The Other Side of Love (47 page)

They were lost.

The dense fog that had descended on the Ardennes sometimes thinned but never lifted. No matter how often Wyatt had checked his compass, he couldn’t figure where the American line was meant to be. So when they’d found this farmhouse, previously shelter to Germans, he’d let the remnants of his men take a rest.

Reaching for his Camels, he felt paper. He fished out an unopened V-mail letter. It had been handed to him three days earlier centuries earlier - at Regiment Headquarters. Because the writing was not Araminta’s but Aubrey’s, he had shoved it in his pocket and forgotten it. Scratching a match to his cigarette, he slit the thin blue paper.

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Dear Wyatt,

First of all, I can’t apologize enough for sending you the news by telegram. I did my best to put through a call, but you know better than I how impossible that is. Second, I’m most terribly sorry I didn’t send a letter of explanation immediately. But this is the first time I’ve been able to collect myself enough to write.

As far as I can piece together, she was doing her regular Tuesday-night stint at the Rainbow Club. The other hostesses said she left before eleven. She must have been winding her way home to the flat. Another street, a few minutes earlier or later, and she would have been safe. The one consolation is that death came instantaneously. The flying bombs are merciful that way. She never knew she was hit. She didn’t suffer. They found fragments of her coat, and very little else. Oddly enough, her handbag was thrown clear, and that was how we found out so quickly.

You know how Father doted on her. He has been cornpletely dazed, and keeps referring to her as if she were still alive. The doctor assures me that this is his way of dealing with the shock, and he’ll snap out of it. Mother hasn’t stopped weeping, and Grandfather looks so tottery that I fear for him. But he keeps a stiff upper lip and has promised to manage Kingsmith’s until Father’s up to it.

I took Geoff on a walk, and tried to explain as much as one can to somebody not yet two that his mummy wouldn’t be coming home. He tilted his hŤl in that quiet way of his, and then began to cry. I criea, too. After a minute, he patted my cheek and said:

“Hurt self,

“Ncle Aubwee?”

I couldn’t answer. Araminta was the light shining through my childhood, all the brightness and fun and happiness. I cannot believe she is gone.

Although there was no body, I decided a funeral would give us all a chance to vent our grief. So yesterday we put a seal, as it were, on her death.

Even with the miserably crowded trains, more than a hundred people came down to the service. Our neighbours saw to it that they had transport from Faversham station. Do you remember the Frognall plot? It is just behind the fourteenth-century extension of the church, and fenced off from the rest of the graveyard. The older stones are mossy and grow out of the earth, but the last century produced marble angels and crosses that have stayed an astonishing white. Araminta’s grave is next to

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the memorial obelisk for our uncles who were killed in the Great War.

It was a bitter morning, but afterwards we did not disperse the way that mourners usually do. Instead, we took turns talking about her. Some stories I never knew. Maybe you don’t, either. The station officer told how she never turned a hair during the worst of the Blitz, speeding him along burning streets where the buildings might collapse at any moment. Once, while he was directing the engines, an old woman came to the car crying for help for her grandson. Araminta rescued the little boy just before the house caved in.

The Red Cross club contingent had stories of how she bucked up the wounded. Fellow-debutantes told of her popularity with the opposite sex. Old school chums eulogized pillow fights she organized. The evacuees repeated her less respectable jokes and, though some of the stodgier folk glared, Araminta would have adored the laughter.

Telegrams arrived from all over, including one from the Prime Minister himself, which I read aloud.

Wyatt, the Knightsbridge fire station are banding together for a plaque that says:

“Araminta Kingsmith, remembered by us all for her gallantry during the Battle of Britain’. Gallant is the exact description of your wife, my sister.

Sorry, but I cannot write any more.

Keep safe, Wyatt. We need you.

Your cousin and brother, AUBREY

It was almost dark. Wyatt didn’t notice the waning light as he refolded the thin blue V-mail paper back into its creases.

“Sir, looks like the fog’s lifting.”

“What?”

