Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook

by Celia Rees

  “So?” he was saying. “What have you got?”

  “It could be something or nothing.” Edith shrugged. “I was told to keep my eyes and ears open, and that’s what I’ve done. The billet I’m in, the housekeeper, Frau Schmidt and her husband, Stephan, that’s if he is her husband, have a veritable trove of SS paraphernalia in the cellar—”

  “Is that all?” Adams laughed. “Them and every other German—”

  “No, that’s not all,” Edith said evenly. “There’s a hut in the garden. It shows signs of occupation. I suspect that Stephan and Frau Schmidt are keeping someone there. Hiding them. I have reason to believe that they form part of an active Nazi network, carrying on a campaign of intimidation, dealing extensively in the black market and helping war criminals.”

  “What’s your source?”

  “Not for you to know.” She sat back. Tit for tat.

  “Ha!” He laughed, a short, sharp bark. “Hoist by my own petard and all that. That is worth following. We’re picking up information about an underground organization made up of local cells of like-minded individuals, unrepentant Nazis, better-under-Hitler types, just as you describe. A lot of them women, helping their men on the run.” Adams looked at her across the table. “We’ve heard different names: ODESSA—initials stand for Organization Der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen—Organization of Former SS Members. Hand it to Jerry, he likes an acronym. The other name we’ve heard is Die Spinne.”

  “The Spider?”

  “Exactly that!” He nodded his satisfaction, as if conferring his approval on a particularly apt pupil. “More metaphorical, that one. We don’t know if they’re one and the same, or different. We don’t know much of anything. Devilishly difficult to penetrate, so anything you can find out would be very valuable. Whatever the moniker, the objective is to shift die brüder out of Germany, help them on their way south, through Italy and onto a ship to somewhere more congenial. The Schmidts, Herr and Frau, might well be involved in this little enterprise. Well spotted, Edith. We’ll keep an eye on them, of course, but we’ll let them run. They might well lead us to others. Then we can scoop up the whole network. That calls for another brandy.” He signaled to the waiter. “Anything on von Stavenow?”

  That wide-eyed stare was on her again with a slight twitch of the head, like a cat watching a mouse.

  “Not as such.” She wasn’t ready to tell him about Elisabeth. She thought fast. He needed something to chase. “But I have information that the Americans might be looking for him. Or men like him. Men with a similar—history.”

  “Ha. Bound to be! Hardly news.”

  “I mean here. In the British Zone.”

  “Who told you that?” For the first time, Adams looked disconcerted.

  “My journalist friend,” Edith supplied. “She has it on very good authority.”

  “Hmm, yes, well.” Adams crossed and recrossed his legs. “Good work, Edith. Keep it up. Ear to the ground and all that. But no private initiatives.” He wagged a finger. “Pass it on and carry on caring for the Kinder. Sure you don’t want a nightcap?”

  “No thanks. My driver will be here in a minute. There he is now.”

  “Ah, Hunter. Good evening, Sergeant.”

  Jack saluted smartly. “Good evening, sir.”

  Edith was drained by her encounter with Adams, though she thought that she’d won on points. By the time she got back to the billet, she was all but done in, but before she could get to bed, she had a card to write.

  Hope you liked the Latvian Dish, I’ve become rather partial to it. Bienenstich—unexpected treat. Dinner tonight in the mess. Dutch Steaks on the menu (recipes for your info). My companion showed an interest in Latvian Recipes, which surprised me. Steaks not to my liking—too heavily grilled.

  Yours, Edith

  P.S. Speaking of regional dishes—I might have something Prussian for you soon.

  22

  44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck

  25th February 1946

  Wild Boar Steinhof

  A robust dish from the north. A reminder of times gone and places lost forever. The boar is marinaded in a strong red wine, pungent with juniper and thyme from the forest, onions and carrots from the kitchen garden, strong spices--clove and peppercorns. The cooking is long and slow. A dish from the past, a fragrance and flavor that lives on now only in memory.

