The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (18 page)

After thirty minutes of her hand-wringing, I steered our conversation to the war. I had asked specifically, on the phone, if she would talk about those days. She agreed, so I didn’t feel ungracious about asking.

“Where was Jacob a prisoner?”

She dabbed at her eyes. “In the camps, to the east. Yaakov was at Auschwitz and Janowska, where he worked with metal. From there they sent him to Drütte, in Germany. He was one of those rare Jews they used according to his talents. There weren’t many of us. Usually, they just made us dig ditches until we died. He met Isaac at Drütte. Who’s she?”

“A friend,” I said. “My good friend. I already introduced you.” I felt Liesel’s hand at my shoulder when the widow mentioned Drütte.

“He fell right there.” She pointed. “Do you see the stones?”

“I see, Tosha. What did the police tell you? What happened?”

“Everybody said
accident,
a terrible accident for an old man. The policeman said he lost his balance and fell when he was getting up to answer the door. Someone was delivering a package. Did you know my Yaakov?” She dabbed her eyes. “A good man. Everybody said so.” Her black dress had short sleeves; on her left forearm was tattooed a five-digit number, preceded by the letter A.

Liesel stared.

Zeligman was an old but still powerful man when we met. Isaac had wasted away and needed help bathing and walking at the end. But Jacob, only weeks before, had drunk vodka like a Cossack and walked a straight line when the time came to leave. I would have bet he had years left in him. I patted the widow’s hand. “Even oak trees fall, Tosha.”

“Freda said you were a good boy. How is she?”

I told her the truth. “Lonely. Sad.”

“Yaakov said Isaac worked on a farm before the war and also knew how to work with metal, so they sent him to the steelworks. They both came to Drütte from other camps in the east. We met at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Jacob had typhus, but I was sick with it already at Auschwitz, so I was safe. I got to be a nurse.”

Again, I felt Liesel’s hand at my shoulder. If Zeligman and Isaac were at Drütte, then this was without question the Jacob Zeligman who had signed the affidavit. Liesel had gotten, was getting, what she’d come for. She had met the woman who married one of the ten who’d stood as witnesses for her father.

“Did he ever talk about life in the camp?”

“The SS worked them like animals, is all I know. Look,” she said. “In those days, people didn’t live or die the normal way. Do you understand me? Jacob survived. We met, and we just wanted to live and die in the normal way. He would have talked to you, for Isaac’s sake. Now he won’t.”

She rocked back and forth.

Liesel said, “Tosha, did your husband ever mention a man named Otto Kraus?”

The widow looked at her. “Who’s she?”

“A friend, Tosha. I introduced you.”

Liesel would tell me later that she put her question in precise German to make sure she was being clear.

“
Deutsch?
” said the widow.

“Yes, Tosha.”

“This is a German’s
Deutsch.
I know this accent.”

“Yes,” said Liesel. “I’m German.”

“Ach! Nazi.
Killer
.”

The widow began wailing. I tried to talk sense. “Tosha, she was born after the war. She did none of that.”

“And her father and uncles? Where were
they?
Burning babies?”

“My father did not burn babies.”

“But he knew men who did. Did he stop them?
No,
because if he tried they would have killed him. So he said nothing and lived. And that’s why you’re alive, because he lived and permitted children to be killed.” The widow struggled for breath.

Liesel fought back tears, but she pressed on. “At Drütte, did your husband know the director of the steel mill? His name was Otto Kraus. Did he speak of him?”

I watched the widow go somewhere in her head, to a special hell that had taken our species thousands of years to perfect. No one who hadn’t survived the camps could follow. Her face, by degrees, betrayed horror, grief and finally blank annihilation. I’d made a mistake in coming.

“Tosha, you took time to see us. Thank you.”

She grabbed my arm. “The police. The police and my neighbors said he called
’Boża miłość
’ as he fell. Three times. What did it mean, they asked. I cried when I told them and cry when I tell you. Because he called ‘God’s Love’ as he fell. They all heard it. Jacob, he wasn’t a religious man. But he called to God, and it makes me happy to think so.
L’amour de Dieu.
God’s Love.
Boża miłość!
”

She smiled in her pain. “He must have seen Heaven as he fell.” And then, pointing a stubby finger at Liesel: “Who is she?”

Liesel didn’t move.

“A friend, Tosha. Did your husband ever speak of signing a piece of paper after the war? To help someone—a German?”

