by Celia Rees
“Amen,” Edith joined in automatically. “Maybe you should have this back.” She held up the medallion she was wearing.
“No.” Dori gazed down at the sad, scarred face of the proffered Madonna. “You may still have need of Her. You’re going to meet von Stavenow this afternoon.”
“Is he there?”
Dori shook her head. “No, not yet. Expected later today. Mein Host is in a high old tizzy getting things ready.”
“Where’s Elisabeth?”
“Out for the day. Off bright and early. To Merano probably, to get new papers, would be my guess.” She passed the beads through her fingers. “I admire her more and more and trust her less and less. She’s clever and quite, quite ruthless. She’s got a photographic memory; did you know that? The routes we took? One glance and she knew them. One of the guides tried to give us the runaround. He went for a walk with Elisabeth. I think he thought he had a chance with her. He didn’t come back.” She recited a few more Hail Marys. “The evidence Adeline found puts her at the center of Nazi Intelligence, she’d know names, places, circuits within the Soviet Union, contacts who may still be active. Worth a great deal in anybody’s money. I’m guessing that their plan is to make their way from here to a port, probably Genoa, where the Americans will be waiting with lovely new identities for their onward journey and tickets to happy ever after. She’s good, I’ll give her that. Did you see her with those Yanks on the train? They’ll never forget that encounter.”
“It’s a very powerful story.”
“You can say that again. She didn’t make that up. The thing is, all the time she was telling it, I was thinking: How did she get herself stuck in Prussia? This is how I think it went. By July ’44, Russians to the east, Allies to the west. Everyone knew it was coming unstuck. Panic. Some of them try to blow up Hitler and get strung up by piano wire for their pains. There’s a general covering of tracks. This was when our Joes and the SAS chaps were rounded up and dispatched. People start making plans. Clandestine approaches to the Allies, a hasty remove to the Alpine Redoubt. Individuals start thinking about their own survival, so Sturmbannführer von Stavenow and his good lady wife come up with their personal strategy. Number One: they don’t want to be in Berlin when the Ivans arrive. Number Two: they have items that might be of interest to the Allied Forces. How to kill large numbers of people quickly. The key to major espionage circuits. Both are smart enough to see this could be useful currency after the war. They aren’t going to keep sensitive materials in Berlin. My guess is they kept such in Prussia. Along with easily transportable valuables, gold and jewelery.”
“And the horses,” Edith added. “She would never leave the horses.”
However much of Elisabeth’s story was fabricated, her love for her horses was genuine. The thought of them falling into the hands of the Red Army would be enough to send her back to Prussia, whatever the risk or personal cost.
Dori inclined her head, accepting the point. “And the horses. She’s dispatched to the Schloss while he gets himself and his lucky patients sent north. But she gets caught. Ivans advancing on all fronts. The only way out is to take to the saddle, which she does, fetching up in Lübeck in time to meet you.”
“How did they know I was going to be there, though?” Edith asked. It was all speculation but it sounded plausible—until the last part. That was too much of a coincidence.
“Ah! That’s the really interesting question,” Dori said with a note of triumph.
“So, how did they?”
“Search me, darling, but I have my suspicions. Tell me, when did Leo know about you applying to the Control Commission?”
“Early on. He was one of my character references.”
“And how did you end up in Lübeck?”
“I don’t know. I thought they sent people to where they might be needed—”
Pennies were dropping, puzzle pieces falling into place. “You don’t think—”
“’Deed I do. Leo can wangle anything; he’s on all sorts of committees, and there’s always the Club. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Von S. a target. The Gräfin has relatives in Lübeck. She’s likely as not to end up there . . .”
“He set me up from the start!”
“You were perfect! Known to the subjects, totally aboveboard, no taint of skullduggery. He must have been rubbing his hands. And you’re good. You took to it. He knew you would. They trust you. She does, anyway. I’m the enemy. Not you. You’re the only one who can get close to von Stavenow. So now you need to make the meeting. See what he wants. And keep him talking. As long as possible. That’s very, very important.” She stood up. “We’ll do the rest. No.” She put a hand on Edith’s arm as she made to rise too. “Best not leave together. Stay here. Look at the frescoes. Hans von Bruneck. 1402. Very fine.”
