Now it’s a different war, different soldiers, but the cold and the hunger and the despair are as familiar to her as her own raw fingers, as her own reflection in the scrap of mirror above the washstand. Outside the window, rimmed in frost, Berlin staggers to its feet and begins another day. At nine o’clock, an elderly woman wearing a plain blue headscarf will be waiting on a certain bench in the Tiergarten, feeding pigeons from a bag of crumbs. Ursula must be there to meet her.
Still, as Ursula slips past the doorway of the boardinghouse and into the frigid morning, she can’t shake the image of Mutti from her head. She realizes that she was actually dreaming of Mutti—bits and pieces of that dream return to her now, or rather impressions of the dream—and that was why she had woken this way, whispering Mutti, Mutti. Now, to be fair, Ursula thought of Mutti often anyway. Mutti made a shrine in Ursula’s imagination. Maman was dead and unlamented—she had died just before the end of the war, simply collapsed on the stairs one midnight—but Ursula had always nursed the idea that Mutti remained alive, golden and glowing, in some distant and happy home somewhere.
Indeed, that was why Ursula had left France and taken the girls to Germany after the war. They had gone in search of Mutti, had tracked down some woman whose name appeared occasionally in the letters Maman had left behind. Helga von Kleist turned out to be a very grand lady who lived in an enormous, baroque schloss in Westphalia. She told Ursula she had no idea who this Mutti could possibly be, but that their Maman had been a prostitute in the village many years ago, and she had given Maman money to take her immoral ways elsewhere and start a new life. She had actually offered Ursula money to do the same but Ursula had proudly refused. She had gone to Berlin instead and become a waitress to support her sisters, in a café frequented by artists and philosophers, some of whom she slept with, some of whom painted her or put her in their stories, an interesting bohemian existence. She learned how to draw and sold her illustrations to magazines and newspapers. Her sisters grew up and went to school (Ursula paid the fees) and married, and all the while Ursula never stopped looking for Mutti in the face of every woman she served at the café, every woman on a bus or at a shop or on the street itself.
She does it now, in fact, as she navigates the piles of frozen slush to the Tiergarten in her patched coat of brown wool, her creased, ancient shoes. Some habits you can’t break. Though you wouldn’t know it from looking at her—in fact, you wouldn’t look at her to begin with, because Ursula’s an expert at passing beneath your notice, hunching her wide shoulders and sturdy frame, practically melting into the pavement and the shop windows and the lampposts—Ursula’s examining every forehead, every chin, every pair of eyes that passes by. From beneath her eyelashes she rakes in each detail of her surroundings and records it to memory.
Oh, her memory. There it goes again, taking a snapshot of this woman on the corner, aged about sixty-five, skeletal, threadbare gray coat, pale, narrow eyes, who might be a bank teller or a manager at a munitions factory or a Gestapo agent. Always Ursula has had this tremendous power of recollection, this capacity for storing and retrieving information, human faces especially—it’s what’s kept her alive these past four years, while committing endless acts of treason right here in Berlin beneath the very noses of the Gestapo. Longer than that, even. Since before the war. When the Nazis came to power and passed their laws, many of her Jewish friends began to disappear, so that it was natural to try to help them out of Germany, using her drawing skills to forge documents and so on, a hobby that became a vocation when the war came and one of her old lovers, an Englishman who had been studying in Berlin before the war and now worked for the British intelligence agency, the so-called Special Operations Executive, recruited her as an agent for the German section. It turned out that, in addition to her prodigious memory, she had a knack for subterfuge, an amoral willingness to sleep with any man or woman who might further her cause (or else kill him, as necessary), a feral bravery when it came to crossing forests and hayfields and alleyways in the dead of night. In short, she was a natural.
And just where has it got her?
