The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  He took her hand in his. “I need you, sweetheart. You light up my life. Please come back. We can even try for a kid. I know that’s what you’d like.”

  His fingertips brushed her cheek. “You only have to call and I’ll get my assistant to fix a ticket.”

  * * *

  —

  “I SHOULD NOT HAVE just walked into the house like that. I didn’t know you had company.”

  Matthias had returned a few hours later, holding a bottle of Riesling.

  “No reason you should know. I was explaining to Dan that this house was owned by Irene Weissmuller. Is that wine for now?”

  Matthias produced a corkscrew and two glasses, then led the way to the library and settled in one of the chairs. As Juno took the first, fruity sip, he said, “I am sorry again for intruding. I hadn’t realized…”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s…complicated.”

  “He’s your boyfriend? Husband?”

  “Dan and I used to live together in New York. Then he went to L.A. and I didn’t. He was here to see a director at Babelsberg about a movie. He’s an actor.” She frowned. “Do you really not recognize him?”

  “I am afraid I don’t watch many movies. Does it matter?”

  She grinned. “No. Not at all.”

  “And do you have children, you and Dan?”

  “We almost did…”

  Juno found herself telling Matthias about the miscarriage. How it had hit her life the same way the car had thudded into her body that day on East Ninety-first Street.

  “I think, as a photographer, I’ve been used to being always in control. I’m used to deciding how things look, creating my own narrative, setting my own scene. But after the miscarriage…I realized I had no control over the thing I actually wanted most, which was a child.”

  “Love and loss are two sides of the same coin. That’s something Irene used to say, as it happens.” Matthias looked at Juno thoughtfully. “Do you mind me asking why you are so interested in her?”

  “You really want to hear?”

  “Of course. I want to hear everything.”

  “Then I’ll show you.”

  Juno got up and went to the typewriter case. As she opened it the scent rose up, a mingled aroma of brushed leather, the metallic odor of pencil leads and pennies, a wash of rain, and the faintest hint of fragrance. What Juno had come to think of as Cordelia Capel’s perfume.

  “A typewriter! I have never used one.”

  “The young guy at Customs had never seen one before. He thought it was some kind of decoding machine.”

  “It’s a beauty.”

  “It’s vintage. An Underwood 1931. I’d never heard of Irene Weissmuller until I found this. It belonged to her younger sister, Cordelia.”

  She pulled out the manuscript from the case.

  “She left this inside. It’s an unfinished novel, telling of their estrangement. Cordelia lived most of her life in America, and Irene, as you know, died here in Berlin. In the novel, the two sisters took very different paths. I want to know if they met again.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t help.”

  “Irene never said anything about Cordelia?”

  “I have been racking my brains, and I am sure, as I told you, she didn’t mention a sister.”

  “Were there any photographs around, of her family? Her childhood?”

  “Perhaps. If there were she might have kept them here in the library, and that was strictly out of bounds for me. When she died this house was sold to a charity and managed by a rental agency. Most of Irene’s personal belongings, all her clothes and so on, were cleared by my mother, though they kept some pieces of furniture in place for tenants.”

  Juno gazed around the room despondently. None of the clues she had come to find were here. Irene’s elegant house was devoid of any trace of Cordelia, or their previous life.

  “I sometimes think I’ll never find the answer. Not here, or anywhere.”

  Matthias rose, and came to stand behind her. Her senses prickled as he leaned closer to read over her shoulder and she caught a snatch of something fresh and foreign. Sandalwood? Bergamot? Cedarwood? He looked down at the manuscript.

  “For Hans. Forgive me. Who is Hans?”

  “Don’t know that either. There’s no mention of him in any of the research I did. Did you ever hear Irene talk about someone called Hans? A lover perhaps? An old confidant?”

  He shook his head.

  “My hope is, he might still be alive.”

  Juno ran her fingers over the casing of the Underwood and the keys that locked its secrets so firmly in the past.

  “The problem is, I don’t have the first idea how I’d find out.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Villa Weissmuller,

  Am Grossen Wannsee,

  Berlin

  April 29, 1945

  Darling Dee,

  I think the end is near and there’s every chance I won’t survive what’s coming, so I’m leaving this letter in my safe, together with all the others, with a prayer that they might one day make their way to you…

  Berlin was encircled. A hurricane of fire raged in the city, burning through Schöneberg, Charlottenburg, Moabit, Wilmersdorf, sending a molten glow up into the sky that was plainly visible from the villa at Wannsee. Potsdam, which until then had boasted of being the only intact city in Germany, was bombed to ruins. From the Führer’s birthday on April 20 onward, a sound like thunder rumbled through the suburbs, knocking pictures from the walls, bringing a million and a half Russians like an ice storm surging in from the East. Russian combat planes appeared for the first time over Berlin and screamed down Unter den Linden. Bursts of artillery fire heralded tanks rumbling across the Spree at Moltke bridge, advancing inexorably on the Reich Chancellery and government buildings. Hitler ordered the arrest of Himmler. Goering fled south. Aircraft spiraled through the darkness. Pilots fell flaming from the sky.

