The Other Side of Love (43 page)

“Kathe, I’ve already told you too much.”

“How do you know he’s all right? It’s over a year and a half since you saw him.”

“Don’t you think I’ve stayed in contact?”

“What’s the man’s name?”

“Kathe. A Lebensborn adoption is sacred.”

“You know.”

“I know too damn many things.”

They were passing the Kurhaus, and Groener stared at the bulky silhouette.

“Having so much locked away is like carrying a hod of bricks. But believe me, Kathe, our boy’s perfectly safe.”

“Is he still called Erich?”

“Of course, and Erich he’ll remain. A son of the Black Order. Put your mind at rest. These are fine, fine Nazis.”

She shivered.

“There’s my house.”

Groener insisted on walking her up the icy path. At the front door, he said:

“Take care of that headache. And tell Frau Kingsmith I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon to convey my Christmas wishes.”

“That’s not necessary”

But he was stamping back to the car.

IV

“So you know Hauptbannfiihrer Groener,”

Hannalore Eberhardt said the following afternoon as she plopped down at Kathe’s table. A dense cloud had settled over the top of the Zugspitze, and the

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veranda of the Schneefernerhaus was crowded with skiers waiting for the milky fog to lift.

“He’s a friend of my brother’s.”

“He’s very goodlooking, but did you ever see a man so positive he’s God’s gift to women? Still, I’m a sweetie pie with him. Father’s high up in the Special Office of Labour Allocation, and he’s important to him.”

She leaned across the varnished wood, whispering:

“He’s in charge of the workforce for the Vergeltungswaffe.”

“The Vergeltungswaffe?”

Kathe peered into Hannalore’s vividly blue eyes. Rumours of miracles swirled brightly in tandem with the whispers about the reprisal weapon, the Vergeltungswaffe. Having never seen any mention of a new type of weapon in her filing, Kathe had assumed the stories were opiates circulated by the Ministry of Propaganda to make people forget the Allied air raids, the shortages, the defeats in Italy and Russia.

“It actually exists?”

Hannalore glanced around.

“I’ve heard such crazy stories,”

Kathe murmured.

“It’s a gas that turns conquered people into robots, a germ that kills everyone except the Nordic race. A bomb that destroys the enemy population but not the buildings or the animals.”

Hannalore’s superior little laugh showed a fleck of brown wedged between her buck teeth.

“All I can tell you is that it’ll win the war.”

V

The cloud didn’t lift. Kathe rode down in the last jam-packed cablecar. Long before she reached the chalet darkness had fallen. Even so, Groener was still drinking tea in the whitewashed main room.

“Hauptbannfiihrer Groener has offereAo drive us back to Berlin,”

Clothilde said in the bland tone in whiclr she would praise a hardworking servant.

“You’ll have a far more pleasant trip than by rail,”

Groener said. An understatement. The trains coming here had been miserably crowded, the stops interminable.

Even so, the thought of spending ten to twelve hours in a car with him brought goosebumps to her arms.

“We couldn’t possibly put you to the trouble,”

she said.

“Now you’re being ridiculous,”

Groener said. Til be by first thing tomorrow morning.”

As Groener’s car approached Berlin in the gathering dusk, they could see brownish smoke hovering above the flatness of the central city, reaching like tentacles into the outer areas.

“Damn terrorbombers,”

Groener muttered. Turning in at their driveway, he jammed on the brakes. A barrier with the red and black Danger sign barred entrance. Kathe wrenched open the car door. Brick dust

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and the odour of burned wood filling her nostrils, she dodged around the barrier and raced towards the curve of unpruned yews. She came to an abrupt halt.

Though many of the windows on the left side of the house remained intact, every pane of glass to the right of the front door was gone the window casements were as vacant as an idiot’s stare. Slowly climbing the front steps, Rathe edged around the front door, which had been axed down by the firefighters. In the twilight the staircase and cavernous drawingroom appeared undamaged. Otherwise her childhood’s home was a shambles. The diningroom, Alfred’s Herrenzimmer, the kitchen, pantry and laundry were ceilingless and heaped with rubble. The master suite and boxroom where they stored old clothes remained. But Sigi’s room with the ancient von Graetz tapestry

“Loyalty to country, Fidelity to oath”

- was gone, as was her own room with the inlaid box that contained Wyatt’s letters and the amethyst brooch. Thank heavens Trudi went home to Saxony for Christmas.

At a creaking overhead, Kathe looked up. The reverberations of her footsteps must have dislodged the bathtub. It teetered back and forth on crossbeams. Then the blackened tub crashed down. She leaped backwards. The fog of disturbed soot made her cough violently.

The other two had come to the entry.

“Those damn air pirates! I can’t wait until I get my hands on them!”

Groener said angrily.

“I have a new flat in Charlottenburg, quite swank. I’ll drive you over there.”

Clothilde gazed up at the ruined mansion where she had spent most of her second marriage.

“How thoughtful of you,”

she said calmly.

“But we can manage quite comfortably in the chauffeur’s quarters.”

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i

Kathe used her lunch hour from Hall Six to check on Kingsmith’s. Unter den Linden had been hit. A fierce stench rose from the central lane, where members of the Technische Nothilfe the auxiliary specializing in air-raid damage hurried about supervising the Russian prisoners who struggled to dig out a ruined sewer main. Many pedestrians, protecting themselves against odours, ashes and masonry dust, had tied damp towels over their n

Kingsmith’s had the Closed sign on the floor. Kathe climbed on the sandbags to peep through a space in the boarded windows. What she could see of the shop appeared reasonably undisturbed. Getting down, she held her gloved hand over her nose. People were rushing by the sewer repair squad. One man, however, had halted near a fireblackened linden tree. Beneath the shabby topcoat, his shoulders were hunched in a way that thrust his head forward like a turtle’s. A pocket handkerchief covering his lower face, his hat pulled down to the metal rims of his glasses, it was difficult to tell much about him, but Kathe decided from his strange posture that he was a veteran. Nowadays men with amputations or deforming wounds were sadly common.

