The next day was hot again. Berlin was literally steaming, the rain that had washed the dust from the air now rising in wisps over the wet ruins, making the smell worse. Emil’s father lived in Charlottenburg, a few streets away from the schloss, in what was left of an art nouveau block of flats, divided into rooms for bombed-out families. The street hadn’t been cleared, so they’d had to leave the jeep on Schloss Strasse and thread their way through the rubble on a footpath dotted with house-number sticks planted in the debris like trail markers. They were sweating when they arrived, but Professor Brandt was dressed in a suit and a high starched collar from the Weimar era, stiff even in the wilting heat. His height took Jake by surprise. Emil had been Jake’s size, but Professor Brandt towered over him, so tall that when he kissed Lena on the cheek, he bent at the waist, an old officer’s bow.
“Lena, it’s good of you to come,” he said, more polite than warm, as if he were receiving a former student.
He looked at Jake, taking in the uniform, and his eye twitched. “He’s dead,” he said flatly.
“No, no, a friend of Emil’s,” Lena said, and introduced them.
Professor Brandt offered a dry hand. “From happier days, I think.”
“Yes, before the war,” Jake said.
“You are welcome, then. I thought perhaps-an official visit.” A flicker of relief even his composed face couldn’t hide. “I’m sorry, I have nothing to offer guests. It’s difficult now,” he said, indicating the cramped room whose light came in shafts through a boarded-up broken window. “Perhaps you would care to walk in the park? It’s more pleasant, in this weather.”
“We can’t stay long.”
“Well, a little walk, then,” he said, clearly embarrassed by the room and eager to go out. He turned to Lena. “But first, I must tell you. I’m so sorry. Dr. Kunstler was here. You know I asked him to inquire in Hamburg. Your parents. I’m sorry,” he said, his words as formal as a eulogy.
“Oh,” she said, the sound catching in her throat like a whimper. “Both?”
“Yes, both.”
“Oh,” she said again. She sank to a chair, covering her eyes with a hand.
Jake expected Professor Brandt to reach out to her, but instead he moved away, leaving her isolated, alone with her news. Jake looked at her awkwardly, stuck helpless in his role, a friend of the family unable to do more than be silent.
“Some water?” Professor Brandt said.
She shook her head. “Both. It’s certain?”
“The records-there was so much confusion, you can imagine. But they were identified.”
“So now there’s no one,” she said to herself in a small voice.
Jake thought of Breimer looking out of the plane window at the wrecked landscape. What they deserved. Seeing buildings.
“Are you all right?” Jake said.
She nodded, then stood up, smoothing out her skirt, visibly putting herself in order. “I knew it must be. It’s just-to hear it.” She turned to Professor Brandt. “Perhaps a walk would be better. Some air.”
He picked up a hat, clearly relieved, and led them down the hall, away from the front entrance. Lena drifted behind, ignoring Jake’s arm. “We’ll go out the back. They’re watching the building,” he said.
“Who?” Jake said, surprised.
“Young Willi. They pay him, I think. He’s always in the street. Or one of his friends. With cigarettes. Where do they get them? He was always a sneak, that one.”
“Who pays him?”
Professor Brandt shrugged. “Thieves, perhaps. Of course, they may not be watching me. Someone else in the building. Waiting for their chance. But I prefer they don’t know where I am.”
“Are you sure?” Jake said, looking at the white hair. An old man’s imagination, protecting a boarded-up room.
“Herr Geismar, every German is an expert at that. We’ve been watched for twelve years. I would know in my sleep. Here we are.” He opened the back door to the blinding light. “No one, you see.”
“I take it Emil hasn’t been here?” Jake said, still thinking.
“Is that why you’ve come? I’m sorry, I don’t know where he is. Dead, perhaps.”
“No, he’s alive. He’s been in Frankfurt.”
Professor Brandt stopped. “Alive. With the Americans?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God for that. I thought the Russians-” He started walking again. “So he got out. He said the Spandau bridge was still open. I thought he must be crazy. The Russians were-”
“He left Frankfurt two weeks ago,” Jake said, interrupting him. “For Berlin. I was hoping he’d come to you.”
“No, he wouldn’t come to me.”
“To find Lena, I mean,” Jake said, awkward.
“No, only the Russian.”
“A Russian was looking for him?”
“For Lena,” he said, hesitant. “As if I would help him. Swine.”
“Me?” Lena said, listening after all.
Professor Brandt nodded, avoiding her eyes.
“What for?” Jake said.
“I didn’t ask questions,” Professor Brandt said, his voice almost prim.
“But he didn’t want Emil,” Jake said, thinking aloud.
“Why would he? I thought-”
“He give you a name?”
“They don’t give names. Not them.”
“You didn’t ask? A Russian making inquiries in the British sector?”
Professor Brandt stopped, upset, as if he’d been caught in an impropriety. “I didn’t want to know. You understand-I thought it was personal.” He looked at Lena. “I’m sorry, don’t be offended. I thought he was perhaps a friend of yours. So many German women- one hears it all the time.”
