by David Boyle
It was a beautiful July morning when she set out to walk from their tiny office to the Pariserplatz. The air was alive with early summer and the birds were singing as she crossed the Tiergarten. It was hard to imagine that there was war now from one side of Europe to the other, with fighting in the English Channel. There was the embassy ahead, a little back from the road, a huge Renaissance-style edifice, a palace among embassies – though she knew that the ambassador had been recalled and the staff had been run down.
As she approached, she could just see the huge letters “USA” painted in white on the roof, presumably in a vain attempt to warn the bombers overhead that this was a neutral building.
Inside, there were people milling around in the foyer and the queue of desperate, demoralised-looking people snaking around very slowly towards the visa department. She marched straight up to the man in uniform at the desk, wondering how to begin a conversation.
“Excuse me, is it possible to read the American papers anywhere?”
“Yes, ma’am. We have a copy of the Herald Tribune over there at the table by the bench if you’d like to read it.”
Then she said it. “I just wanted a touch of Uncle Sam,” she said, with a toss of the hair.
“That’s right, miss,” he said. Xanthe looked for a flicker of recognition, but there wasn’t one. For form’s sake, she went and glanced at the Herald Tribune. The news was irredeemably bad. The Channel Isles were being occupied; the German army had reached the Pyrenees.
Then, desperately trying not to look back, she took her handbag and walked purposefully out onto the street. She had an hour to kill and she didn’t want to sit drinking at the Hotel Adlon again. She decided to scout out the particular bench in the Zoologischer Garten next to the Tiergarten where she was then supposed to meet Uncle Sam, or whoever it was used his code name.
It was obvious when she got there. There was a bench outside the front of the elephant house and, after a pleasant wander through the trees and past the lions and antelopes, she sat down with about five minutes to spare.
The time ticked by. She kept glancing at her watch. People walked by enjoying the Berlin lunch hour in the sunshine. The smell of elephant dung wafted over them. By the time her contact was ten minutes late, she began to worry. Had she not been explicit enough? Was he perhaps absent today? What was the point in being in Berlin at all? She looked at her watch again.
“Are you late for an appointment?” asked the elderly gentleman next to her as she did so. “I couldn’t help wondering because you keep looking at your watch. I mean it is a lovely city, isn’t it?” he said, in German. “It isn’t Cincinnati, of course.”
Xanthe breathed a huge sigh of relief and said her designated reply: “No, but I expect the Reds would find it hard here.” It was a reference to her baseball team back home. Not her idea – she had never really followed baseball.
She was shocked at herself for hardly noticing the man, dressed in black in the fashion, perhaps of the 1890s, and looking every inch a local. He dropped his voice: “Now please don’t look at me or smile. Or tell me more than I need to know. What is your message?”
“Could you tell Uncle Sam that I have made contact with…” – for a moment she had forgotten the code name they had agreed to use, then a flash of inspiration. “I have made contact with the editor and will work up the article in the next week. No conclusions.”
“Excellent,” said Uncle Sam. “I will see you in precisely one week, by the antelopes. And you will bring your report wrapped in a newspaper for the letter drop, right? I will see you then, good day to you.”
Xanthe sat for a few moments without him on the bench with the sun in her face and the rich smell of the elephants from across the way, and marvelled at the fact that she had become a spy. It was hardly a word she had used about herself so far – she had thought of herself so far as just helping out – but, for the first time, she now felt that was what she actually was. And so extraordinary in the kind of world she lived in to find the best-laid plans actually working. She remembered that, in England, they used to say: “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” to cover up the fact that things did not work very well anyway. Certainly they never worked very well back home in Cincinnati. Yet there was she, following instructions and making things happen. Who would have thought it?
That moment of elation would so easily have been her undoing, as she realised at the time. She was by then late back at the office.
6
Berlin, July 1940
Stumpf met them at the Hotel Adlon that evening and hailed a taxi – an impressive touch, given that ordinary Germans were no longer able to hire them – and whisked them off to the theatre, where Xanthe and Mathilde were introduced to a shy and nervous naval officer. Carl seemed to be iron deficient. Either way, he was as pale as a corpse, but seemed to have a little more life in him than that, and they made polite and gentle conversation in English, for which Xanthe was grateful.
“What brings you to Berlin, leutnant?” she asked him during the interval. “It isn’t known for its sea!”
“My ship still requires repairs, after a little spat with the British navy off the coast of Norway.” He gave her a big grin. “Perhaps I should say the same to you, Fraulein. What brings you to Berlin?”
“Oh me – I’m a reporter…”
“And yet you have some powerful friends – Oberleutnant Stumpf, who I know only a little, and I understand you are a friend of our British guest.”
It was so tempting to ask more but she thought it best not to press her advantage.
“Well, I was – I’m not so sure we are friends now.” How do you change the subject? “Tell me about your ship.”
“My ship is a cruiser. It is called the Admiral Hipper, after the celebrated hero of the Battle of Skaggerak.”
Xanthe pricked up her ears. The British had reported that the Hipper had been badly damaged in an encounter with the British destroyer Glowworm, but the Propaganda Ministry had denied it.