Dori left the pew without looking back. When she reached the aisle, she bowed her head to the altar and dropped into a graceful curtsy of genuflection.
Edith gazed up at the frescoes. Softened by time, the colors muted to darkened pastel, rubbed away to shadows in places, tableaus and scenes ran around the whole church, one after another, crowding in on each other. Angels soared across the ceiling. Saints suffered a variety of martyrdoms; the Passion, depicted in a number of small scenes, surrounded the plain wooden crucifix fastened to the eastern wall: the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion. A sad-eyed Madonna looked down over all.
She closed her eyes and leaned forward, hands clasped tightly together. She didn’t know how long she stayed like this. Perhaps she was actually praying. At length, she stood up. Time to leave. She walked toward the door. The great Doom painting spread above her. The dead rising from their graves, pale and naked, angels on one side, devils on the other. Christ in Judgment, sorting out good from bad. Sheep from goats.
Giorgio brought her breakfast: coffee and brioche, a plate holding three kinds of cheese, slices of salami and thinly cut ham. The others had already breakfasted, he said. Signora Hunter and the American Signorina had gone by train to Verona to see the Roman edifices and the Basilica San Zeno Maggiore. Signor Hunter had gone for a hike and would be out all day.
Edith ate her breakfast slowly. She had time to kill. She noted down what was on the table, asked about the various cheeses, was that fennel in the salami?
Giorgio answered her questions and brought her more coffee. “My Angelina, she has prepared the recipe for you.” He smiled. “The Torte ai Carciofi.”
“Thank you.”
Edith followed him past a larder, stacked with round cheeses, dark as a cave, into the kitchen. A long, cool room, lit by small windows and an open door that led to a garden already green with thick growth: silver-stemmed artichokes, peas raveling over netting, beans winding up sticks, tomatoes bursting from their stout wooden frames, rows of radish, beetroot, carrots, white-stemmed chard, purple radicchio and lettuces: bright green and frilly, dark, coppery—varieties she didn’t even know. She caught the scent of lavender and rosemary, bees already busy among the purple and blue flowers. Mint, Italian parsley, and oregano grew in terracotta pots by the door.
Angelina was already at work preparing lunch, humming as she washed vegetables at a stone sink. A box stood on the draining board packed with bunched white and red onions, bundles of herbs: sorrel and rocket; wild asparagus, as thin as whips, the purple-tipped, fat-blanched spears of its cultivated cousin. Another box on the floor held celery and white-bulbed, green-fronded fennel.
“The Signora,” Georgio said.
“Scusi.” Angelina turned, drying her hands on her apron.
“No, no! Don’t let me disturb you. I was just admiring your garden.” Edith smiled. “It reminded me of home. My brother-in-law, Ted, would love this! He loves to grow vegetables.” The image of Ted digging in his plot brought sudden tears springing. “You have so many different varieties,” she went on quickly. “Ones I’ve never seen before, and he loves to grow new things.”
Angelina nodded, smiling as Giorgio translated.
“Thank you.” Edith put the recipe into her bag. She looked round the kitchen. “May I stay for a bit?”
She felt the day stretching out in front of her. A yawning gap of time before the appointment she was destined to keep at 4 p.m. She could feel anxiety growing, gnawing at her with little sharp teeth. If she could just stay here, at least for a while, in this airy, sunlit kitchen with its smells of wood smoke from the oven, bread rising on the scrubbed pine table, green things growing in the garden, cheeses under their lacy covers on the long sideboard. She wanted to be doing something. Chopping, mixing, rolling out, and shaping would help to calm her. She’d always found cooking a comfort and a solace.
