The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  A tiny piece of meat, more fat than meat, landed on the table. The cat flew from Henk’s hands to snap it up.

  ‘Stalin,’ said one of the men and clenched his fist discreetly close to his chest.

  ‘Stalin,’ Henk encored, looked over at Eleanor to gloat and displayed his defiant fist more openly.

  She watched as another poured milk from a small jug into a cup and handed it to Henk.

  ‘Thank you, comrade,’ he said, dipping into his sparse French.

  Dismayed, Eleanor watched the cat drink. Only a few days ago, she’d have paid a king’s ransom for so much milk. Clearly the working classes of Lyon were not as oppressed as they made out.

  At a doorway into the back of the café, she noticed the waiter pointing her out to another man, younger, with lustrous dark hair, clear, dark eyes and fine skin on a tight, closed face. In his dark leather jacket over an open-necked shirt, he was a handsome bourgeois among all this proletariat. The younger man slipped back out of sight. The waiter came to her table. He indicated that she follow him.

  Passing through the kitchen, Eleanor came face to face with a lump of pork that looked green and smelt as it looked. She gagged and drew her scarf across her fastidious Parisian nose. The cook laughed. His assistant laughed.

  She hurried down the hallway after the waiter.

  He opened a door to a room and indicated she wait inside. Someone would come soon. She told him she wasn’t alone, they were two. ‘The young man with the cat,’ she said. The waiter left.

  The room hadn’t seen paint since Napoleon. It had a couple of iron beds with bare, stained mattresses, which looked recently slept on, a couple of old chairs, a cupboard with a battered suitcase and a serge jacket hanging on a hook. A window, presumably giving out onto the back lane, was shut and covered by a blind and a dirty curtain. After the warmth of the café, she had returned to winter.

  The door opened. Henk entered, with cat and the cup of milk, which he set down on the floor. ‘You have made the contact?’

  ‘Possibly,’ she replied.

  He turned on the tap in the dirty basin. The pipe groaned and squealed but soon water came out. He took off his coat, his top, his shirt, his undershirt, hung them neatly on one of the chairs and lowered his trousers.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I must wash. Do not look,’ he said. ‘Then I will not look at you.’

  Eleanor sat in the other chair, facing away from him. She dared to lift the cup of milk from the cat, thinking she might use it for her face. It wasn’t milk at all but a watery soup with a rancid fishy flavour. Disappointed, she returned it to the cat, tempted as she was to throw it all over Henk.

  ‘You have been to Pau before,’ he said, as he sluiced the freezing water over his genitals.

  ‘None of your business,’ she muttered. Her attention was on his undershirt, draped over the chair in front of her. It looked new and of good-quality cotton.

  ‘Yes, you have,’ he persisted. ‘I could tell. You do not want to go there.’

  ‘I keep telling you,’ she said, as she felt the fabric behind his back, ‘it’s the stupidest place to cross into Spain this time of year.’

  ‘That is not your reason,’ he said.

  The little shit. Was he psychic?

  Emboldened by his meeting with the French workers, he seemed to be enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘There is another reason,’ he needled.

  ‘A honeymoon,’ she replied. ‘Years ago.’ If she hardly ever thought of Fred, she never thought of this would-be husband, whose name she had to dredge up from a vault labelled ‘Forgotten’. She remembered his nickname though. Roméo. That alone should have warned her but there was nothing like a woman hitting thirty and being alone – a femme seule, as the French so harshly put it – to frighten her. She found it hard even to conjure up his face.

  ‘You do not have this husband anymore,’ he said, fact not question.

  ‘I didn’t have him then. He was married already,’ she said. ‘I was pregnant.’

  ‘To him?’

  ‘Yes. His instinct was honourable. Then I miscarried and so did he, so to speak.’ She chuckled.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ Henk demanded with a severity that would have done a Providence Presbyterian proud.

  ‘He was one of your lot.’

  ‘A Jew?’

  ‘Yes, though they’d converted a couple of generations before,’ she said. ‘I meant a socialist. Not that he would ever have fronted a barricade. A bar more like.’ What on earth had she seen in him, even as a ticket out of her solitary status?

