When the Doves Disappeared (19 page)

Juudit turned red.

“I didn’t think so. It’s no wonder Hellmuth fell for you. Innocence like yours is rare in Berlin, take it from me. A woman’s best friend is her pessary—everything else is snake oil. I know a doctor where you can get one,” she whispered. “It’ll cost you, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem. Trust me, it’s completely discreet, and then you won’t have to worry.”

Gerda wrote the doctor’s address on the back of a calling card and the greatest worry for a married woman with a lover was lifted. Juudit’s sigh of relief made Gerda laugh, and they giggled on each other’s shoulder there on the divan until Juudit started to hiccup and Gerda’s eyeliner smeared and they had to pull themselves together. The world looked so different now that Juudit could talk to Gerda about almost anything. When Juudit whispered that she was afraid of what her husband would think if he knew his wife was going around in public on the arm of a stranger, Gerda had just snorted. She thought Juudit would be crazy to leave Hellmuth, was sure that Hellmuth would marry her because after all even Reichsminister Rosenberg had had an Estonian wife, the ballerina Hilda Leesmann. When Juudit pointed out that the Reichsminister’s career had advanced much more quickly once Hilda was carried off by tuberculosis and he’d switched to the German Hedwig, Gerda would hear none of it. Even when Juudit remembered that the Reichsminister was a Baltic German, not from Germany proper like Hellmuth, and a wife from the eastern outposts surely wouldn’t be wise for a real German SS officer, Gerda had just laughed at her arguments, and she laughed at them again as they sat on the divan.

“Listen, you silly thing. It’s just a matter of making arrangements. I’ve been watching you two. My Walter looks at other women even when I’m right beside him, but Hellmuth never does. Walter says Hellmuth has a wonderful future, that he has a head for all kinds of strategies that I don’t understand. When the war’s over, he’ll be transferred to Berlin with medals on his chest and you’ll be parading around all the salons as his lady. You’ve chosen well. Your German is flawless, and you look like a regular Fräulein. That chin! And your nose!” Gerda bopped her lightly on the nose, and Juudit’s worried brow smoothed. “You didn’t go to the German school for nothing. I’ll bet you were at the top of your class. My dear, let’s go get ourselves a cocktail. Away with sorrow!”

Gerda took hold of Juudit’s hand and squeezed. She made everything sound so simple, and maybe everything
was
simple, at least for the moment, here on the divan at Du Nord. Hellmuth had taken her to a whole new world where there was no place for the troubles of her old life. Yesterday Mr. and Mrs. Paalberg had exchanged a glance as Juudit was coming toward them on Liivalaia. Mrs. Paalberg had raised an eyebrow disdainfully and then they had turned to look in the bakery window, and Juudit had thought about how Gerda would have treated such a meeting, had just tossed her head and lifted her face from the street toward the sun, and once she did that she was in a good, even boisterous, mood again. Gerda hated the snobbery that women in twice-turned coats had toward her. She didn’t need people like them, or anybody else. Gerda was right. Now Juudit was watching a movie in their screening room on Roosikrantsi, which she liked because in a movie theater she might have run into someone she knew, someone she no longer had anything in common with. She also thought it was wonderful to invite Gerda over to watch
Liebe ist zollfrei
in her own private cinema. She no longer took part in complaining about having to walk everywhere or clucking about the infrequent public transport. She had the Opel Olympia and a chauffeur at her disposal. And she didn’t know what she would do if someone she knew sneered at Hitler or the Germans within earshot of Hellmuth—the Germans couldn’t understand Estonian, and people used it for a laugh. The Germans were much more easygoing than the Russians. Just recently Juudit had seen a boy pull a face at a German soldier and the soldier hadn’t cared in the least. She couldn’t imagine that happening under the Soviet authorities.
Nevertheless, she didn’t let herself get drawn into anything like that when she was with Hellmuth. It wouldn’t be right, after all he’d done for her. He’d even promised to look for information about her brother Johan.

Gerda’s company lightened her spirits, and a few cocktails lightened them more, but as they were walking back to the dining room, she still looked around. She’d grown used to doing this from the very first evening, though she rarely ran into anyone she knew in the places that Germans frequented—least of all Roland, the one thing she couldn’t talk about with Gerda.

AS JUUDIT LIFTED
her drink to her lips over the white tablecloth at Du Nord, Roland was pretending to read a sign on Roosikrantsi Street that had Vacant Rooms painted in large letters at the top. He knew every posted notice fluttering in the wind. From the doors of the nearby hospital came a drifting odor of carbolic acid, waiting, and frustration. He even knew the footsteps and voices of the nurses and ambulance men hurrying inside, the staff in the German commissaries, the clerks marching to the supply room. Although his landlady was almost deaf and blind with age and took no notice of him, there were always Germans tramping down the street, and as the sound of every step quickly became familiar to him, he assumed that the sound of his own would soon be familiar to others, so he’d decided to change lodgings. He would move to the attic of a villa on Merivälja Square. He had to be cautious, living underground, and he’d had enough of watching the guests and outings of Juudit’s German. From the reports he’d received from their contact at B4, there could be only one conclusion: the Germans were as twisted as the Bolsheviks, who had sucked the country dry and done it all aboveboard, according to Soviet law. When the Soviet forces had left the Kuressaare castle, Richard had been among the first to witness the piles of bodies, the women with their breasts cut off, their corpses full of needles. The walls of the Kawe factory cellar had been painted with blood. And the same thing was going to happen, just as much within the law as before. The Germans would do whatever they had to in order to keep Rosalie’s case from becoming public, if only to create the illusion of legality. Roland was beginning to be certain that he was about to witness the same kinds of acts that the Bolsheviks
had perpetrated, and his hands shook as he wrote about it that evening. A messenger would take the letter to Sweden:

SS-Sturmbannführer Sandberger and his puppet leader Mäe believe that Germany has to regain the trust of the Estonians. The Jews who fled here from Germany and elsewhere during Estonian independence have done so much counterpropaganda that the pogroms that worked beautifully in Lithuania and Latvia couldn’t possibly get the same result here. Sandberger sensed this immediately and thus understood that the Sonder command had to be kept as invisible as possible, and that no illegal violence should be tolerated. This method and their emphasis on obedience to the law has shown Sandberger’s wisdom and psychological insight. Any measures taken will be in strict accordance with German law.

Reval, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

I
REMEMBER WHEN
the Shore Club opened. Those were long, white nights. They sold cocktails until three in the morning, can you imagine?”

Juudit had arrived. Her talk reminded me that she was different from Rosalie, from a different world. She’d spent her youth lapping up cocktails and circling buffet tables, twitching to the beat of swing tunes.

We sat silent for a moment and listened to the music from the Pirita Shore Club and I hid my relief. It had been a lot of work to arrange for the short time off and there was a line of men ready to take my job at the harbor. I’d been sure that she would miss the meeting again and I hoped I wouldn’t be disappointed like I had been so many times before. Too many times.

“Do you miss the countryside?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what she was getting at. The cobblestones of the city didn’t suit me any better than they would my horse, and she knew that. But I tried to behave, to tamp down the anger seething inside me from all the nights I’d tailed her with no results. When I’d finally seen her coming and she was alone, relief and fury battled within me. The glass eyes of her silver fox wrap had been as unfeeling as her
own, eyes that had forgotten Rosalie, but even so I managed to control my emotions. I shouldn’t frighten her too much—just enough. We didn’t have a single contact in Juudit’s position, and in spite of everything I trusted her more than any of the Germans’ other tarts.

“Where are you staying these days?” Juudit asked.

“It’s best that you don’t know.”

“Right. Many of the Merivälja villas are still empty, I’ve heard.”

I looked at the people walking on the shore, a dog running after a ball, women in bathing suits, their legs so shiny-wet that my eyes hurt, couples strolling down to the water arm in arm, wiping waffle crumbs from each other’s mouths. Their happiness rippled with the waves, piercing my chest. I was incapable of further small talk.

“Have you found anything out?”

My question made Juudit flinch, although I’d asked the same thing every time we’d met, and her mouth snapped shut. I squeezed my hand into a fist.

“Why do you even come here if you don’t have anything to tell me?”

“I could have stayed away, you know,” she answered, and scooted farther down the bench.

I understood instantly that I’d said the wrong thing. The hope that always sprang up when I saw her had disappeared again, and in trotted those same thoughts that tortured me every night, rattling their bits between their teeth even as I awoke. Juudit looked at my fist, slid all the way to the end of the bench, and looked at the water as if there were something of interest to see there. I shuddered. Juudit was like everyone else. She wouldn’t hear a bad word about the Germans, not now that the sharp edge from poorer times was disappearing from her cheekbones. Even if I’d told her what I knew, she would have called me a liar. After the victory at Sevastopol there was no doubt that Germany would succeed, and although the Germans were the only ones who could save us from a new Bolshevik terror, our forces believed in Churchill and the Atlantic Charter—the return of independence when the war was over, the promise that territorial changes would not be made against the wishes of the citizens. Our couriers were constantly bringing material to Finland and Sweden—my reports among them—and we were getting newspaper clippings and news analysis from around the world. There was no indication
that the Germans would abide by our wishes in spite of their public pronouncements. But so many wanted to believe them, including Juudit, who’d gotten a taste of cream.

“I just keep house there,” Juudit said. “I don’t hear about anything important from the staff. Besides, he doesn’t investigate crimes, only sabotage, and his office only has jurisdiction over Tallinn. I’m sure he doesn’t even have access to information pertaining to the rest of the country. Don’t you understand? I’m no use to you.”

I’d heard the same explanation so many times, the same lousy excuses, even though I’d stressed that any information at all could lead to Rosalie’s murderer, even the smallest petty crime. Time after time she denied the rumors, the bullying and misconduct. I didn’t believe the Jerries adhered strictly to rules and discipline, and her dogged insistence that they did made me screw my mouth up tight, hoping she wasn’t as bad at lying to her German. I could understand her choice of a lover. Her marriage situation wasn’t a normal one. But I couldn’t understand having to remind her about Rosalie.

SHE WAS CLEARLY
getting ready to go, raising her padded shoulders and prying at the Bakelite clasp on her sweater until her fingertips turned white. She did have news—suddenly I was sure of it. The realization helped me control my feelings. I kept my voice steady: “Here’s a phone number. If your German leaves town, place a call to this number and say that the weather is good. I want to come and look at his office. Any small scrap of information could help our cause.”