“You thought that?” she said, angry.
“It’s not for me to judge these things,” he said, his voice correct and distant.
She looked at him, her eyes suddenly hard. “No. But you do. You judge everything. Now me. You thought that? A Russian whore?” She looked away. “Oh, why am I surprised? You always think the worst. Look how you judge Emil-your own blood.”
“My own blood. A Nazi.”
Lena waved her hand. “Nothing changes. Nothing,” she said and strode ahead, visibly walking off her anger.
They crossed the street quietly, Jake feeling like an intruder in a family quarrel.
“She’s not herself,” Professor Brandt said finally. “It’s the bad news, I think.” He turned to Jake. “Is there some trouble? This Russian-it’s to do with Emil?”
“I don’t know. But let me know if he comes back.”
Professor Brandt looked at Jake closely. “May I ask what exactly you do in the army?”
“I’m not in the army. I’m a reporter. They make us wear the uniform.”
“For your work. That’s what Emil said too. You’re looking for him-as a friend? Nothing else?”
“As a friend.”
“He’s not under arrest?”
“No.”
“I thought perhaps-these trials. They’re not going to put him on trial?”
“No, why should they? As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything.”
Professor Brandt looked at him curiously, then sighed. “No, just this,” he said, gesturing toward the gutted schloss. “That’s what they’ve done, him and his friends.”
They were approaching the palace from the west, the ground still covered with pieces of glass from the smashed orangerie. Berlin’s Versailles. The building had taken a direct hit, the east wing demolished, the rest of the standing pale yellow walls scorched with black. Lena was walking ahead into the formal gardens, now unrecognizable, a bare field of mud littered with shrapnel.
“It was always going to end this way,” Professor Brandt said. “Anyone could see that. Why couldn’t he see that? They destroyed Germany. The books, then everything. It wasn’t theirs to destroy. It was mine, too. Where’s my Germany now? Look at it. Gone. Murderers.”
“Emil wasn’t that.”
“He worked for them,” he said, voice rising as if they were in court, the case he’d been arguing for years. “Be careful when you put on a uniform. It’s what you become. Always the work. You know what he said to me? ‘I can’t wait for history to change things. I have to do my work now. After the war, we can do wonderful things.’ Space. We. Who? Mankind? After the war. He says this while the bombs are falling. While they’re putting people on trains. No connection. What are you going to do in space, I said, look down on the dead?” He cleared his throat, calming himself. “You agree with Lena. You think I’m harsh.”
“I don’t know,” Jake said, uncomfortable.
Professor Brandt stopped, looking at the schloss. “He broke my heart,” he said, so simply that Jake winced, as if a bandage had been lifted off the old man’s skin, exposing it. “She thinks I judge him. I don’t even know him,” he said, his words seeming to droop with him. But when Jake looked up, he stood as stiffly as before, his neck still held up by the high collar. He started into the park. “Well, now the Americans will do it.”
“We didn’t come here to judge anybody.”
“No? Then who else? Do you think we can judge ourselves? Our own children?”
“Maybe nobody can.”
“Then they will get away with it.”
“The war’s over, Professor Brandt. Nobody got away with anything,” Jake said, looking at the charred remains of the building.
“Not the war. No, not war. You know what happened here. I knew. Everybody knew. Grunewald Station. You know they liked to send them from there, not in the center, where people would see. Did they think we wouldn’t see there? Thousands of them in the cars. The children. Did we think they were going on holiday? I saw it myself. My god, I thought, how we will pay for this, how we will pay. How could it happen? Here, in my country, a crime like this? How could they do it? Not the Hitlers, the Goebbelses-those types you can see any day. In a zoo. An asylum. But Emil? A boy who played with trains. Blocks. Always building. I’ve asked myself a million times, over and over, how could this boy be a part of that?“
“And what answer did you get?” Jake said quietly.
“None. No answer.” He stopped to remove his hat, then took out a handkerchief and patted his forehead. “No answer,” he said again. “You know, his mother died when he was born. So there were just the two of us. Just two. I was too strict maybe. Sometimes I think it was that. But he was no trouble-quiet. A wonderful mind. You could see it working when he played-one block after another, just so. Sometimes I would sit there just watching his mind.”
Jake glanced over at him, trying to imagine him without the collar, stretched out on a child’s floor in a jumble of building blocks.
“And later, of course, at the institute, a wonder. Everyone predicted great things, everyone. Instead, this.” He spread his hand, taking in the past along with the torn-up garden. “How? How could such a mind not see? How can you see only the blocks, nothing else? A missing piece. Like all the rest of them, some missing piece. Maybe they never had it. But Emil? A good German boy-so what happened? To be with them.”
“He came back for you at the end.”
“Yes, do you know how? With SS. Do you expect me to get in that car, I said, with them?”
“The SS came for you?”