Wyatt looked up at the man standing over him. It was Pelissi, the burly sergeant with the silver star from Normandy.

“Maybe, when it’s dark, we should get out of here.”

“What’s that?”

Pelissi was squinting down at him, a peculiar look in his round bloodshot eyes.

“You OK, sir?”

Wyatt was on his feet.

“The noise, dammit,”

he said in a low voice.

“What’s that fucking noise?”

Over the faraway rumbling of artillery came a rattling snort of engines.

“Jeeps,”

somebody said.

“Thank God for giving us jeeps.”

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The lounging men had come alert. Wyatt was already at the window, peering through his binoculars into the brownish-grey soup of dusk.

Three jeeps emerged from the fog, swerving towards the farmhouse. The first halted behind what had been a pigeon-coop.

The mud-covered helmets were the wrong shape. Wyatt raised a hand, signifying silence. There was a command in German. The four in the front jeep jumped out. The big Waffen-SS corporal ran to the dovecote, the short thin private following. The other two covered them, then in turn were covered, and the big corporal trotted forward again, a smoothly professional warriors”

ballet.

Below, the front door was kicked open. A high-pitched voice said in German:

“Place is empty.”

Then the four men trotted back towards the jeep, two of them talking about having some goddam shelter tonight.

Suddenly the twilit mist erupted with sound, and the Germans fell in turn. At first Wyatt didn’t realize he was firing an Ml rifle and screaming:

“You lousy motherfuckers! You filthy shits, you filthy Kraut shits! Goddam rocket bombs killing women! You rotten lousy Nazi motherfuckers!”

In less than a minute, bodies in field-grey were sprawling in the jeeps or on the road. The mist shifted, and he saw a prone German bellying his way towards the cover of a tree. Wyatt peered down the sight. The German jumped, then lay still, but Wyatt continued to spray the corpse with -30-calibre bullets.

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Enjoy the war; the peace is going to be a lot less fun.

Graffito on a bombed-out Berlin warehouse,

March 1945

I

By March of 1945, Hitler’s lunatic military decisions had cost the Third Reich the immense new empire that had been paid for in Wehrmacht blood. The Russians had advanced to the Oder river. The Allies were crossing the Rhine. Saturation bombing was pulverizing German cities into heaped rubble. After eighty-five raids in less than eleven weeks, Berlin was missing so many landmarks that native Berliners continually lost their wm (Kingsmith’s was one of the gutted shells along the ruins of Unter den Linden.) The Fiihrer refused to look upon his new Reich. After the attempt on his life the previous July, he had grown yet more misanthropic and fearful, more dependent on the drug injections of his physician. A pasty-faced addict, he shuffled through the maze of cement bunkers far below the Chancellery gardens issuing his martial manifestos and dictating proclamations that adjured every German man, woman and child to fight to the death.

The remaining buses, S-bahn and U-bahn lines were unbearably crowded, and never on schedule. Kathe, like many other Germans, had taken out her old bicycle.

One cold bright Saturday afternoon in early March as she pedalled along Bendlerstrasse, she spotted a shawled old woman sitting on tne kerb with a display of snowdrops. Buying a grass-tied bouquet, she stowed it carefully in her handlebar basket. Through soot and smoke from a raid earlier this afternoon gleamed the enormous

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gilt statue of Victory, marking the way to the Tiergarten. At the Seegessaule, a policeman raised his palm to halt the stream of bicycles. A bundled-up pregnant woman called out asking where Kathe had found the snowdrops, and other cyclists turned, chorusing heartfelt delight at the white flowers. Kathe found it touching that weary people who lived in privation and constant danger should be captivated by these traditional harbingers of spring. The nostalgic sweetness remained with her as she followed detour signs. So many streets were blocked because of fires and burst water-mains that it took her nearly two hours to reach Griinewald.

By the time she got to the pharmacy where they were registered, he had no aspirin.

II

In the chilly garage bedroom, she found Clothilde exactly as she had left her, red-eyed, pale, huddled under blankets and overcoats.

