Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  “I’ve changed my mind!” Pepper says, tossing the laundry bag to Florian.

  He grins, catches it handily, and closes the lid of the trunk.

  Fourth Movement

  “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

  SUN TZU

  Annabelle

  GERMANY • 1938

  1.

  In the pasture nearest the tennis court, Johann was teaching Florian how to ride a pony, using a longe line and an enormous amount of patience. I sat on a picnic cloth, with Frieda and Alice and my new baby sister, and watched them circle under the hot sun. Frieda was giving little Margot her bottle. Above the waving grass, I could hear Johann’s bass voice, giving out instructions in German, though I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Is it perfectly safe, do you think?” said Alice.

  “The younger the better, Johann says.”

  “Oh, yes,” Frieda said. “We all started when we were two. I think Frederick is more horse than boy, sometimes.”

  “He looks as if he’s enjoying it, at any rate.” Alice drew her knees up under her chin. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and her blond hair, streaked by the persistent sunshine, was gathered into a chignon. She wore a dress of white eyelet and looked like a daisy. When Margot began to fuss, she turned her head and stretched out her long arm to tickle her daughter’s chin. “What’s the matter, darling? Are you keen to be off riding horses, too?”

  Frieda laughed and put the baby to her shoulder. “She just needs to burp, I think.”

  Alice lay back on the cloth. “You’re far better at this than I am, aren’t you? Perhaps I should let you adopt her.”

  “I like babies, that’s all,” Frieda said.

  I gazed across the hot meadow grass. Florian looked so grown-up in his riding clothes and leather boots. I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was concentrating fiercely on Johann’s words. He was always desperate to please his father.

  His father.

  And there it was, just like that: the knot of pain in my chest, which had become smaller and appeared less frequently as the months passed, but which never quite disappeared. I imagined it was a permanent condition, a chronic illness to be managed in the privacy of my own brain. It helped, perhaps, that I hadn’t heard a single word from Stefan himself since we parted on that hot July day a year ago. He had walked out of the Paris Ritz and vanished. Not even Charles knew where he was, or maybe he wasn’t telling me. A clean break, like an amputation. Eventually, you realized you could survive without all your limbs, that you could function and even thrive, because human beings were designed to take a battering. And though you weren’t whole, you at least had a son. And though it sometimes seemed as if your heart had stopped beating, you at least knew that somewhere in the world, another heart was beating for you.

  Margot burped daintily, and I shifted my gaze to my baby sister and marveled at the difference between her and Florian. Her delicate lips, her perfect tiny fingers. If I leaned in to smell her hair, I knew she would be puppy-sweet. How was it possible that my sturdy son, rising and falling in his stirrups as the pony moved to a trot, had been nursing at my breast only a year and a half ago? My baby was gone forever. I wouldn’t get him back. I had this new Florian, this walking, talking, pony-riding Florian, a swaggering miniature image of the man who had created him inside me. But my baby was gone.

  “Are you all right, Mother?” asked Frieda. “You look a little ill.”

  I rose to my feet and shook the crumbs from my dress. “I’m fine, darling. I think I’ll just take a walk.”

  2.

  We sat down to lunch an hour or so later. The sunshine poured through the long French doors, and as I took my seat at the end of the table and picked up a glass of water, the housekeeper came up behind me and told me that a woman had been here to see me.

  “Who?” I asked in surprise. I had no friends here in Germany, only a few neighboring acquaintances who didn’t approve of me at all.

  “She did not leave her name, Frau von Kleist, but she gave me this note for you and explained that it was urgent.”

  Alice and my father were already in place, drinking their wine and talking animatedly about tennis. The smoke from their cigarettes drifted to the ceiling. The boys scraped back their chairs. Johann looked expectantly across the table, which was fragrant with a profusion of red roses I had cut just that morning

  I tucked the note under my plate. “Thank you, Hilda.”

  3.

  For a house so large, Schloss Kleist offered little privacy. Actually, it wasn’t the house itself, it was the inhabitants. You could not be called to the telephone without everyone wanting innocently to know who had called; you could not play tennis without at least a pair of spectators. It was easier at night, when I could retreat to my cozy rooms at the end of the east wing without some request bouncing my way every four minutes. During the day, I could achieve a quiet moment only in the lavatory, which is exactly where I opened the note Hilda had delivered to me at lunch.

  It was written on a leaf of cheap notepaper, the kind you might pick up in a hotel or a train station. The words were English and neatly printed, as if the writer wanted to be sure I could read them properly.

  I need your help. Wilhelmine. 23 Marktstrasse

  I folded the paper and put it back into my pocket. Just before I opened the door, I remembered to flush the toilet and run the faucet, so I could pretend to wash my trembling hands.

  4.

  I found Johann upstairs in our bedroom, changing into his tennis clothes.

  “Isn’t it a little hot for tennis?” I said.

  “Your father made me a challenge. One does not turn down a challenge from the father-in-law.” He reached for his shirt. His chest was pink and enormous, like a side of beef. “Will you come to watch?”

  “Thank you, no. I thought I might motor into the village for a bit of shopping,” I said.