“Really? I understood your ship had only suffered slight damage?”
He laughed heartily. “Oh no. We nearly sank. Don’t you believe everything you read about us. The destroyer was courageous. We battered away at it from point blank range and it just came on until it had rammed us, and damn nearly took us to the bottom with it.”
“Why did they not tell the truth?”
He looked pained.
“There are ways in which we have more in common with our enemy at sea than either of us have with our governments – as I believe your British friend will tell you.”
She tried to look understanding. She had noticed already one of the peculiarities of good reporters – that the more people talk to you, the more they trust you. A strange and rather dangerous paradox.
“Should you be telling me this? I can’t believe your friend would approve.”
“Nonsense, Fraulein. I am a sailor not a politician. Anything you want to know about the navy, you just ask your friend Carl.”
It was extremely tempting, but she approached it from sideways.
“Ok Carl. This badge you’re wearing with the lightning coming out – what does it mean?”
“It means signals, of course!”
“So you operate the codes? Exciting!”
Carl seemed to relax. He laughed again.
“Yes, and since our naval codes are completely impregnable, I’m going to defy our friend Stumpf and tell you just how impregnable it is. Have you got a bit of paper?”
She had a copy of Frankfurter Zeitung in her bag. She handed it over. He got out his pen and wrote a series of letters along the margins on the outside as he explained it.
“Army Enigma, they just choose their own three letters to start with, let’s say EAX. We look ours up in the book of the daily settings and we put two of these on top of each other, like this:
E A X
D C B
“Then you add a letter at random to the beginning of the first line and
the end of the second like this:
P E A X
D C B G
“So that gives us four pairs, PD, EC, AB and XG. Then we look those up in the tables and see what their equivalents are. Then you arrange their equivalents again in the same way, on top of each other, with me? Like this, say:
Z D G H
B G R T
“That is then sent just like that, without being coded. Then the receiver at the other end knows what settings you’re using. Simple – well, actually, not very simple – but there we are!”
“Gosh, Carl, should you really be telling me all this?”
He was suddenly serious.
“In fact, it may be you who should be a little careful, I think, not me. Just some advice about our friend Stumpf. Whatever Stumpf wants, I know from past experience, Stumpf gets.”
Stumpf came back a moment or so later, and so did Matilde and the play was soon off again. Xanthe folded the newspaper and put it in her bag, marvelling at what men will tell women without apparently thinking.
The play was called Einsiedel, and appeared to be totally without humour; certainly nobody laughed. The first half seemed to involve most of the protagonists losing their memories. Towards the end of the second half, a First World War memorial service or patriotic songs revived the memory of the hero. In the final minutes, he appears to die of a stroke.
With difficulty, the sheer lugubriousness of the play threatened Xanthe with an attack of the giggles. She managed to resist, just as she had halfway through when she began to feel a slight pressure on her thigh and realised Stumpf’s hand was attempting to make some kind of entry. She moved out of the way and, when it began to again, she gave it a good slap.
She glanced at him a few moments later and saw him completely impassive, staring at the stage, where the hero was trying to remember where he was.
“There is no need to be so distant, Fraulein,” he hissed during the applause. “Otherwise we may just have to ask about your meeting yesterday in the zoo. Then we might find that it is you who have something to be ashamed of.”
7
Berlin, July 1940
When Stumpf referred to her clandestine meeting by the elephants, Xanthe had no guilty conscience, but she also knew all too well that she had something to hide. What she did not know was whether Stumpf actually knew anything or whether he was just supposing. A cold feeling ran down her neck. She reassured herself by reminding herself that he was having her followed – as he clearly was – on the off-chance of finding something on her. She tried hard to ignore it. Any reply, beyond a kind of interrogative look, would simply confirm his suspicions.
“My conscience is pretty clear,” she said, challengingly. “I’m just asking you not to paw me during the play.”
“Listen, Fraulein Schneider,” said Stumpf suddenly, and rather too close to her face. “You may have reason to be extremely grateful to me, and if you don’t realise that, then you may find yourself in a rather – how do you say it in English? – sticky situation.”
“Now,” he said, drawing himself up again and changing the expression on his face. “Let me give you another chance – let us both give each other another chance, yes? I fear the play left something to be desired – perhaps we could try again next week. I am free, as it happens, on Saturday night, and this time, let it be just the two of us.”
*
“What should I do about Stumpf?” she asked Ralph over tea the next day – Ralph insisted on tea in the English upper class style. It was not a familiar meal in Berlin, any more than it was in Cincinnati. “He doesn’t seem to have any, well, inhibitions. But I don’t want to cross him – and you clearly don’t want to either. But equally I don’t trust him, and I don’t like the way he touches me the whole time, as if he was sort of – treating me like Poland, I suppose. I mean, who does he think he is?”
Ralph smiled. “Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about Stumpf, either of us. He isn’t nearly as important as he thinks he is. I think he’ll just calm down in the end – but I agree that it makes no sense to irritate the man. Can’t you just go to the theatre with him and then beat a hasty retreat?”
