by Karen White
She undid Hazel’s dirndl bodice. “Breathe slowly.”
“Ja,” Hazel whispered with eyes rolled back to whites. “Peter.”
It was the name of Hazel’s fiancé who died at the beginning of the war. She hadn’t been in the Program then. Hazel’s firstborn son, Julius, was created of love, not duty. Cata had always been envious. She’d never known a man’s touch that was hers alone to claim.
Hazel flapped an arm in the air. “Peter!”
Brigette handed Cata the pillbox. The doctors had given them out to the girls for pain of body and mind, and they worked better than any liquor or opium or drug Cata had ever known.
“Hush, hush now, dear.” She cradled Hazel to her breast like Yann. “This will help.” She put a tablet to Hazel’s lips.
Hazel’s eyes rolled to color and met Cata’s. She swallowed then reached out wildly to the pillbox for another, accidentally knocking it sideways. The overturned tablets eddied like stars across the floor.
“Don’t waste them all on her,” said Brigette. She took up the cabbage and began to chop. “If she doesn’t come to her senses, give her a good slap.”
“Just one more then.”
Hazel’s face was wet. Chalky spit smeared the corners of her mouth. “Cata,” she mumbled.
“She’s returned,” assured Cata. “Look, she’s calm.”
“Let’s hope her second born doesn’t inherit this lack of fortitude. Germany needs strong daughters, not feebleminded fools.”
Cata had put Hazel to bed then, drawing the feather coverlet up to her chin against the January night. She had not known her roommate would never wake up. At dawn, they found her cold and blue as the winter morn.
“You killed her!” Brigette accused.
Distraught, Cata counted the pills in her mind. “Two, I gave her two, like you told me!”
“You poisoned her. A Lebensborn mother, a German.”
“No, I—” Cata had begun to defend then realized she had never taken more than one pill at a time. She couldn’t say with confidence that the double potency was safe.
“Murderer!” Brigette seethed and pulled her shawl from the hook. “I won’t stay in a room with a dead woman and a murderess. Gestapo!”
Before Cata could think, Brigette was gone and she was alone, standing over Hazel, beautiful as an angel even in death.
“I’m sorry, Hazel,” she’d wept. “I didn’t mean . . .”
She heard a shout outside. The Gestapo were arresting women and children, old and young, for the most inconspicuous offenses. For murder, they might shoot her on the spot! So she’d thrown everything she owned in a laundry basket, including Hazel’s passport papers. They were the only documents with her Garmisch address.
In Cata’s frenzy and self-reproach, she’d sworn to write Hazel’s family anonymously to explain what she could about her death, her children, the Program . . . Hazel was close to her younger sister, Elsie. She’d spoken of her often. Cata hadn’t any sisters and could only imagine what it might be like to have a confidante so true. If no one else, Elsie should know what happened there.
As she left, she grabbed a hat with black netting to cover her face. She’d forgotten that Hazel had let her borrow the garnet hatpin the last time she’d worn it—a windy day—and so, added thievery to her list of crimes.
Until the Allies invaded, Cata worked and hid as a laundress, writing her parents as if she were still at the Lebensborn Program. The truth was worse than any lie imaginable. But even now, she wasn’t certain of what exactly that was: the truth.
Germany’s chaotic collapse was her open window and she hurled herself out. The gardener said Cata reminded him of the sixteen-year-old daughter he lost to influenza. He had always been caring to her. She used that to her advantage and compensated him handsomely for the 865-kilometer ride to the Port of Hamburg. Kindness was as scarce as food in Germany and more deserving of returns.
—
“Trouble! Trouble!” A paperboy held up an inky newspaper outside her train car window. “Re-education-ing da Axis yoot! Berlin opens up school but double-trouble schoolin’ fascists!”
A man in a business suit threw coins in the kid’s overturned cap, scooped up a paper and moved on without a word.
“Trouble in Berlin!” the boy continued. “Whattaya do wit Nazi kids?”