“For me? No. Files. Even then, with the Russians here, they came to get files out-imagine it. To save themselves. Did they think we didn’t know what they did? How can you hide something like that? Foolishness. Then here. ‘It’s the only way,’ Emil said, ‘they have a car, they’ll take you.’” He switched voices. “‘Tell the old shit to hurry or we’ll shoot him too,’ they said. Drunk, I think, but they did that, shot people, even in those last days, when everything was lost. Good, I said, shoot the old shit. That will be one bullet less. ‘Don’t talk like that,‘ Emil says. ’Are you crazy?‘ You’re the crazy one, I said. The Russians will hang you if you’re with these swine. ’No, Spandau’s open, we can get to the west.‘ I’d rather be with the Russians than with scum, I said. Arguing, even then.“ The SS voice again. ”’Leave him. We don’t have time for this.‘ And of course it was true-you could hear the artillery fire everywhere. So they left. That’s the last I saw him, getting into a car with SS. My son.“ His voice grew faint and stopped, as if he were rewinding a spool of film in his head, the scene played out again.
“Trying to save you,” Jake said.
But Professor Brandt ignored him, retreating back to conversation. “How is it you know him?”
“Lena worked with me at Columbia.”
“The radio, yes, I remember. A long time ago.” He glanced toward Lena, waiting for them near the edge of the garden where the sluggish water of the Spree made its bend. “She doesn’t look well.”
“She’s been sick. She’s better now.”
Professor Brandt nodded. “So that’s why she hasn’t come. She used to, after the raids, to see if I was all right. The faithful Lena. I don’t think she told him.”
She turned as they approached. “Look at the ducks,” she said. “Still here. Who feeds them, do you think?” A kind of apology for her outburst, simply by not mentioning it. “So, have you finished?”
“Finished?” Professor Brandt said, then peered at Jake. “What is it you want?”
Jake took the photograph of Tully out of his breast pocket. “Has this man been here? Have you seen him?”
“An American,” Professor Brandt said, looking at it. “No. Why? He’s looking for Emil too?”
“He may have been. He knew Emil in Frankfurt.”
“He’s police?” Professor Brandt said, so quickly that Jake looked up in surprise. What was it like to be watched for twelve years?
“He was. He’s dead.”
Professor Brandt stared at him. “And that’s why you want to see Emil. As a friend.”
“That’s right, as a friend.”
He looked at Lena. “It’s true? He’s not trying to arrest him?”
“Do you think I would help with that?” she said.
“No,” Jake said, answering for her, “but I’m worried. Two weeks is a long time to be missing in Germany these days. This is the last man who saw him, and he’s dead.”
“What are you saying? You think Emil-”
“No, I don’t think. I don’t want to see him end up the same way, either.” He paused, taking in Professor Brandt’s startled expression. “He may know something, that’s all. We need to find him. He hasn’t been to Lena’s. The only other place he’d go is to you.”
“No, not to me.”
“He did before.”
“Yes, and what did I say to him? That day with the SS,” he said, running the film again. ‘“Don’t come back.’” He looked away. “He won’t come here. Not now.”
“Well, if he does, you know where Lena is,” Jake said, putting the picture back.
“I sent him away,” Professor Brandt said, still in his own thoughts. “What else could I do? SS. I was right to do that.”
“Yes, you were right. You’re always right,” Lena said wearily, turning away. “Nowlook.”
“Lena-”
“Oh, no more. I’m tired of arguing. Always politics.”
“Not politics,” he said, shaking his head. “Not politics. You think it was politics, what they did?”
She held his eyes for a moment, then turned to Jake. “Let’s go.”
“You’ll come again?” Professor Brandt said, his voice suddenly tentative and old.
She went over and put her hand near his shoulder, then brushed the front of his suit as if she were about to adjust his tie, a gesture of unexpected gentleness. He stood straight, letting her smooth out the material, a substitute for an embrace. “I’ll press it for you next time,” she said. “Do you need anything? Food? Jake can get food.”
“Some coffee, perhaps,” he said, hesitant, reluctant to ask.
Lena gave his suit a final pat and moved away, not waiting for them to follow.
“I’ll walk a little now,” Professor Brandt said, then glanced toward Lena’s back. “She’s like a daughter to me.”
Jake simply nodded, not knowing what to say. Professor Brandt drew himself up, shoulders back, and put on his hat.
“Herr Geismar? If you find Emil-” He stopped, choosing his words carefully. “Be a friend to him, with the Americans. There is some trouble, I think. So help him. You’re surprised I ask that? This old German, so strict. But a child-it’s always there, in your heart. Even when they become-what they become. Even then.”
Jake looked at him, standing tall and alone in the muddy field. “Emil didn’t put people on trains. There’s a difference.”
Professor Brandt lifted his head toward the scorched building then turned back to Jake, lowering the brim of his hat. “You be the judge of that.”
When they got back to the jeep, Jake took a minute to look into Professor Brandt’s street, but no one was there, not even young Willi, keeping watch for cigarettes.
Nothing had changed at Frau Dzuris‘-the same dripping hallway, the same boiling potatoes, the same hollow-eyed children watching furtively from the bedroom.
“Lena, my god, it’s you. So you found her. Children, look who’s here, it’s Lena. Come.”
