Silence (18 page)

Chapter 34

April 25, 1998

Despite taking a sleeping pill, Therese Mende had had a restless night. It was not until the early hours of the morning that she dropped off, her sleep foggy, peopled with the old shadows circling round and round. Fragmented images lining up disconnectedly and declaring her guilty.

When she woke up in the morning, she could not get the words
Keep silent
out of her head, and in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, she applied it for the first time not to her past but to herself. “I’ll keep silent till the day I die,” she whispered at her reflection, and the words struck her with such force that she staggered.

Tillmann had known her story; maybe his death had been so distressing, and had left such a void in its wake, precisely because she had gone back to bearing the weight of her guilt alone afterward.

A stabbing pain in her chest extended into her left arm, taking her breath away. The thought that her daughter might, like Robert Lubisch, go unsuspectingly hunting about after her death and find out that her mother had lied to her for her whole life was suddenly unbearable. And what would she find? The remnants of a time that had become foul and rotten over the years, handed down by people who had convinced themselves they were blameless.

She took a heart pill. After breakfast she felt stronger again.

Robert too had had a short night, but he arrived on time. Therese invited him to join her on her daily walk.

They went down the narrow street, and she asked about his life in Hamburg. He spoke freely, telling her about his wife, Maren, his work in the hospital, and also about his father and his struggles with him when he decided against following him into the business and became a doctor. “I now think he was always a stranger to me. As a child, I sought out his company, his affection. I wanted him to like me. Later, my efforts went in the opposite direction—probably because they had been so fruitless—and now that I really think about it, I didn’t have his attention until I started to rebel.”

The first swimmers of the day were gathering on the beach, spreading out their towels and picnic blankets, inflating orange armbands on children’s thin arms, dipping their toes in the water, and flinching away with a shiver.

Once they had left the bay behind, Therese abruptly resumed her story from the night before.

1943/44

The days went by and there was no news from Yuri. Wilhelm came to visit, but he was wary and did not mention her promise to marry him. She avoided talking about Yuri and did not tell him she had seen him one more time, but when there was still no news after two weeks, she could bear it no longer.

They were walking side by side through the town. It was mid-November.

“I’m afraid. They’re bound to be looking for him. If they had caught him, you’d know, wouldn’t you?” She had thrust her hands deep into her coat pockets. He was pushing her bicycle with one hand and had his arm around her shoulders.

“They haven’t caught him, because no one’s looking for him,” he said. He continued matter-of-factly. “The official report says Yuri made a break for it, and Gerhard stood him up against the van and shot him.” He stopped and looked at her. “He didn’t shoot him, of course. The dead man was someone else.” Therese clenched her fists in her pockets. She looked down at the ground, not daring to look at him, and heard Yuri saying, as if from far off, “There was another prisoner in the van.”

Therese Mende and Robert Lubisch sat on a bench that served as both resting place and viewpoint at a widening of the path. She said, “Look, that’s how it is with the truth. I could say I just wanted to save Yuri’s life, and it’s the truth. I could say the other one would have been shot anyway, and that’s probably a truth too. But it’s also true that my request for Yuri’s life extinguished another life.”

Robert Lubisch leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. They looked out to sea. Therese’s words came softly, mingling with the rhythm of the waves as she went on with her story.

They never touched on the subject again, and life went on so unquestioningly that sometimes she could scarcely bear it. She waited for news from Yuri, thinking he was probably in Holland, but the only mail came from the private in France. At the end of 1943, she wrote to him one last time. She thanked him for his trouble, and explained that circumstances had changed and he should no longer write to her.

