Silence (11 page)

Chapter 21

April 23, 1998

When she thought back to the year 1941, it was primarily the last days with Leonard that she remembered.

The winter of 1940/41 was one of the coldest ever, and February 14, a Friday, was so cold that Therese had tied a scarf tightly around her mouth and nose. She was cycling home from the Kruse farm. What daylight remained lay in a thin violet band over Holland, and when she dismounted in front of the Kramers’ house, the moisture from her breathing had collected in her scarf, freezing it stiff so that it stuck to her cheeks. Frau Kruse had given her a basket of winter apples, and Therese wanted to drop some of them off here. Frau Kramer opened the door. Leonard was in a good mood and invited her in for a cup of tea. Alwine had written to him to say she had found a room for him in Cologne from March 1, and he wanted to take the train there the following day to sign the lease.

“What else does she say?” asked Therese, still hoping that Alwine’s grudge against her might have cooled. Leonard laid his hand on her arm and said, “When I’m in Cologne, I’ll explain it all to her one more time. She’s stubborn—you know that. Give her a little time.”

When the doorbell rang, he stood up and called out to his mother, who was busy in the kitchen. “I’ll go.”

She could hear him say it, even now, in his earnest, yet innocent, way. As he went out, she felt a touch of sadness at the thought that soon Leonard would be gone too. She had seen him strolling through the streets of the big city with Alwine.

The bay now lay beneath a thick layer of cloud. The little sails of the windsurfers danced on the sea, and Therese Mende went into the house because the wind was now unpleasantly chilly. Once in the living room, she felt slightly faint, as she often did recently. She took off her shoes and lay on the sofa.

She remembered the confusion of voices; she heard Leonard’s mother running into the hall, shouting, “No!” and, “But why?”

She had gone out into the hall. There were two men in suits standing there. One of them had Leonard by the arm. “Don’t make things difficult,” the other one said, and then they pulled Leonard toward a car by the side of the road. Frau Kramer grabbed Leo’s coat and her own from the wardrobe and ran after them, out into the darkness. “I’m coming too,” she cried, but one of the men pushed her back roughly. She stumbled, regained her balance, and held up Leonard’s coat. “His coat.” She ran up to the car again. “Please, he needs his coat.” But the door slammed shut, and they drove away.

She stood beside Frau Kramer at the end of the path. The taillights had long since disappeared, the sounds of the engine fallen silent. The deserted road seemed to lead toward an even deeper darkness, and Frau Kramer, clutching her son’s coat, stroked the woolen fabric gently, as if she could feel her son within this outer shell.

She did not seem to realize that it was just his coat until they were back in the house, and then she collapsed on the sofa, weeping.

“A misunderstanding,” said Therese in an effort to calm her. As she said the words, a band tightened around her chest, an undefined fear that went far beyond the word
misunderstanding
. She ran into the hall and telephoned Leonard’s father at his chambers in Kleve. Then they waited.

How long did they sit there in silence? Ten minutes? Thirty? Or was it hours? In her memory it was an almost unmoving picture, etched in her head like a photograph, and, as in a photograph, time stood still. Frau Kramer’s chest was the only movement, rising and falling with her tremulous breathing.

When they heard Herr Kramer’s car, they both leapt to their feet and ran to the door. He was standing on the path, three or four steps away from the front door. With the key in his hand, he glanced at his wife, shook his head, and looked down. He was hatless, his coat muddy.

They had not told him what Leonard was accused of. When he insisted on his rights, and mentioned that he was there as his son’s lawyer, they had seized him and thrown him out. He had fallen over. Monday, they had said. The prosecutor would be there on Monday, and he could come back then. He had driven back to his office and telephoned the prosecutor at home. A maid had answered the telephone and asked him to wait a moment. Then she had come back on the line. “The prosecutor is not available. Not for the whole weekend,” she had said.

Frau Kramer took her husband’s coat, went into the kitchen with it, and tried to clean the patches of mud off with a cloth. She did not look up, intent on rubbing the black woolen fabric, as if she could remove the whole day along with the dirt.

Blind with tears, Therese had ridden home. Her cheeks burned like fire in the cold, and at the same time she felt frozen in a way she had never known before. It was a cold not from outside, but that her heart pumped into her head, hands, and feet.