But it was Jake who drew their attention, pulling out chocolate bars, which they snatched up, tearing off the shiny Hershey wrappers before Frau Dzuris could stop them.
“Such manners. Children, what do you say?”
A mumbled thanks between bites.
“Come, sit. Oh, Eva will be sorry to miss you. She’s at church again. Every day, church. What are you praying for, I say, manna? Tell God to send potatoes.”
“She’s well, then? And your son?”
“Still in the east,” she said, dropping her voice. “I don’t know where. Maybe she prays for him. But there’s no God there. Not in Russia.”
Jake had expected to stay two minutes, a simple question, but now sat back at the table, giving way to the inevitable visit. It was a Berlin conversation, comparing survivor lists. Greta from downstairs. The block leader who chose the wrong shelter. Frau Dzuris’ son, safe from the army, then trapped at the Siemens plant and hauled off by the Russians.
“And Emil?” Frau Dzuris said with a sidelong glance at Jake.
“I don’t know. My parents are dead,” Lena said, changing the subject.
“A raid?”
“Yes, I just heard.”
“So many, so many,” Frau Dzuris said, shaking her head, then brightened. “But to see you together again-it’s lucky.”
“Yes, for me,” Lena said with a weak smile, looking at Jake. “He saved my life. He got me medicine.”
“You see? The Americans-I always said they were good. But it’s a special case with Lena, eh?” she said to Jake, almost waggish.
“Yes, special.”
“You know, he may not come back,” she said to Lena. “You can’t blame the women. The men made the war and then it’s the women who wait. But for how long? Eva’s waiting. Well, he’s my son, but I don’t know. How many come back from Russia? And we have to eat. How will she feed the children without a man?”
Lena looked over at them still eating the chocolate, her face softening. “They’ve grown. I wouldn’t recognize them.” She seemed for a moment someone else, back in a part of her life Jake had never known, that had happened without him.
“Yes, and what’s to become of them? Living like this, potatoes only. It’s worse than during the war. And now we’ll have the Russians.”
Jake took this as an opening. “Frau Dzuris, the soldier who was looking for Lena and Emil-he was a Russian?”
“No, an Ami.”
“This man?” He handed her the picture.
“No, no, I told you before, tall. Blond, like a German. A German name even.”
“He gave you his name?”
“No, here,” she said, putting her finger above her breast, where a nameplate would have been.
“What name?”
“I don’t remember. But German. I thought, it’s true what they say. No wonder the Amis won-all German officers. Look at Eisenhower,” she said, floating it as a light joke.
Jake took the picture back, disappointed, the lead suddenly gone.
“So he wasn’t looking for Emil,” Lena said to the picture, sounding relieved.
“Something’s wrong?” Frau Dzuris said.
“No,” Jake said. “I just thought it might be this man. The American who was here-did he say why he came to you?”
“Like you-the notice in Pariserstrasse. I thought he must be a friend of yours,” she said to Lena, “from before, when you worked for the Americans. Oh, not like you,” she said, smiling at Jake. She turned to Lena. “You know, I always knew. A woman can tell. And now, to find each other again. Can I say something to you? Don’t wait, not like Eva. So many don’t come back. You have to live. And this one.” To Jake’s embarrassment, she patted his hand. “To remember the chocolate.”
It took them another five minutes to get out of the flat, Frau Dzuris talking, Lena lingering with the children, promising to come again.
“Frau Dzuris,” Jake said to her at the door, “if anyone should come-”
“Don’t worry,” she said, conspiratorial, misunderstanding. “I won’t give you away.” She nodded toward Lena, starting down the stairs. “You take her to America. There’s nothing here now.”
In the street, he stopped and looked back at the building, still puzzled.
“Now what’s the matter?” Lena said. “You see, it wasn’t him. It’s good, yes? No connection.”
“But it should have been. It makes sense. Now I’m back where I started. Anyway, who did come?”
“Your friend said the Americans would look for Emil. Someone from Kransberg, maybe.”
“But not Tully,” he said stubbornly, still preoccupied.
“You think everyone’s looking for Emil,” she said, getting into the jeep to leave.
He started around to his side, then stopped, looking at the ground. “Except the Russian. He was looking for you.”
She glanced over at him. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Trying to add two and two.” He got in the jeep. “But I need Emil to do that. Where the hell is he, anyway?”
“You were never so anxious to see him before.”
Jake turned the key. “Nobody was murdered before.”
Emil didn’t come. The next few days fell into a kind of listless waiting, looking out the window, listening for footsteps on the quiet landing. When they made love now, it seemed hurried, as if they expected someone to come through the door at any minute, their time run out. Hannelore was back, her Russian having moved on, and her presence, chattering, oblivious to the waiting, made the tension worse, so that Jake felt he was pacing even when he was sitting still, watching her lay out cards on the table hour after hour until her future came out right.
“You see, there he is again. The spades mean strength, that’s what Frau Hinkel says. Lena, you have to see her-you won’t believe it, how she sees things. I thought, you know, well, it’s just fun. But she knows. She knew about my mother-how could she know that? I never said a word. And not some gypsy either-a German woman. Right behind KaDeWe, imagine, all this time. It’s a gift to be like that. Here’s the jack again-you see, two men, just as she said.”
