In War Times (29 page)

“I suppose that we haven’t succeeded in developing an atomic weapon. We would have used it by now.”

She didn’t look at him. “Did you get that page there?”

“You’re tired,” he suggested.

“I’m mad as hell. Our guys fought all that way and then those pissant generals left Berlin to Stalin. We could have had it.”

“Scuttlebutt is that it would have made for a pretty big fight. With Stalin. We’ve had enough, we got what we wanted, we don’t need more territory.”

“Neither do they.”

“I thought you were Russian.”

“I’m an American. And I think we’ve been had. Finished?” She folded the papers, fed them into the false back of her belt, and buckled it.

“Wow,” said Sam. “You’re a real spy.”

“Shut up before I belt you one. Pun intended. Let’s go.”

Her blond hair gleamed in the dim light of the Hindenburg lamp. Delicate features. Blue eyes.

A thought struck him. “Did you really give that device to Perler?”

“What are you talking about? Who’s Perler?”

“Perler is—”

“You’re right. I’m tired. Let’s go. This place makes me sick.”

As they gathered their things, he said, “It strikes me as very odd that you don’t want to talk about Perler. He had one of these devices.”

“Be struck all you want, Sam. Don’t forget the tripod.”

Soon they were out of Berlin, driving down small, winding roads through the German countryside as the sky changed from black to gray.

As he drove, she folded and unfolded a piece of paper. Each time she unfolded it, she studied it for a moment, looked out the window, then folded it again and put it away. Each time she seemed a little more agitated.

Finally he said, “What are you looking at?”

“Private business.”

“Oh.”

She was silent as the sun rose. They drove through the blasted remains of what had been a forest. Shell-ripped trees rose from mud through which refugees slogged past the dead—soldiers who had fallen in the last defense of the Reich, mostly old men and boys. Then she said, “I’m not sure it will do any good.”

“What?”

“Looking for my cousin.”

“What cousin?” He was ready for some food and a nap, in that order. They were behind a band of Germans, men and women and children, all of them carrying everything they still owned.

Finally the crowd parted to let him pass. Several obediently raised their right arm in a Nazi salute as the Mercedes nosed through them. Sam stopped the car.

“What are you doing?” asked Bette.

“I’m really tired of this.” He rummaged in the backseat and found the American flag that Bette had removed when they neared Berlin, and tied it onto the antenna.

“I think we should go,” said Bette quietly.

“I was just getting ready to go.”

“No, I mean to Ravensbrück. It’s on the way,” she said, and then he saw she was crying.

He put his arm around her shoulder. For a moment she hesitated, then dropped her head against his chest.

She whispered, “I’m just very afraid of what I’ll see there. I’m not sure I can do this again.”

“Again?”

“I’ve been to Auschwitz and Treblinka already. It’s unspeakable.”

He put the car in gear and moved forward again.

“I wouldn’t recognize this cousin, and he wouldn’t recognize me. We’ve never met. My mother is very upset about him. I just asked questions, looked at the records—oh, they kept very careful records, Sam. The sheer magnitude is numbing. I finally found a comrade of his, a soldier from his unit. He said that he thought that Mikhail might have been taken to Ravensbrück. That’s all I know.” She wiped her face and blew her nose. “It’s unimaginable. So many people. Just…gone.”

Bette had no trouble getting them into Ravensbrück. She spoke Russian, flashed the appropriate cards. Sam saw looks of sympathy on the faces of the Russians who had taken over the camp.

Together they roamed hastily established hospital wards, which were for the most part places where former prisoners could die clean and in peace. One nurse told them that they’d been able to save only about twenty percent of those they liberated. He helped Bette comb records until his vision blurred. Though he never suggested that her quest was hopeless, he knew that it was. And he knew that she did too, but was driven by fury, doggedness, a thoroughness of being which he increasingly admired and respected.

“We can never be whole again,” she said, after five days of heartbreaking search, on their way back to Muchengladbach. “Not after this. Not ever. Let’s get out of here. Head west.”

After several hours, he said, “This is beginning to look somewhat familiar.”