  “Shopping?” He stopped and lifted his eyebrows. “But you do not like to shop.”

  “I need to order a hat for the festival.”

  “Have the milliner come to us. It is what Frieda would always do.”

  “I’m not Frieda, remember?”

  He set the shirt aside and smiled. “No. You are my beautiful Annabelle. I almost die to look at you.”

  “Johann, stop.”

  “Come here, beautiful Annabelle.” He snared me around the waist and slipped his hand inside the opening of my blouse.

  “Johann! What’s gotten into you?”

  He kissed me, and when he lifted his face away, his eyes were soft. “The sunshine, I think. It is so good to have the sunshine again.”

  5.

  I waited until the tennis balls had actually launched into the air before I slipped into the garage and started up the Mercedes.

  The village was a few miles away, down a meandering road that glared white in the sun. I had put the top down, and the draft pulled at my hat, smelling of ripe hops and sunshine. I concentrated on keeping the car steady, on breathing just the right amount of oxygen into my lungs: not too much, not too little.

  Marktstrasse was almost deserted; everyone had done her shopping early and gone home to enjoy the summer afternoon. I pulled up in front of number 23—a small hotel I’d never noticed before—and a slim figure stepped out of the shadow of the eaves.

  “Frau von Kleist?” she said.

  She was pretty, I thought, in a cold wash of jealousy. She stood taller than I did, and her curling dark hair bobbed about her ears. She looked more modern than I had imagined. She wore no makeup, except for a bit of lipstick, and she didn’t need to. Her silk blouse and wide trousers were well made and a little mannish, almost like a movie star’s, suiting her the way Alice’s deep V-necked dresses suited Alice. I could well imagine Wilhelmine as an elegant new bride in a hotel bed, ma
king love to Stefan, making a daughter with Stefan.

  “Wilhelmine,” I said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name.”

  “It’s Himmelfarb,” she said in perfect English. “May I get in?”

  “Of course.”

  She got in the passenger side and shut the door. “Let’s drive somewhere, if you don’t mind. I have already taken enough risk.”

  I released the clutch and we set off down Marktstrasse in a little spurt of white gravel. She leaned her elbow on the door and turned her head to watch me, as if she was waiting for me to start the conversation.

  So I did. “It’s Stefan, isn’t it? Something’s happened to Stefan.”

  She went on regarding me, without speaking.

  “Tell me, please. At least tell me he’s alive, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to see if you were sincere.”

  “What the hell does that mean? For God’s sake, tell me what’s happened!”

  “He’s alive,” she said, and my shoulders slumped. The car swerved to the edge of the road, and Wilhelmine gripped the edge of the doorframe and pressed her right foot into the floorboards. When I had righted the car, she said, “All right. So you don’t know anything about it.”

  “I haven’t heard from Stefan in a year. Not since he walked out of the Paris Ritz last July.”

  “Ah. Then I suppose you don’t know he was taken by a pair of Gestapo agents as soon as he turned the corner into the rue Cambon to fetch his automobile, and he has been held like a dog in the Dachau camp ever since.”

  I stuffed my hand into my mouth and swerved to the side of the road—this time deliberately—slamming the brake with my foot, until the Mercedes bumped to a stop alongside a weathered fence. The engine coughed and died. I opened the door just in time to vomit into the grass.

  6.

  “It was a month or two before we realized he was actually missing,” Wilhelmine said, “and it was several more months before we found out for certain where they had taken him. He is a very special prisoner, you know. They would not let me see him. I managed at last to get a message to him, and he sent a reply that he was fine, but I could hardly recognize the writing.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, holding my fist to my mouth. I thought of my tranquil autumn and winter, settling Frieda into her school, resuming my cello studies, a recital Johann arranged at a music conservatory that was very well received. He said he was proud of me. Christmas in Paris, surrounded by my new family. A pile of decadent presents under the tree, including a breathtaking necklace of black pearls from Johann, which he fastened around my neck himself. Plenty of food and wine, plenty of music and warm fires. At night, Johann would hold me close to his chest, because a Paris apartment, however grand, is always drafty in winter; and as I drifted to sleep, safe and warm, I would say Good night, Stefan in my head, and wonder if he were keeping some woman warm in his own arms while she drifted to sleep.

  Sometimes, when the bitterness ebbed in my heart, I even wished he were. I wished he did have a woman in his arms, because no one should lie alone in the middle of winter.

  “That was in May,” said Wilhelmine. “The officials refused to tell us any more, only that he was being held indefinitely for crimes against the state. So I demanded to know what crimes, and after many weeks of letters and telephone calls, they at last sent me this.” She handed me a piece of paper, folded twice into a square.

  I stared at the paper between my fingers. “You said us. Whom do you mean?”

  “His family, of course. His parents cannot sleep for worry.”

  “Of course.”

  “I have not told my daughter. She loves him so much. She draws pictures of him and hangs them in her room.”

  The tiny indentations of the typewriter were like Braille under my fingertips. The paper was crisp and thin and terribly official. I unfolded the page: not in the easy flips by which you opened the morning news, but by brute force, the individual grasping of each leaf, requiring dogged concentration.

