by Pam Jenoff
“I’m going to find Marcelitis,” I insist.
Paul scrapes the bottom of the bowl, finishing his stew. “Were you always this stubborn?”
“It’s almost dark,” I say, draining the last of my beer. “We should go.”
Outside, we walk to the bike. “Here,” Paul says, handing the helmet to me. Our fingers brush, sending a jolt of electricity through me. I look up and our eyes meet. Suddenly his face is above mine, his breath warm on my forehead. “Marta,” he says softly, staring down at me. He lowers his lips toward mine. Unable to control myself, I raise my face to his. Then a vision of Rachel appears in my mind.
I pull back. “Paul, stop, I can’t.”
He searches my eyes, his expression hurt and confused. “Do you love him?” he demands.
“What?” I ask, still flustered.
“Your husband—do you love him?”
That question again, I think, remembering Emma. I hesitate. “I married him.”
“And me?” he presses. “I know that you still have feelings for me, Marta. I could feel it just now.”
I bite my lip. “Would it change anything if I did?”
“No, of course not,” he replies quickly, looking away. Neither of us speak for several seconds.
“I’m sorry if you came after me for this,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I came after you because it was my job.” But the pain underneath his voice tells a different story. I study his face as he stares off into the distance.
“But why…” I pause, biting my lip. “Why didn’t you come after me sooner? After you recovered from the crash?”
“Does it matter?” His eyes are hollow, his face a mask of bitterness I have never seen before.
I reach out and touch his arm. “Paul, I…”
He turns, pulling away from my touch. “Let’s just concentrate on finding Marcelitis,” he says coldly. “Then you can go home.”
As I climb on the bike behind him, I can tell that Paul is angry. Jealous. Defensiveness rises in me. It isn’t fair of him to blame me for my choices. He was dead, or at least I thought so. It is not as if I chose someone else over him. I am seized once more with the urge to tell him about Rachel. But would the truth just make things worse? Before I can consider the question further, he starts the engine. The motorcycle lurches forward and I grab him quickly so as not to fall backward as we pull onto the road.
An hour later we reach the outskirts of Berlin. It is as if the war ended yesterday, I think as we pass through the residential neighborhoods. The city is a wasteland. The aftermath of the bombings is evident everywhere, street after street of once-elegant houses reduced to rubble. Paul drives more slowly here, weaving between the large craters and debris that litter the roadway. A charred smell lingers in the air. Though it is early evening, the streets are eerily silent. The few houses that still stand are dark and shuttered. Like the Jewish Quarter in Kraków after everyone had been sent away. I remember Jacob and I passing through on our way out of the city, watching his jaw tighten as he took in the once-vibrant neighborhood where Emma had been raised, now an empty shell of its former self. I can still see the curtains blowing through broken windows, feel the shattered glass crunching beneath my feet.
A sense of sick satisfaction rises inside me. So the Germans suffered, too. Good, I think, wrapping my arms more tightly around Paul. We stop at a red light. On the corner sits a house completely destroyed except for the garage. Through the half-open garage door, I see a woman and three small children sitting around an open fire. Nearby stands a man, breaking a wooden chair into pieces for kindling. The smallest child, no older than five, looks out into the street and, noticing us, stands and takes a few steps forward, eyes widening as he takes in the motorcycle, our strange clothes. He is nearly as thin as I had been in prison. For a moment I wonder if he is going to run into the street and beg us for money. But the man hurries forward and pulls him back, scolding him in words I cannot hear. I notice then the rags wrapped around the child’s feet where shoes should have been. Children, like those we had seen so long ago through the window in Paris, those on the boat when I came to England. Like Emma’s children. These were not the Germans I had imagined. My satisfaction disappears, replaced by a lump in my throat.
It is nearly dark now as we near the city center. Here there is new construction, identical concrete houses set too close together, tall apartment blocks being crudely erected amid the grand architecture of old Berlin. The sidewalks are thick with pedestrians making their way home from work, but the streets are strangely empty except for some buses. “Not many cars,” I observe.
