by Matt Killeen
“But, Lisbeth—” The words were out of Sarah’s mouth before she could stop them, and now everyone was looking at her. “I mean, Dr. Fischer said you’d only lost one nurse.”
“And we did, a good man.”
“We also lost twenty-two native workers, Ursula,” Lisbeth said quietly, fiddling with her necklace. “Before we knew what we were dealing with.”
“And a fair few since,” the professor went on as if no one else was talking. “Bofinger’s Disease has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? I’d name it after the first patient, but he was some meaningless Platzverschwendung—”
“Father!” Lisbeth cried.
“Some poor subject of the Belgian Empire,” he corrected himself sarcastically and went on. “And I don’t even remember what toilet of a river we were near at the time, something running off the Ubangi River or somewhere. Can’t call a disease Ubangi, no one would take it seriously. I’d seen it before anyway, or something like it, off and on for the last ten years. But this . . . it’s better, stronger, more infectious, takes longer to appear in a host, kills slower . . . this is something worth having—”
“Father, enough,” Lisbeth snapped. “I’m sorry, my father is an old warrior, and he occasionally forgets to be anything else.”
“Yet we’re at war again, stepdaughter. A time for warriors. Do you think Berlin’s sudden interest in our work is altruistic?”
Sarah wondered if he were drunk. That would have made her feel better about this conversation, that it could be dismissed as an alcohol-fueled rant, like her mother’s admonishments and threats. That there would be a time of tears and apologies and regret. Yet the man seemed steely eyed.
“Time was it didn’t matter what the cost,” he continued. “Didn’t have to pretend that we cared, or that we were doing things for their own good. Back when Germans went into Südwestafrika. We wanted the land, we took it. We wanted the cattle dead, my father killed all the cattle—”
“Father!”
“If there was research to do, someone needed a human skull, my father would just walk into the concentration camp and take one—”
“Father, please,” Lisbeth insisted. “Stop talking about that.”
There were now tears in her eyes. Sarah wondered at this woman, living with someone who seemed to revel in his inhumanity. Like attending Rothenstadt forever.
Something occurred to Sarah, who looked around the tent. There were six servants present. Six people for whom this was also a reality, who were the subject of this story.
Bofinger looked at his daughter with a mixture of pity and disgust. He sighed, as if disappointed. “So, Haller, isn’t it?” The professor changed the subject. “What do you bring me from the Fatherland? Men? Money?”
“I’m here to assess your work and bring you to safety. Then to Germany, where I’m sure—”
“Then you’re useless to me. I don’t know why I’m feeding you and your Neger.” He glanced at Claude, who visibly bristled. “I’m not coming home now to have this taken off me by some upstart. No! I’m coming home a hero, with a weapon to win the war, or not at all.”
Lisbeth was shaking her head angrily, gripping her necklace with white knuckles.
“You are now surrounded on all sides by enemies of the Reich,” the Captain said. “Free Belgians to the east, the British to the northwest, the Free French everywhere—”
“Do you know how many times this benighted piece of land on the edge of a stinking continent has changed hands in the last forty years? The only difference is where the money goes. Doesn’t matter to the natives, to your priest over there, or even the lowly servants of the German Empire like us. We’re just treating the local sick, like good little missionaries.” He looked at Claude. “Not that anybody here is naïve enough to still believe in God,” he muttered, and then tapped the table. “I’ll come back when I’m good and ready.”
“Well, will you at least allow me to stay and report back on your progress?” the Captain asked, with just the right level of disappointment and need in his voice. “I can spread the word.”
Sarah had forgotten how good he could be when he was able to concentrate.
“Very well.” The professor sighed magnanimously. “I’ll let Lisbeth show you round the local petri dish.”
Lisbeth made a face and closed her eyes.
“Have you heard of the White Devil?” Sarah asked.
Bofinger stared at her—that same look of incredulity tinged with both amusement and anger. Then he laughed.
“Of course I have. Gottverdammten superstitious savages. Still, stories travel faster than news; it’s a good way of getting to the next outbreak in time.”
“So you don’t think someone is deliberately infecting villages?” Sarah asked.
There was a brief silence in which looks were exchanged and the dinner guests squirmed.
“Shush, child,” ordered the professor. The amusement was gone, leaving just the incredulity and anger.
Lisbeth put a red hand on Sarah’s. Reassuring. Calming. Warning. The skin was rough and oily where she had recently applied a cream, but it was wonderfully warm.
Dearest Mouse,
Men and boys. Everywhere there is a problem, everywhere there is something bad happening, everywhere there is damage and pain and suffering. Men and boys.
There are bad women, I know, and you and I have met many of them. Maybe I’ve become one of them. But for every dictator like the Ice Queen, for every attack dog like Rahn, for every twisted teacher like Langfeld and her stick, there seem to be dozens of bad, dangerous men.
And these men have all the power. They have the opportunity to be worse, or the chance to be bad on a bigger scale. Maybe that’s the problem? If we had power, might the world not be better?