“Only two?” Lena said, smiling.
“Two marriages. I said one is enough, but no, she says it always comes up two.”
“What’s the good of knowing that? All during the first, you’ll be wondering about the second.”
Hannelore sighed. “I suppose. Still, you should go.”
“You go,” Lena said. “I don’t want to know.”
It was true. While Jake waited and worked the crossword puzzle in his head-Tully down, Emil across, trying to fit them together-Lena seemed oddly content, as if she had decided to let things take care of themselves. The news of her parents had depressed her and then seemed to be put aside, a kind of fatalism Jake assumed had come with the war, when it was enough to wake up alive. In the mornings she went to a DP nursery to help with the children; afternoons, when Hannelore was out, they made love; evenings she turned the canned rations into meals, busy with ordinary life, not looking beyond the day. It was Jake who waited, at loose ends.
They went out. There was music in a roofless church, a humid evening with tired German civilians nodding their heads to a scratchy Beethoven trio and Jake taking notes for a piece because Collier’s would like the idea of music rising from the ruins, the city coming back. He took her to Ronny’s, to check in with Danny, but when they got there, drunken shouts pouring out to the street, she balked, and he went in alone, but neither Danny nor Gunther was there, so they walked a little farther down the Ku’damm to a cinema the British had opened. The theater, hot and crowded, was showing Blithe Spirit, and to his surprise the audience, all soldiers, enjoyed it, roaring at Madame Arcati, whistling at Kay Hammond’s floating nightgown. Dressing for dinner, coffee and brandy in the sitting room afterward-it all seemed to be happening on another planet.
It was only when the lush color changed to the grainy black-and-white of the newsreel that they were back in Berlin-literally so, Attlee arriving to take Churchill’s place, another photo session at the Cecilienhof, the new Three arranged on the terrace just as the old Three had been that first time, before the money started blowing across the lawn. Then the Allied football game, with Breimer at the microphone winning the peace and fists raised in the end zone as the British made their unlikely score. Jake smiled to himself. In the jumble of spliced film, at least, they had won the game. The clip switched to a collapsing house. “Another kind of touchdown, as an American newsman makes a daring rescue-”
“My god, it’s you,” Lena said, gripping his arm.
He watched himself on the porch, arm around the German woman as if they had just emerged from the wreck, and for an instant even he forgot what had really happened, the film’s chronology more convincing than memory.
“You never told me,” she said.
“It didn’t happen that way,” he whispered.
“No? But you can see.”
And what could he say? That he only appeared to be where he was? The film had made it real. He shifted in his seat, disturbed. What if nothing was what it seemed? A ball game, a newsreel hero. How we looked at things determined what they were. A dead body in Potsdam. A wad of money. One thing led to another, piece by piece, but what if you got the arrangement wrong? What if the house collapsed afterward?
When the lights came on, she took his silence for modesty.
“And you never said. So now you’re famous,” she said, smiling.
He moved them into the swarm of British khaki in the aisle.
“How did you get her out?” Lena said.
“We walked. Lena, it never happened.”
But from her expression he could see that it had, and he gave it up. They moved into the lobby with a crowd of British officers and their Hannelores.
“Well, the man of the hour himself.” Brian Stanley, tugging at his sleeve. “A hero, no less. I am surprised.”
Jake grinned. “Me too,” he said, and introduced Lena.
“Fraulein,” Brian said, taking her hand. “And what do we think of him now? Very Boy’s Own, I must say. Come for a drink?”
“Another time,” Jake said.
“Oh, it’s like that. Enjoy the film? Apart from yourself, that is.”
They passed through the door to the warm evening air.
“Sure. Make you homesick?” Jake said.
“Dear boy, that’s the England that never was. We’re the land of the common man now, haven’t you heard? Mr. Attlee insists. Of course, I’m common myself, so I don’t mind.”
“It still looks pretty cushy on film,” Jake said.
“Well, it would. Made before the war, you know. Couldn’t release it while the play was on and of course it ran forever, so they’re just now getting around to it. You see how young Rex looks.”
“The things you know,” Jake said. Another trick of chronology.
Brian lit a cigarette. “How are you getting on with your case? The chap in the boots.”
“I’m not. I’ve been distracted.”
Brian glanced at Lena. “Not by the conference, I gather. I never see you around at all. The thing is, you got me thinking a bit. About the luggage and all that. What occurred to me was, how did he get on the plane in the first place?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it was a scramble. You remember. Had to pull strings just to get on the damn thing.”
“So what strings did he pull?” Jake said, finishing for him.
“Something like that. There we were, packed in like sardines. The Honorable and everyone. And then one more. All very last-minute.
No bags, as if he hadn’t expected to go. More like he’d been summoned, if you see what I mean.“
But Jake had leaped ahead to something else-how had Emil managed it? No one just walked onto a plane, certainly not a German.
“I don’t suppose they found any travel orders?” Brian was saying.