Cata shrank back from the glass and pulled the window blind down. She had an ache in her jaw. Her teeth were clenched. She sucked in the hollows of her cheeks for a good stretch, making her lips pucker like the beak of a tit bird.
The door of the roomette slid open. A man in dark glasses prominently gripped the door frame. Cata coughed and hid her face down to her lap. He turned his cheek sharply to her, and for a moment, she had the similar striking fear as when a high-ranking SS officer made his way along the line of Program girls for selection. His features were impeccably groomed: his suit jacket lacked a single crease, collar and cuffs starched, fedora at just the right tilt, a gleaming wedding band on his left hand and a matching gold-knobbed cane in his right.
She rummaged in her coat pocket for her ticket. She had paid the higher tariff, but this man looked far above her station. Perhaps she was in the wrong carriage.
“Pardon.” She groped in her wool pocket, but her nervous fingers could not decipher between the receipt and the passports, and she dared not chance the wrong.
“No pardon necessary,” he said kindly and removed his hat. His salt-and-pepper hair had been pomaded back from his forehead. “Is this car thirteen?”
She ran through her numbers, dreizehn. “Yes.”
“Lucky number thirteen. The building I live in doesn’t have a thirteenth floor. They skip right over it to fourteen. But I wonder how those residents feel about living on a floor that, no matter what you name it, is still thirteen in the counting.”
Cata nodded. She wasn’t superstitious when it came to numbers. Other things—living things: owls, bats, black cats and snakes were bad omens; flowers with thorns should never be given to friends you want to keep; wheat had to be planted under a full moon; the smell of basil on the wind was a good soul passing; burnt hair was a vengeful ghost. Numbers, however, had never given her trouble.
The train hissed a steam whistle then lurched, and the man staggered to the seat across from her. He set his hat down on the side cushion, undid his jacket buttons and placed his cane between his knees, holding firm to the golden knob with both hands.
“It should be cooler in Boston. Rather warm in the city today, don’t you agree?”
She thought he was referring to her wool coat. The lenses of his glasses, like two black eclipses, barreled down on her. There are spies everywhere, Brigette had told her once about their countrymen. They have technology to know German and Jew, trusted and traitor. Cata’s knee trembled, but her pocket pin was out of reach. She turned to the window. The paperboy grew smaller and smaller as the train pulled back from the station.
The man sniffed the air. “Is that 4711 perfume you wear?”
It was. An SS naval officer had given it to her as a gift. While it was military issued to all seamen to combat the ship fetor, she’d thought the gesture sweet. Perfumes of any kind were limited. He could’ve just as easily taken it home to his wife.
“My mutter wore that. She was from Cologne,” he said in German.
The quake moved up her leg to the junction in her hip where the earlier stab still pricked. She gulped hard, her throat dry. He had to be a spy, polizei or international bounty hunter ready to arrest and ship her back to Germany. Unless she used prudence.
“I am from Luxembourg,” she replied in labored English. “I have papers,” she added in German. It’d been so long since she’d dared her native tongue that it sounded off, wrong, more foreign than all her practiced English.
The man smiled and tilted his head oddly to the side. �
�Are you Jewish?”
“Nein!” She sat up straight. Her heels clicked against the floorboards.
He raised a hand of goodwill from his cane. “I only ask because no one carries papers in America. My mutter was a German Jew and carried papers until her dying day. She wore that perfume, too. My father was an athlete—the pentathlon. He competed on the German team. I was born just outside of Frankfurt but immigrated with my parents to seek medical treatment for my blindness.”
Only then did he remove his glasses, carefully folding the wires back and sliding them into the front pocket of his jacket. His eyes were the color of late-summer leaves, intact and clear except for their inability to make focal purchase.
She lifted a hand and waved so slowly that her 4711 did not waft an inch closer. His gaze vacillated in every direction but hers. She’d known many elderly afflicted with cataracts and weakened sight but had never before met an adult who’d never seen sunrise or sunset or a single color between.