“I don’t know. He’s beginning to give me the heebie-jeebies.”
“Hah! I know what you mean.” He looked thoughtful, as well he might; she stared at him, and not for the first time, wondered what kind of game he was playing. “I tell you what. I will run into you after the play and tag along. It will annoy him intensely, but I’d like to look after you.”
It was said with a kind of sincerity that she had barely heard from him before. She felt pathetically grateful.
“The thing about Stumpf is that he has so little role, you know,” said Ralph. “All that uniform, that liaison position between the Propaganda Ministry and the navy, it is what he makes of it. If it wasn’t for the uniform, I’m not sure he would be anybody.”
It reminded her of the strange conversation she had enjoyed with Carl and his open gossip about Enigma. It haunted her since, even after she had hidden the newspaper with the notes on under a wobbly floorboard in her bedroom. She did not expect this place would survive more than a few minutes if Stumpf’s friends arrived to do a proper search, but it made her feel safer.
She decided to say nothing about it to Ralph. Instead, they found themselves talking more broadly about life in Berlin and she told him about another article she was hoping to file. She imagined that, as long as she praised some aspect of German wartime supply, then maybe she might get away with telling the truth about some of the other deprivations. She explained that she had therefore chatted to as many people as she could in bars, sometimes putting up with the inane news broadcasts that nobody dared turn off. It was when she was chatting, in rather broken German, with the owner of a bar around the corner from where she was staying in Charlottenburg, that another woman she knew by sight began to join in. It was not clear what had reminded her, but she told a story which seemed extraordinarily grotesque – and Xanthe retold it to Ralph.
It had concerned one of her neighbours, and so much of the conversation was taken for granted. Reading a little between the lines, she had realised she was trying to say they had received a telegram informing them that their son Wolfgang had been lost at sea when his submarine U-33 went down. They were busy planning a memorial ceremony and a wake with all the relatives when, guess what – the family heard on the wireless from London that he had been rescued and was a prisoner in England.
“The woman said she never listened to the broadcasts herself, and of course we were not necessarily intended to believe her,” Xanthe explained. “Then she took a big slurp of ersatz coffee. So what should they have done, she asked? If they cancelled the ceremony it would look as if they had been listening to foreign broadcasts and that would get them into big trouble. But if they carried on with it, they would feel like idiots.”
“You understand, Fraulein,” the woman had said. “We don’t listen to broadcasts from our enemies. You can get sent to prison.”
“What a dilemma,” said Ralph. “What did they do?”
“They went ahead with it anyway. What else could they do?”
As Xanthe had listened to the story, she knew it was hardly one she could use. The pathetic element was too obvious, not to mention the revelation of what it was like living in a totalitarian state in wartime. But it was still fascinating background.
“You know Frau Schultz?” the barman had asked his friend. She nodded. “Three-year sentence for listening.”
“No!”
“Her daughter let it slip at school.” His friend had pursed her lips as if to say she had opinions but could not express them.
Xanthe was happy to tell Ralph all this because, for once, she could talk to him about her professional life, and he listened, raising his eyebrows here and there. Then she asked him what he thought.
“Desperate times. Desperate times,” he said.
This seemed strangely bloodless. She had expected something mo
re visceral, perhaps because she was now aware of him in an increasingly visceral way. She felt him as a physical presence as she had certainly never done before, even in their brief flirtation in London. He was a good fifteen years older than her but somehow in this great equality, of living in wartime, away from home and under such a government, she felt they had something in common. Both had risked everything to be there. And neither was apparently able to tell the other. Rather perversely, this made her fonder towards him.
“Ralph, it’s time now. Come on, tell me why you’re really here. I don’t believe you’ve turned your back on your own country…”
“Not here. I’ll tell you later. Promise.” And he stood and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Come on now, the film’s going to start.”
*
The film was a dreadful trash, though they knew it had been popular. It was called The Great Love and it was a little hard to follow – lots of suffering women on farms, separated from their husbands and overcoming hardship like heroines. It was odd that the war, presumably the reason for the separation, was never mentioned.
Of rather more interest was the newsreel, which showed the Luftwaffe attacking the coast of Britain, and some painful stuff about Marshal Pétain taking absolute powers over the section of France he was still allowed to rule.
Afterwards they strolled through the Tiergarten in the evening, among the flurry of unidentifiable uniforms from black and brown to blue and grey. She could not stop thinking about the strange reaction of the audience in the news feature – they had laughed when Goering came on the screen. He was clearly almost as much of a figure of fun in Germany as he had been in England. What was different was the way that the audience was addressed – everything was always expressed as a kind of rant involving overblown words like “cowardly” (about the RAF) or “glorious” (about the Luftwaffe), spiced up with martial music and extra bombast. How could people stand it, being spoken to continually by their government as if they were idiots? Perhaps that was the only major difference between the warring nations – but, then again, perhaps it was symptom not cause. In any case, as far as she could remember, only the intellectuals and the politicians ever took a blind bit of notice of the news in England, apart from the sports pages and racing results.