Tm sorry, Mother, Herr Edendorfer was out of aspirin.”

She , brandished the flowers.

“But I found these.”

“How lovely,”

Clothilde said, and went into a spasm of hoarse coughing.

“Let me make you something to drink.”

After two cups of hot grassy tea, Clothilde drowsed. She slept while Kathe prepared dinner cabbage and potatoes simmered with two thin slices of long-life Wurst.

“I’m not hungry tonight, dear,”

she said.

“If you’d make another pot of tea. And turn on the news.”

“Hier spricht Hans Fritzsche,”

intoned the famous newscaster who by some magical trick of delivery made Goebbels’s most idiotic pronouncements believable, even palatable. Tonight Fritzsche’s main story was of a Wehrmacht division booby-trapping the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, thus killing many Americans. Following the news there was a Brahms concert. Despite the round-the-clock bombing, the fires, the tight rationing, an eerie kind of normality laced the city together. Newspapers printed advertisements for sales at The Berliner and other department stores, postmen delivered mail, milkmen delivered milk, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwangler played out its season.

During the applause for the Academic Festival Overture, Clothilde lifted her head. Tm sorry, Kathe. It slipped my mind. You have a letter.”

The envelope, postmarked Berlin, lacked a return address. The handwriting was unfamiliar.

Kathe slipped out a lined sheet wrapped around a crumpled flimsy scrap of toilet paper. She read the covering message.

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Dear Fraulein Kingsmith,

It is wiser for both of us if you do not know my name but I have the honour of being a friend to your brother, Colonel Siegfried von Hohenau. He has requested that I pass this on to you.

They had not heard from Sigi in months, not since his promotion to full colonel; but, then, he’d always been a sloppy correspondent. As far as they knew, he was with his uncle in Zossen. With shaking hands Kathe unfolded the toilet paper.

Dearest little sister,

I feel rotten that I haven’t seen you and Mother in so many months. And now it’s impossible. Kathe, last summer in my own dilatory way I served the Reich, services for which I am currently being rewarded by a billet in the safest quarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Please don’t worry. The Gestapo are most intent on keeping matters quite legal.

There is some sad news. My uncle died last week - a heartattack and he

She had reached the end of the flimsy little page. There was no other. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. The few sentences had told her everything.

Sigi had somehow been involved in what people were now calling the July Plot.

The plot - an attempt to overthro\l|he Nazi regime by killing Hitler - had taken place on 20 Jury of the previous year at Wolfsschanze, the Fiihrer’s headquarters in a gloomy East Prussian forest. Colonel Glaus von Stauffenberg had detonated a small but powerful bomb beneath the conference-table. The stout oak of the table had preserved the dictator’s life. Since that hour Hitler had been wreaking a maniacal vengeance. The officers who had spearheaded the failed assassination were executed that same night. During the following months more and more of their cohorts as well as other suspected anti-Nazis were hauled in. Hitler had already reinstated Sippenhaft, the ancient Germanic law which punished families of criminals, and thus the bloodbath spread.

Gestapo interrogators plied whips, prodded electricity, maimed and mutilated. The dungeons below Prinz Albrechtstrasse rang with hoarse screams. Those whom the Gestapo considered culpable were sent to the People’s Court, where they were further degraded by fanatical Nazi judges. Eventually the Ministry of Propaganda had determined that the huge number of

“fiendish villains”

cast a

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poor light on the Leader’s popularity. The circus of public trials dwindled. Prisoners were reported to have succumbed from

“natural causes”

or in a few cases to have

“died a hero’s death for the Fiihrer at the front’.

Rathe clutched at the flimsy paper. Sigi? How was it possible? Sweet-natured indolent Sigi with his spotted uniforms and overage mistress bestirring himself to join the conspiracy? Had he merely followed the one-eyed general, his uncle? The Brahms flowing majestically over her, she recalled Christmas Eve at GarmischPartenkirchen and Sigi jumping - or, rather, stumbling - into the fray at Wyatt’s side.