“We’re getting close to Nordhausen,” said Bette. “Near where you went with Hadntz.” Her face was drawn; her eyes and nose were red from bouts of weeping. The next time he glanced at her she was asleep. Curled against the door, arms crossed, she moaned and muttered. He shook her.

“What?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

“We’ll stop.” She directed him down ever smaller roads until they came to a mansion on the bluff of a river. He was so tired that he was practically driving in his sleep. Several command cars were parked in the sweeping driveway.

“Come on, Dance.” She led him up the steps and threw open the heavy, beautifully carved wooden door. Just inside, a private drew a pistol. “Halt.”

Sam glimpsed a beautifully appointed room. A fire blazed in the fireplace. A crystal chandelier hung overhead; heavy damask curtains were open, admitting gray twilight.

Two men stood at a large table, studying a map. One of them looked up.

“Elegante!” he said. “I never know when you’re going to turn up next. Come in!”

“Jervowski! So good to see you again.”

After a brief dinner, they were given adjoining rooms. The door between them was open; Sam saw Bette reach into her ditty bag and pull out a small book.

“What are you reading?”

She looked up. “Oh. Didn’t see you there. Chinese poetry. Full of mountains and rivers and loneliness and a hell of a lot of drunken poets. It soothes me.” She shut the door.

Sam fell onto his bed fully clothed. The next thing he knew, he was wakened by Bette. Her hair was wet and she smelled of soap. She wore a long T-shirt.

“Move over, Dance.” She lay down next to him. “Just hold me. I’m feeling very sub-par.”

He gathered her close. Some time during the night, they made love quietly, as if they had done so a thousand times, and then went to sleep.

In the morning, he awoke alone.

He got up and looked through both of their suites, taking in for the first time just how sumptuous they were.

Her small bag was not there, and, when he looked out the window, the Mercedes was gone. Women, he reflected, were always leaving him.

He missed her.

While availing himself of the luxurious shower, he was struck by a thought. Grabbing a heavy white towel, he rushed into the bedroom and dumped the contents of his bag on the floor and did not see it.

It was gone. No. There it was.

The camera. Full of exposed film from Berlin: the Russian-found Hadntz plan.

Bette was not a careless person. Either she would be back, or she intended him to have it.

He dressed and went downstairs in search of coffee and followed tantalizing smells coming from the rear of the mansion. Through open French doors, he saw Captain Jervowski, who waved him in. “Sit down.”

A middle-aged woman holding a silver coffee pot asked, “Kafe?” Sam nodded, asked the captain, “Where is Major Elegante?” The captain shook out his napkin with an abrupt gesture. He frowned. “She got a call. Said to tell you she had to go to Moscow. Though heaven knows why she would want
you
to know such a thing. She said to give you a jeep from our pool.”

On hearing the captain’s clear irritation with his importance to Bette Elegante, Sam decided that the wisest course would be to keep his smile, as well as his growing sense of joy, to himself.

Just before Sam left, the captain came out and handed him a large, sealed envelope, and without comment turned and went back into the mansion. Sam drove down the road a while before pulling over and opening the envelope.

Dance:

I didn’t try to wake you. You were exhausted. This is the first place they’ve been able to catch up with me in a week. Damn.

I’m at a loss to explain what has happened, except to say that I don’t know where the future will take me. I have a lot of work to do. Important work, I think. It looks as if the war will soon be over for you. Not so, for me. What I’m trying to say is, something seemed to happen, for both of us, I think, but it can’t matter. What I’m trying to say is—and this is very hard for me to say—don’t wait for me. It will be a very long time before I come home—if ever.

All my love,
Bette

Beneath the note was her book of Chinese poetry.

Loss, rain, and mountains. Her gift to him.

His sense of desolation was muted by the note—strangely, because it held little hope. Yet, for him, it held all the hope in the world.

O
N A JUNE EVENING
, Sam and Wink walked at a good pace toward the outskirts of town, where tank-blasted Muchengladbach gave way to linden-flanked streets filled with beautiful homes. Wink’s new girlfriend, Elsa, had one such home. Her parents had fled to Munich. They remained there, but she returned, found the house livable, and opened it up to the trickle of refugees returning from the east.

