* * *
WE PARACHUTED blind into a field outside Quedlinburg in October of 1944. Once we’d arrived in town Hans was meant to bring us to his cousins’ house, where he hoped we might stay while we got our bearings. His cousin, however, coldly informed us that she could only shelter Hans, and after a night in the choir loft of a church down the road, we three—Jonah, Fisher, and myself—had to scramble for a better place to hide.
At midday I decided to find us a temporary safe house by way of the local tavern, where I felt sure I would encounter someone we could trust. I spotted a man with my father’s face here and there and had to wait until they’d finished their beers and left the place before I could make any overtures. Finally I struck up a conversation with an elderly man, a farmer, seated at a table beside me and found him willing to shelter us for a few nights in his barn. Through him Jonah began to make contacts with other locals disaffected with the Nazi regime.
He hadn’t yet had a chance to get word to Hans of our whereabouts, and it was a good thing, too, for later that week I learned from a shopkeeper that Hans had been arrested. The radio was more than likely discovered as well. The life expectancy of a radio operator was six weeks; Hans had lasted six days. I wondered if that statistic took into account the time one spent in prison.
Howard had told us that in a pinch we could rely on a man named Hoppe, whose brother was working as a translator at Bletchley Park; the only problem was that the Hoppes’ farmstead was on the far side of the mountains.
Getting all three of us there posed a considerable problem. I couldn’t work more than a pair of shape-shifts at a time, and as I say, riding the loo flue in a war zone is out of the question unless one’s life depends on it. If it had been only Jonah and myself, I could have turned us both to owls so we could fly the whole way, but the chances of Fisher making it to Bad Harzburg on his own were, as he put it, “piss-poor.” So I decided to risk the train, with a mouse in either pocket. The Nazis wouldn’t suspect a woman traveling on her own.
In retrospect, it wasn’t such a good idea. The conductor greeted me as he took my ticket, but as he returned it I caught him looking down at my coat pocket with a frown. There was a chance I could pass myself off as an eccentric who kept mice for pets, but Jonah’s life was literally in my hand if I took him out to make such an explanation to the conductor. The man might bat him out of my hand and crush him underfoot. So I laid my hand over the twitching wool as casually as I could, and he nodded at me as he left the compartment.
But a minute later I ducked my head out the door of our compartment and spotted him conferring with an SS officer down the corridor. Right then, we’d have to take the flue. There are some times it’s worth betting on the wild card that is a moving toilet, and this was certainly one of them.
I ran toward the WC on the far side of the carriage, and a second later the SS officer was in pursuit. I closed the door, flipped the latch, pulled the mice out of my pockets, and in a twinkling there were three of us crammed into the tiny stall. Fisher was swearing like a sailor with his hands over his eyes. Jonah glanced down at the train tracks passing swiftly beneath the hole at the bottom of the toilet bowl, then looked at me doubtfully. The latch groaned as the Nazi threw himself against the door.
“The general vicinity of Hoppe’s Farm, Bad Harzburg, please,” I said, and took the hands of both men in a firm grip.
I AWOKE IN the morning to a cock’s crow in the distance and a crisp breeze wafting through an open window. I opened one eye and found Jonah seated in the corner of a sparsely furnished bedroom, the fluttering curtains occasionally hiding his face. He was gazing at me as if something had gone horribly wrong.
I sprang up in bed like Finnegan’s corpse. “What is it?” I hissed (for I had no idea yet how safe we were). “What’s happened?”
He didn’t answer, just sighed and rubbed his eyes.
Then I had an inkling. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Three days, Eve.” Clearly he’d been bursting to scold me for the last seventy-two hours. “Three whole days.”
“Oh. Is that all?”
“This isn’t the time for levity. I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up.”
“I can’t help it, Jonah. I get so tired.”
“Tired? You were comatose!”
I rolled away from him and faced the wall, where a birch tree cast dancing shadows on faded floral paper. “I should have rolled you in a carpet and stuck you in the boot, just like they did to you last time,” I grumbled.
He rose from his chair, sat down on the bed beside me, and reached for my hand. “Oh, Eve, you know I’m grateful for all you’ve done. But …”
I turned over and looked at him. “Where are we, anyway? And where’s Fisher?”
“He’s safe. He’s staying at a farm up the road.”
“You mean we’re here?”
He nodded. “But not without a fair bit of trouble, I can tell you that. We landed in some farmer’s outhouse thirty miles southeast of here, and you were in a heap at our feet. I had to stay with you in the woods while Fisher found a car. It was a small miracle there was enough petrol in the tank to get us here.”
“Oh, that won’t be any trouble now that I’m awake.”
He only glared at me in response.
“I did try to tell you, you know.”
“I know you did.” He stroked my cheek. “But I couldn’t have woken you if our lives depended on it. That concerns me.”
“It’s my tragic flaw,” I replied with a twitching mouth. “Every heroine has one.” He gave me one more reproving look before he got up from the bed and left the room. There was fresh water in the bowl and a sliver of lye soap on a washstand in the corner, and I splashed my face and lathered my forearms before I followed Jonah downstairs.