“Not many people here can afford to own them now,” Paul replies. “But you make a good point. We should lose the bike so as not to attract attention.” He pulls over to the curb, helps me dismount. “Wait here,” he says, disappearing around the corner with the bike. I stand on the street, watching the people as they pass, thin, pale and silent. They walk by shells of former buildings matter-of-factly, not looking up. “Ready?” Paul asks, walking up behind me. He leads me expertly through the streets, turning right, then left.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I ask in a low voice.
He nods. “I’ve been here a few times in recent months for my work.”
“The devastation…” I gesture upward with my head. “I had no idea.”
“You should have seen it a year ago,” he replies. “At least now, with money pumping in from the West, they are starting to rebuild. But it’s going to take a long time.” We turn another corner. “This is it. Oranienburger Strasse.” The right side of the street is dominated by a massive domed building. “That’s the New Synagogue,” he adds as we approach. I look up, not answering. In our village, the synagogue was a single room, no larger than our house, with a lace curtain separating the area in the back where the women sat. Our synagogue in London is larger than that, of course, but even it is dwarfed by the cathedral-size one now before me. The brown-brick facade climbs high into the air, topped by a wide dome. Two narrower towers, identical in design, flank the main structure. But the building is in a horrible state of disrepair. The entire eastern wall of the synagogue is missing. The arched stained-glass windows have been shattered, reduced to jagged shards. Soot blackens the front doorway of the synagogue, as though there had been a fire.
It is Friday night, I realize. Before the war, the synagogue would have been filled with hundreds, even thousands of Jews, chanting the Sabbath prayers. Instead, the synagogue lies silent, a ghost of its former self. Are there any Jews left in Berlin? I wonder. Sadness rises up in me. “We should keep moving,” Paul says in a low voice, looking furtively over his shoulder. Following his gaze, I see a man walking a dog on the far side of the street watching us curiously. Have we been followed? No, I realize quickly. The man is simply puzzled by the fact that we are interested in the synagogue. Berlin does not have tourists now. We walk farther down the street past the synagogue. “He’s gone,” Paul says.
I turn back. Across the street, as Emma said, is a tiny used bookstore in front of an apartment building. “There it is.”
We cross the street. As we approach the bookshop, Paul grabs my arm. “This way,” he mouths, pulling me into a narrow passageway beside the bookshop, separating it from the adjacent building. At the back of the passage, there is a wood door with a high glass window. Paul stands on his toes, peering through. “Looks like a lobby of some kind. The apartment must be upstairs.”
I notice a button beside the door. “Here goes nothing,” I say, pressing it. There is no response. “Maybe it’s broken.” I push it again.
Paul presses his ear against the door. “It definitely works. I can hear it. Well, no one’s answering. What do you want to do?”
I hesitate. “We can’t give up. We have to find him.” I turn the doorknob and the door opens. Inside, a single bare bulb casts dim light across the tiny foyer. Paint peels from the walls. “Hello,” I call, stepping through the doorway. My voic
e echoes back at us. Paul points toward a narrow metal staircase leading upward. The stairs groan beneath us as we climb them. At the top, there is a short corridor, leading to an open door. “Hello,” I call again. As we near the doorway, I see that the frame is splintered, one of its hinges ripped away. An uneasy feeling rises in me. Someone has broken in.
Paul grabs me by the shoulder, pulling me behind him. I notice for the first time that he has pulled out his gun, holding it low to his waist. “Wait here,” he mouths, stepping forward. He enters the apartment, then disappears from view around a corner. “No…”
“What is it?” Unable to wait any longer, I race through the door. “Oh, my goodness…” The apartment is in complete disarray. A brown sofa lies toppled backward, its cushions ripped open. In the small kitchen off to the right, shattered glass and dishes litter the floor.
Paul walks to a desk in the corner of the room. The roller top is open and papers are strewn across the desktop, chair and floor. “This is Marcelitis’s apartment,” he says, picking up a piece of paper and scanning it. “My guess is that Marcelitis had a visit from the police.”