Here. Skidding on a patch of ice, grasping at a lamppost, clutching her bag of crumbs to her chest. Bitten with cold. The man on the corner looks her way and squints, like he’s seen her before and can’t remember where. Ursula composes herself and strikes off across the street, between weary bicycles and streetcars, hungry, exhausted, feminine Berlin. We are so sick of this war. We want our men back, our food back, our good times back. Our dignity, our trust in each other. What’s that? What about our Jews? Maybe not them. But everything else. A new coat for winter, one that actually keeps out the chill. Hot coffee made from genuine beans, not ersatz. Meat. Schnitzel, sauerbraten, schmaltz to spread on your bread in the morning. Remember that?
Ursula reaches the safety of the street corner and trudges on, without expression. She learned early in life that you kept your thoughts to yourself, your emotions to yourself, cradled carefully in your chest so that no one else could see them or touch them or hear them, and this, too, has served her well in her chosen field. An offhand glance over her shoulder reveals that the narrow-eyed woman has turned her attention elsewhere.
How different the Tiergarten looks. In the old days, even when times were bad, it was full of men and women walking their dogs and their children, lovers walking each other, picnics, roller skates, green grass, each flower and shrub in immaculate order, not a speck of gravel outside its allotted bed. Jews playing their violins for the spare change tossed in the open cases at their feet. Now it’s barren and unkempt. The lovers have parted, the men are at war, the women have no energy left for walking, the Jews are in the camps, the dogs have been discreetly boiled for soup, the January sky dyes the world gray. On a bench near the Brandenburg Gate, an old woman sits with her bag of crumbs, feeding a flock of skinny, ravenous pigeons. Ursula joins her.
It feels good to sit. Together they toss their crumbs and watch the bobbing and jerking of the pigeons, the frantic, nasty pecking. Like the sky, the birds are colored in shades of gray. Neither woman says a word. A policewoman passes by, eyes them carefully, moves on. After a few minutes, Ursula picks up the bag of crumbs and moves on too.
Except it’s not the bag she arrived with.
By the time Ursula arrives home—stopping along the way at the grocer, the newsstand, just an ordinary Berlin woman making her morning rounds—and decodes the messages inside the bag, she’s forgotten about Mutti and the vivid, half-remembered dreams of the night before. Which makes her shock all the greater when she reads the third message, received from a radio operator near Bremen on a relay from Denmark, originating in Scotland, from somebody code-named Dunnock who works in G section. She reads it three times, and even then she has some trouble understanding what it means. Boiling down this meaning to a single devastating essence.
Mutti and Mr. Thorpe have a son who is imprisoned in Colditz.
For four years now, Ursula has maintained a network of friends whose loyalty to humanity exceeds their loyalty to Germany, who are willing to commit treason in order to provide a bed or a meal to a downed airman, or a Jew, or another agent whose identity has been discovered. This is dangerous work in the occupied countries of Europe, where most of the population hates the Nazis, but in Germany it’s suicidal. Ursula expects to die. She’s surprised she’s still alive, in fact. She continues to exist, day after day, only because of luck, or possibly the grace of God. (She debates this point with herself all the time.) But as long as she continues to live, she’ll dedicate that overdue life to rescuing others, to sending men and women from safe house to safe house, south toward Switzerland, where a few organizations exist inside that cocoon of neutrality to receive the fugitives. She can’t tell you why, exactly. Just that she must, that she cannot imagine herself otherwise.
To spirit a man out of Colditz, however, that was another story.
How did you extract someone from between the stones of Germany’s most notorious fortress?
And then, once the alarm was sounded, smuggle him across the border to Switzerland? It was madness. It was impossible. Were this prisoner any other man, Ursula would refuse the request outright.
But he’s not any other man. He’s Mutti’s son, the son of Mutti and Mr. Thorpe, and Mutti is the only mother Ursula’s known. Mr. Thorpe is all she can remember of a father. So this prisoner, Benedict Thorpe, is her brother.
Still, the message is worded strangely. Instructions for reply are detailed and specific, routing through Scotland instead of London. The idea itself is crazy. It’s unprecedented. Ursula understands at once that Dunnock—whoever he is—possesses intimate knowledge of her past, considerable expertise in SOE operations, and no formal authority whatsoever. By any objective assessment, it’s probably a trap of some kind.