Sam half-expected Bette to show up at any moment, in spite of her note, but she did not. There was no way to get in touch with her. Still, he felt her presence, and despite, or maybe because of, her sudden disappearance, he knew that her own feelings mirrored his. Since Berlin and Ravensbrück, the perspective of Sam’s writings had subtly changed. The imagined reader was no longer just Keenan, but someone in the future, for whom he kept a record.

Perhaps Bette.

Chemicals were distilling in their lab, and they could only wait for the long process to finish, drop by drop, which was why Sam had agreed to an evening’s absence from the lab.

“It’s a floating population.” Wink was talking, as usual, not only enamored of Elsa, but enthralled by the fluidity of the inhabitants, and the stories he heard as he eavesdropped. “They might stay a night or two, get some sleep and a little bit of food, and move on. Elsa’s got a heart of gold. And a basement overflowing with potatoes.”

“It’s free?”

“Of course not—are you nuts? She charges. It’s a lot of work. But it’s lovely. Her father was the
Bürgermeister
.”

“Probably piled up a lot of loot.”

The imposing house, constructed of gold-colored bricks, was damaged only on the right front porch, where a bomb fragment had fallen. To the left of the large front door, a vase of fresh-cut forsythia, the bright yellow flowers spraying out in a circle, were centered on a small table. Two elderly German men sat on porch chairs, smoking cigarette butts, and looked warily at Sam and Wink as they climbed the steps.

When they walked into the front room, lavishly furnished with Beaux-Arts couches, chairs, and tables, conversation stopped. Sam counted nine women and three men in the parlor and glimpsed a few more sitting at a vast dining room table in the next room, all looking at them with curiosity and some suspicion.

After Elsa emerged from the dining room and welcomed them, the low murmur of German returned. The windows were open, the long drapes pinned back, and the cool night breeze dispelled the fusty smell of the refugees, with their ragged clothing and improvised shoes. Electricity had not been restored to this part of town, and candles cast their glow from the mantle. Striped silk wallpaper, blackened in the corner where the porch roof had been, caught the flickering light.

They took two empty chairs and lit cigarettes. The Germans turned their heads longingly and Wink said in a low voice, “I can’t go passing out cigarettes here every night—they’ll get the butts. There’s Elsa.”

She brought them glasses of Rhône wine. She was buxom, and although otherwise thin, she was not as emaciated as most of her guests. “I am busy right now.” She kissed Wink on the cheek and returned to the dining room.

Sam took a sip. “Tastes familiar.”

“Well, yes, it’s part of last week’s requisition. But we have some extra crates.”

“That depends on your definition of extra.”

“Got those records for the
biergarten
in return.”

“The Billie Holiday?”

Wink nodded.

“Excellent! That source does need cultivating.”

“I thought you’d approve. In fact—there he is. Our underground jazz buff himself.” Wink waved one of the men over. “Hans!”

Hans was short, and the grip of his hand was strong and confident. “I speak English,” he proclaimed. “I hope it is good. I worked on it in secret for many years.”

“He ran a radio station in Koblenz.”

“Yes,” said Hans. “I have more records, if—”

“Don’t worry,” said Wink, patting his pocket. Sam had watched him stuff them with cigarettes before leaving. “We definitely want the records.”

“I have something more. Come upstairs.”

In his large front bedroom—secured, no doubt, with his cigarette supply—was a mahogany four-poster bed. Covered with what was surely a hand-crocheted spread, it was neatly made. Next to it, on a night stand, a light was provided by a Hindenburg lamp. On top of the bed were—

“See!”

“Where did you get these? It’s amazing.” A saxophone, a cornet, and a clarinet lay in a neat row on the bed. The saxophone was dented; the cornet likewise. The clarinet was marred with long scratches.

“Would you join me in some playing?”

“Gladly,” said Wink.

From the bottom drawer of his dresser, Hans took out a rag-wrapped bottle of Bordeaux. He opened it while Sam and Wink played experimental blats on their instruments.

“Let’s tune to middle A,” Wink suggested. They pushed and pulled various sliding metal parts on their horns until their middle A’s sounded the same. After he poured each of them a glass of wine, Hans joined in.