  Irene stayed in the villa. It was madness to venture into the city center; air attacks were coming twenty times a day, and low-flying planes strafed any pedestrians foolish enough to navigate the mess of rubble-filled ditches. Cooking with electricity was prohibited by the death penalty, and even in Wannsee mains water failed, so she was forced to wait daily in line for her bucketful at the standpipe. The talk was all of the best methods of suicide—guns, obviously, if you could find the bullets, otherwise pills were easily obtained. The Hitler Youth had been authorized to hand out cyanide tablets in public places.

  At night she stood in her garden, watching the fires in the east and listening to the thunder of artillery as the smell of cordite and decomposing bodies drifted on the air. Snow fell, white as ash, and she took the flakes in her mouth like an icy kiss.

  Every moment since Axel Hoffman’s discovery, three weeks previously, Irene and Oskar had fully expected to be arrested. The penalties for hiding Jews were strict, and the closer the Red Army got, the shorter the process of justice.

  As soon as Hoffman had exposed the hole in the wall, he pivoted on his heel and left.

  It was a catastrophe. Yet as the days passed, Irene’s terror gradually subsided, giving way to anxiety, then misgivings, until eventually, she realized her suspicions were correct.

  Axel Hoffman would not betray her secret.

  * * *

  —

  NOW, WITH THE RUSSIANS advancing by the hour, there was no more time to lose. Instead of a safe place, the villa felt claustrophobic. Irene had taken the picture of Hitler that hung on the wall and smashed and burned it, along with all the photographs of Ernst with Goering, Ley, Goebbels, and all the other Nazi dignitaries, watching flames curl across their smiles as she made her plans for escape.

  The obvious route was via the lake. Abutting the jetty was a timbered boathouse where the family had kept a rowing b
oat for weekend picnic trips up the Havel. Irene had packed it with Ernst’s Luger, some spare blankets and jumpers, bottled water, and her few remaining tins of meat.

  They could not afford to wait a moment longer. At the first glimmerings of dawn she and Oskar would set sail, traveling up the river as far as they could go, though she had no sense of what awaited them there.

  To drown out her anxiety she switched on the radio. Through tinny static came the brusque tones of the newsreader.

  Adolf Hitler has fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany.

  Hitler was dead. How incredible that such news should be an anticlimax.

  The Führer has appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz as his successor.

  So it was not to be Bormann or Himmler. Yet even as she thought it, she realized such internecine power struggles were utterly meaningless now. The monstrous politics of the Nazis had died with Hitler. The announcer handed over to Dönitz.

  My first task is to save the German people from annihilation by the advancing Bolshevist enemy. Inasmuch as the attainment of this aim is being hindered by the British and the Americans, we shall have to continue to defend ourselves against them as well, and shall have to continue to fight against them. The Anglo-Americans will then continue the war no longer for their own peoples but only to further the spread of Bolshevism in Europe.

  * * *

  —

  SNAPPING OFF THE RADIO, she began to pace the house.

  Her feverish energy refused to allow her to relax. She wandered into each room in turn, rifling through the rows of clothes in her wardrobe, like the shed skins of another life. She fingered the bundle of letters from Cordelia she had stored in the office safe, together with the ones she had written but never sent. She found a half cigarette squirreled away in her jewelry box and shared it with Oskar by the light of a spirit lamp fed from her last bottle of eau de cologne. They would wait until dark and no more.

  * * *

  —

  TOO LATE. THE HAMMERING at the door resounded through the house. Irene and Oskar exchanged glances as he dashed for the hiding place.

  “Wait. It can’t be the Gestapo. They have other things on their minds—”

  “I haven’t hidden all this time to be caught now.”

  “It must be the Russians. If we go out the back we can make it to the boathouse. They won’t be expecting that. There’s a gun in the boat. I’ll row and you cover us.”

  “I can’t risk it.”

  “Please, Oskar!”

  “No.”

  As he walled himself back into the cavity, Irene looked around in confusion. She felt paralyzed. Her every instinct told her to flee, but how could she leave Oskar alone? And even if she did, would she be able to manage the boat without him?

  The banging intensified. Blood was pulsing in her ears. A rush of adrenaline rooted her to the spot.

  Peering out, she saw only a single figure, wax faced, in the livery of the SS.

  “You!”

  Axel Hoffman pushed past her, unbuttoning his uniform jacket with one hand. In the other he held a gun.

  “Is he still here? Your Jew?”

  Instantly, her terror was replaced by a surge of anger. She felt fury that Hoffman should come now, when the world was almost at an end. That his obscene obedience should prevail even when there was no one left to obey. No Führer, no Eichmann, no Reich. Everything that commanded his loyalty lay in a pile of smoking ruins.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  He strode into the library, and she pushed furiously in front of him.

  “For Christ’s sake, it’s too late for that! Don’t you see?”

  “Too late?”