“Were you born so?” she dared, feeling more confident with his handicap revealed.
Whoever heard of a blind spy? Implausible. Not in Germany, at least.
“No, but I was quite sickly as an infant and suffered from fits of epilepsy. I lost my sight during one of those before my first birthday.”
A child of seizures. The daughter she’d borne had suffered from those. When the Lebensborn initiative was at the height of popularity with the “special” girls being chosen from Hitler’s League of German Maidens, Cata had begun her duty as a Lebensborn mother in a smaller Program Home across the border from Luxembourg. There, she’d given birth to a baby girl before Yann in Steinhöring.
When the child was not yet three years old, there was an accident. She was in the pool during the children’s exercise hour. Somehow she slipped or was pushed and hit her head against the concrete ledge. When they pulled her from the shallow pool, she had a seizure in the instructor’s arms. Hours later, she lay in bed nibbling cherry gummies, groggy but otherwise fine. They’d all hoped the frightening episode had been a singular response to the head contusion; however, a couple weeks later, while in the middle of a lesson on how to properly comb her hair, she fell prostrate amid her peers and seized. After examination, the medical staff concluded that her brain had been permanently damaged by the accident. They couldn’t have an epileptic child in the Program. It would appear as a blemish on the data reports and skew future statistics. Their ultimate goal was to create perfect Germans. Cata’s daughter was no longer that, and so there was nothing to be done.
Luckily, one of the attending physicians took pity and offered to take the child into his household. Shortly thereafter, the second war began and the doctor left the country with his family for America. There were rumors his wife had a distant Jewish relation, and he could not endure being separated from her or their biological children. Cata’s daughter had gone with them. It was the last she’d heard of her.
It had always irked Cata how nonchalantly the Program staff expunged the child from their records and the Fatherland. Now, looking back, she had smug satisfaction that her child had truly held the upper hand. She had not been forced to live through all that Cata had seen. In silent retaliation, she imagined her daughter dancing to the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and watching Bing Crosby on the silver screen. Those sweet bluebell eyes glinting merrily in the theater lights, free of fear, free of Germany. If only she could look into that face again. Cata was sure she’d recognize her, even all grown up to age seven.
Meeting this man, she suddenly worried after a child she’d attempted to put out of her mind and hadn’t seen in years. Could a seizure have blinded her daughter, too? She hoped not. But even if it had, look at this man: the son of an athlete and a Jewess. No one of marked pedigree. Yet here, in America, he had exceeded his biological affliction and the genetic sum of his forbearers. Cata’s heart lifted for her daughter—for herself, too.
She’d had four miscarriages before Yann. What none of the other Program girls had known was that Cata’s own medical record included years of failure. She’d been moved to the larger clinic at Steinhöring to take part in the experimental SS fertility treatments. They had worked. It was yet another reason it would’ve been impossible not to love her son as her own—hard earned.
“Do you still . . . suffer?” she asked, realizing halfway into the question that her guard had lowered with her mind’s wandering.
He shook his head. “My last epileptic compulsion occurred just before puberty, and I haven’t had so much as a shudder again.”
She was envious. Even now, she had to keep her hands balled in fists to fight off her nervous tremble. She gulped hard and quickly parroted the ticket booth man’s question:
“Do you have family or friends in Baw-stin?”
His right eyebrow raised in amusement. Had she pronounced it incorrectly?
“Both,” he replied and tapped his cane to the floor with a happy click-click. “My wife and son being the most significant of the lot. I come down to New York once a month for business.”
A blind businessman.
“What ist your trade?” The verb slipped and she stretched her mouth to the corners in unseen reminding: Izzz.
He didn’t notice. Not that it mattered. He’d already tagged her as German. Now she simply had to hide her criminality.
“Educational literature.”
She frowned and was glad he couldn’t see it. Literature was a pastime, a hobby, a means of lively conversation with her male companions: A man likes a woman who can entertain his mind and body, the more experienced Program girls had taught her. But a business?