The history of the world is the story of men, and it seems like history is the story of death, greed, and destruction. Great towers built on the backs—and the corpses—of the poor and the weak. It sets the tone, the world that women like the Ice Queen and Elsa have to live in, to survive in.
In fact, history is the history of Western men. White men.
Do you think . . . maybe . . . that there’s nothing superior about Aryan men? Really, I mean? Other than enough nastiness to do the horrible things necessary to always be the winner?
Do you think that maybe being the fittest and surviving shouldn’t be an aim in itself?
Those are dangerous thoughts these days. They shouldn’t be, Mouse. They shouldn’t be.
Alles Liebe,
Ursula
TWENTY
LISBETH WALKED THE guests back to their tents. Outside of the path and its pale oil lamplights harassed by clouds of small insects, the darkness was total. The jungle chittered, hissed, and vibrated, keeping its secrets until dawn.
“What camp is your father talking about?” Sarah asked.
Lisbeth shook her head. “My father is wrong to talk of such things, I’m sorry,” she said sadly. “Especially around you, Ursula. It’s not right.”
“It’s fine. I’m quite hardened.”
“So it seems. But little girls shouldn’t be.”
“Well, you seem pretty strong,” Sarah ventured.
Lisbeth laughed, all cheekbones and eyebrows. “Strong, hard . . . these are not necessarily the same.” She smiled. “But you’re right, I was hardened, and that wasn’t really a good thing.”
“Was it living here?”
“Lord, no, I love this place, every muddy, dusty, stingy, buzzy bit of it. This is my home. Africa made me strong.”
“Then what—”
“My mother died,” she said quietly, holding her necklace in one fist. “Back in the Fatherland an illness took her away, as the defeated troops came home, the streets burned, and you needed a bucket to carry the money to buy a cup of tea. That made me hard . . . bu
t not hard like my father, my stepfather I mean. He doesn’t . . . care. That’s actually useful in a man, especially one dealing with this disaster. I get upset, he gets busy.”
“Nothing wrong with getting upset.”
Sarah didn’t believe this, or couldn’t allow herself to believe it, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“Good, now you sound like a little girl again,” Lisbeth said, smiling.
“Can your father be persuaded to come back with us?” the Captain interjected.
“I’m not sure I want you to take him.”
“You would come, too, of course,” the Captain added.
“Oh, would I?” Lisbeth’s voice grew cold.
“I’m sorry.” The Captain held his hands up. “What does he want?”
“If you appeal to his vanity enough, and you have something concrete to offer him, then maybe. He doesn’t feel valued by Germany anymore. When the empire was taken away at the end of the last war, and we were driven out of our homes, nobody cared what we’d lost. We got back here under our own steam. He has some plans, but they don’t involve Germany much.”
“Doesn’t he understand what the Führer has built in his absence? People like your father are valued now,” the Captain gushed. “In the Third Reich your father’s work would bring him prestige and fortune.”
“You’ve seen his flag. I don’t think anything after 1918 means anything to him.”
“It’s an empire of hard people, people who don’t care. It’s the place for him.”
The words were out of Sarah’s mouth before she had time to think about their consequence.
Lisbeth screwed up her face and closed her eyes, as she had done over dinner when distressed by her father’s words. When she opened her eyes the anxiety was gone.
“What do you want, Dr. Fischer?” the Captain asked.
“To do my work, achieve my goals,” she said defiantly. She stopped as they reached their tents. “Well, goodnight, Herr Haller, mon père.”
The men, dismissed, murmured their farewells and disappeared.
Lisbeth stood with Sarah. It was only for the briefest of moments, but being in each other’s company felt . . . right. Sarah couldn’t think of any other way to express the feeling.
“Thank you for dinner,” Sarah said.
“Well, thank you for being there. It gets very dull, the same eight faces every night. Klodt thinking he’s going to get sick drinking the water and Father shouting at him.”
“What are your father’s other plans?” Sarah asked.
“He has friends in the United States. They share his ideals, and I believe they do actually support the new Reich, but they make a lot of promises.”
Elsa had once said, of her father’s American friends, America is full of Nazis. More dangerous, more secretive.
Sarah shuddered. She thought it was on the inside, but she began shivering.
“You’re getting cold. You should go in,” Lisbeth suggested.
“I’m sorry about your mother . . . my Mutti is . . .”
Sarah dug into the grief of her mother’s death to support the lie. She found that soil dry and dusty, like the feelings hadn’t been watered in so long they’d died off. She grabbed hold of her new and raw pride and felt the jolt of its power.
“In an institution. She’s gone.” Sarah hugged that truth and rode the wave of loss. “She doesn’t know who I am anymore,” she finished.
Lisbeth’s face filled with the same sympathy, the same concern that she had shown Millie, but this time there was a quiver around her mouth, accentuated by the thick lipstick. She reached out, jerkily, and when Sarah didn’t flinch, she placed her hands on the girl’s shoulders and slowly gathered her in.
Until Sarah was reunited with Atsuko she hadn’t been held, other than for the purpose of deception or violence, for much more than a year. Before that her mother’s touch had been such a conditional thing, so often tinged with violence, accompanied by the scent of alcohol, and later vomit or urine or both. The available comfort had also needed to flow uphill to the adult who should have been supplying it all.