  “Your damn Führer’s dead. The Russians are coming to kill what’s left of you. There’s no point persecuting us anymore. What are you thinking of, coming here?”

  Across his temple ran a jagged crimson gash, and a spatter of blood stained his cheek. How astonishing that, despite being injured, Hoffman was still determined to fulfill his duty.

  Her throat was closing, so she could barely breathe. “If you’re planning on shooting Oskar, you’ll have to kill me first. Go on! Kill me!” Their gazes locked. Hoffman stood startled, like a man who has been stabbed but not yet fallen down, eyes deep pits in the pallor of his face. The gun was still clenched in his hand. Then he flung it aside.

  “Kill you? Is that why you think I’m here?”

  “Why did you come then?”

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like out there? Chaos. The Russians are going from house to house asking for German soldiers. They’re flushing people out with grenades, bayoneting them through the eyes. The SS are burning their uniforms, sewing stars onto their clothes, inking numbers on their forearms.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “It’s something they do in the camps. To the Jews.”

  “They ink numbers?” She was bewildered.

  “Tattoos. Is he in there? Your Jew?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  He didn’t answer. Approaching the bookshelf, he pushed it open, taking in in one glance the whole of the narrow space—the sketchbooks, the lamp. And Oskar, pressed against the wall, frozen in fear. His trousers stained with urine, and his eyes wild with terror.

  “There’s room for two.”

  Hoffman turned and took Irene’s hand, with a shadow of the old, courtly grace, almost as though he was asking for another dance.

  “I must warn you—if they find me they may kill you.”

  “I won’t be here. Oskar and I are leaving by boat at dawn—”

  “You can’t. There’s no chance. They’re everywhere. They’d shoot you as you go.”

  “We can’t just stay!”

  “It’s the safest thing you can do. You’re a woman, not a soldier, Irene. Your husband is dead.”

  She tugged her hand free. “I need to think…”

  She went to the kitchen and returned with a bandage from the hospital that she had salvaged and washed for reuse. She also had a basin of water, a sponge, and a grainy lozenge of soap. The bowl trembled in her hand as she washed the split skin on his head, delicately, with a nurse’s tender precision, squeezing out the sponge as the blood blossomed in the bowl, assessing the gravity of the injury before winding the bandage around his skull. Then, for a moment, she held his head between her hands like a benediction.

  “Go then.”

  She pushed Hoffman inside and swung the bookcase shut on both men.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE ENDLESS HOURS of the night Irene fell into a kind of trance. At the thought of Axel Hoffman concealed in the unlit cavity, feelings she refused to name unfurled inside her, like flowers opening in darkness. The past few weeks had been the most astonishing of her life. When Hoffman first appeared on her doorstep, her only motive had been to distract him. But once her defenses were breached, she could not stop touching him. To lie in a man’s arms after so long alone, to feel desire, and have that desire reciprocated, was intoxicating. She told herself sex had shorn them of everything—all social, political, moral associations, all character and individuality. Passion had rendered them purely human.

  Fragments of her past revolved through her mind. She thought of the morning Ernst had sat beside her on their bed, confirming his infidelity and advising her to accept the state of affairs. Then, further back, of her wedding, the party streamers in the garden expanding in bright bursts of color, and, even more distantly, of Cordelia dancing in the garden at Birnham Park, devising elaborate games for the two of them in which they were lost princesses of an ancient kingdom, separated at birth; laughing, conspiring, hiding from each other behind the honeysuckle wall.

  What would Dee think if she c
ould see her now? Alienated from her family, marooned in a ruined country, sheltering two men?

  She had the sudden vivid realization that each choice, each split-second decision she had made until that moment, was what had made her life. She had shaped her life daily, the way a painter chooses pigments and lays down one brushstroke after another on the canvas. Whether she would die here, at the hands of the Russians, or be cut down in a senseless attempt to escape, she was comforted.

  She had, at least, been the artist of her own existence.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  BERLIN, JULY 1945

  My darling Torin,

  On our final night together you urged me to keep writing. You said it was my gift and that it would always be with me, even if you could not be. And that’s true, because whenever I write, the only person I’m addressing is you. It’s been that way since that evening in Paris when you struck out the adjectives from my first fashion column. For a long time, everything I’ve written is for you. Every turn of phrase, every joke, every metaphor, I’ve laid at your feet. And as that’s the only way I can be with you now, I need to keep writing and never stop…

  Cordelia shut her notebook and peered out of the smudged window of the British military train. Even though she had witnessed the blitz on London, the devastation of Germany shook her profoundly. Through Frankfurt, Göttingen, Karlsruhe, and Wolfsburg, they’d trundled across mile after mile of empty, mutilated land. Fields whose only crops were rearing spears of twisted metal, blackened villages, each with its own yawning church, and desolate towns where people scurried into dusty tenements like hermit crabs or stood on station platforms staring sullenly at the passing trains.

  She glanced again at the booklet on her lap, issued to all personnel coming here on government business.

  The Germans are not divided into good and bad Germans…there are only good and bad elements in the German character, the latter of which generally predominate.