The Diaries - 01 (13 page)

She grabbed his
right hand, moving it to her stomach, clasping her left hand over it.

They stayed that
way for another two hours, reading in silence.

***

Mannheim, Germany

The train ride
from Frankfurt’s
Hauptbahnhof
had been a short one,
especially on the sleek ICE bullet train.
 
Damien Ellis leaned against a towering column just off the platform,
eating pistachios, dropping the wet shells into a paper sack.
 
He was due to board the next ICE train in
less than five minutes, a fact made clear by the green digital timer staring
him in the face, ticking backward like a NASA countdown.

He took steadying
breaths, pressing his mind through the fear, trying to enjoy the nuts.
 
The consternation had struck him on the
train, sitting there in his second class seat all alone.
 
And that was the problem.

All alone.

Since they’d met,
he’d never gone anywhere for pleasure without Rose.
 
Not once.
 
Sure there were business trips when she was alive, but that’s the way he
kept them—strictly business—and always in a rush to get the job done and get
back home, back to his Rose.
 
Unlike many
of his contemporaries, he always viewed time away from his wife as an extreme
inconvenience.
 
He’d never once caroused;
never hit the bars with the fellas.
 
When
Rose Ellis was home waiting for him, his top priority had always been getting
back into her arms.

“But she
ain’t
there no more,” Ellis said to himself, the deep bass of
his voice reverberating in his whisper.
 
“And she’d be so angry right now…flat pissed off if I don’t go on and
enjoy this trip.”

The digital clock
displayed two more minutes.
 
Ellis
pocketed the remainder of the pistachios.
 
He donned his trilby hat, tugging on it as two women boarded the car
before him.
 
After finding his seat, he
hiked his right knee up on the ledge at the right side of the train, staring at
the station as it slid silently away.

“You can enjoy it
with me, darling,” he whispered, a smile creasing his face.
 
“’Cause we’re still together.”

***

The first diary
covered May through December of 1935.
 
While
more upbeat in tone, it was just as compelling as the 1938 chronicle.
 
The entries detailed Greta’s past, telling
about her finishing
Gymnasium
,
similar to American high school.
 
After
two extra years of schooling, which sounded the equivalent to an American junior
college, her prescient parents bribed a well-connected government official to
assign new identities, and new locales, to Greta and her brother.
 
Instead of Jews, she and her brother were
then viewed as good Germans.
 
Greta spent
weeks in mourning, each day lamenting her new city, Berlin, and the pain of the
separation from her family:

I’d rather be dead than never see Mama and Papa
again.
 
Papa told me over and over, on
the day the I was driven to Kassel, to forget who I was.
 
He kept saying, if I wanted to live, to forget
the past and focus on the future.
 
“Consider us both dead, or you will be too,” he told me.
 
“A day is coming when they will try to kill
us all.” Those were the last words my Papa ever left with me.

They put Benjamin on a train to the north, I went
east.
 
Our family, our beautiful loving
family is no more.
 

I am considering suicide, diary.
 
There is a nearby bridge that I have crossed
over several times.
 
Last night, all
alone, I stood on its ledge, staring at the cobblestone below.
 
Two times I leaned out, only to pull myself
back.
 
Something kept me from
jumping.
 
A purpose.
 
But what purpose?

Or is it just my cowardly fear?

Gage read on,
feeling Greta’s emotions, like a volatile stock, rising and falling.
 
While he knew she didn’t kill herself, Gage
certainly empathized with the pain of living a ruse.
 
He cut his eyes to Monika, engrossed, her
hand drifting up and down his leg.

He turned the
page, reading on.
 
It seemed, as that
first summer wore on, that Greta’s mood improved as she grew more comfortable being
Greta
Dreisbach
.
 
Her writing was stilted on August 7
^th
, however.
 

I responded to an advert for maid service
yesterday, queuing for sixteen grueling hours before I was ushered in to the
little building off of
Wilhelmstrasse
.
 
The catty old women sat behind the table,
studying me like they might judge a fattened sow at the autumn festival.
 
They made me lift my arms, checking the skin
to see if it might be saggy.
 
I was
forced to lift my skirt while a woman touched my legs and bottom, feeling them
like she might search for firm apples at the grocery.
 
A doctor of some sort came in, examining my
private parts, asking me incredibly personal questions.
 
This all, while bizarre, I was able endure in
the interest of making a proper living.

But they asked me about my family!
 
Every night, before I write, I study the
papers given to me by that horrid, perverted man my parents hired.
 
I study the names, my history, where I went
to school…all of it.
 
And when they began
quizzing me about my past, and taking notes, I so badly wanted to run
away.
 
I wanted to run back to Frankfurt
and find Mama and Papa and melt into their arms!
 
But, coward that I am, I told them...told
them the story, told them the names and places I had memorized.

 
A week later:

I got the job!
 
The woman called me in (a true bitch in every sense of the word) and
told me I was one of four chosen from over a thousand suitable candidates.
 
I have to move into the servants’ quarters
and will work twelve hours a day, six days a week, but I can do it!
 
She did unnerve me somewhat when she said I
had better do anything I’m asked to do, no questions whatsoever.
 
I felt she was hinting at something, with a
nasty gleam in her mean eyes.
 
But, with
my money almost gone and no prospects, I had to agree.
 