On the other hand, Ursula dreamed of Mutti last night. She woke with Mutti’s name on her lips. Who else but Mutti would know of her connection to Benedict Thorpe? Isn’t that a sign of some kind? A stamp of faith? Maybe all these years that came before, all Ursula’s long apprenticeship in subterfuge, her continued survival in the face of impossible odds, has led to this single operation. After all, nobody else in Germany stands a better chance of freeing a prisoner from Colditz. If the thing can be done at all, only Ursula can do it.
In fact, as she stares at the paper in her hand, lit by a single flickering bulb that causes the letters to squirm on the page, she’s sure of it.
Ursula takes a scrap from the pile in the drawer, sharpens her pencil with a knife, composes a reply, and translates it carefully into code.
Lulu
March 1944
(Switzerland)
If you look at a map of Germany—and God knows, I’ve done little else for the past nine weeks—you’ll notice that the town of Colditz, tucked into the forests and farmlands of Saxony, lies at a considerable distance from the border with Switzerland. About four hundred miles, to be exact, across farm and forest and mountain, and then you get to the shores of Lake Constance, the Bodensee. You raise your hand and peer across the water, and on a nice clear day you can see Switzerland.
Or, if you’re standing on the opposite rim of the lake—as I am, as I’ve done for ten days now, bundled in a thick wool coat that bulges over my middle—you see Germany.
Because of the pregnancy, and because I don’t speak German, and because I don’t have any training in this kind of thing, Ursula Kassmeyer made it absolutely clear that I was not to set foot, or attempt to set foot, on the wrong side of this border that stretches invisibly along the length of the lake: the border that separates Germany from Switzerland, enemy territory from neutral territory. Bad enough that I exist here on false papers, on a stack of clever, delicate lies. Bad enough to have made my way by train through occupied France, across strictly defended borders, on a passport that identifies me as Lenore Schmidt, a Swiss national born in Geneva, married to a Zurich banker, returning from medical treatment abroad in the company of my sister, Marguerite, whose hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows are as dark as mine, thanks to a brunette rinse obtained in an Edinburgh drugstore. Bad enough that at any moment, we might be captured and tortured and expose brave men and women to capture and torture. Nein. I was not to enter Germany. I was not going to make a shambles of a finely wrought plan, I was not going to make some clumsy American mistake and shatter this line she had developed and nurtured herself, for which she would give her own life. No, no. She would get Benedict Thorpe out of Colditz, all right, for the sake of his dead father and dead mother, who had apparently once been like a real father and mother to her, but she wasn’t going to babysit the pair of us fine ladies, by God. Once we crossed into Switzerland—if we crossed into Switzerland—we were to proceed to Lake Constance for our health (mine is a difficult pregnancy, you understand, most fragile) and wait there for a man called Stefan, who runs a safe house across the lake on the German side. By cover of night, Stefan crosses the lake with Jews and pilots and messages. He’ll find us. He’ll deliver Benedict Thorpe to safety.
So. Here I sit, on an elegant bench along the esplanade, as I’ve done for the past ten mornings, the past ten afternoons. The wind is brisk today, the pigeons hungry and cross. The lake ripples before me, reflecting the sun, and behind all this (rather distant) you see the Alps and their sharp, snowy peaks against a sky of winter blue. Margaret—I beg your pardon, Marguerite—has gone off for a walk and a smoke and, possibly, a continued flirtation with the woman who runs the bookstall near the pier, the one that sells racy French novels. There was a giant fall of snow the other day, and while the sun’s made an earnest effort to melt it all into puddles that soak the turf and flood the gutters, the piles of slush remain.
And the lake itself? Well, there are the fishermen, plying the waters. There are the patrol boats, mostly German. In times of peace, there were countless pleasure craft, but nobody sails Lake Constance for pleasure at the moment. Margaret explained to me that there is a peculiarity of borders on this lake, which is really just a wide spot on the Rhine; that no official treaty governs exactly what belongs to Germany and to Switzerland and to Austria. The Swiss believe the border runs right down the middle of the lake. The Austrians believe everybody holds it in common. And the Germans, well, they’ve got no official position at all, so that everybody sort of dances about on this water, patrols circling each other edgily, a choreography of suspicion. About a quarter mile out, a fishing boat hauls in its net; I can just see the little ant-men and their miniature spiderweb.