  “Not far.” Edith smoothed the creased scrap of paper. “It must be up here somewhere.”

  Had the boy got it right? Could Elisabeth be here? Part of her hoped he’d got it wrong. After so long, what would they say to each other? So much had happened, so much was altered. All the dreadful things that she’d learned about Kurt. How much did Elisabeth know? More than years measured the gap between then and now.

  Edith made herself concentrate on the numbers as Jack crawled along Möllnstrasse. It was the right kind of area, or had been once. Elisabeth’s cousin might well have had a town house here. The handsome houses had escaped bombing, but they showed every sign of dereliction and decay: roofs sagging, eaves rotting, windows boarded, wide gravel paths weed choked, steps broken, woodwork ripped away for firewood. A few were burned out, looted by DPs or slave workers when the original residents, dead or displaced, failed to return. None of these houses would be empty. Every scrap of shelter was precious, fought over, in a city swelled to more than twice its normal size by refugees.

  As they bumped along the rutted road, the houses grew better kept. These would be in the greatest danger. Edith could not see anyone at the windows or shutters, but she could feel eyes watching. There was no fear of looting. Those days were over. What the residents feared now was the delivery of a British Requisition Order. Everyone to vacate the premises with what they could carry. The house taken over for billets, messes, offices, whatever the British saw fit.

  There was a truck parked at the foot of the drive to a large house. Edith couldn’t see a number, but she was pretty sure that this was it. Soldiers stood around smoking, lounging against the truck’s dropped tailgate, enjoying the weak winter sun, listening to an argument going on. Jack stopped the car and got out. He nodded to one or two of the men, exchanging a cheery greeting. They grinned back. Looked like their man was getting the worst of it. He was being addressed by a woman standing at the top of a flight of steps. She was speaking English; her clear, ringing voice held just the trace of an accent. Edith knew the voice immediately. She had found Elisabeth.

  The sergeant stood holding a clipboard in front of him, like a shield.

  “You were warned a week ago now. You should have vacated. You must leave immediately.”

  “But we have many families living here.” Anxious faces watched from the windows. “You will make thirty, more, people homeless. Women. Old people. Children. Where shall we go?”

  “That’s not my concern.” He went to mount the steps, but she blocked his way. “You were given notice. Alternative accommodation should have been found for you.”

  “But we’ve heard nothing about other accommodation! How is that even possible with the town as full as it is?”

  “That’s not my department,” he said with triumphant finality, as though that settled the matter. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  He tried to push past her. She held absolutely no power in this exchange but she was ready to stand her ground. Edith feared a tussle and was about to intervene when Jack touched her arm.

  “A word, ma’am.”

  He spoke rapidly, gesturing toward the sergeant and the truck behind them.

  “I see.” Edith straightened her back, squared her shoulders, and moved down the drive toward them. She deliberately didn’t look at Elisabeth, concentrating her attention on the requisition sergeant: small of stature, self-important, hiding inside his uniform. “What’s going on here?”

  “What’s it got to do with you?” He turned, his mouth a snarl beneath his bristling, shredded-wheat mustache.

  “I’m the Education Officer for this District. I came to see why
the children who live here are not attending school.”

  “Got more things to worry about, I should reckon.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “Like where they’re going to kip. This house has been requisitioned.”

  “What for exactly?”

  The man looked at his sheet. “Offices. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “What is your name?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I like to know with whom I’m dealing.”

  “Wilkins, as it happens. What’s yours?”

  “Miss Edith Graham.”

  “CCG type.” There was a sneer in his voice, but Edith let that go.

  “I hold the equivalent rank of Lieutenant Colonel.”

  “That’s by the bye, love.” Wilkins looked back down at his clipboard. “Orders is orders. This lot out—” he pointed to the woman standing above him. “That lot,” he jerked a thumb behind him “—in.”

  “I don’t think so.” Edith took a step closer.

  “Oh? And what would you have to say about it?”

