Petty Magic (22 page)

I found an opportunity for a new cover in Albrecht’s elderly mother, who was suffering from an eye infection so acute that I found it difficult to look at her directly. The skin round her eyes was covered in sores. When I asked, Albrecht told me that the condition was chronic and that she was often in a great deal of discomfort.

I suggested she might benefit from the services of a private nurse, and Frau Hoppe looked at me dubiously. “But do you have any experience?”

I supposed there was little use trying to make her understand that I would be
posing
as her nurse, and that it was her dumb luck I happened to be trained. “Actually, I do. I was trained at a hospital in the city.”

“Berlin?”

It was only a tiny fib. I nodded, and she was satisfied. Despite her ailment, Frau Hoppe was quick to laugh and generally in high spirits. Between outbreaks, she would sing as she went about her work in the kitchen, and over the two months they sheltered us I grew quite fond of her. I sometimes made an ointment that would ease her discomfort, plucking all the herbs I needed from her window box as if they’d grown there without my help.

Jonah spent that first day exploring the outbuildings on the vacant farmstead and found several places where we might hide the radio. There was a tiny crawl space above the milking shed, accessible only by a trapdoor in the corner stall; we thought that might prove useful at some point.

Though the house was isolated, we thought it best to sleep in the stable. It was a massive structure, with two stories, and the whole place still had that pleasantly musty smell of hay and leather. There was a row of windows on either side of the loft, so that during the day the great open space was flooded with dust motes twirling in the sunlight. There was a door to the loft on the upper story, but the outside staircase had been removed so the wood panels on the side of the building were discolored where the stairs had been. The owner, rest his soul, had nailed several planks across the door on the inside so that no one could open it by mistake.

The Hoppes were starved for company, Adelaide and her grandmother especially. First the child sought us out in the daytime, then her grandmother began to linger after she’d brought the food basket. She’d sit and watch us eat our dinner, and it wasn’t long before she was telling us about the family who would, in all likelihood, never return there. They had had a child about Addie’s age, she said. She hoped he was safe.

A
FTER HANS’S
capture, Jonah served as organizer as well as radio operator—through Morven’s locket, I’d been able to arrange for an arms drop that also included rations and a new radio. Unlike Jonah, I could afford to do much of my work by day. Frau Hoppe was fond of napping in the afternoons, and once she was sleeping soundly I would make myself into a hawk to observe the activity along roads and railroad lines in and out of the mountains. If I wanted to eavesdrop, I would turn myself into a barn cat or a pigeon. I gathered still more intelligence from members of the resistance, though they would never have identified themselves as such.

There was a limit to what most men were willing to do, and some nights it drove me mad. Hoppe came to the stable one night with our dinner of sausages and boiled potatoes, and we invited him up to our humble table in the hayloft for a spot of whisky. He was plainly uncomfortable, but Jonah was making a heartfelt effort to put him at ease.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I pressed him. The next time he went into town, I said, he should keep an ear out for any talk of
Werwölfe
.

He was astonished. “Werewolves?”

“Die Bandenkämpfer,”
I said. “The Nazi guerrillas. They are expecting an Allied invasion, so there are men preparing for it now up in those camps in the woods.” I suspected most of the “werewolves” were little more than schoolboys, but it was better to err on the side of overestimation. “I’d like to know how many they’ve recruited.”

Albrecht didn’t answer.

“Will you listen out for me?”

“People don’t talk of such things. Not at the market. Not anywhere.”

“People always talk of such things.”

“You are mistaken,
Fraulein.”

I slammed my mug on the table, folded my arms, and glared at him.
“When?”
I said, rather more loudly than I ought.
“When
will you resist?”

Jonah took hold of my arm, and I yelped like a startled hound. “Remember yourself, Uta,” he said in English. “This man is sheltering us.” After a moment he said more gently, “He
is
resisting.”

Over my shoulder I looked at the farmer seated on an overturned milk crate. He was staring at the floor as he swished the last drops of whisky around the tin cup in his work-worn hands. He couldn’t have been more than forty-five, but suddenly he seemed ancient as a prophet. I wanted to rage at him, to make him understand that it wasn’t enough to keep his fist in his pocket.

