Petty Magic (29 page)

Night and Fog

28.

1945–1946

She showed me mine, in crystal clear,
With several wild young blades, a soldier-lover:
I seek him everywhere, I pry and peer,
And yet, somehow, his face I can’t discover.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Faust

C
ARRY ON
and carry out, they tell you. But you feel quite sure the sun won’t rise the next morning, and when it does you resent it for shining.

After he hid me in the milking shed, tucked the dagger in its sheath inside the curve of my sleeping form and his father’s pocket watch in my hand, I like to think he kissed my lips and forehead and murmured a farewell in my ear.

He might have heard engines in the distance as he sprinted back to the stable and set fire to his notes. As the flames spread across the worktable, he would have drawn out the L-pill from a smaller bag inside his tobacco pouch and tucked it in his jaw before loading his pistol, all the while hearing the lorry grind to a halt outside, doors slamming, heavy footsteps but no orders shouted, not a word spoken. From one of the loft windows he’d have taken out four or five men before the rest could reach the door, but once they were inside the building … well.

I told you they killed him, and that wasn’t strictly true. He didn’t give them the chance.

I
DROPPED THROUGH
the trapdoor and came out of the milking shed to find both stable and farmhouse in cinders, the ruins still smoking in the wintry sunshine.

My first thought was that Albrecht Hoppe had betrayed us. It makes little sense in retrospect, of course; why would he cooperate with the men who were responsible for the death of one brother and would have taken any opportunity to do away with the other? But then again nothing made sense when it came to the German psyche in the grip of National Socialism, and I’m sorry to admit that in that first hour I put my whole heart into blaming Hoppe for Jonah’s death and the collapse of the mission. His mother’s behavior only added to my suspicion.

I hurried across the snowy fields between the abandoned farmstead and the Hoppes’ place and tapped at the kitchen door. Frau Hoppe was genuinely surprised to see me—shocked, even. I caught a faint whiff of pine from the garland still tacked to the wooden mantelpiece and thought,
The holiday is finished, everything is finished
. She stood solidly in the door frame, as if to say I was no longer welcome inside. “We thought for sure they had captured you,” she said. “Where did you come from?”

“I was hiding in the milking shed. Where … where is Herr Robbins?”

“Oh, but Herr Robbins is dead,” she said.
Dead?

“Tot,”
she said again, with an air much less sympathetic than I would have expected of her. “We heard gunshots. He killed some of their men before they got him. Albrecht could tell, because he saw more blood on the ground. But by the time my son got there they were all gone.”

I didn’t want to ask the next question, because in these paltry seconds I still had hope. I could bring him back. If it had happened less than three hours ago, I could bring him back.

“When was this?”

My heart sank when she answered me. Two days ago. Too late.

It took all I had left to hold myself together. “And … did they leave the body?”

She averted her eyes. “It is in the ice shed. But you cannot leave it there for much longer.
Verstehst du?
”

Frau Hoppe’s manner had changed in a twinkling. With all the muttering and hand-wringing, her eyes darting this way and that as she spoke, I didn’t need to read her mind to know she was eager to see the back of me. The aura of warmth and childlike mischief I had so admired in her was gone.

You see what fear does to people? Makes them small.

I swallowed my disgust as I said my last good-bye. I told her Jonah would be buried and I’d be gone before next morning. Albrecht and Addie were nowhere to be seen.

I
WENT TO
the ice shed and found his body under a tarpaulin in the corner. The Nazis had left him facedown in the snow, and my tears fell on his face as I brushed the grit from his nose and cheek. He looked almost as if he’d frozen to death. It’s the cyanide—turns your lips blue. I kissed him again and again, wishing the poison on his lips could have some effect on me.

For a good long while I sat on the floor beside his body, mulling over the prospect of life without him. And there’s no sense denying I thought of bringing him back just as the foolish young beldame had done at La Corbière.

But if I restored him—what then? He wouldn’t have been the man I remembered, for one thing, and he might have resented me for the strange, numb half life I would have imposed upon him. He might very well have hated me for not letting him rest in peace. Nor could I argue that we couldn’t complete our mission without him; Jonah would have been the first to tell me that a war can’t be lost by a solitary failure.

And then I thought of Cordelia Wynne and her cold black heart. He was gone, and I had to accept that. I’d wait until nightfall, and then I would bury him.

Jonah had left me the crystals but there hadn’t been time to hide the radio, and naturally the Nazis had retrieved it out of the smoldering ruin. I decided to find a loo and get back to London to deliver the intelligence in person, though the real reason for doing so was the good long cry I could have in Morven’s arms. The thought of seeing my sister again was the only thing that would keep me going over the next ten hours.

I spent that time covering our tracks. I would finally have to find out what happened to Hans; I had to face the likelihood that he had talked, and also the possibility that I mightn’t find a trace of him. They could have shot him weeks ago.

I flew back to Quedlinburg, to the roof of the town jail, and set about searching for our hapless radio operator. I didn’t really expect to find him there, but perhaps I could locate his name in one of their bloody ledger books. Then I could say I had tried.

I poked my little bird head into each cell in the basement prison block, feeling sorry that I could do very little for the sleeping, broken men inside them.
I could free them
, I thought,
but what would become of them after that?

But I did find Hans, in the last cell on the basement corridor. He was lying on a filthy pallet on the floor, staring sightlessly at the cracks in the ceiling. I hopped between the bars, resumed my womanly form, and he sprang up in horror. “Please, Uta,” he gasped. “Please don’t kill me!”

I stared at him.
“I’m
not the one you need to beg for your life.” I paused. “You talked to them, didn’t you?”