Angelina wouldn’t hear of Edith helping, but she allowed her to stay and watch as she prepared lunch. Her English was limited and Edith hadn’t used her Italian much since college, but cooks don’t really need language. It’s all in the look, the scent, and the movement of the hands.
Angelina promised to prepare a picnic. Edith would spend the afternoon down by the lake. She bought sun-faded sepia views of the little town, the market square and clock. It was time she wrote home. She took the cards out onto the terrace and closed her eyes for a moment to imagine a gentler sun. She’d never felt so close to them, or so distant.
Giorgio brought her a pot of coffee and with it a bundle of small brown packets. He laid them on the table, almost shyly. “Per tuo cognato. Dal nostro giardino. From our garden. We keep from year to year.”
The packets were carefully labelled: lattuga, cipolle, cavello nero, prezzemolo, oregano, carciofo. Giorgio’s translations carefully printed underneath.
“Thank you, both of you!” Edith smiled, although his kindness had brought fresh tears.
She bought one last postcard and begged an envelope from Giorgio. She put in the little packets and the recipe for Torta ai Carciofi. Ted would be delighted with the seeds, and Louisa could make pie from the plants that he would grow.
40
Pensione Sterzberg, Vipiteno Sterzing
18th May 1946
Marende (local name), Brettljause (German)
A snack (often served in the afternoon), more Austrian than Italian, consisting of speck, sausages, local cheeses, and pickled cucumbers, served on a wooden board with farmers’ bread--Vorschlag--a round, flat domed loaf with a fine texture, thick crust, and slightly sour taste, and wine.
Dori watched from her balcony in the upper chalet.
In the distance, the cracked town bell was striking four as she tracked Edith walking from the side of the lake up toward the Pensione Sterzberg. Behind her, a jetty jutted out to the water. Dori studied the small boats moored there then swept her glasses along the lake’s edge. She caught stealthy movement under the overhanging branches. She looked away instinctively, as if to stare would draw attention. Edith was taking the flight of steps leading up to the first-story entrance of the Pensione.
Boxes of geraniums edged each step, the scent strong after the heat of the day. Edith crushed a leaf between her fingers, breathing in the sharp, peppery smell. Double glass doors stood open, the panes pasted with peeling posters advertising ski competitions, local attractions. The pine of the doorframe oozed, adding a resinous, creosote tang to the geraniums’ pungency. A stand of curled postcards stood at the end of the empty reception desk.
“Ah, Signorina Graham.” Signor Rossi’s small, sleek head appeared from behind the postcards. He smiled, a flashing of gold. “I’m sorry if you are waiting.” He waved his small hands in apology. “Come, Herr Kushner is this way.”
He led her past a small bar, into a cavernous dining room. The pine-paneled walls were heavily varnished and dotted with painted shields: the black, red, and gold of the old Empire, dragons, gryphons, lions rampant, representing who-knew-which noble families, expressing a patriotism for a place with no independent existence. Between the heraldic shields, the inevitable hunting trophies, stuffed heads and skulls.
They emerged through open doors into the sunlight, blinding after the darkness of the house. Edith put on her sunglasses. Kurt was sitting at a table, drinking wine. He was wearing a high-collared, green loden coat, stag’s-horn buttons undone, a natural linen trachten shirt open at the neck, cavalry-twill breeches tucked into high polished boots. He was dressed as though nothing had changed, as if he was still the prosperous Graf, owner of vast estates, out on a hunting trip. Signor Rossi added to the illusion; he could not have been more obsequious. Kurt hardly acknowledged his presence.
“Edith!” Kurt stood as she approached the table. “Come. Sit. Wine?” He was pouring a glass, whether she wanted it or not. “Lagrein. It is local.” He replenished his own glass and held it to his nose. “Not bad, actually. Prosit!”
Edith lifted the heavy Roemer glass. The dark wine was warm and syrupy from standing in the sun. Edith caught a whiff of rancid salumi. On the table between them, Rossi’s Marende: drying bread, curling cheese, and thin slivers of sweating speck. Cut too early and left too long.
