. He backtracked to his favorite room, the cigarettes, and discovered the packs newly stacked into a pyramid that reached the ceiling. He didn’t know if it was a bad sign, if Willy had lost his mind for good.
Willy wasn’t in his camp, but Gertrud peeped a greeting from her nest. “Glad to see you too, sweetheart,” Jakob said. Propped up on an iron stand was a piece of metal bent into something almost like a star. A boxwood shrub stood on the crate table where Willy’s nails and screws used to be. Stars cut from the lids of food tins hung from what Jakob assumed was the boy’s version of a Christmas tree. Small packages wrapped in paper were stacked underneath. Jakob shook one, then peeled back the paper. It was a can of ham.
He recognized all of this. Christmas at the front. No Yuletide joy, only quiet, melancholy rest. His last Christmas in Russia, soldiers from around Europe had sung carols on the radio. When the opening notes of “Silent Night” began softly, it was the only time in three years of war that Jakob cried.
He pulled his own gifts for Willy out of his bag and laid them under the tree. These were the things that would convince the kid the world had changed. Between putting on his uniform and getting to the mine Jakob had been inspired, borrowing one of Dorrit’s beloved books, with her permission, of course, and a promise to bring it back. He’d collected Allied forms, even a partially filled-out Fragebogen that his mother had abandoned when she fell sick. Her illness had made it irrelevant, and she hadn’t belonged to any of the Nazi organizations anyway. On the way to the mine, he had peeled a military government notice off the wall of a building. He spread the poster out on Willy’s bed, and Gertrud hopped around it, her head cocked as if she was reading what it had to say. The best for last, Jakob found a nail in the timber wall and hung up his calendar. The December girl smiled out, wholesome and inviting.
He withdrew to the dead end to watch and wait and guess what the kid would look at first. If Jakob had been cooped up in a mine for two years, the first thing he’d look at was the calendar. It had to be the girl or the kid had no warm blood in him.
But when Willy returned to his camp, he looked around, startled at the new things under his tree, on the wall and the bed. He picked up Dorrit’s book and held it like a precious thing, angling it to the lantern.
“It was one of the first things published after the war,” Jakob said. “Look at the copyright: 1946. A woman wrote it secretly when she was in prison near the end.”
Willy set the book on the table, then shook out his hands as though he’d been burned. He stared at Jakob as if noticing him for the first time, his mouth open. “You’re wearing . . . that.”
“You should know I’m not just some fellow off the street. I was a soldier. I fought.”
Willy swiveled away from Jakob’s gaze and picked up the Allied forms, frowning deeply the longer he browsed them. “What is this? Why is it partly in English?”
“That’s a Fragebogen, a form we use to summarize our lives and war and to see if we were political. It’s a way for the Allies to ferret out just how Nazi each of us was. They want to know everything. Where we went to school. What kind of toothpaste we used.”
Willy examined the half-dozen pages in his hand. “It doesn’t say anything here about toothpaste.”
“I was exaggerating. But they use it for what they call denazification. Sounds like disinfection, right? No coincidence. Anyway, you want a job as a teacher or something, they ask you: Have you been fragebogenized?”
Willy pulled a face. “That’s a strange word.”
“It’s a strange world. To be honest, the world has been like that one way or another my whole life. It’s even more true for you, kid. Just have to accept it and move on.”
Willy let the forms spill to the ground. He walked over them, tracing black prints on the paper, and stopped at the government poster. Gertrud hopped across it, out of his way. He blinked down at the words, then put his hands to his face.
“Don’t look away, kid. The truth isn’t going to change just because you cover your eyes.” When Willy didn’t move, Jakob snapped, “Look at me, soldier.”
Instantly, Willy dropped his hands and came to attention. His eyes shimmered. His whole body was like a twanging wire, vibrating with an anxiety Jakob could sense. He felt disgusted with himself for speaking to the boy like this, a reminder of how one man could stomp on the will of another with his voice alone.
“Do you respect this uniform?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look. This tunic doesn’t have the Reich’s eagle. You see? Look. No swastika.” He emptied his wallet and showed his papers. “This is my identity card. Nineteen forty-six. And not a swastika anywhere on it. My ration card. Same thing. Look at them.”
Willy did, glancing at the papers, breathing hard.
“I know you’ve got nowhere to go, and that’s why I’m offering you a little help, kid. You can come home with me. I don’t have much, just my sisters and a couple of rooms. You’re welcome to stay with us, but you got to come out of here peacefully.”
Willy pivoted away and stopped at the timber wall. The December girl and her cheerful smile. Nineteen forty-six.
“A lot of pretty girls out there,” Jakob said. “I don’t know if you realize it, but you’re a handsome fellow. You’ll be even better when you get some color back in your face, eat some fresh fruit and vegetables. There’s a man shortage out in the world. You’re going to get a lot of attention. Ever thought of that?”