  “As you see,” said Wilhelmine—I did not see, actually; I could not comprehend the German script before me—“this is an arrest order for one Stefan Silverman, for the crimes of murder and treason and various other infractions, according to evidence and sworn statements.”

  “Murder,” I said. “Did he really commit murder?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No.” My back rested against a fence post. Someone was mowing a field nearby; the drone of the engine floated along the motionless summer air. If I closed my eyes, I could smell the wholesome brown scent of newly cut hay. I said, “How did you know about me?”

  Wilhelmine’s arms were folded across her silk chest. Her breasts were small and lean, like the rest of her. I thought she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. She was practical and stylish all at once; she was indomitable. “Do you have a cigarette? I left mine in my motorcar.”

  I said I didn’t.

  She crossed one leg over the other. “I knew he had a mistress in Paris, a married woman, and he had gone to see her during the summer. So in May, after I got this arrest paper at last, I went to France. I went first to the Ritz, because he always saw his women there; it was such a great pleasure to him, to screw some beautiful woman in the bed of the Imperial Suite.” She paused. “I’m sorry, that was rather cruel, wasn’t it? I have always said I would not be bitter. I did love him, you know. I still admire him very much. It is impossible not to admire such a man as that. He has such qualities.” She made a circle in the dust with the toe of her elegant shoe.

  “Please go on,” I said.

  “So I went to the Ritz, and at first Alfonse would not tell me anything, though I could see perfectly well that he knew all about you. I am old hands with Alfonse, you see. He prizes discretion above everything. I had gone there to murder my husband a few years ago, and Alfonse stood very firm, even though I was Stefan’s lawful wife. He would not let me disturb the bastard.” She laughed. “But this time I told him it was a matter of life and death, that their precious client had been arrested and thrown in a prison when he walked out of the hotel last July, and that he was now in great danger. So Alfonse gave me the note you left for Stefan.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and contemplated this. “But I only signed it Annabelle. There was no surname.”

  “Oh, that was the easy part. Everyone knew that the Baron von Kleist had made a fool of himself over a young French wife named Annabelle.”

  Across the road, the cows were on the move, wandering slowly across a tender green pasture. “I don’t understand,” I said. “What does my husband have to do with any of this?”

  Wilhelmine straightened her lean body away from the fence and turned to me. “Are you serious? You are this ignorant?”

  I looked up at her helplessly, into the full glare of her contempt. The air around us seemed to be cracking into pieces, preparing to shatter. “Yes,” I said. “I am this ignorant.”

  Her small dark eyes traveled over my face, taking my inventory: forehead, brows, eyes, mouth, chin. “I suppose that is why he fell in love with you, of all of us. You are so fucking innocent. It must have been a relief.” She laid her thumb against my cheekbone, like a lover’s caress. “Sweet thing. Look again at the paper. Tell me if there is any other name that springs from the page.”

  I lifted the paper and stared at it. The gothic script had always confounded me; I had learned a great deal of German during my marriage, but I seemed to lose the meaning when I saw the words written in that dense medieval lettering. But now my eyes, as if knowing what to look for before my brain did, traveled down the page and fastened on the words Johann von Kleist.

  “You do not know that the two of them, they are like Javert and Valjean? They are immortal enemies. It all made sense to me, when I saw that Annabelle von Kleist was Stefan’s lover. Why your husband would n
ot let him go, like the bloodhound tracking down the fox. Why there is now no possibility of Stefan’s release.”

  I slid down the fence post and came to rest in the dusty grass. “It’s not true.”

  “You know it is. You are ignorant but not foolish.”

  “But Johann’s a general in the army, not Gestapo.”

  She snorted. “This is Hitler’s Germany, Frau von Kleist. No one is what he seems. Do you know what your husband did in Berlin last year? He oversaw the reorganization of the prisons, the prisons in which they put the people who do not agree with the Nazis, so that now they go to the rehabilitation camps, these beautifully designed camps, even bigger and better than before.”

  “My God.”

  “But it is more than that. There has always been a grudge. I believe Stefan pinched his nose a few years ago, intercepted some papers or some matter like that. And then there was this murder of a police agent, who was sent to catch him and put him in the prison. And I think you understand your husband, Frau von Kleist. I think you understand he is a man of rules and consequence. He is dogged in pursuit of his goal.”

  “Yes, I understand that.” At the word understand, the shattering began at last. The fatal tap on the cracked grass. Stefan and Johann. Johann denouncing Stefan, having him arrested and thrown into Dachau to be tortured, and then going home to our Paris apartment and playing horses with Stefan’s son. Taking Stefan’s lover to bed, the final stroke. We are man and wife again.

  I wanted to crawl out of my revolted skin. I wanted to vomit again, but there was nothing left in me. I took off my hat and let the sun bake into my hair.

  Wilhelmine sat down next to me, Indian-style. A wooden slat creaked as she leaned her back against it. Her knee was sharp and bony against my thigh.

  I whispered, “He never said anything. Stefan never said a word.”

  “No, I am not surprised. Stefan has his faults, but he plays fair. He does not turn women into pawns.”