  “Not me. My driver. Sergeant Hunter. I think you might know each other?”

  Jack gave a mock salute. “Wotcha, Wilko.”

  “And your superior. Captain Morrison, isn’t it? Jack was asking if you’ve been down to the Böttcherstrasse lately. Or has it moved to somewhere else now?”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice had lost its sneer and was edged with nervousness.

  “I think you do.”

  He frowned, his small mouth pursed, considering. He tapped his pencil on his clipboard, in rapid staccato. Some of the men involved in requisition did a tidy amount of business, redirecting Government Issue, selling off goods and furnishings “liberated” from the houses they took over, buying up more, arranging for the most valuable items to be shipped back to Britain, or sold on in Brussels. There was big money involved, according to Jack.

  “Well?”

  Sergeant Wilkins looked at her. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses, the last spark of arrogant authority flickered and died.

  “I got my orders,” he said sulkily.

  “Haven’t we all?” Edith smiled. She knew she’d won. “Mine are to get children into school. How can I do that when you people keep making them homeless? Now.” It was time to take charge. He was only a sergeant, after all. “I suggest that you tell your superior that these premises are unsuitable. That shouldn’t be too difficult and should get you out of a bind.”

  “What am I supposed to do with that lot there?” He gestured toward the truck.

  “What does it contain?”

  “Desks, tables, chairs, filing cabinets. Office furnishings.”

  Edith smiled. She knew the perfect place for it. “As of now, it has been redirected. Jack will show you where to take it.”

  “If you say so.” He turned and stomped down the steps toward his men. “No skin off my nose.”

  The truck drove off in a cloud of blue exhaust.

  “Edith? It’s you, isn’t it? You are like an angel sent from heaven! I don’t know how to thank you.” Elisabeth ran down the rest of the steps and took Edith in her arms. Then she held herself away, examining Edith’s face. “You dealt so well with him. Such authority.” She regarded Edith with a bemused smile and a slight shake of the head, as if trying to reconcile the woman she’d known with the one standing before her with all the confident assurance that her uniform gave her. “I didn’t think to see you here. Now. After . . . everything . . . but the strangest things happen.”

  “I’m so, so glad to see you!” Edith blinked back tears of absolute relief and genuine joy at seeing Elisabeth. “To know you’re safe!”

  The search was over. Edith breathed the slightest trace of gardenia as she took Elisabeth back into a tight embrace.

  They broke apart to look again at each other, searching for what was the same, what was different. It had been seven years, and five of those had been war, which had changed everything and everyone. Had Elisabeth also been sullied by the regime her husband had so enthusiastically embraced and that had infiltrated every single aspect of national life? Impossible to tell yet, but she was certainly different from the woman that Edith had first met. There were shadows under Elisabeth’s eyes and fine lines at the outer corners. Her face was thinner, but the hollows in her cheeks only emphasized her fine bone structure; her pale skin made her almost ethereal. She was still lovely.

  Edith smiled as she followed Elisabeth into the house, brushing aside any doubts, her jublilation silencing any faint drumbeat of suspicion. The wide hall was lined with makeshift cots, to what must once have been a pleasant morning room at the back of the house. It was now divided by a crude wooden partition with a baby crying on the other side and drying bedclothes thrown over the top.

  There was little by the way of furniture. A table and chair by the window. A couple of old rugs on the bare wooden floor, Persian by the looks of them, but worn to threads. Two old leather chairs stood at the center of the room; a carved box between them acted as a table. A narrow iron bed, draped with an appliqued coverlet, occupied an alcove. A battered leather satchel and a travel-stained loden coat hung on a hook on the back of the door. The ceramic stove in the corner had not been lit.

  “You may find it rather cold.” Elisabeth was wearing a thick knitted Norwegian jacket over layers of clothing but still managed to look elegant. “I’m used to it.” She pulled the collar closer, as if she felt the cold despite what she said. “This is my cousin Lena’s house. I came with so little. What I stood up in, what I could carry in that bag. She’s been kind enough to take us in. The bed is from one of the maids’ rooms in the attic. At least I have a bed.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “They are sleeping on straw mattresses up there, five, six to a room.” She looked about. “I’d offer you something, but . . .”