“Not that I know of.”
“Of course, it may have been the old greased palm-I’ve done it myself. But if someone okayed it? I mean, if you’re so curious about him, it might be useful to know.”
“Yes,” Jake said. Who had okayed Emil?
“You never know with the army-they keep a record of everything except what’s useful. But there must have been some kind of manifest. Anyway, it’s just a thought.”
“Keep thinking for a minute,” Jake said. “How would a German get here?”
“How does anybody? Military transport-he’d have to hitch a ride. There isn’t any civilian transport. I supposed he could bicycle in, if he didn’t mind the Russians running him off the road. They do it for fun, I hear.”
“Yes,” Lena said. Brian looked at her, surprised that she’d been following the conversation.
“Anyone particular in mind?” he said to Jake.
“Just a friend of mine,” Jake said quickly, before Lena could interrupt. “He’s been due for over a week.”
“Well, there’s nothing to that. Do you have any idea what it’s like out there?” He swept his hand in a broad gesture to the dark space beyond the city. “Chaos. Absolute bloody chaos. Seen the autobahns? Refugees going this way and that. Poles going home. And good luck to them. Sleep anywhere you can. He’s probably in a hayloft somewhere, rubbing his feet.”
“A hayloft.”
“Well, a bit of color. I shouldn’t worry; he’ll turn up.”
“But if he flew-” Jake said, still thinking.
“A German? Need to pull some big strings for that. Anyway, he’d be here, wouldn’t he?”
Jake sighed. “Yes, he’d be here.” He looked at the thinning crowd as if Emil might suddenly appear, strolling down the Ku’damm.
“Well, I’ve got a drink waiting. Fraulein.” He nodded at Lena. “Mind you stay out of falling houses,” he said, winking at Jake. “Once lucky. Lovely how we won the game, wasn’t it?”
“Lovely,” Jake said, smiling.
“There’s a thing, by the way. What’s he up to, the Honorable?”
“Why would he be up to anything?”
“He’s still here. Now your average poobah, they’re in and out. Not that I blame them. But there’s the Honorable, lingering, lingering. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
Jake looked at him. “Does it?”
“Me? No. Made Tommy Ottinger wonder, though. Says he’s really just a point man for American Dye.”
“And?”
“And Tommy’s going home. I hate to see a story go to waste. You might want to look into it-if you’ve got the time, that is.” Another quick glance at Lena.
“Tommy’s giving away stories now?”
“Well, you know Tommy. A few drinks and he’ll tell you anything. Strictly an American affair, of course, so no good to me. Anyway, there’s a tip. I have to say, I rather like the idea of catching the Honorable with his hand in the till.”
“His hand in what till?”
“Well, Tommy thought he might be up to some private reparations. Just a little something for American Dye. Which, to their way of thinking, is pretty good for the country too, so it’s patriotic looting, really. They talk their heads off at Potsdam about reparations and meanwhile they’re stripping the place clean.”
“I thought it was the Russians doing the stripping.”
“And not your clean-cut American boys. Football players one and all, if you believe the films. No, this is the game. The Russians don’t know what to take-just pack up the power plants and anything shiny and hope for the best. But the Allies-oh, we’re doing it too, God bless us-now, that’s something different. Experts, we’ve got. Tech units all over the country, just hauling off the good bits. Blueprints. Formulas. Research papers. Picking their brains, you might say. You were at Nordhausen. They got all the documents there-fourteen tons of paper, if you can believe it. And of course you can’t, because nobody can get the story-you get near it and poof, off it goes. Classified. Ghosts. There’s a thought-maybe we should give Madame Arcati a go, she might get somewhere.“
He stopped, his expression serious. “That’s what I’d look into, Jake. This is a real story, and no one’s got it-just a whiff once in a while. The Russians get fussed and bark at us-you kidnapped the engineers at Zeiss! — then of course they turn around and do the same thing. And on it goes. Until there’s nothing left to steal, I guess. Reparations. That’s the story I’d go after.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t have the legs for it. Not anymore. Needs someone young who doesn’t mind a bit of trouble.”
“Why Breimer?” Jake said. “What makes you think he’s doing anything but making dumb speeches?”
“Well, the man at the stadium, for one thing. Remember him? Thick as thieves. He’s with one of the tech units.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked,” Brian said, raising an eyebrow.
Jake looked at him steadily, then grinned. “You don’t miss a thing, do you?”
“Not much,” he said, returning the smile. “Well, I’m off. You’ve got a tired young lady wanting to go home and here I am, blathering on. Fraulein.” He nodded to Lena again, then turned to Jake. “Think about it, will you? Be nice to see you back at work again.”
Jake put his arm around Lena and headed them toward Olivaerplatz, away from the streetwalkers and cruising jeeps. There was moonlight, so that you could see the broken tops of buildings against the sky, spiky, like jagged pieces of gothic script.
“Is it true what he says? About the scientists? They want to pick Emil’s brain too?”
“That depends on what he knows,” he said, evasive, then nodded. Yes.