He looked up at me in abject misery. “I couldn’t stand it.”

“What they’ve done to you here is nothing compared to what would have happened to you in Berlin,” I said. “But I suppose they’ll be sending you there eventually.”

He clasped his hands together as if I were some terrible angel of judgment. “I did it for my children,” he said. “I said to myself, better a traitor who provides for them.”

I snorted. “Like you’re providing for them now? Like you’ll provide for them after they’ve shot you and thrown you in a hole?”

He didn’t speak for several moments. “What are you going to do to me?”

I was thinking of a sort of corollary to the beldames’ oath, one that said punishment for the genuinely penitent is a cruelty. And yet to leave him here
was
cruelty when his execution was a foregone conclusion.

In the end I freed every last prisoner that night, in the hope that they might find safe places to wait out the last few months of the war.

J
ONAH WAS
one of the lucky ones. They hadn’t worked and starved him to death. He hadn’t had to live with the shame of talking—not that he ever would have, I know that much for certain—and unlike the rest of his fallen colleagues, he would be given a proper burial.

Snow fell softly on the charred remains of the old farmhouse. Earlier in the day I had spotted an old yew tree not far from it, and I carried him over the fields toward it with a strength I didn’t know I had—a hideous inversion of a honeymoon night, but I could not bring myself to fold him into a wheelbarrow. There were two inches of snow by then and the ground was frozen solid, so I was obliged to spend a little more oomph making the hole.

For the second time in my life I wished I could find a holy man, but as it was, I had to see him off in my own way. First I stood above him for a good long while, until I could no longer feel my fingers or my face. I cried for all the missions he’d never fulfill, the lives that would be lost because of the broken link—and for the children he’d never sire, the future perfect family who would never give him joy or comfort—and I cried in the face of my own selfishness.

Then I prayed to the only god I knew. It didn’t take long; our burial rites are generally brief and to the point. I asked that Jonah’s spirit be allowed to return to its maker and be at peace there. “And please,” I said, “if it’s not too much to ask—send him back to me someday.”

The grave filled itself in as I took out Jonah’s carving knife to mark the trunk of the yew tree with a Star of David and the letters JAR.

It hit me then that I would see and touch and kiss him no more, and I wept with renewed bitterness. I knew now that nothing was ever “for keeps.”

O
F COURSE
, I had to use the Hoppes’ water closet to get back to London. I looked for signs of life in the house, but all was still. I hesitated outside for a minute or two—I did so want to see Adelaide one last time—and suddenly she was standing in front of me, stealthy as a fox though she was wearing heavy rubber boots under her woolen nightgown.

“Addie!” I reached out a hand to stroke her silky hair, wet with melted snow. “What are you doing here? You ought to be in bed!”

“I snuck out the window.” She looked at my soiled hands. “Oma says I can’t talk to you anymore.”

“Your Oma is right. I’ve got to go away now.”

“But why?”

“Because if I don’t, the bad men will catch me.”

“Like they caught Herr Robbins?”

“No, Addie. They didn’t catch him. He … he didn’t let them.”

“I heard guns,” she said. “But me and Oma hid in the cellar and it was all right.” Addie paused. “Frau Braun?”

“Yes?”

“Will I ever see you again?”

“I don’t know, Addie. But either way, always remember me as your friend. Will you do that?”

She nodded, smiled, and threw her arms about my waist in a brief but snug embrace. “Tell Herr Robbins good-bye for me, and good luck.” She ran off into the snowy darkness, toward the house and her warm bed, and I pinched my nose as I opened the privy door.

T
HE REST
hardly seems worth telling. I stayed in London for a few weeks, had my good long cry, and gave Morven Jonah’s pocket watch for safekeeping. OSS London had received Jonah’s transmission in its entirety, but the Allies had decided not to use the soap bomb to destroy the factory. The war in Europe would soon end by other means. But that night at the
Schloss
hadn’t all been for nothing: another shipment of V-
2S
had been destroyed en route from Nordhausen on the fourth of January.

One night, while I was staying with Morven in Little London, I opened his pocket watch and my heart thrilled when I saw a folded-up bit of paper tucked between the gears and the brass casing, but when I unfolded it with trembling fingers, all I found was an old cipher.

And then I went back to Germany for one last mission. At that point, the end was in sight and the Allies wanted us to gather evidence for the trials. It was as dangerous as any other mission and yet the easiest by far. Now there was nothing to lose.

I met my sister in London after V-day and we took the flue back to Cat’s Hollow, though my homecoming turned out to be temporary. I must have been insufferable those first few months—poor dear Morven! In Germany there hadn’t been time for despair, but now I threw myself into it, hankies, booze, and all. Wasn’t I perfectly entitled to breakfast with amaretto and praline chocolates every morning, and to sit around in my dressing gown all afternoon with piles of records all over the floor and coffee table, listening to the most depressing music I could get my hands on?

Other days I was restless and irritable and paced the city until sunrise. When we went out to eat I would inevitably drink much too much wine and start speaking of Jonah again. “And I don’t even have a picture of him,” I’d sob as we walked home through the warren, with me leaning heavily on my sister to keep me upright.

My sisters and aunties were sympathetic, yet there was a distant quality to their words of comfort; they didn’t want to know any more about him than they had my other lovers. They’d seen it happen a hundred times already: the war transformed what should have lasted a couple of dates into something that felt like kismet. I could talk myself blue trying to explain that what I’d had with Jonah was different, it
was
kismet, but they only would have said
Yes, dear
, of course
it was special, dear
. Morven had declared long ago that all I really wanted out of life was one great love. Now that I’d finally had it, I didn’t know what to do with myself.