She said I will be surrounded by the
influential people of the Party!
 
I’m
floating, diary.
 
Floating!

Who will I meet?
 
What will I be privy to?

Still, lingering in my mind is the way she eyed me
when she told me that I should acquiesce to any demand made of me.
 
My mind keeps going back to that awful little
man who was hired to give me my identity.
 
I cannot stop thinking of the threats, the things he did to me, and made
me do.
 
Things I’d never thought possible
between two human beings, things I will never speak of or write for all my
days.

Why can’t people live and let live?
 
Who would want a person who doesn’t want
them?

I hope, as I write this, touching the locket on my
chest, that this job will lead me to a good man who will love me for my soul
and not my body.

There was a knock
at the door.
 
Gage padded into the
hallway, looking through the peephole, unalarmed but still cautious.
 
It was the maid.
 
He shot the deadbolt, opening the door and
pressing ten euro into the older woman’s hand, his mind on the maid he’d just
been reading about.

“One hour, please,”
he asked in German.

The lady arched
her eyes, smiling at the generous tip.
 
She nodded, pushing her cart to the next room.

When he walked
back into the bedroom, Monika was prone, staring at him, a finger holding her
place almost midway through the diary.
 
Her face was bright, her eyes alight.

“What do you
think?” Gage asked, opening his hands.

“I think it’s
incredibly tragic, but at the same time…and I feel awful saying this…but the
story is riveting.
 
I can’t take my eyes
off of it.”
 
She flipped backward,
carefully turning the brittle pages.
 
“Here, listen to this
…

I read the new grotesque proclamations this
morning, adopted by the Reich as infallible rules regarding interactions with
Jews.
 
Any man who has sex with a Jewish
woman has an unclean penis, and there is no possible way to undo the damage
that has been done.
 
That man can no longer
father clean children.
 
So, unbeknownst
to Aldo, according to this, his people’s own twisted doctrine, he’s now
unclean.
 
This makes my decision to tell
him the truth even harder.
 
In fact, who
am I kidding?
 
I know beyond a shadow of
a doubt I will never tell him.
 
He would
have me killed.
 
Killed!
 
And what’s worse, diary, is…well, I will save
it for tomorrow’s entry.
 
I need to have
a good cry.

Gage nodded his
head, remembering the passage all too well.

“You read this,
didn’t you?
 
So you know her hesitation
is because she suspects she’s pregnant, no doubt by this sicko Aldo?”

Gage picked up the
plate of croissants, sitting on the bed next to Monika.
 
“Before we discuss the diary—and trust me, it
gets more tragic—I want to know that you’re okay with everything I told
you.
 
As I sat next to you, reading one
of the other diaries, I had a feeling you might be feeling a bit betrayed by my
keeping it from you for so long.”

Monika leaned
forward, running her hands over his short hair.
 
Her brown eyes moved over his, flicking back and forth as she studied
him.
 
“Gage, I feel closer to you than I
ever have.
 
And after what you’ve been
through, I wouldn’t have expected you to ever tell me the truth.”
 
She smiled.
 
“But I’m thankful, so thankful, you did.”

“Thank you.”

There was a moment
of silence between them.
 
She lifted his
chin.
 
“But I like Gage better than
Matthew.
 
I hope you don’t expect me to
call you that…
Matthew
.”
 
She said his given name in a mocking voice.

Gage smiled,
grasping her shoulders and playfully rolling her supine on the bed.
 
They lay there, their laughter trailing off, staring
at one another, expressions saying everything. Finally Gage broke the silence.

“Anything about
the diary that jumps out at you, besides the tragic and twisted content?”

Monika appeared
thoughtful.
 
“Only that Aldo seemed to be
a man of considerable power.
 
Though the
writer, Greta, never said what it was he did for a living.”

Gage sat up,
nodding.
 
He took a croissant, eating
half in an entire bite.
 
With a mouthful
he asked, “Have you read about Elsa yet?”

Monika looked up,
recalling.
 
“She’s his wife, or
girlfriend, or something.
 
Yes, she’s
been mentioned several times.”

After stuffing the
remainder of the pastry in his mouth, Gage washed it down with water.
 
“And has she mentioned the visitors yet,
Albert and
Margarete
?”

“That’s right
where I am right now, in April.”

“Those names mean
anything to you?”

“Not at all.”

“I looked them
up.”

“And?”

Gage made her wait,
blinking his eyes, twisting his mouth.

“And?”

“Albert was
well-known.”

“Okay…who was he?”

“Albert Speer, and
his wife
Margarete
.”

Monika
shrugged.
 
Her expression was open.

“You know who he
is, right?”

She shook her
head.

“Albert Speer was
a
chief Nazi
, the architect and
production head of the
entire
Third
Reich.”

Monika grabbed the
water bottle, sipping from it as she cut her eyes to him.
 
“In German schools, we don’t exactly focus on
the Third Reich and all its stars.
 
Not
exactly our finest hour, Gage.”

He nodded,
properly admonished.
 
“Understood, but
nevertheless,
Speer
was world famous.
 
In fact, before the war he was probably one
of the most-talked-about Nazis, other than Hitler himself.”

She eyed him.
 
“Go on.”

“Did you notice
where Greta lived?”

Monika nibbled her
thumbnail.
 
“Berlin, right?”