No one else was in the house; I could sense that as soon as I opened the bedroom door. I made my way quietly down a narrow wooden staircase, through a bright kitchen with a massive hearth—he’d left a slab of bread and butter and a steaming mug of something for me on the broad butcher’s-block kitchen table—and into a sitting room where Jonah stood looking out a window into the yard. The place smelled faintly of pipe smoke. There were photographs lined up along the mantelpiece, and a needlepoint sampler lay half-finished in a wicker basket on the floor by an armchair.
And on the wall above the chair was a framed embroidery, a marvelously intricate scene of a midnight tryst between a knight and a golden-haired maiden. Tristan und Isolde read the embroidered caption.
I laughed quietly, and he turned around and looked at me. I decided not to tell him why I was laughing. We were damned lovers if ever there were.
IT TURNED out our new home had been forcibly abandoned the year before. No one in the area knew what had become of their neighbors, but nobody expected them to return. People were afraid of the place, so they stayed well away from it. It was the perfect safe house.
Albrecht Hoppe lived with his mother and eight-year-old daughter, Adelaide, a quarter of a mile from there. We arrived on his front step at nightfall and were quickly ushered inside. Jonah had met them three days before, and it was Albrecht who had helped him settle me into bed upstairs at the empty farmhouse.
The future of his farm seemed bleak indeed; that year’s harvest had been confiscated to feed the Wehrmacht, and the family had very little to live on. Albrecht’s youngest brother had been killed on the Russian front, and his other brother, as I say, had long since fled to London to work for the Allies. Hoppe had been brought in for questioning on multiple occasions, and each time he’d said, truthfully, that he’d had absolutely no contact with his brother since his departure. Owing to his family’s sacrifice, the Nazis were inclined to believe him. There was a portrait of Hitler on the sitting room mantelpiece, and on that first visit it was all I could do not to spring up and cast it into the fire. “It’s only for show,” Jonah told me later that night. “Just try not to look at it.”
I found an opportunity for
a new cover in Albrecht’s elderly mother, who was suffering from an eye infection so acute that I found it difficult to look at her directly. The skin round her eyes was covered in sores. When I asked, Albrecht told me that the condition was chronic and that she was often in a great deal of discomfort.
I suggested she might benefit from the services of a private nurse, and Frau Hoppe looked at me dubiously. “But do you have any experience?”
I supposed there was little use trying to make her understand that I would be posing as her nurse, and that it was her dumb luck I happened to be trained. “Actually, I do. I was trained at a hospital in the city.”
“Berlin?”
It was only a tiny fib. I nodded, and she was satisfied. Despite her ailment, Frau Hoppe was quick to laugh and generally in high spirits. Between outbreaks, she would sing as she went about her work in the kitchen, and over the two months they sheltered us I grew quite fond of her. I sometimes made an ointment that would ease her discomfort, plucking all the herbs I needed from her window box as if they’d grown there without my help.
Jonah spent that first day exploring the outbuildings on the vacant farmstead and found several places where we might hide the radio. There was a tiny crawl space above the milking shed, accessible only by a trapdoor in the corner stall; we thought that might prove useful at some point.
Though the house was isolated, we thought it best to sleep in the stable. It was a massive structure, with two stories, and the whole place still had that pleasantly musty smell of hay and leather. There was a row of windows on either side of the loft, so that during the day the great open space was flooded with dust motes twirling in the sunlight. There was a door to the loft on the upper story, but the outside staircase had been removed so the wood panels on the side of the building were discolored where the stairs had been. The owner, rest his soul, had nailed several planks across the door on the inside so that no one could open it by mistake.
The Hoppes were starved for company, Adelaide and her grandmother especially. First the child sought us out in the daytime, then her grandmother began to linger after she’d brought the food basket. She’d sit and watch us eat our dinner, and it wasn’t long before she was telling us about the family who would, in all likelihood, never return there. They had had a child about Addie’s age, she said. She hoped he was safe.
AFTER HANS’S capture, Jonah served as organizer as well as radio operator—through Morven’s locket, I’d been able to arrange for an arms drop that also included rations and a new radio. Unlike Jonah, I could afford to do much of my work by day. Frau Hoppe was fond of napping in the afternoons, and once she was sleeping soundly I would make myself into a hawk to observe the activity along roads and railroad lines in and out of the mountains. If I wanted to eavesdrop, I would turn myself into a barn cat or a pigeon. I gathered still more intelligence from members of the resistance, though they would never have identified themselves as such.
There was a limit to what most men were willing to do, and some nights it drove me mad. Hoppe came to the stable one night with our dinner of sausages and boiled potatoes, and we invited him up to our humble table in the hayloft for a spot of whisky. He was plainly uncomfortable, but Jonah was making a heartfelt effort to put him at ease.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I pressed him. The next time he went into town, I said, he should keep an ear out for any talk of Werwölfe.
He was astonished. “Werewolves?”
“Die Bandenkämpfer,” I said. “The Nazi guerrillas. They are expecting an Allied invasion, so there are men preparing for it now up in those camps in the woods.” I suspected most of the “werewolves” were little more than schoolboys, but it was better to err on the side of overestimation. “I’d like to know how many they’ve recruited.”
