Silence (21 page)

Robert put his hands in front of his face to fight off what he was hearing. And the suspicion that had been growing in the farthest reaches of his brain, ever since Therese Mende mentioned Wilhelm Peters’s burns a few hours before, was now definitively confirmed. He could see his father’s scarred upper arms and left calf in his mind’s eye. “A house fire, right at the beginning of the war,” he had always claimed. His father!

It was dusk. An unreal, purple light lay over the water as Therese Mende stood up and returned with a bottle of cognac and two snifters. She poured generously. They drank in silence. Then she leaned forward. Her eyes were wet with tears. “When he left, he said, ‘I can’t help you anymore now. You have to take responsibility for this on your own. But you should know one thing: Everything I did then, I did for love.’ He really said that. ‘For love.’ ”

Chapter 39

April 25, 1998

Having spread fresh straw in the stall, Hanna brought the wheelbarrow into the barn, hung the pitchfork, point up, in a wooden rack in which more forks, rakes, shovels, and spades were tidily arranged in a row. Karl stood in the yard and watched her. He thought Hanna must be over seventy, but in her checked shirt and overalls, and with her industrious energy, she looked like a woman in her midfifties.

She came out of the barn and said, as she marched past him, in her abrupt way, “I’ll get dressed. Then we can go.”

Karl watched her walk toward the house. He thought he would clear up the death of Rita Albers now, and he felt neither pride nor satisfaction. He waited by his car. The Hövers’ orchard and vegetable garden extended all the way to the road. A gentle breeze wafted through the fruit trees, which were in bloom. A brimstone butterfly settled on the roof of the car, apparently taking a short breather.

When she came out of the house, she had put on her good clothes, and it looked strange. She was wearing a white blouse with an elongated shawl collar, which she had tied in a large bow over her chest. The narrow gray skirt reached to her calves, and in her matching pumps she looked even taller than usual. Without a word, she went up to his car and got in on the passenger side.

Karl sat behind the wheel. She looked out of the window and said, “I’ve written Paul a note. I’m sure he’ll follow.” On the way to the police station, she sat quietly beside him. Her thoughts seemed to revolve entirely around her brother. At one point she said, “He’ll have to hire someone to help.” At another, “It won’t be easy for him,” and then, “He’s hardworking, but writing out the bills, sales tax, feed prices—he can’t handle that.”

Karl knew he should really take her straight to Steiner, but he thought about the Long One’s manner and decided to talk to her alone first.

At the station, he made coffee, and Hanna said, after trying it, “Your coffee’s good, but if you put a little pinch of cinnamon in with the powder, it would be even better.” She smiled, and Karl thought he had seldom seen her smile.

She put her cup down and, unprompted, began to talk.

When Hanna stepped out of the house to milk the cows, early in the morning of August 13, 1950, Therese was sitting on a bench behind the house. It was barely possible to speak to her. She kept saying, “I hit him and killed him.” Hanna fetched her father, and Paul came too. It was almost an hour before Therese was able to give a more or less clear account of what had happened. Old Höver found out for the first time that Paul had seen Wilhelm and Theo Gerhard shoot Yuri. Paul stammered that he could not have known, at the time, that it was wrong. “There was a war on. Yuri was the enemy, after all,” he said.

Höver struck Paul in the face, roaring that shooting unarmed enemies in the back was always wrong, even in wartime. Hanna was extremely worried that Therese might talk about her denunciation of Leonard too, but she did not mention it. Bit by bit, they learned that Wilhelm had come home, Therese had grabbed the poker and lashed out in the dark, and the iron had struck his companion, Friedhelm Lubisch. “Wilhelm’s gone,” she said. Her whole body was trembling, and she asked Hanna’s father to come with her to the police station. “I was going to go myself, straight away, but I’m afraid. Theo Gerhard will be there again, like when I was arrested,” she said, weeping.

Hanna’s father asked Paul what Gerhard and Peters had done with Yuri’s body, but all Paul knew was that they had dragged him to the car. In a whisper, Therese told them how Yuri’s escape had come about, about Gerhard, who had shot a stranger, and her promise to marry Wilhelm. Old Höver sat in silence for a long time. His gaze wandered over the flat land, piercing hedges and fences, and landed on the horizon, where the first soft light of dawn was appearing. He stood up. “Enough deaths, enough misery,” he said curtly. “Who does it help if you go to prison now?” He and Paul went to the cottage. The well had half collapsed during the war and was no longer in use. They wrapped the stranger in a blanket, threw him down the well, filled it in, and demolished the visible part of the stonework.