This was different.
The arms were uncertain, but that caution came from care. They wrapped themselves around her gently and then squeezed slowly, to a point nearing discomfort, before relaxing. The smell of perfume, strong but clean, was like a sunlit garden, masking the underlying trace of bleach and disinfectant.
And the embrace was warm. Not like the surrounding muggy, snakelike heat or the aggressive dryness of the desert, but a warmth born in the heart.
In that moment, Sarah of Elsengrund was no longer solely responsible for her survival, for her happiness, for her life. She felt a fissure open deep within her and through it, raw untrammeled emotion oozed out, a slight trickle that might retreat at any moment, like canned milk from too small a hole.
She had thought that she felt nothing, that the empty box of horrors meant that there were no emotions to deal with. Then she thought she was sliding toward them, on wheels spun by anger. Now the sudden awareness of all the pent-up sensation that she stood on, the perception of that tide of feeling washing around under that skin, made her see that she was in the box. She lived in that small space, and the emotion, and the horrors, were in the walls and floor all around.
“Get strong, don’t get hard,” Lisbeth whispered.
Sarah pulled away, as gently as she could, feeling the loss almost immediately.
“Thank you,” Sarah said with a sincerity that she hadn’t needed for a long, long time.
* * *
Sarah felt her way into her tent. She could hear Clementine’s breathing.
“Nice fancy dinner? Do you know what they gave me? Half a potato,” her voice growled from the darkness.
Sarah was all at once deeply, profoundly tired and was struggling to find the entrance to the mosquito net.
“That’s . . . sorry,” she murmured.
“Want to know what I’ve learned, or do you just want a Nickerchen in there?”
Sarah gained entry and slumped onto the cot. Then she rolled back toward Clementine. “Do tell,” she managed.
“The money from the missionary society doesn’t begin to cover what they’re spending here, not that there’s much religion going on. Someone else is giving them money . . . the pay is good. It’s why no one has left, despite the danger. And some of the Africans are a long way from home now, unlikely to ever make their way back to Angola or South West Africa—”
“Did anyone say what the professor was doing in Südwestafrika?”
“Long time ago. There’s an old man, Samuel, who was there . . . the Africans think Fischer is an angel and Bofinger is a monster. They think the professor is the White Devil.”
“I think they might be right,” Sarah said, rubbing at her cheek where Lisbeth’s makeup had stuck to her face.
“Your uncle, what’s he trying to achieve here? I mean, he’s not here for the Abwehr, not really . . . not with a Jewish girl in tow.”
“No one said I was Jewish,” Sarah said, rolling away from Clementine. She stuck to the line, not knowing what else to do.
“Fine, but . . .”
“Doesn’t matter who we’re working for,” Sarah insisted. “He needs them to leave and as quickly as possible so we can stop all this.”
“Before the SS officer from the hotel catches up?” Clementine asked after a moment. Sarah was silent. “Your uncle is a terrible diplomat. He’s crashed into every conversation so far and offended someone. You might as well ask Claude to do it.”
“He’s overcompensating,” Sarah murmured.
“What does that even mean?”
“He’s . . . afraid and he knows that’s bad, so he’s trying to be more impulsive.”
“Oh, I thought it was because he needed more morphine,” Clement
ine said quietly.
Sarah rolled back to face the darkness where Clementine sat.
“He was shot last year. He was in a lot of pain. It became a habit, I suppose.”
“It’s going to get us killed, I suppose.”
“Did you learn anything else?” Sarah said carefully, changing the subject.
“You know what they’re calling this disease? L’hémorragie . . . the Bleeding.”
* * *
The tent was bathed in blue-gray light, and every detail of its inside—the two cots, the mosquito nets, Clementine snoring away, and their baggage—was clearly visible. On the end of Sarah’s bed sat the Mouse, half in and half out of the netting as if it wasn’t there.
The little girl, because Sarah always thought of her as such, was nodding excitedly to nothing, as she often did when she was about to say something. She was slight and all eyes, on the verge of laughter or horrified tears, as Sarah remembered her.
“Hello, Haller,” she said.
Sarah tried to sit up but found she couldn’t move. “I’ve been writing to you, did you get my letters?” she managed.
“Only in your head, silly.” The Mouse giggled.
“You look happy, Mouse,” Sarah said.
“Because you are, I think. I’m here because you’re feeling guilty. But you aren’t really guilty, or you don’t think you’re guilty . . . I don’t understand.”
The Mouse delivered this with a shrug and a little head wiggle.
“Everything that happened to you, I’m sorry—” Sarah began.
The room darkened like a cloud had passed over the moon.
It looked like the Mouse was gone, and then she reappeared, leaning forward and looking at Clementine.
“Older girls . . . fathers, mothers . . . sisters. Finding people to take their place . . . you should be careful, Haller. You think this is all wonderful, and by the time you realize it isn’t, it’ll be too late.”
“You said that once before . . . no, Mouse, Mauser, Ruth, come back, talk to me—”