  ‘A bourgeois socialist,’ Henk sneered.

  ‘Until I met you, I didn’t know there was any other sort,’ she replied airily. Her attention was on the faint imprint on his undershirt. She picked it up for closer inspection. What she saw chilled her, an eagle with a swastika and underneath that, ‘Deutsche Wehrmacht’.

  Henk turned, drying his hair on the dirty pillow case he’d taken from the bed.

  ‘We shoot such people,’ he said.

  ‘I would have shot him too but I didn’t have a gun,’ she said.

  ‘Hah?’ he said, on the precipice of a mocking smile. ‘The only real difference between you and me is you are born in rich America and I am born in – ’

  He stopped. The precipice had turned into a real one.

  ‘Warsaw?’ Eleanor fished through the hole he’d opened up for her. ‘Minsk?’ She pointed to the Wehrmacht imprint on his undershirt. ‘Or might that be Berlin?’ He snatched it from her and pulled it over his head.

  ‘Vienna,’ he conceded.

  ‘Stolen?’ she said, pointing to the undershirt.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘legal. But illegal if we agree that no Nazi law can be obeyed.’

  It was easier to tell her now rather than have her needle him the whole time. The minimum to shut her up.

  His father, a Catholic, he began, had been a records clerk in an insurance office in Vienna, his mother a worker in a cigarette factory. They’d hovered on the insecure margins of the respectability his father craved. He, the last child, the bright one, went to the gymnasium, the only one of his four brothers and sisters to get an education. But his father’s attempt to sling him up into the bourgeoisie was thwarted; he was kicked out before he could take his matriculation.

  ‘Too much Comrade Stalin,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter why,’ he said, weary of her sarcasm. ‘It happened and I got sent to a camp.’

  This shut Eleanor up.

  ‘A labour camp,’ he said. He could see she had misunderstood; they rubbed each other up the wrong way, he and she. ‘Austria didn’t get Nazi concentration camps until after the German invasion. Twelfth of March, nineteen thirty-eight.’ He paused, although not for dramatic effect. He was sick of it all. ‘My nineteenth birthday,’ he added grimly.

  She’d had him at only nineteen, yet here he was, nearly twenty-three.

  In the turmoil of the Nazi takeover, he had been able to escape the labour camp because plenty of the inmates had been young Nazi toughs who were suddenly top dogs. He made it back to Vienna past the checkpoints by pretending to be one of them. He found his father had not only joined the Nazis but had started divorce proceedings against his mother. She, he now discovered, was a Catholic convert; her parents and she had been Galician Jews.

  ‘Now, suddenly, I am half-Jewish,’ he said, a fifty percent Mischling under the Nazi race laws, which the Germans applied immediately. His mother killed herself; he tried to enter Switzerland but the border was clogged with desperates like him. The Austrian border police, who were all Nazis, refused exit passes if you didn’t have the money to pay the bribe. He tried to cross illegally. ‘Nearly got caught.’

  ‘I went to the Jewish charity in Vienna, who tell me to get lost. Hitler said I was a Jew, my mother was a Jew. According to them, I wasn’t. So I joined the Wehrmacht.’

  ‘The German army?’ exclaimed Eleanor in disbelief. />
  ‘The only place you are safe from the Gestapo is in the army, where they have no power,’ he said. ‘You know better, do you?’

  She shut up. His rebuke was deserved.

  ‘I take a chance and say nothing about being a Mischling Jew,’ he continued. ‘My father wanted to get rid of me so signed the papers.’

  He decided, he told her, that he would be the best soldier he could. He would fit in. He would survive. He had managed it in the youth labour camp infested by young Nazis.

  ‘Some were human beings,’ he said, forgetting his current black–white view of his ex-compatriots, ‘but only in secret. Same in the army.’

  In the Polish campaign, he unfurled his story further, he won an Iron Cross for bravery and was made a lance corporal. Then, in April 1940, a personal order from Hitler forced the army to weed out the half-Jews like him, just at the very moment, with terrible German precision, his mother’s conversion documents met his army file. This was news to him, he had said, defending himself, and if they didn’t believe him, he’d drop his pants to prove he was no snipcock Jew. This didn’t wash. Ignorance and not being circumcised might be an excuse for getting into the army, not for staying.