“Ach! Who would help a German?”

“Someone who had helped him,” said Liesel. “Your husband signed a piece of paper to help my father. His name was Otto Kraus. He was one of the Germans who saved Jews, one of the righteous. He saved as many as he could. Did your husband ever speak of him?”

“
Saved
us?” said the widow, beginning to shake. “Was that before or after the soldiers killed his family?” She rubbed the armrests of her chair. “I cry too much. I couldn’t help him. I went to the market.”

She looked at Liesel. “
Deutsch?
”

Liesel nodded, and the widow grabbed her arm, digging in her fingernails. “They killed my daughter. They clubbed my brother to death at the rail yard for stopping to help a child. From that day I cried. Who cries for you,
Deutsch?
Who cries for the murderer? Out! How dare you bring a filthy woman into a house of mourning. Out,
Deutsch.
Get out!”

twenty-five

“I
can’t breathe,” she said. “We’ve got to leave Bruges.”

We were standing in the courtyard. Above us, Tosha Zeligman sat at her window, rocking back and forth. If I returned in a month, should she live that long, she would be rocking still. Through an archway, we could see the spire of the Church of Our Lady.

“The Nazis were here,” said Liesel.

“You told me you’d never been to Bruges.”

“You think I don’t know German history? I can
smell
Nazis. They overran the city, rounded up Jews, then walked to that church to admire Michelangelo’s
Madonna and Child.
How do you
do
this? Kill in the morning and admire a sculpture in the afternoon?”

She held my good hand and led me from the courtyard. “Do you understand, they were here.
Here
.” She stamped her foot. “Sometimes I can’t breathe because of it. I love my country, but how did it happen? We were not all monsters! But I can’t help myself. I go walking in Munich or Berlin and see a man with white hair, and I wonder how many people he killed during the war. Why do I struggle like this? My father was a
good
man. He was gentle with me. If you knew him you’d know he never wanted to be one of them. He never
was
one of them. Not in his heart.”

She buried her face in her hands.

“I need to get out of here. I need air.”

W
E
ROARED
out of the city. Liesel drove hard, squealing the tires and opening the throttle wide on the ring road, tears streaking her cheeks. She headed north and, after thirty minutes, found a coastal road.

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere off this fucking continent. Back to Löwenherz.” She began to sob again, this time so violently I couldn’t trust her driving. We raced through lowland farm country, past fields of wheat and rye. She braked hard, then pulled the car onto a dirt road.

“Watch out!” I called.

I felt a hard bump beneath the car. She skidded to a stop and we got out.

Behind us, on a road, lay a small dog, a terrier mix. The car had crushed its abdomen and spine. The animal was dying, unable to move its hind legs. When she saw what she’d done, Liesel dropped to her knees and wailed. “Oh, my God. Gott! Gott! For the love of God.
Liebe Gottes.
” She touched the animal. She stroked its muzzle as it closed its eyes, blood pooling on the dusty roadbed.

The dog had a kerchief tied where its collar would have been. Someone’s pet, then. Liesel murmured, she spoke softly as the life drained out. “I killed it,” she said, looking at me. “I
killed
it. I’ve never killed anything, Henri.” I knelt beside her. “Oh Henri, I’ve killed this poor dog.”

“Liesel, you didn’t see. You couldn’t stop. It was an accident.”

We heard a rumbling behind us, and when I turned a farmer was stepping from the cab of his tractor. “What’s the problem?”

I walked back to explain, and the man came to inspect.

“I didn’t mean to do this.
Liebe Gottes
” She broke down again.

Without a word, the farmer returned to his rig for a shovel. Again, without speaking, he scooped up the animal and heaved it into a drainage ditch. “A dog,” he said. “There are other dogs.” He climbed back into his tractor, pulled around the BMW, and drove off.

I placed my jacket around Liesel, then opened the trunk of the car. The closest I could come to a shovel was a tire iron. I grabbed it, then rummaged through my suitcase for a shirt. I lifted the dog from the ditch. Liesel watched as I wrapped it and scratched out a shallow grave along the edge of a field. My hand and ankle ached.

We didn’t make Terschelling that day. I drove to Cologne and we found a hotel. In bed, Liesel cried and I held her until she stopped shaking, finally, and her breathing grew even.