“Everyone capable of active resistance is dead,” Jonah said quietly. He paused. “Or will be, shortly.”

“He’s
capable.”

“No, he’s not.” Jonah spoke with the patience of a schoolteacher. “And you’ve got to accept it.”

Things were awkward between myself and Hoppe from then on, though he seemed to bear me no ill will. The next time I visited his house, the portrait of the Führer had disappeared from the mantelpiece.

O
UR FIRST
success came in late November, when Allied fighter planes bombed a train carrying forty V-
2S
from the Mittelwerk plant. All the rockets were shipped back to the factory for scrap.

I’d never seen Jonah so energized, so full of purpose, though that’s not to say he wasn’t well aware of the danger we were in. There was a blind dog, a Saint Bernard, at the next farm up from the Hoppes’, and whenever I laid eyes on the poor thing I knew there’d be a German direction-finding car out that night. On those nights Jonah couldn’t use the wireless telegraph set, and I warned the Hoppes well in advance to keep their radio hidden. They assumed I had come by the intelligence somewhere in town that day and didn’t question me.

I would come back after midnight, and once I’d given him my report—and provided there’d been no portent that day—Jonah would pull out his wireless case and set to work. I fell asleep listening to his nimble forefinger making a soft
rat-a-tat-tat
on the transmitter. Sometimes we’d climb up onto the roof of the stable and watch the sunrise, bundled up together in a scratchy wool blanket.

Our conversations inevitably hinged on our families, our ambitions, our regrets, all the choices that had led us to this very moment: perched precariously on an old tiled roof that might give way anytime, in the freezing dark of a hostile country. We looked up at the great celestial wilderness, and I told him which stars were dead and which were dying.

“How can you possibly know that?”

I shrugged. “I just do.” I’d dallied with an astronomer in Berlin, and when I started pointing out which stars I believed were dead, he’d looked into his telescope and told me I was right.

Other nights we’d see the Allied planes flying in formation on their way to Berlin, and when the moonlight caught the tinfoil they dropped to jam the German radar, it looked like a meteor shower on the horizon.

It would have lent a nice shape to this story if I could tell you he promised to marry me someday, but he didn’t. It wasn’t the thought of Patricia that kept him from it, or the knowledge that we would not age in tandem. I suppose part of him just
knew
somehow that he wasn’t going to live long enough.

He asked me one night if I’d ever wanted children. “Not especially,” I said. “I have enough trouble taking care of myself, you know.” He laughed at how true this was. “Why—did you?”

He nodded. “We tried for a few months before I left.”

I felt a wave of nausea at the thought of Jonah making love to another woman hoping for a child. To me Patricia was a spectral figure, ever the dark shape at the foot of the bed—provided there was a bed to sleep in.

He drew out his tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. “Of course, looking back on it now, I’m glad it didn’t happen. That’s the problem with marriage,” he said as he licked the paper. “It’s only after the fact that you become intimately acquainted with one another’s faults. I have my share, Patricia has hers. Some faults you can live with, and others …” He lit the cigarette and handed it to me.

“And others, you can’t,” I said.

He looked at me and nodded.

“What are the faults you can’t live with?”

“Patricia is … well, she’s exceptionally bright. Bookish, you know.” I handed it back, and he took a long, pensive drag.

“What’s the good of knowing half a dozen languages if you never use any of them?”

“That’s it, exactly. She belongs in that office with all her maps and card indexes.” He paused. “All brains and no guts.”

“Surely you knew that beforehand.”

He looked sad. “I thought it wouldn’t matter.”

“Or do you think perhaps you weren’t cut out for it?”

“Not cut out for marriage?” Plainly this notion had never occurred to him.

“Halves one’s rights and doubles one’s duties, you know.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not that I wasn’t cut out for it. I loved Patricia—I still do—and I can’t say our marriage was a mistake. But …”

I didn’t press him there; there was no need to say any more.

“I wonder about you sometimes,” he said after a brief silence.

“What about me?”