She started back to Bendlerstrasse.

Near the Potsdamer Bahnhof, she spotted a small bakery with no line. The baker’s wife clipped her ration-book, handing over a dark loaf with a cheery

“Heil Hitler’.

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Since Aubrey’s surveillance tutorials, Kathe had fallen into the habit of looking around. As she emerged, she glimpsed a man relying his shoe in the shadow of a pillar.

It was the hunched-over veteran from Unter den Linden.

He’s following me!

Coldness prickled on her skin, and her thoughts skittered. Had the military intelligence, the Abwehr, caught on to what she’d been up to? Had the Gestapo caught on to the errands she ran for Schultze?

Her impulse was to run. She forced herself to continue at a normal pace. Reaching a four-storey bombed-out building plastered with Danger signs, she used her free hand to clamber up into the ruins of the first flat, edging deeper inside to the diningroom. The broken window overlooked the debris-heaped courtyard. She couldn’t be seen from the street.

In the direction she had come, tiny bits of broken glass were crushed a small sound as terrifying as the thunder of high explosive. She moved on rubbery legs to the far side of the fallen table and stood absolutely still, scarcely breathing. The hunched veteran appeared in the arch of the diningroom. The round table and a shaft of dusty light all that separated them, he peered through his glasses at her.

Unconsciously cradling the bread in front of her breasts, she attempted Clothilde’s most arrogant tone.

“Must you keep annoying me?”

“Ich dachte du hist Tot,”

he said in a Berlinische accent. Pulling the handkerchief from his face, he said it again.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Aubrey?”

she whispered.

“Aubrey … how could I not recognize you?”

“Kathe. My Kathe.”

“You’ve been sent back?”

Relief and joy caught in her throat, and she laughed.

“That’s a ridiculous question. You’re not on holiday in Berlin.”

“I wasn’t to contact you,”

he said.

“But I snooped around the house and saw it had been bombed. Since then I’ve been circulating between Unter den Linden and the Bendlerblock, praying I’d spot you.”

“We were in GarmischPartenkirchen over Christmas.”

“Thank God.”

“What about you? Your shoulders, I mean.”

“Tip-top shape. But Rutger Metz was wounded at Stalingrad.”

Aubrey continued to hold his turtle position while tilting his head.

“Kathe, how could I have forgotten how beautiful you are?”

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‘There’s an example of Kingsmith eyes. Or maybe it’s those German ground spectacles you’re wearing,”

she teased. How strange, she thought, not being on guard. Is this what peace was like, being able to speak without constraint?

“Aub Rutger, how are the family? How are they all?”

His smile faded. He shook his head, a warning he couldn’t tell her what she shouldn’t know.

“I’m alone, so alone!”

she burst out.

“And you know the most unbearable part? Not knowing whether they’re alive or dead. Think how frantic you were about me.”

After a long pause, he came around the table, touching her cheek gently.

“Alive. They’re all alive. And your people?”

“Mother’s the same as ever. And Sigi’s …

“

Her voice faded. She had never given the British information tethered in any way to her halfbrother.

“He’s all right.”

“Good.”

Suddenly, without the routine advance warning of sirens, far to the west there was excited rattle of ack-ack, and the distant sound rather like a tearing of cloth that she’d learned to recognize as approaching aeroplane engines.

Aubrey listened a moment longer.

“Bl7s,”

he muttered.

“Again. The bastards.”

“Bastards? They’re Americans. On your side. You should be cheering.”

“What, that women and children are being bombed out of their homes?”

“Once a pacifist, always a pacifist.”

She laughed softly and, because she was so at ease, she asked:

“Is Wyatt wlheir air force?”

“Kathe,”

he warned with a pitying lookr

She wanted to shout not to pity her, she wanted to shake him, her unrelentingly professional English cousin. She wanted to hug him. The sirens had started their howling, and there was a distant reverberation of bombs. A block warden shouted, but from the voices and sounds in the street nobody appeared to be making a dash for the shelters.

Aubrey, have your people heard about the Vergeltungswaffe?

We’re fairly positive there’s some top-secret weapon being developed.”

He spoke guardedly.

“Why?”

A … friend knows about it.”

|Steer clear,”

he said.

What sort of response is that?”

“Darling, do only what they ask.”

But this thing’s brand new.”

“Aren’t you in enough danger?”

” could be terrible for all of you.”

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‘Go to the shelter!”

The shout rang clearly over the thunderous cacophony of the raid. The block warden must be right outside.

“Everybody to the U-bahn shelter!”

“No use attracting attention,”

Aubrey said quietly.

“Let’s get a leg on.”

As they emerged, a formation of Messerschmitt 109 fighters cut across the sky. In the direction of Lankwitz, American bombers were dipping between barrage-balloons to drop what appeared to be giant eggs that burst into smoke and flames. Puffballs formed around the big American planes. One plummeted downwards, trailing blackness.

“Forget the miracle weapon, Kathe,”

he said quietly.

“Will I see you again?”

“Not this time.”

He was staring at her as if to imprint her on his memory. Raising his arm in a salute, he said:

“Heil Hitler, Gnadiges Fraulein, and thank you for the directions.”

That evening at five-thirty, a man with a peculiar wound that drew his head into an awkward position was walking along Bendlerstrasse as the civilian employees poured from the Bendlerblock. The girl with the slender legs and platinum hair spread like a white gold shawl on her drab coat didn’t see him. Aubrey, watching Kathe disappear, wished he could protect her from all manner of dangers, including her own integrity and goodness.