“Marende. Will you join me?” Kurt opened a white napkin with a flourish. “I’m famished.”
Edith shook her head.
“Such a treat after Germany. There is so much food here. I can’t get over it.”
Kurt made a show of selecting slices from the plate, but he merely nibbled at what he had taken, despite his protestations of hunger.
Edith put her goblet down on the table. “What am I doing here, Kurt?”
“Cannot old friends—”
“We’re not friends, are we? Not anymore.”
He pushed the food aside and took her hand. The ring he wore glowed bloodred in the sunlight. Edith tensed at his touch.
“Time is short, and I want you to understand.” He leaned forward. Edith caught the wine on his breath, the slightly rank scent of food, mixed with the vetiver of his cologne. “First, my work. Whatever you have been told will be lies and propaganda. What I did was important. We learned a great deal. Don’t mix me up with the fanatics—but since the matériel was available, it was sensible to use it.” He folded his arms. “Those dead, or dying, or destined to die could still serve a useful purpose.”
Edith took him to mean the Jews, reduced further to “matériel” She kept her silence. She would let him talk. See how far he would go to justify what he had done, what others had done; how far he’d try to excuse the inexcusable. Let him condemn himself out of his own mouth.
“Of course, such processes are unpleasant to the medically untrained, just as an autopsy might be, or a dissection.” He mistook Edith’s look of distaste and disgust for general squeamishness. “I would cite the importance of the research carried out by one of my colleagues, Dr. Mengele, on the pairs of twins that came into his care.” Edith stared at the table, unable to look at him. He was retreating into science now, seeking to hide his lack of humanity behind the specious screen of medical detachment. “It is necessary work. Important work. We need to know what makes people different. If we can find the inborn causes that create that difference, then we can discover the very keys to life.”
Edith thought of Anna and Seraphina; the Polish girls Kay had cared for and all the myriad, nameless others. Her mouth felt numb and she had to swallow. She was glad she hadn’t touched the food.
“Is,” Edith managed to say. “Not was?”
“Oh, the work will go on! Perhaps not in the way it was performed, such . . . freedom—may not come again, but what we discovered is of great value. Not just what makes persons—” he paused to find an acceptable term “—degenerate and how to mercifully end life but how better to treat disease and to know the effect certain . . . substances have on the human body.”
“The better to kill people, you mean?”
“The better to treat and to save! In order to do that it is important to know how the human body changes when put under . . .”
he searched again for an acceptable word “. . . stresses.”
“So, you don’t think that anything you did was wrong?”
“On the contrary, it was, as I said, necessary work.”
“Even.” Edith fought hard to keep her voice from shaking “even when it was your own son?”
“You have no children, Edith. You cannot understand what it is like to know that your son will never grow up to be a man, have children of his own.”
“And Elisabeth?”
“Oh, she was in full agreement, whatever she might have said to gain your trust and sympathy. It was a mercy, believe me. Wolfgang could never have lived a normal life. We were there together to ease his passing.”
So she had been there. The story she’d told about her visit to the hospital had not been fabricated, rather it had been re-created, reimagined in reversed polarity where evil became good. To be able to do that traveled so far beyond natural human feeling that Edith profoundly wished Elisabeth had lied, had made the whole thing up. In the face of such enormity, there was nothing to say. All words fled away.
“It is progress.” Kurt’s continuing justifications filled the silence. “To eliminate weakness. To promote strength. For the greater good. Ultimately, it would have led to the improvement of the whole human race. One day the world will understand the wisdom of such actions.”
“I hear there’s to be a special trial at Nuremberg.” Edith finally found her voice, clear and strong. “Just for the doctors. I hope they hang you all.”
“A few will be sacrificed.” He shrugged. “For show, that’s all. There is much interest already expressed, in what we can offer to the world. The Russians, the Americans, the British all want what I can tell them. The Americans are, of course, by far the better option. I understand from Agent McHale that I have to thank you for making that possible.”