“She’s all made up. She looks like a tart.”
“Nice to look at, though, hey? Why don’t I take you to an American film? What was the last one you saw?” Jakob swerved away from reminding Willy of the past. “Doesn’t matter. Pack up some stuff, we can take off these uniforms and be at the Atrium by eight o’clock. What do you say?”
Willy gave him a look of despair. And then he lowered his head like a bull’s and charged straight into the wall.
24
At the sound of the motor outside, Clara ran to the window and wiped the glass with her palm. The soldiers went to meet Captain Fenshaw, and as she watched him get out of the car, she saw the empty passenger seat beside him. Her stomach tightened with anxiety and dread. Where was Elisa?
Fenshaw came in stomping his boots, trailing in snow. “How have you been getting on?”
“Sir, where is Elisabeth Sieland? You said you’d bring her.”
He hung up his hat and began to unbutton his coat. “I don’t think I said that.”
“We had a deal. About the mine, remember?”
He rubbed his hands at the weak fire in the hearth, and checked the kettle had water. The soldiers Jennings and Dwight carried in boxes and unpacked them on the table. Fenshaw’s files thudded one after the other onto the wood like the booming of her own heartbeat. He waved for her to take a seat opposite him, and opened the top file to a stack of blank paper. He sat back with it, a black pen with a flashing golden nib at the ready. “Tell me how you escaped from custody the first time, and your whereabouts and activities up to when we found you at the iron works.”
“Why does any of that matter now? Why are you doing this? For your files? It’s just paper.” She picked up one of them, thinking she would hurl it at the flames, but he gave her such a sharp look of warning she immediately set it back on the table. “You know what’s happened to Elisa, don’t you? Why won’t you tell me?”
“Why is it so important to talk to her now?”
She let out a sound of frustration and paced to the fire. She couldn’t tell him about Willy yet. She had to protect him as long as possible and, besides, she didn’t know how to begin to explain his situation.
“I can’t say. You’d draw the wrong conclusions. About all of us. Why would you even try to understand? You’ve made up your mind about me already.”
He slapped his papers onto the stack of files and got up abruptly, ruffling his hands through his hair as he stalked away from her to the cabin door.
“I’ve been trying to make up my mind about you since 1936.” He turned back to her, a collision of anger and uncertainty in his face. “I’ve tried to be impartial, to approach your case like any other, a matter of gathering information, constructing a complete picture of who you are. But I could never quite”—he curled his fingers as if trying to grasp something invisible—“reach down far enough. Most people aren’t that hard to understand, actually, but with you it’s like trying to read a spinning compass. At that BUF rally, you were wonderful. You were courageous, independent, disrespectful, all the things the Fascists hate. You had me convinced”—he gestured as if he was alone, talking to himself—“you had me hooked, really. It was only after the war started that I wondered if you were as brilliant an actress as your mother, as the rest of your family. If you truly have any convictions at all. If maybe you had been playing with me to amuse yourself. If it was all a game.”
She watched him pace, fascinated by how raw he seemed when he let his composure fall away. It amazed her that she had affected him so deeply, that such a brief encounter had fed something inside him for years. The young heiress had broken the professionalism of the government man, but how? She remembered her mother’s dossier on Fenshaw, that he was a widower with a son. She wondered if he had been a single father grieving for his wife a decade ago, finding in Clara a woman who could replace something of what he’d lost, if only from afar. He would not be the first man to project onto her his own ideas of who and what he wanted her to be.
“I wasn’t playing back then, sir. What you saw of me was real. What I thought and felt. Convictions . . . yes, I always had them, even in the war. I just . . .” She was rubbing her arms, cold suddenly. “Oh, if only you were in my family, you’d know. My father used to say, ‘Kaisers and chancellors come and go. The family stays.’ The foundation of everything. I thought the Nazis, the war, it was all temporary. It was only a matter of getting through, holding on, doing what I could.” She stopped herself, sensing the old slip into excuses. She was on the verge of blaming her father, that anger pulsing in her again, but she was a grown woman. She couldn’t push her guilt on to him as if she were a child.
Fenshaw sat again, his hair smoothed back, the color still high in his face. “For a long time, I’ve wondered—if I’d approached you more openly back then at the rally, in that cloakroom, if I’d told you who I was, established that contact early on, would that have affected what you did in the war?”
She tried to imagine it: a kind of lifeline to a different set of choices. With a little more encouragement, she might have passed on production schedules or weapons specifications to the Allies, sabotage on a grander scale than what she’d attempted with Elisa and Max. “I don’t know if I would’ve done things any differently if you’d tried to recruit me. Back then, I would probably have felt like I was betraying my family.”