  “I’ve brought things!” Edith dived into her briefcase and took out coffee, sugar, bars of chocolate, and packets of rich tea and digestive biscuits to lay before her. “It’s all I could pack in, I’m afraid.”

  “Real coffee! It’s enough! Lena will be overjoyed!”

  She came back with a tray of coffee and biscuits arranged on a fine china plate.

  Edith nibbled at a biscuit out of politeness. She offered Elisabeth a packet of cigarettes, placing it on the table between them.

  Elisabeth took one. “Such luxury to smoke them. And so good to speak English after all this time! I fear I’ve grown a little rusty.” She inhaled deeply. “You won’t join me?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Asthma!” Elisabeth’s face lit up at the memory. “You mentioned it that first evening when we drank all that brandy on the terrace.”

  “You were drinking brandy.” Edith smiled, caught in the web of shared recollection. It had been a magical evening. “I was drinking schnapps.”

  “Williams Pear, I recall.” Elisabeth gave a faint echo of the sudden ringing peal that Edith remembered. She had always felt absurdly rewarded when she made Elisabeth laugh.

  They were silent for a moment, netted in a memory that telescoped time, bringing them back to the late-evening gloaming of that last, lost summer.

  The light died from Elisabeth’s eyes as quickly as it had been ignited.

  “I can’t believe I will never go back there again. I wake up in the morning thinking I’m there, only to realize . . . It is the same every day. A purgatory that I will never escape.” When she turned to Edith, her smile was tired, automatic. “You are here with the Control Commission?”

  “Yes.” Edith looked down at her uniform. “Education Division. I was a teacher, if you remember.”

  “Of course. Remembering is all there is for me to do.” She extinguished one cigarette and lit another. “I’ve lost everything. House, land, position, family. My people. All those I knew and loved. Our place. Our way of life. All gone. We’d been there for seven hundred years. Now, I have nothing.” She paused. “The people called the
moment of our defeat Die Stunde Null: Hour Zero. I feel I’m there still, as though life is over, or has not begun. Toward the end, people began committing suicide, whole families of them. It was very common. Not through love for the Führer but because they knew that their time, everything they held familiar, was finished.”

  Elisabeth sat very upright and still for quite a time, her blue eyes dark, magnified by tears she refused to spill. Of regret? Loss? Bitterness? Edith didn’t know and couldn’t ask her. Do tears have to be defined? And to cry before another went against her upbringing, her caste. When they’d first met, Edith had been dazzled and fascinated in equal measure. Now, she saw the woman behind the aura that her title, position, wealth, and privilege had given her and was deeply moved by her, but she knew better than to go to her, to touch her. Elisabeth would despise any gesture with the slightest tincture of pity. She was not the kind of woman to fall into another’s arms.

  But Elisabeth was still Elisabeth. There might be holes in her stockings and the knitted jacket might be worn at the elbows, but it was Setesdale and the loden on the door was fur lined. Edith felt a frisson of the feeling that she’d had on first coming to Schloss Steinhof. A touch of the same social awkwardness. She looked down at her uniform, the cigarettes and packets of biscuits on the table. Such shows of largesse and British authority might seem very like boasting.

  “Did you feel tempted?” she asked at last. “To end it all, I mean.”

  “What?” Elisabeth turned as though she’d forgotten that there was anyone else in the room. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that.” Her laugh was ironic, bitter. “Although I sometimes wish I had. No,” she repeated quietly. “I didn’t do that. I had to survive. For my daughter.”

  “You have a daughter?” Edith looked around in absolute surprise, as if she might be hiding somewhere.

  “Elfriede—Elfi. Would you like to see her?”

  “Yes.” Edith was at a loss. She had not expected this. “Of course.”