I walk to the kitchen table, where a cup of coffee lies spilled. “Still warm,” I say, touching the liquid. “You think he’s been arrested?” Paul nods. An uneasy tingle crawls up my spine. I turn back toward him. “Do you think it was because of…” I begin, then stop again. Paul has opened the desk drawer and begun rummaging through it. Then he drops to his hands and knees and starts tapping on the hardwood floor by the desk, his ear close to the ground. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for the cipher,” he replies, sliding away from the desk and tapping on the floor again.
“You really think he would leave it here?”
“I think I want to make…” He stops, then pulls a small pocketknife from his coat and begins to pry at one of the floorboards. I walk toward him as he raises the board, revealing a hollow compartment. “Aha!” he exclaims, pulling several sheets of folded paper from the ground. Setting the papers aside, he reaches into the hole once more. His face falls.
“No cipher?” He shakes his head. Picking up the papers, he unfolds them and scans the top sheet. He replaces the floorboard, tapping the nails back into place with the handle of the pocketknife. Then he stands, still holding the papers.
“What are you doing with those?”
“Taking them, of course. We can’t leave them here. They contain key information about Marcelitis’s work. I don’t want the police finding these if they decide to come back and search more thoroughly.”
“But I don’t understand. Why would they…?” He thinks they may come back after us, I realize. Goose bumps form on my arms.
Paul tucks the papers into his jacket and starts toward me. “Let’s discuss this outside, shall—” A shuffling sound comes from the doorway on the far side of the room. Both of our heads snap toward the sound. Someone is here. The noise comes again, louder this time. I hold my breath as Paul takes a step toward the doorway, raising his gun. An orange cat meanders into view, looking at us with disinterest.
I lean against the table, relieved. “Just a cat.”
“For now,” Paul replies. He bends over and scoops up the scrawny animal, his face softening. “She looks hungry.” I cannot help but think of Delia’s well-fed cat, Ruff. He walks to the kitchen and opens one cupboard, then another. “Nothing…” Then he opens the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of milk. He pulls a bowl from the sink and pours some milk into it, then sets the cat gently down. “Poor thing,” he says, watching the animal drink greedily. “Let’s go.”
“I didn’t know you liked cats,” I remark in a low voice as we make our way back down the stairs.
“Cats, dogs, it doesn’t matter. Growing up on the farm we had every animal you could imagine. But during the war…” He shudders. “You wouldn’t believe what I saw. All kinds of animals left on their own to starve or be killed.”
“I know,” I say, remembering the packs of scrawny dogs that roamed the outskirts of Kraków during the war, searching through piles of garbage. There were stories of people killing them for food. Outside, in the passageway, I stop. “So what are we going to do?” The darkened street is nearly deserted and the few remaining passersby walk quickly with their coats drawn, heads down. I look sideways through the front window of the bookstore. A thin, balding man stands behind the counter, hunched over a ledger. His eyes flick upward, peering out behind wire glasses. Then, meeting my gaze, he looks downward once more. I gesture toward the bookstore with my head. “Maybe he saw something.”
Paul shakes his head. “Even assuming he’s not too scared to talk to us, what’s he going to say? That he saw the police take a man away? And asking will only draw attention to us.”
“I think we’ve already drawn attention,” I reply, remembering the ransacked apartment. “It’s worth a try.”
“I’ll go check,” Paul relents. “Wait here.” He looks both ways out of the passageway, then walks into the bookstore. A look of alarm crosses the bookseller’s face as Paul enters the store. Then, as Paul speaks to him, the man seems to relax slightly, saying something and pointing out the window to the right. A minute later, Paul walks out of the store. “Let’s get out of here.” He leads me around the corner. As we walk, our steps fall into a natural, easy rhythm, Paul’s shortening to match my own. It is as if nothing has changed, as if we had walked the streets of Paris together yesterday, and the years between simply did not exist.