“You’ve no nerves at all. You never cry, you never panic.” He paused. “How can I be so in love with a girl who seems so inhuman?”

I sat up abruptly, shivered, and turned away from him so he wouldn’t see my face. “I
do
feel,” I said, looking up at the sky. It had grown so cold all of a sudden. “I feel plenty.”

“Oh, darling,” he said as he reached for me. “I didn’t mean it—I know you do. You just don’t show it, do you?”

“Be fair, Jonah. It has been known to happen, on occasion.”

He smiled sympathetically. “Like now?”

I didn’t answer, just stared out at the forest and the mountains and the blooming light in the east. “I’ll never understand it,” I said finally. “How you can sit here thousands of miles away from your wife and talk about her the way you do. What’s the difference between how you love me now and how you loved her then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it different?”

“Of course it is! But why are you so hurt? You’ve loved other men.”

“I didn’t love them,” I replied. “Flings are one thing. Marriage is meant to be for keeps. You must have thought you knew, when you married her.”

“This is different,” he replied. “I know it now—because of Patricia.” He didn’t say anything for a while. “Just think of it: if I hadn’t jumped off that train, I would never have known you.” He pulled me tight and tucked my head under his chin. I felt his heart beating against my cheek.
“This
is for keeps, Eve.”

So you see, he never asked me to marry him. But he didn’t have to.

A
S THE
nights got colder Frau Hoppe started inviting us to pass some evenings with her family. Would we care to listen to the BBC?

Two German soldiers had passed through a few weeks back and had offered some of their rations in exchange for milk and bread. Addie showed me two packages of
Lakritzen
—ropes of salty licorice—and four fifty-gram bars of phony chocolate.

“It is foul stuff,” she told me, and I couldn’t help laughing. “No wonder the soldiers are so bad tempered. Before the war Papa used to bring us real chocolate from Berlin. Will we ever have real chocolate again, Frau Uta?”

“Yes, Addie,” I said. “I’m quite sure you will. Say, why don’t you go over there and look in my knapsack? The front pocket, yes, that’s right.”

The little girl was thrilled to find a stash of Cadbury’s ration chocolate, all the labels removed of course.

Jonah looked at me in amazement. “Where did you get that?”

“A warehouse in Kent,” I whispered back.

“It’s real chocolate, Oma!”

“It can’t be. Let me taste a little.” Frau Hoppe broke off a piece and popped it in her mouth. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her eyelids fluttered, and she let out a little groan of pleasure. Addie giggled and reached for the wrapper, but her grandmother slipped the rest of the chocolate into her apron pocket and swatted the little girl’s hand away.

“You mustn’t have any more, Addie. It is bad for your teeth.”

“You can’t fool me, Oma,” the little girl said good-naturedly. “You want it all for yourself.”

Her grandmother broke into a guilty grin before relenting, and between the two of them they devoured the bar in seconds flat.

“Is there any more?”

“Addie!” her grandmother hissed. “Don’t be rude, child.” But Frau Hoppe caught my eye, and plainly she was wondering the same thing. I nodded to Addie, who eagerly plunged her hand into the rucksack pocket once more.

“How did you fit all that chocolate in there?” Frau Hoppe cried in delight as she tore off the foil wrapper.

When their sweet teeth were satisfied at last, Addie pulled a string of marionettes out of her little toy chest. The pride of her collection was a girl puppet with a dirndl dress and blond ringlets made of real hair. It wasn’t a juju, but the craftsmanship was admirable all the same. Addie amused herself, and Jonah, by seating the pretty puppet on his knee and making cooing sounds. But when her father began pacing in front of the sitting room window, we knew it was time to go.

A
NOTHER NIGHT
, soon after that, Albrecht let Jonah use his razor. We were in an upstairs bedroom that hadn’t been slept in for a long time; there was dust on the furniture and the colors of the patchwork quilt on the bed were all too crisp.

Addie had brought up a bowl of hot water, and there were a large mirror, a badger-brush, and a cake of soap on the dresser. “Do you ever wonder what you’ll look like when you’re old?” I murmured as I watched him lather his cheeks.