“Now them. Everybody wants to find Emil.”
“He must have flown,” Jake said, still thinking. “Nobody walks from Frankfurt. So either he hasn’t got here yet or he’s hiding somewhere.”
“Why would he hide?”
“A man’s dead. If they did meet-”
“Still the policeman.”
“Or he got a ride. He did before.”
“When he came for me, you mean.”
“With the SS. Some ride.”
“He wasn’t SS.”
“He came with them. His father told me.”
“Oh, he’ll say anything. So bitter. To think, the only family I have now, a man like that. To send away a child.”
“He’s not a child anymore.”
“But SS. Emil?”
“Why would he lie, Lena?” he said gently, turning to her. “It must be right.”
She took this in, then turned away, literally not facing it. “Right. He’s always right.”
“You like him, though. I could see.”
“Well, I feel sorry. There’s nothing for him now, not even his work. He resigned when they fired the Jews. That’s when the fighting started, with Emil. So he was right, but now look.”
“What did he teach?”
“Mathematics. Like Emil. They said at the institute he was their Bach-passing the gift, you know? Just alike. The two Professor Brandts. Then one.”
“Maybe Emil should have resigned too.”
She walked for a minute, not answering. “It’s easy to say now. But then-who knew it would end? Sometimes it seemed the Nazis would be here forever. It was the world we lived in, can you understand that?”
“I was here too.”
“But not a German. There was always something else for you. But Emil? I don’t know-I can’t answer for him. So maybe his father’s right. But your friend, he wants to make him a criminal. He was never that. Not SS.”
“They gave him a medal. It’s in his file. I saw it. Services to the state. You didn’t know?”
She shook her head.
“He never told you? But didn’t you talk? You were married. How could you not talk?”
She stopped, looking across Olivaerplatz, empty and moonlit. “So you want to talk about Emil? Yes, why not? He’s here. Like in the film, the ghost who comes back. Always in the room. No, he never told me. Maybe he thought it was better. Services to the state. My god. For numbers.” She looked up. “I didn’t know. What can I say to you? How can you live with someone and not know him? You think it’s hard. It’s easy. At first you talk and then-” She trailed off, back in her head again. “I don’t know why. The work, I think. We didn’t talk about that-how could we? I didn’t understand it. But he lived for that. And then, after the war started, everything was secret. Secret. He wasn’t allowed. So you talk about daily things, little things, and then after a while not even that, you don’t have the habit anymore. There’s nothing left to talk about.”
“There was a child.”
She looked at him, uncomfortable. “Yes, there was a child. We talked about him. Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice. He was away so much. I had Peter. That’s how things were with us. Then, after Peter-even the talking stopped. What was there to say then?” She turned away. “I don’t blame him. How can I? He was a good father, a good husband. And me, was I a good wife? I tried that once. And all the time we were-” She faced him again. “It wasn’t him. Me. I stopped.”
“Why did you marry him?”
She shrugged, making a wry smile. “I wanted to be married. To have my own house. In those days, you know, it wasn’t so easy. If you were a nice girl, you lived at home. When I came to Berlin, I had to live with Frau Willentz-she knew my parents-and it was worse, she was always waiting at the door when I came in. You know, at that age-” She paused. “It seems so silly now. I wanted my own dishes. Dishes. And, you know, I was fond of Emil. He was nice, came from a good family. His father was a professor-even my parents couldn’t object to that. Everybody wanted it. So I got my dishes. They had flowers-poppies. Then, one raid and they were gone. Just like-”
She looked at the crumbled buildings, then picked up the thread again. “Now I wonder why I wanted them. All that life. I don’t know-who knows why we do what we do? Why did I go with you?”
“Because I asked.”
“Yes, you asked,” she said, still looking at the buildings. “I knew, even that first time. At the Press Club, that party. I remember thinking, nobody ever looked at me this way. As if you knew a secret about me.
“What secret?”
“That I would say yes. That I was like that. Not a good wife.”
“Don’t, ”Jake said.
“So I couldn’t be faithful to him,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard. “But I don’t want to hurt him. Isn’t it enough to leave him? Now we have to be policemen too? Waiting here, like spiders, to trap him.”
“Nobody’s trying to trap him. According to Bernie, they want to offer him a job.”
“Picking his brain. And then what? Oh, let’s go now. Leave Berlin.”
“Lena, I can’t get you out of Germany. You know that. You’d have to be-”
“Your wife,” she finished, a resigned nod. “And I’m not.”
“Not yet,” he said, touching her. “It’ll be different this time.” He smiled at her. “We’ll get new dishes. Stores in New York are full of them.”
“No, you only want that once. Now it’s something else.”
“What?”
She turned her head, not answering, then leaned against him. “Let’s just love each other. It’s enough now,” she said. “Just that.” She started walking again, pulling his hand lightly with hers. “Look where we are.”
They had turned without noticing into the end of Pariserstrasse, the heaps of rubble like pockets of shadow along the moonlit street. The washbasin was still perched on the mound of bricks where Lena’s building had been, its porcelain dull in the faint light, but Frau Dzuris’ notice had fallen over, the ink now streaked by rain.