Albrecht didn’t answer.
“Will you listen out for me?”
“People don’t talk of such things. Not at the market. Not anywhere.”
“People always talk of such things.”
“You are mistaken, Fraulein.”
I slammed my mug on the table, folded my arms, and glared at him. “When?” I said, rather more loudly than I ought. “When will you resist?”
Jonah took hold of my arm, and I yelped like a startled hound. “Remember yourself, Uta,” he said in English. “This man is sheltering us.” After a moment he said more gently, “He is resisting.”
Over my shoulder I looked at the farmer seated on an overturned milk crate. He was staring at the floor as he swished the last drops of whisky around the tin cup in his work-worn hands. He couldn’t have been more than forty-five, but suddenly he seemed ancient as a prophet. I wanted to rage at him, to make him understand that it wasn’t enough to keep his fist in his pocket.
“Everyone capable of active resistance is dead,” Jonah said quietly. He paused. “Or will be, shortly.”
“He’s capable.”
“No, he’s not.” Jonah spoke with the patience of a schoolteacher. “And you’ve got to accept it.”
Things were awkward between myself and Hoppe from then on, though he seemed to bear me no ill will. The next time I visited his house, the portrait of the Führer had disappeared from the mantelpiece.
OUR FIRST success came in late November, when Allied fighter planes bombed a train carrying forty V-2S from the Mittelwerk plant. All the rockets were shipped back to the factory for scrap.
I’d never seen Jonah so energized, so full of purpose, though that’s not to say he wasn’t well aware of the danger we were in. There was a blind dog, a Saint Bernard, at the next farm up from the Hoppes’, and whenever I laid eyes on the poor thing I knew there’d be a German direction-finding car out that night. On those nights Jonah couldn’t use the wireless telegraph set, and I warned the Hoppes well in advance to keep their radio hidden. They assumed I had come by the intelligence somewhere in town that day and didn’t question me.
I would come back after midnight, and once I’d given him my report—and provided there’d been no portent that day—Jonah would pull out his wireless case and set to work. I fell asleep listening to his nimble forefinger making a soft rat-a-tat-tat on the transmitter. Sometimes we’d climb up onto the roof of the stable and watch the sunrise, bundled up together in a scratchy wool blanket.
Our conversations inevitably hinged on our families, our ambitions, our regrets, all the choices that had led us to this very moment: perched precariously on an old tiled roof that might give way anytime, in the freezing dark of a hostile country. We looked up at the great celestial wilderness, and I told him which stars were dead and which were dying.
“How can you possibly know that?”
I shrugged. “I just do.” I’d dallied with an astronomer in Berlin, and when I started pointing out which stars I believed were dead, he’d looked into his telescope and told me I was right.
Other nights we’d see the Allied planes flying in formation on their way to Berlin, and when the moonlight caught the tinfoil they dropped to jam the German radar, it looked like a meteor shower on the horizon.
It would have lent a nice shape to this story if I could tell you he promised to marry me someday, but he didn’t. It wasn’t the thought of Patricia that kept him from it, or the knowledge that we would not age in tandem. I suppose part of him just knew somehow that he wasn’t going to live long enough.
He asked me one night if I’d ever wanted children. “Not especially,” I said. “I have enough trouble taking care of myself, you know.” He laughed at how true this was. “Why—did you?”
He nodded. “We tried for a few months before I left.”
I felt a wave of nausea at the thought of Jonah making love to another woman hoping for a child. To me Patricia was a spectral figure, ever the dark shape at the foot of the bed—provided there was a bed to sleep in.
He drew out his tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. “Of course, looking back on it now, I’m glad it didn’t happen. That’s the problem with marriage,” he sai
d as he licked the paper. “It’s only after the fact that you become intimately acquainted with one another’s faults. I have my share, Patricia has hers. Some faults you can live with, and others …” He lit the cigarette and handed it to me.
“And others, you can’t,” I said.
He looked at me and nodded.
“What are the faults you can’t live with?”
“Patricia is … well, she’s exceptionally bright. Bookish, you know.” I handed it back, and he took a long, pensive drag.
“What’s the good of knowing half a dozen languages if you never use any of them?”
“That’s it, exactly. She belongs in that office with all her maps and card indexes.” He paused. “All brains and no guts.”
“Surely you knew that beforehand.”
He looked sad. “I thought it wouldn’t matter.”
“Or do you think perhaps you weren’t cut out for it?”
“Not cut out for marriage?” Plainly this notion had never occurred to him.
“Halves one’s rights and doubles one’s duties, you know.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not that I wasn’t cut out for it. I loved Patricia—I still do—and I can’t say our marriage was a mistake. But …”
I didn’t press him there; there was no need to say any more.
“I wonder about you sometimes,” he said after a brief silence.
“What about me?”
“You’ve no nerves at all. You never cry, you never panic.” He paused. “How can I be so in love with a girl who seems so inhuman?”
I sat up abruptly, shivered, and turned away from him so he wouldn’t see my face. “I do feel,” I said, looking up at the sky. It had grown so cold all of a sudden. “I feel plenty.”
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