Hanna told her story fluently and almost without emotion. Occasionally she broke off, and a deep groove appeared between her eyebrows. Then she nodded briefly, as if confirming to herself what remained to be told. Her tone was steady, and Karl was certain she would not leave anything out, that she wanted to wipe the slate clean once and for all. “Therese stayed with us until Tuesday afternoon, and then she went to the police, as my father had told her, to report her husband missing. Theo Gerhard took over the investigation and, right from the start, accused Therese of having killed Wilhelm. He interrogated her for hours, shouting and threatening. At one point he whispered to her, ‘Seven years ago you got away with it, you whore, but now you’re going to get what you deserved back then.’ ”

A week later, Therese came to the farm and said Gerhard had ordered that the whole site where the cottage stood be turned upside down. Old Höver went to the town hall, as he had when Fedir was beaten up. Paul went with him. When they came back, he said to Therese in his taciturn way, “Don’t worry about it.”

The land was never searched. Gerhard maintained the outward appearance of the relentless investigator for a while, but he was cautious, and once Therese had gone, no more was heard from him.

Hanna got up, stood by the window, and stared out. “That Gerhard, he’s still there. He gets a good pension and is a respectable citizen.” Karl thought about Gerhard’s blustering way of talking, the cognac in the morning, and the apartment he did not inhabit.

He spoke to Hanna’s back. “Your father threatened to report him for shooting Yuri?” Hanna nodded. “In a sense, yes. I know from Paul that Father put the matter more simply. He just said, ‘You shot two prisoners of war in the back. I know it, you know it, and now you should let things lie.’ ”

Karl offered her another coffee, but she stayed by the window and shook her head. He poured himself some more. “Have you been in contact with Therese Mende all along?” He saw Hanna start at the name. She said, “Yes, we’ve found out her current identity.”

She turned to lean against the windowsill. “About two years after she left, a letter came from Frankfurt. She asked us to get her a copy of her birth certificate and take care of her parents’ grave. From then on, there were regular Christmas letters with money for the care of the grave. They came from London, Paris, Amsterdam, and God knows where else. But there was never a return address—there was always just
Therese
. She didn’t come and visit until just before Paul’s wife died. I wasn’t there. She came to the farm, and she was probably quite shocked at the way things looked. She offered to buy the cottage from Paul, but he had already leased it to the Albers woman because he was short of money. After that, she got in touch regularly. She tried to help Paul financially, but he was too proud, and probably he also felt guilty about her. At some point I mentioned that I could imagine setting up a boarding stable of some sort on the farm, and when Paul was widowed, she gave us the money to convert it and start the business.”

Karl smiled. “The word here is that the money came from Paul’s wife’s life insurance.”

Hanna laughed shortly. “We never said that, but you know what it’s like in the village. If there’s no official explanation, people just make one up. It suited us.”

She looked down at the floor and fell silent. Karl stood beside her at the window. “Was there a condition attached to the money?” he asked softly.

“No. No condition. When we began making money with the horses, I wanted to pay her back in installments. She wouldn’t accept it. These last years were the best for Paul and me, and then that Albers woman came and started stirring up the old stories.”

Chapter 40

April 25, 1998

Robert Lubisch had drunk the second cognac. The remnants of the sun laid a purple path across the water, flaring up one last time. The perfect view struck him as inappropriate, and at the same time he felt the play of colors having a calming effect on his bewilderment. The cognac played its part too, burning in his throat and stomach and driving away the numbness in his body. Therese Mende fell silent, and there was a moment when he thought,
She’s lying.

But then his gaze returned to the photograph, and he admitted to himself that there was no doubt. He was Wilhelm Peters’s son. He remembered a trip one Christmas at the beginning of the nineties. The borders were open, and he and his wife, Maren, had offered his father a trip to Wrocław, the former Breslau, as a gift. His father had not seemed pleased, and in the end his mother had gone there with a friend, supposedly because he could not be spared from the firm. And even when the Association of Displaced Persons, on whose board he sat, organized trips to the old homeland, he had never gone. He had said that a visit like that would reopen old wounds.

Luisa came and asked Therese Mende when and where she should serve dinner. Robert did not hear her answer. A short while later, Luisa brought wine and some water.

Seagulls glided by weightlessly, their plumage tinged pink in the evening light.