  ‘Fifty percent Jew was fifty percent too much Jew.’

  He was saved only by the start of the military campaigns of May 1940 and the connivance of his platoon, his lieutenant and his CO, all Austrian. To them he was no Jew – a backhanded compliment, he understood. He joined the invasion of Norway, his unit along with the other Austrians being detailed to rescue the Wehrmacht’s Third Mountain Division at Narvik, which they had done. This was a joke. They were all city boys from Vienna. Then they were sent to Lapland, of all places, for the invasion of Russia, although after only one month, he was finally forced out of the army. He’d thought of trying to get to Sweden from there, but German soldiers had been told: do that and the Swedes will send you back, and you will be executed. And they did. He had no choice but to go to Vienna, where his father gave him money to disappear. He tried again to get into Switzerland, succeeded this time, was caught by the Swiss, who kindly posted him back to the Gestapo, who sent him to a camp near Linz. Had he not been discharged formally from the Wehrmacht, he’d have had that bullet.

  ‘This camp, its name is Mauthausen,’ he said. ‘The “bone mill” they call it. Hard labour, digging out granite rocks. But I was strong and I was tough.’ Better than a ghetto in Poland, where the rest of the Jews went, the Gestapo told him. ‘Mauthausen was really a reward for earning an Iron Cross,’ he said with grim humour. ‘Another reward was a red triangle the right way up on my sleeve instead of an upside-down yellow triangle. Even though I was kicked out of the army, I wore the mark of a Wehrmacht deserter instead of the mark of a Jew. That saved my life. The Jews got worked the hardest. If you couldn’t work anymore, if you were sick, they just shot you.’

  He sighed.

  ‘You have no idea how people who are skin and bone struggle to stay alive when they are finally trapped by death.’ He stopped. The telling of this was draining him. He wanted to lie down, to sleep and wake up in Palestine. Or in heaven. Really, he wanted to forget.

  With an insight into the darkness of individual members of humanity from her experiences in the Great War, she appreciated acutely that what he was telling her now was more than just another rung on the ladder of war and its miseries.

  ‘No one knows this,’ she said.

  ‘In Germany they do,’ Henk replied, without emotion. ‘My father knew. They all know. They choose not to know the gory details. Every soldier in Russia knew the SS commandos were killing off the Jews. They saw them doing it. You think they don’t tell anyone?’ He paused. ‘Now I tell you so you know too.’

  He sat silent for a few moments. She didn’t say a word; the look on his face was too distant, too lost. But he was not finished.

  ‘One damp, freezing morning,’ he continued, ‘the beginning of last month – November, end of October, you lose track of time in the camp – I am with Russian prisoners of war who they give the hardest rocks to crack and treat like Jews. My name is called out. I think: this is it, I am to be shot. But no. Things are not going so well in Russia.’

  He was being recalled to the army, to a probation unit on the Eastern Front, where, if he did well and survived, he would earn the right to return to his old unit.

  ‘That is a joke, no?’ he said. ‘The only way a half-Jew like me can get out alive from the bone mill is to die fighting Jewish Bolshevism in Russia. This is more reward for earning the Iron Cross. You think the Nazis do not have a sense of humour?’ He paused. ‘Once I come out through those gates with my Wehrpass and my back-pay, I do not oblige them.’ He saw the look of astonishment on her face. ‘Yes, even funnier they give me my back-pay since I was kicked out,’ he explained. ‘So this,’ he said, fingering his Wehrmacht undershirt. ‘In der Not, frisst der Teufel Fliegen,’ he said. ‘In need, even the devil will eat flies.’

  Eleanor noticed her reflection in the dirty mirror, an observer of life from the silk sheets and gowns of privilege to which she’d return as soon as she had organised his passage to Spain. The divide between their experiences was unbridgeable. Her face burnt with shame.

  ‘Presuming you get into Spain,’ she said, ‘and presuming General Franco doesn’t lock you up, where will you go after that?’