How could I help, I wondered. I could no more remove the stain of war from her German soul than I could swim an ocean. I couldn’t speak to her father’s complicity, however much he may have helped innocents. I felt her drifting off, but then she startled and looked at me, beautiful even in her pain. She made an effort to smile, then let it go.

“If I died tonight,” she said, “if I died, would you cry for me?”

W
E
HAD
been gone a week. In the morning, Liesel called Munich to pick up her messages and discovered that Anselm had tried multiple times to reach her. “
What?
” she said, when they finally connected. “Not again! You go this time.
You
fix it!”

She slammed the phone down.

“What?”

“Our ship-breaking yard in Bangladesh. One of the workers cut the wrong truss with his torch, and a three-ton section fell away from a tanker and crushed several men. One disaster after the next, Henri.
What
is happening? I’ve got to get back to Munich. Let’s go.”

“I can’t,” I said.

She stared at me.

I could hardly explain it to myself. “I need to see Tosha Zeligman again. Something doesn’t make sense. Jacob was a strong man. He was old and could have had a stroke and fallen. Even so, something’s missing. I need a day or two.”

She looked doubtful.

“It’s me, isn’t it? You can’t stand to be with me anymore. It’s my family. It’s everything. There’s too much
shit
in my life.” She put a hand to her head as if to stanch a wound and leaned against a bureau. A tray fell, and she kicked it across the room.

“That’s not true, Liesel.”

“Then why stay behind?”

I couldn’t say more because I didn’t know.

I held her and forced her to look at me. “I’ll return to Munich soon. I’ll be with you. I
want
to be with you. Do you understand?”

She choked off a sob. Her pain at the death of these workers was real. I knew then that she needed me.

“Are you OK to drive?”

She nodded.

“Something,” I said. “Give me something, a photo. I’m going to keep it in my wallet and I’m going to look at it and think of you.”

She wiped her nose with her sleeve and tried to laugh. “You want my picture?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re coming home soon?”

“I just said so. I am.”

She crossed the room for her purse. “Before we left, I picked these up from the photographer, photos from Anselm’s party at Löwenherz. There’s one of me and you that I’m keeping.” We sat on the edge of the bed as she flipped through them. “There’s this other one. You don’t mind, I hope?”

“Impossible. I’ll cut them out.”

“No, you can’t. They’re my uncles.”

The photographer had posed Liesel with Hofmann to one side, and Nagel and Schmidt to the other. I asked if I could at least fold the photo. She said
no.

“They look like trolls, and you look like their prisoner.”

“At least I’m smiling, Henri. It’s this or nothing. I’ll get you a better one when you’re back in Munich.”

So I took the photo, pressed it between the pages of
Steel and Service: The Life of Otto von Kraus,
and waved as she drove off. The ache I felt as she turned onto the highway and disappeared didn’t surprise me, exactly. I thought of other partings. My parents sending each other, and me, off with a kiss. My leaving Isaac for University. Isaac’s leaving us.
Get over it,
I thought.
You won’t see her for a day or two. Get a grip.
But I couldn’t help myself then and can’t help myself now. From my earliest days, I have felt that delight in this world carries within it the seeds of its own agony. Nothing lasts.

As Liesel drove off, I recognized the void.

Still, there was work to do. I rented a car and headed back toward Bruges for something important left behind, though I couldn’t remember what. In Ghent, I found it. I had stopped for lunch—why hurry if you don’t know what’s coming next?—when, in the way of things, the world snapped into focus over a random choice. For no particular reason I turned right, not left, out of the café where I had enjoyed a salad and baguette. Fifteen minutes later, I found myself before Saint Nicholas’s Church. Strung above the main entrance was a large banner that read “God Loves You” in Belgium’s three official languages: Dutch,
God houdt van u.
French,
Dieu vous aime.
And German,
Gott liebt Sie.

Agnostic bordering on atheist that I was, I chuckled and wondered if just to be safe I should be crossing myself in all three languages. I kept walking but then stopped on realizing, with a jolt, why I’d let Liesel return to Munich alone. Tosha Zeligman said Jacob fell to the courtyard hailing God’s love in his native Polish:
Boża miłość.
I turned back to the sign. In German,
God loves
is
Gott liebt.
I repeated the words until they blended and became something else:
Gott liebt, Gott lieb, Gottlieb.
Zeligman hadn’t called to God when he died. In his final moments, in the language of his childhood, he had bellowed the name of his killer.