“What about you—what is your trade?” he asked.
“Children.” To this, she could speak truth.
“Oh!” His eyes widened and swept back and forth over her head. “My apologies. I assumed a woman traveling alone was unmarried . . .” He stomped the cane again, this time in self-chastisement. “Old-fashioned assumption. It’s a new age—women building fighter planes and running factories! My own wife spent much of the war working at the USO. I barely saw her—well, I never see her, but you know what I mean.”
He smiled tenderly, and Cata could see that every thought of his wife was beautiful despite his lack of vision.
“So you’ve been blessed with children,” he went on, still grinning. “My son is named Ralph. He turned sixteen last week—practically all grown up. How old are yours?”
“No,” she formed the word carefully, her jaw hanging low and open in proper English. “I am to governess children in Baw-stin.”
She draped the disguise over her identity once more and was oddly soothed by its shadow. The truth, too, burning bright. It was stuffy in the car. She lifted the shade slightly to open the window.
“Do you mind?”
The incoming breeze lightly fingered his pomaded hair, but it remained steadfast. “Not at all. I enjoy fresh air.” He inhaled deeply. “Thank God for weekends.”
She readjusted her coat over her lap to keep her skirt from catching sail. The pocketed passports stuck up like miniature masts at her knees. Cata Kutter and Hazel Schmidt.
Click-clock, click-clock, the train wheels churned faster and faster. Their cadence echoed through the roomette. Suddenly, a whoosh of air: the cabin door pulled open again. The conductor with his metal ticket punch.
“Well, Mr. Krupper!” Her companion’s presence surprised the conductor who quickly tilted his hat despite Mr. Krupper’s inability to witness the salutation.
One of the League of German Maidens’ courses had been the study of Germany’s finest family lineages. Each of their dynasties had been sketched out like branches of a tree with the trunk being God himself. Krupp was distinctly German but not Krupper. That was Dutch. She thought he said his parents were German—or perhaps they simply lived in the Fatherland without blood ties.
“Is t
hat you, Murphy?”
“Yes, sir. Are you headed home?”
“I am. Ruth made cottage pie and chocolate cake for dinner. We’re celebrating Ralph’s birthday tonight since I missed it while on business. How’s Dorothy—happy for the kids to be back in school?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Krupper. Happy for life to get back to normal now that the war’s over. Dottie was getting mighty tired of driving the Victory Speed every time she went to visit her mother in Philadelphia. Said she’d rather shoot a rifle and help lick the Jerries quick rather than driving at thirty-five miles per hour anymore. I had her stick to rationing rubber. I’ve seen her play catch—her aim would’ve proven as much an enemy as the bloody Nazis!” He thumped the doorway with a fist.
Mr. Krupper laughed and stomped his cane.
Cata cringed.
Acknowledging her with a demure nod, Murphy apologized. “It’s the fighting Irish in my Dottie,” though she sensed more pride than regret. “Ticket, miss?”
With steadier hands, she recognized the feel of the thin voucher from the stiff passports and presented it.
Murphy studied the ticket, click-clicked and handed it back while Mr. Krupper pulled his own from his jacket vest. Murphy took it dutifully, and Cata was glad to see it was business as usual for the conductor. She had passed inspection. It was the American that produced a frown.
“Mr. Krupper, you’re in the wrong train car.”
Both of Mr. Krupper’s eyebrows rose. “Am I? Is this thirteen?”
“Yes, but the porter has put your luggage in car three, per your ticket for a first-class roomette.”
“Isn’t this first class?”
“Well,” Murphy looked to Cata, smiled weakly then turned his body so that he stood between them, his back walling her prying eyes from the conversation. “There’s first class and then there’s first first class,” he said, lowering his voice to a deferential whisper. “You being one of our VIP passengers.”
Mr. Krupper grinned. “How considerate of you, Murphy, but I really am quite fine where I sit.”