“Excuse me, madame. Is there room on this bench?”
For an instant, I think it’s another one of the Swiss guards, patrolling up and down the esplanade with his rifle. But it’s only a civilian, a man in a gray overcoat and felt hat, medium build, handsome as the devil. He’s addressed me in French, too, whereas most of the Swiss in this part of the country speak German.
I slide a foot or two to the right. “Naturally, monsieur.”
He sits with a flourish. “A beautiful afternoon, isn’t it? But I think the weather may turn.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes. The lake is notorious for storms. The winds, you see, come down from the mountains in astonishing gusts. Sometimes the waves reach two or three meters in height.”
“Dear me. How dangerous.”
“Yes. The fishermen stay in port, even the patrol boats stay in port. Only the foolhardy venture out.”
He’s got a beautiful, rich voice, this fellow, and he doesn’t seem to notice that my accent—while excellent, I do admit, having a certain ear for music that helps in such matters—isn’t exactly authentic to a native speaker. (Neither is his, if we’re keeping score.) Like me, he seems to be staring ahead, watching this fishing boat haul in its catch. A small, jagged line of white forms and disappears on the surface of the water, as if to confirm his words.
“The foolhardy,” I say, “and also the brave.”
“Brave? I wouldn’t say that. Desperate, perhaps. Like a bear in winter.”
I repeat the words slowly. “A bear in winter.”
“Yes, madame. A bear. Ursus, if you prefer the Latin name.”
“Ursus. Yes.”
“A bear and her cub. I’ve heard—on the radio, just this afternoon—they wait for just such a night as this one, when the weather is too terrible for anyone else to risk their lives.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“Ah, but not when the boat is accustomed to such waters. Courage, my dear madame. The bear will arrive safely.” He rises, turns to me, and lifts his hat. “Good afternoon, madame.”
“Good afternoon, Monsieur Stefan.”
He winks. “Until the dawn.”
Then he’s gone, ambling down the esplanade, whistling some song, while my breath chokes in my lungs and my heart slams into my ribs. Eventually I rise and walk to the railing, just to calm my nerves. The wind is picking up, the whitecaps are spreading, the fishermen are heading into port. I curl my hands on the railing and fill my chest with
the clean air that tumbles down from the Alps.
After a half hour or so, Margaret returns, cheeks all pink, hair straggling from beneath her hat. The brunette suits her, I think.
“My goodness, look at that water,” she says. “I think it’s going to storm.”
After dinner that evening, I remove some papers out of the lining of my suitcase and fold them into an envelope. Just by themselves, no note. Though I have carried them with me since leaving Nassau, sometimes right next to my skin, I experience no sentiment at all, no pang of loss. Good riddance, I think, that’s all. I seal the envelope and address it to Mr. B—, War Office, London. Outside, the wind’s picking up, the clouds scudding across the darkening sky. I stop at the front desk to purchase the necessary stamps, and the desk clerk offers to hold my letter for the next morning’s post. I refuse politely and walk out the door, down a few streets to the post office, where I push the letter irretrievably through the metal slot marked internationale.
The old dream returns to me that night, during the half hour or so of sleep God grants me. The dusty town, the train, the man passed out drunk on the bed. This time I’m bleeding from within, and I can’t seem to stop the flow. I can’t seem to clean it up, and of course I’ve got to clean it up, every drop, or else he’ll wake and find it. But there’s no keeping up. Turn and wipe, turn and wipe, more blood on the floor now the carpet now the bed
Eyes open. Heart smacking. I turn my head and stare out the window of the hotel to the blackness beyond. The wind rattles the frame in its casing. The baby punches a tattoo in my side. I touch the diamond pendant underneath the nightgown, between my breasts. In the other bed, Margaret stirs. I ask softly if she’s awake.
The Golden Hour Page 41