I follow Paul down another block to a café. As we enter, I look up at him, puzzled. “We need to blend in,” he explains. Inside the atmosphere is surprisingly festive, a respite from the dreary street outside. Tiny Christmas lights and sprigs of fir tree adorn the bar and windows, decorating the otherwise plain room. People crowd the bar, drinking and talking merrily. In the distance, piano music plays. What had this café been like during the war? Had it been frequented by the Nazis, like the one we blew up in Kraków? Perhaps it had been a meeting place for the resistance. Or maybe just a café, like it is now, where ordinary Berliners came to escape their troubles for a while.
Paul ushers me through the crowd to a table in the back of the café. “Wait here,” he says, disappearing into the crowd once more. I sit down numbly. A minute later, Paul returns with two cups of coffee, handing me one. “So what did the bookseller say?” I ask, cupping my hands around the warmth as he sits down.
“Pretty much what we expected. Marcelitis was arrested less than an hour before we arrived.” He pulls the flask from his pocket, pouring some of the liquor into his coffee.
This time I cannot help myself. “You’re drinking again,” I observe, struggling to keep my voice even.
“Yes.” He does not offer an explanation but picks up the coffee and takes a large gulp, defiant.
I hesitate, wanting to say more. The accident, everything that happened, seems to have changed him so. But it isn’t my place. I am not sure I even know him anymore. I take a sip of my own coffee, hot and bitter. “Do you really think his arrest has something to do with us?” I ask instead.
“Seems a little coincidental, don’t you think? I mean Marcelitis managed to elude the Soviets for years. Sergiev must have told someone that you were headed to Berlin before he came after you.”
“But that doesn’t explain how they found out Marcelitis’s location and made it to him before we did,” I reply.
“True. You got Marcelitis’s address from your friend Emma, right?”
I nod. “But she would never have given up that information.” As I say this, an uneasy feeling rises up in me. Emma would have broken and talked to save her children. Had the police come after her again?
“Who else?”
“I told Simon over the phone.” At the sound of my husband’s name, Paul looks as though he has been slapped. “But I called from the train station, so I doubt anyone was listening in on the call,” I continue quickly. “And I had Emma send word through the embassy. I don’t
know if she gave them the address, though.” My head throbs. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Marcelitis is gone.” Defeat washes over me. “Dammit. If we hadn’t stopped to eat or—”
“Marta, don’t. If we had shown up earlier we would be in jail with Marcelitis. You can’t second-guess these things.”
I look away. “I know. It’s just that I really thought if I came to Berlin…” My eyes begin to burn. “Who the hell did I think I was?” I blink several times, but it is too late. Tears spill onto my cheeks.
“Hey.” Paul leans over and takes my chin in his hand, wiping my cheeks gently. Our eyes lock. He is, I see then, exactly the same man I have always known.
I straighten. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be emotional.”
“It’s okay. I’m sorry, too.” He pulls his hand back, then hesitates. “There is one thing. I probably shouldn’t even tell you this…”
“What is it?”
“The man in the bookstore said that Marcelitis was taken away in a city police car, not state.” I tilt my head, not understanding. “That means they’re probably keeping him in the local jail overnight before handing him over to Soviet intelligence in the morning.”
“But he’s still in prison, so what good does that do…?” I trail off, staring at him. “Are you saying we can get to Marcelitis in jail?”
Paul hesitates. “I don’t even know why I’m saying this to you, Marta. A few hours ago I was telling you to go home and give up. And I still think that you should.” He taps his jacket pocket. “But seeing the papers on Marcelitis’s operations, well, I understand now why it is so important.”
“So you’re saying we can try to help him?”
Paul shakes his head. “Not we. Me. I can try, but I won’t have you a part of this. It’s too dangerous.”
“You’re not going without me. This is my mission.”
“Marta, be reasonable. You would be risking your life, even more than you already have. Think of your daughter.” I bite my lip, resisting the urge once more to tell Paul that Rachel is his. “Anyway,” Paul adds, smiling, “rescuing people from prison is what I do best, remember?”