Therese told him about the help she received from the Hövers and about the well, and that she had left Kranenburg in December 1950.

He asked, “Did you ever make contact with him again?”

“No. I could probably have found him, but . . .” She hesitated. “I wanted to forget.” She looked directly at him. “For the first two years, I spent my life on a tightrope, constantly ensuring I left no trace. I did a variety of jobs in Frankfurt—seamstress, administrative assistant, telephone operator—but whenever my employers became impatient about receiving my papers, I had to leave again. Then Hanna got me my birth certificate and, at last, I had an identity. My new life began with that. I was Therese Pohl again, and I used my maiden name to erase Therese Peters.”

Robert took a sip of wine. “And my father erased Wilhelm Peters when he took Friedhelm Lubisch’s papers.” He reflected that his father had left most of his fortune to the Association of Displaced Persons. Had he identified with Friedhelm Lubisch’s life as closely as that, or was it an attempt at restitution?

He thought about the big house, the statue of Diana in the garden, the grand parties. Everything about that life had always seemed to him too big and too loud—all of it false and overblown. And yet it had never occurred to him that the size and volume were there to hide something.

Cautiously, he asked, “You said you had talked about it with your husband. Do you think you would have been able to keep it hidden from him forever?”

Therese Mende did not answer for some time. Then she said quietly, “You’re asking whether your mother might have known, aren’t you?” He stood up, took a few steps, and sat down again.

“Yes, perhaps that’s my question.”

“I can’t answer it for you,” she said neutrally, and he was forcibly reminded of the dream in which his mother said to him, “You’re destroying his life’s work.” Then she had gone away, and he was standing on the thread of her shawl and the stitches came unraveled, exposing his mother’s back.

He felt the shock fading, felt himself beginning to look the truth in the eye, noticed that, for the first time, he was thinking,
My father, Wilhelm Peters.

He stood up again and paced up and down. At length, he asked, “And Rita Albers? What happened to Rita Albers?”

“She called me,” said Therese, and Robert noticed a change in tone. Her voice was steady; she had not had to cast back into the distant past. Now it was the businesswoman speaking, narrating the facts succinctly and precisely.

“I knew from Paul Höver that she had a picture of me and was asking questions. She called me, and I threatened her over the phone, but it was clear to me that she wasn’t going to be stopped that way. I called a friend in Frankfurt, a lawyer, the same day and asked him to offer her money.”

She paused, got up, and went to stand by the balustrade. “ ‘A big story,’ she had said, and that meant she wanted to sell it for a high price.”

She went over to the table and picked up her glass of white wine. “My lawyer was unable to reach her, and the next day I heard from Hanna Höver that she had been found dead.” This too she said in the most matter-of-fact way. She twirled the glass in her hands, and the heavy wine slid viscously up the side of the glass, refracting the evening light. “Although I knew better, I hoped that would be the end of the story.” She looked at Robert Lubisch and smiled mirthlessly. “And then you came, and when I saw you, I knew the time had finally come. I’ll tell you frankly that I didn’t decide to tell you the truth about that night in the summer of 1950 until this morning.” She pointed at the leather wallet that contained the wedding photograph. “Even if I were to destroy it, what would happen if my daughter, like you, went on the hunt after my death? She assumes I grew up in the lower Rhine, that my parents died in the war, and that I married her father in 1956. She’s never been to Kranenburg, doesn’t question my past. What if she wants more detail one day? Whose truth will she get to hear?” She turned around and looked out to sea, where the line of the horizon now clearly separated the sky and the water. Robert Lubisch stood beside her. Quietly she said, “Do you think the truth would have been easier to bear if you had heard it from your father?”

Time piled up on the tiled floor behind them; the day had definitively given up its place. Robert spoke toward the sea. His words dropped down the slope. “What hurts the most is that those intimate moments alone with him in his study, when he told me about his family, his escape, and his captivity, were among the best moments of my childhood.” He laughed bitterly. “It’s hard to accept that we were at our closest when he was lying to me.”

Therese Mende listened to him attentively, watched the lights go on one by one in the hotels, restaurants, and bars, and tried to reassure herself with the thought that she had kept part of her life secret from her daughter, but had never presented her with a stranger’s life. Robert too was lost in thought. He felt tears coming into his eyes and drove them off by breathing hard. Then he said, “When my father died, I mourned him. Just now, I felt as if he were dying again, but that’s not true. He doesn’t exist. Even his tombstone is a lie now.”