  ‘Since I am now a Jew, to Palestine,’ he said.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said in a mix of despair and sudden fondness, ‘with your sense of direction, how will you ever find it?’

  ‘Someone always show me the way,’ he said. His cat meowed and he picked it up.

  ‘And Henk?’ she questioned his name.

  ‘Is better than Heinrich,’ he replied. ‘The French cannot tell Dutch from German.’

  COMMISSARIAT DE POLICE, LYON II

  Towards 8am, Thursday, 11th December 1941

  In the canteen, Bauer and Girard ate a hearty Lyonnaise breakfast whose quality Bauer couldn’t quite believe. Clearly not all the French were being starved to feed Germany and even if they were, most of it was going to the armed forces. Frankfurt detectives and their families had eaten none of it. Kopitcke, who complained constantly about French cooking, picked at the food on his plate.

  While he ate, Bauer read through the autopsy report on the two murdered soldiers, delivered by Girard himself. The boy with the single stab wound in his back had been alive when thrown into the river, where he’d drowned. The poor kid, Bauer thought. That’s not something the parents should learn. The report confirmed his initial hunch about the murder weapon. Most probably a combat knife, possibly French or German, although the British version had a similar blade, shape and width. The doctor offered his opinion in a notation in the margin of the official document that it was a German infantry knife because of the shape of the wound. This raised more questions than it answered, though they were questions that got Bauer thinking about the how and the who.

  He had never seen a current army combat knife in Frankfurt criminal circles – First World War knives, yes, but not from the Wehrmacht. After breakfast, he’d use his old-boys’ network and official lines to get information in case the doctor’s opinion was spot-on. Bauer had his doubts. A Landser who lost his knife would have gotten into great strife, even before the war. Now, especially on the Eastern Front, he’d end up in a punishment battalion. Another argument against the doctor’s opinion was that after the French collapse last year, discarded French weapons had been everywhere, including infantry knives, which were good quality and popular. It would be hard to pick the difference between a wound made by one or the other. Still, Bauer was not about to discard the doctor’s view.

  Then came an urgent message from a police informant. Girard hurried to his office.

  ‘One of the passeur groups has your killer, Kommissar,’ Girard loftily informed Bauer after he had been summoned.

  Bauer didn’t follow. A passeur group? What was going on?

  ‘They’re offeri
ng us a deal,’ Girard explained. ‘Your killer for two of their fellows we’ve got on remand.’

  ‘This will release the French hostages in Nevers,’ Bauer said as encouragement.

  Girard didn’t need Bauer to spell that out. The sooner Bauer was out of his hair, the better.

  ‘There’s a catch. The passeurs won’t personally hand the killer over,’ he explained. ‘They’ve got him holed up somewhere.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ Bauer interrupted.

  ‘Slow down, Kommissar,’ Girard said. He hadn’t finished. They would only get the address once the two on remand had been released. Did they think he was stupid? He was bringing them up to the front door of the commissariat where their pals could see them. Once they had the address, and only then, he’d release the two.

  ‘I’m doing you a big favour,’ he added. ‘These two are crooks who’d sell their grandmothers.’

  A policeman knocked and entered. The two were now at the front door, visible from the street.

  ‘Now we wait,’ said Girard.

  Hardly a minute passed before his telephone rang. It was the informant.

  ‘The Café du Levant in La Croix Rousse,’ Girard repeated the address given him. He was up and on the way. ‘Wait till we’re gone, then let the bastards go,’ he ordered as he hurried downstairs to the waiting car with Bauer on his heels.

  ‘The killer’s in the backroom with an older woman,’ Girard said. ‘An American.’

  ‘That might explain the Chesterfield cigarette,’ Bauer mused, intrigued as much as he was excited. ‘I wonder what else?’

  CAFÉ DU LEVANT, LA CROIX ROUSSE, LYON IV

  Just before 8am, Thursday, 11th December 1941

  The door opened. The waiter urgently beckoned Eleanor.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said to Henk, handing him her cigarettes and lighter.

  The waiter led her to the kitchen, where the young man with the fine skin and tight face was standing in a corner.