“We should put up a new one,” he said. “In case.”
“Why? He knows I’m not here. He knew it was bombed.”
Jake looked at her. “But the American who went to Frau Dzuris didn’t know that. He came here first.”
“So?”
“So he hasn’t talked to Emil. Where did you go after?”
“A friend from the hospital. Her flat. Sometimes we just stayed at work. The cellars were safe there.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died. In the fire.”
“There must be someone. Think. Where would he go?”
She shook her head. “His father. He would go there. Like always.”
Jake sighed. “Then he’s not in Berlin.” He went over and righted the notice stick, wedging it in the bricks. “Well, we should do it for her, so her friends can find her.”
“Friends,” Lena said, almost snorting. “All the other Nazis.”
“Frau Dzuris?”
“Of course. During the war she always had the pin, you know, the swastika. Right here.” She touched her chest. “She loved the speeches. Better than the theater, she used to say. She’d turn the radio up loud so everyone in the building would hear too. If they complained, she’d say, ‘Don’t you want to hear the Fiihrer? I’ll report you.’ Always the busybody.” She looked away from the rubble. “Well, that’s finished too. At least no more speeches. You didn’t know?”
“No,” he said, disconcerted. A lover of poppyseed cakes.
A truck roared into the street, catching Lena in its headlights.
“Look out.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the bricks.
“Frau! Frau!” Guttural shouts, followed by laughs. In the open back of the truck, a group of Russian soldiers, holding bottles. “ Komme!” one of them shouted as the truck slowed.
Jake could feel her freeze beside him, her entire body rigid. He stepped into the street so that his uniform was visible in the light.
“Get lost,” he said, jerking his fingers at the truck.
“ Amerikanski,” one of them shouted back, but the uniform had its effect. The men who had started to get off the back stopped, one of them now raising a bottle to toast Lena, someone else’s property. A joke in Russian went around the truck. The men saluted Jake and laughed.
“Beat it,” he said, hoping his tone of voice would be the translation.
“ Amerikanski,” the soldier said again, taking a drink, then suddenly pointed behind Jake and shouted something in Russian. Jake turned. In the moonlight, a rat had stopped on the porcelain basin, nose up. Before he could move, the Russian took out a gun and fired, the noise exploding around them, making Jake’s stomach contract. He ducked. The rat scampered away, but now other guns were firing too, a spontaneous target practice, hitting the porcelain with a series of pings until it cracked, a whole piece of it lifting up and flying away like the rat. Behind him, he could feel Lena clutching his shirt. A few steps and they would be in the line of fire, as unpredictable as a drunken aim. And then, abruptly, it stopped and the men started laughing again. One of them banged the roof of the cab to get the truck moving and, looking at Jake, threw a vodka bottle to him as it drove off. Jake caught it with both hands, a football, and stood looking at it, then tossed it onto the bricks.
Lena was shaking all over now, as if the smash of the bottle had released everything her fear had kept still. “Pigs,” she said, holding on to him.
“They’re just drunk,” he said, but he was rattled. You could die here in a second, on a trigger-happy whim. What if he hadn’t been here? He imagined Lena running down the street, her own street, being chased into shadows. As his eyes followed the truck, he saw a basement light go on-someone waiting in the dark until the shooting passed. Only the rats could run fast enough.
“Let’s go back to the Ku’damm,” she said.
“It’s all right. They won’t come back,” he said, holding her. “We’re almost at the church.”
But in fact the street frightened him too, sinister now in the pale light, unnaturally still. When they passed a standing wall, the moon disappeared behind it for a minute and they were back in the early days of the blackout, when you picked your way home by the eerie glow of phosphorus strips. But at least there’d been noise, traffic and whistles and wardens barking orders. Now the silence was complete, not even disturbed by Frau Dzuris’ radio.
“They never change,” Lena said, her voice low. “When they first came, it was so terrible we thought, it’s the end. But it wasn’t. It’s still the same.”
“At least they’re not shooting people anymore,” he said easily, trying to move away from it. “They’re soldiers, that’s all. It’s just their way of having fun.”
“They had their fun then too,” she said, her voice bitter. “You know, in the hospital they took the new mothers, the pregnant women, they didn’t care. Anybody. They liked the screaming. They laughed. I think it excited them. I’ll never forget that. Everywhere in the building. Screams.“
“That’s over now,” he said, but she seemed not to hear.
“Then we had to live under them. Two months-forever. To know what they did and then see them in the street, wondering when it would start again. Every time I looked at one, I heard the screams. I thought, I can’t live like this. Not with them-”
“Ssh,” Jake said, reaching up to her hair the way a parent soothes a sick child, trying to make it all go away. “That’s over.”
But he could see in her face that it wasn’t. She turned away. “Let’s go home.”
He looked at her back. He wanted to say something more, but her shoulders were hunched away from him, waiting now for more soldiers in the shadowy street.
“They won’t come back,” he said, as if it made any difference. Contents — Previous Chapter / Next Chapter