“You’re half English.”
“Yes, but as you’re well aware, my mother wasn’t exactly the best representative of that side of me. Growing up, my aunts and uncles and even my grandparents in England were always a little distant as well. I was convinced they thought I wasn’t really one of them—too German. Only my German family accepted me completely.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Fenshaw said, subdued. “Maybe there was nothing I could have done to change things.” He fetched her coat from the wall. “I’d like you to wait outside for a few minutes.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer, and she slipped her arms into the sleeves. His motives reached deeper than she’d thought. Underneath the layers of fascination, curiosity, and duty was a sense of his own missed opportunity to influence what he thought she’d become.
She buckled the coat’s belt tightly, but she couldn’t stop shivering as she waited in the snowy field behind the cabin. Reynolds was indoors with Fenshaw, leaving Jennings and Dwight outside to guard her. They were young, barely older than Willy, and they’d treated her with distant politeness in her three days in captivity. She asked what was happening, but they just shrugged. Soon Reynolds came out with his rifle over his shoulder—nothing unusual. She assumed he was going on patrol as the soldiers did several times a day, but he stopped and stared at her.
“Go on in, miss.” Still staring, he mumbled something to Dwight and Jennings, and then they started for the trees on the path they’d forged through the snow on past patrols.
After a few breaths to gather her composure, she went back inside.
A dozen portrait-sized photographs were hanging on the wall. The beds had been pushed back and a chair set in the middle of the room. Fenshaw was at the table with his files again, smoking as he read. “Please, sit down.”
Instead she approached a random picture and recoiled at the bombed landscape, the wet ditch, the hand reaching out of the soil. Photograph after photograph showed men digging in the mud with shovels, with their hands, revealing a bare foot in the soil, an arm, a head full of matted, filthy hair. She pressed a hand to her throat. A knot was growing there, obstructing her breaths. Why was he showing her these things? She had nothing to do with those people. Nothing. Her head felt heavy, and she sat after all.
“Where do you think these photographs were taken?” Fenshaw asked.
She didn’t like the position of the chair alone in the center of the room. She felt like the accused at a trial. “I have no idea.”
“Not in Russia. Not in Poland.”
“I said I don’t know.”
“In Essen, not far from the Grugapark.”
She wanted to swallow but couldn’t. The knot in her throat had grown hard and sharp.
“In the last months of the war,” Fenshaw said, “foreign workers who escaped their labor camps formed gangs and lived in the ruins. Some joined forces with German criminals, thieves, black marketeers, and the like. The Gestapo had their hands full, as you can imagine. The jails overflowed.”
She turned away from the images, but there was nowhere to look but the windows—and they were a disorienting white, as if nothing was anchoring the cabin to the earth.
“Let’s think like the Essen Gestapo for a moment,” he said, pulling a bottle of whisky and two glasses from his bag. “The Allies are closing in. Communications with Berlin are patchy. Local and district security have to decide for themselves what to do with the foreigners in their jails. Many of them were people who had once been forced to work for you, Miss Fal
kenberg.”
She resisted the urge to get up, staying seated, hugging herself in the center of the room.
“The Gestapo had to act. But they weren’t used to thinking for themselves. What do they do?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“You know why.”
“I don’t. I had nothing to do with these photographs.”
“Look closer.”
She shook her head.
“You’ll have to look at them sometime.”
She realized he was going to keep the pictures on the wall for days if necessary. He would tell the soldiers to guard them until she did all that he wanted. She couldn’t bear the thought of falling asleep with the corpses, of waking with them all around her. So she approached the wall again.
The first row of photographs hung directly in her line of sight. If she looked below them, there were more. If she looked above them, there was the timbered wall. She began counting the gouges in it, the images swimming on the edge of her vision.
“Come on, Miss Falkenberg. You must have an idea what the Gestapo decided to do. That was your world.”
“When our people ended up in jail, we always tried to find out what had happened, what they were accused of, and to get them back if we could. We knew they’d be better off with us than with them. But it wasn’t always possible. There were laws. We couldn’t do a lot if the worker broke them.” She cringed inside, aware of the excuses, the things she’d told herself in the war, told herself since—when maybe, just maybe, she could have done more.
Fenshaw stood behind her, not touching her, but close enough to force her to take a step closer to the photographs. “A special police court,” he said. “That’s the favorite solution of every police state that ever was. It’s efficient. Men and women were condemned on the spot.”
Directly at eye level was a picture of two men, one in a hat, braces, and a tie, the other in the shirt of a workman. Together they were dragging a corpse out of the mud. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, saw only the wet and muddy bundle the men held, the lolling head. She was grateful she couldn’t see the face. Spread behind the men were other people stooped over the soil, digging.