Alwine’s father had fallen on the Eastern Front during the days Therese spent in jail, and Alwine’s grief was boundless. It was Frau Kalder who received Therese’s delayed condolence visit, and she apologized on behalf of her daughter. Alwine withdrew entirely: not only did she avoid contact with Therese, but she also stopped speaking to Wilhelm. Shortly before Christmas—by now, the last of the livestock had been requisitioned from the farms and the Kalder estate—they met by chance in the street. Alwine was almost unrecognizable. She had lost a lot of weight, her eyes were dull, and her finely shaped mouth, in Therese’s memory always laughing, was pinched with bitterness. They stood facing each other, like strangers. Alwine said, as if to herself, “We’re moving in with relatives in southern Germany after Christmas. A manager’s being put in here until the war’s over.” Abruptly, she said, “So you’re going to marry him?” Therese lowered her head, ashamed. She told her, her words at first halting and uncertain, then in a torrent sprinkled with constant apologies, what had happened after her arrest. Alwine interrupted her before she had finished. “You’re lying, Therese,” she hissed. “Why are you lying to me? Gerhard told me, well before you were arrested, that the two of you were getting married.” She turned and left. Therese stood motionless in the cold for a long time. When at last she moved, her limbs were stiff, and she staggered home on unsteady legs. The suspicion that whispered in her head at first, then grew louder and louder, seemed monstrous.

Wilhelm had invited her out to a pub in Kleve the following evening. She did not want to talk to him about it until they were there, but she could not hold it back. While they were still in the car, she asked, “Why did Theo tell Alwine we were getting married before I was even arrested?” Wilhelm reacted immediately, with an easy laugh. “Oh, Theo! He can’t understand why I don’t give in to Alwine. Why I don’t propose to her.” He pulled over on the right-hand side of the road, stopped the car, and looked at Therese. He caressed her face. “I told him there was only one woman I would marry, and that was you.” He sighed. “Theo’s a clumsy oaf. He told Alwine.”

How relieved she was. Suddenly, her suspicions seemed absurd. “It’s worrying about Yuri,” she told herself. “Worrying about Yuri is driving me mad.”

Robert Lubisch and Therese Mende went on walking. They reached a place where the cliff path narrowed and led down to the next bay. They had to walk in single file. The sun stood high and white in the sky, and a gentle, salty breeze wafted in from the sea, bringing with it a pleasant coolness. There was a pine forest immediately behind the small beach. There were no hotels or holiday complexes here, just a rudimentary wooden hut for a beach bar and a handful of swimmers.

Therese turned to Robert Lubisch. “They make excellent coffee,” she said with a smile, and headed straight for a table under a straw-covered sunshade. The young man behind the bar greeted her with a wave and, without being asked, brought two double espressos and a jug of water.

The fragrance of the pines mingled with the salty smell of the sea. It was pleasantly still, and Robert seemed to feel time passing more slowly here, more deliberately. He looked straight at Therese and asked her the question that had been preoccupying him since the previous evening. “The private,” he began cautiously, “the private who wrote to you from France was called Friedhelm Lubisch, wasn’t he?”

She avoided his gaze, but nodded in confirmation. The next question made his spine tingle, but it seemed quite natural. “Did he visit you? Did my father come to Kranenburg after the war?”

Therese Mende stirred her coffee. “Let me tell you the story in order,” she said deliberately, and patted his hand reassuringly.

By early 1944, only the fanatics still believed in the “Final Victory.” There were whispers of a wonder weapon everywhere. A wonder weapon that would turn the tide. At the same time, news of fallen husbands, sons, and brothers reached homes every day. Death became normal. Those months were insubstantial in her memory. She hurried ahead from one day to the next, closing her eyes and ears, and raced home on her bicycle in the evening, ruled by one thought alone: Today! Today there would be news of Yuri.

Her day-to-day work in the factory, her encounters with Wilhelm, taking care of the house and garden—these were just actions and words that followed, one upon the other, because they had to. They belonged to a realm of shadows lurking quietly beneath her hope for a sign of life from Yuri.

But hope dissipated, dropping soundlessly away at the margins of those deadened days. First it happened during the nights, when she counted on her fingers the weeks that had passed, then on Sundays in church, when she asked God’s forgiveness for having bought Yuri’s life with that of another man, and finally in broad daylight, when she woke up from her trance in shock and knew with sudden certainty that she would have received news long since if he had been alive.