It was not until Monday that she learned what Leonard was accused of. “Lewdness with a person of the same sex,” the charge read. Herr Kramer had been issued “a warning from the people.”

Had she thought of Hanna before that, or had the nature of the accusation steered her suspicion toward Hanna? She went over to the Höver farm that very evening. She found Hanna in the barn, feeding the cows. She had tied her hair back under a kerchief, and her pretty, round face was flushed with the effort despite the cold. She wore a dark blue apron and an old cardigan over her coarse woolen dress. For the first time, Therese took conscious notice of Hanna’s suffering, seeing how she had let herself go since Jacob admitted to her that he did not return her love.

“Leonard,” Therese said warily, “you know what he’s accused of?”

Hanna did not interrupt her work, but went on loading hay into the troughs.

“Do you know who reported him?”

“Don’t know,” Hanna threw out, “but there must be something to it. Nobody says that kind of thing for no reason.”

Therese gripped her arm tightly. “Did you . . . ?”

Hanna flung the pitchfork to the floor, prongs first; the short, harsh scratching sound mingled with the metallic clang of the cows’ chains as their heads moved up and down.

“And what if I did?” asked Hanna, her head held high. “If it’s not true, he has nothing to fear.”

“You mean . . . Leonard and Jacob? You’ve . . . ?”

Hanna went back to her work. Then, suddenly, she shouted, “I saw them! I saw them at the lake!” And Therese heard a mixture of pain and anger; she heard Hanna’s voice crack.

She went up to her and whispered, “Hanna, you have to go there and tell them it’s not true.”

“Never! Never!” she cried. Fear flared up in her eyes. “If you say anything, my father will kill me. But I’ll never take it back. Never. It’s the truth.”

Now, beneath the rattling of the chains, there was a humming sound, distant and strange, and for the first time Therese felt this lurching sensation within, as if something she had been holding in equilibrium was about to break away.

She could not remember how she got home. Later, she sat on her bed, incapable of putting her thoughts in order, deaf and mute with helplessness. “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” “Thou shalt not kill.” The word
truth
shriveled up in her head, trembling, thin, and melting into nothingness.

The next day, she came home from the Kruse farm. Her father met her at the door. “Something’s happened,” he said quietly. A weak light fell from the kitchen window onto the yard; the moon was nearly full, and it made her father’s face look unnaturally waxen.

Had she immediately thought of Leonard? She no longer knew. All she knew was that she had put her hands over her ears and that her father’s voice sounded muffled. “Leonard has hanged himself,” he said, and she hit out at him, shouting that he mustn’t say that, that it couldn’t be true.

Therese Mende got up from the sofa and closed the sliding door to the terrace. She tried to ignore the brief stabbing sensation in her chest. The wind had gotten up some more; the pounding of the breakers was audible inside the house. Luisa, busy in the kitchen, was humming as she prepared supper.

Leonard had torn his shirt into equal-length strips and hanged himself from the window grate in his cell. They had wanted names from him; if he told them who he had “done things” with, he could expect a light sentence, they had told old Kramer. He pleaded with his son, but Leonard remained silent.

The days after his death seemed frozen in the flat expanse, rigid with grief and shock.

The pastor refused to bury him in the cemetery. His father and Herr Kramer begged him, but he stood firm. “A suicide, and furthermore someone who . . . No. Never in consecrated ground.” His mother agreed with the pastor. She got down on her knees at her pew and prayed for the young, lost soul.

Using a pickaxe, they cut a hole in the frozen earth just outside the cemetery, next to the hedge. Herr and Frau Kramer, Therese and her father, Alwine and Frau Kalder, gathered for a small, unobtrusive ceremony. Jacob, who was in France, knew nothing of all this. Wilhelm had been contacted in Stuttgart, but he had not come.

Alwine spoke to her again for the first time that day. “Why isn’t Hanna here?” she asked.

Because it’s her fault, Therese wanted to say, but she replied, “I don’t know.” She had wanted to say, Just stay beside me. Tell me about your happy days in Cologne. Say this is all a bad dream.

The lurching in her insides, the sense of disorientation, made her remain silent.