“These French mutts, they seem docile on the surface, but turn your back on them and they’ll bite you like mad dogs.” He walked closer and poked Max in the chest as he talked. “Bite, bite, bite. Kill our soldiers. Officers just like you, assassinated. Genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. Acid poured in their eyes. These people are barbaric pigs!”
Max nodded.
“You front-line officers have it easy,” Auerbach said, smiling now. “You’re surprised to hear that, yes? But it is true. Yes, you have it easy because you know who the enemy is. Here, we have to search them out everywhere, in every face on every street. And just when you finally relax, a glass of brandy, a cigar, then it comes—the knife in your back. Three officers killed that way just this week.”
Now Max shook his head. “I had no idea.”
“Of course not. Of course, you have no idea. The war seems like a simple thing to you, and why not? Drive your boat around the ocean till the enemy appears, waving their flag. Fire a torpedo at them and be on your way. Here things are more difficult.”
“Yes, I see that now.”
Auerbach took Max by the arm and led him out of the room and down the hallway. “In the end, we’re just two men in the service trying to do our duty to the Führer, are we not?”
“We are, Herr Standartenführer.”
In the lobby he gripped Max more tightly and pulled him close. “Stay out of police business, Oberleutnant.”
“Jawohl, Herr Standartenführer.”
Auerbach dropped Max’s arm and stepped back, tall, lean as a whippet, immaculate in his pressed tunic and riding boots, the silver runes of the S.S. stark against the black of his uniform. He came to rigid attention and gave the Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler!”
Max clicked his heels together and thrust his own arm out in response. “Heil Hitler,” he said. He turned and left the building, descending its front steps to the sidewalk on trembling legs. His underarms were soaked with sweat; the moisture had seeped through his shirt and through his uniform coat. He walked to the corner, breathing in the clean night air. Then he began to run—across the street, up onto the sidewalk again, scattering people in front of him. A uniformed German officer running through occupied Paris meant trouble to them, but Max didn’t care. To hell with the Parisians. In his cadet days at the Academy they had run everywhere, for endless kilometers through the forests around Flensburg, and he was always one of the fastest, a champion sprinter from his time at gymnasium. Now he ran till his legs ached, till his body was blown, then stopped and stood gasping in a street near the Eiffel Tower. He could see the long lines of German soldiers waiting for the elevator that would take them to the top to look over the lights of Paris. His whole body was damp now, hair plastered to his forehead by sweat. In the melee with the Gestapo men he had lost his cap. A new one would cost him twenty marks. When his wind returned, he hailed one of the bicycle-drawn carts. “Hotel George the Fifth,” he told the driver.
“Oui, monsieur.”
_________
He found Mareth waiting anxiously for him in the lobby. She didn’t run to him—not in public with the French staring. But when he put his arms around her she kissed him hard on the mouth, clutching his shoulders. “Let’s go to the room,” she said.
In the elevator she leaned against him, put her blond head on his chest. Max stroked her hair and felt himself stiffening against her. His heartbeat was so loud, he wondered if the elevator operator could hear it. The old man jerked the car to a stop on their floor and opened the metal gate to let them out. “Bon soir, made-moiselle, monsieur.”
“Merci, bon soir,” Mareth said.
Inside the room she immediately began to cry as much in anger as relief. “How could you do something so foolish?” she said. “You could have been shot. Damn you, Max—you would have been if my father hadn’t saved you.”
Max sat on the bed and looked down. It had been foolish. “I wondered if it was him.”
“Of course it was him,” Mareth said. “I had to call him in Berlin and interrupt his meeting with the foreign minister, then threaten to never speak to him again unless he called the Gestapo. He loves me, Max. He’s my father and he loves me. But even he hesitated to interfere with the Gestapo. Don’t you know how dangerous the S.S. has become? Everyone is terrified of them, Max. They can do whatever they want. They are the real criminals. Worse than the Communists, almost.”
“Mareth, I don’t even know what to say.” He paused. How was this possible? “Mareth, my God, I had no idea… I just can’t even… Has it truly come to that? Surely the navy would have…”
“Would have what, Max? Would have what? Do you think the navy is more powerful than the Nazis? Admiral Raeder himself could have come to your defense—do you think anyone would have paid attention? Whatever power he had left went down with Bismarck. He just sits in his office and wrings his hands like a helpless old woman. The Führer won’t even see him anymore.”
“Helpless?” Max stammered. “The commander in chief of the Kriegsmarine is helpless? How can that be?”
“That’s what my father says. Damn it, Max, you can be such a fool. Only Dönitz has any power.”
“How was it that your father, that he could, he could, make such a call? Is he that high up in the party?”
“He’s a golden pheasant,” Mareth said. Nazi slang for the oldest party members, a reference to their large Nazi Party badges circled in gold. “He joined in the twenties.”
“I didn’t think… I just never thought that your father… I know he is a powerful man but I didn’t think many in the nobility supported the Nazis early on. How was it… ?”
“Max, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it was like then. Papa did what he felt he had to do for Germany. In the beginning, Hitler didn’t speak like he did later. He only denounced the treaty and spoke about making us respected again in the world. And he promised to crush the Red Bolsheviks who wanted to seize power and kill us all. And they did want to do that, Max, they did. So Papa joined the party because he is a German patriot. He doesn’t believe in the rest of it—burning books and banning cabarets or treating the Jews in such a beastly way. But Father puts up with these things because he’s a German patriot.”
“Aren’t we all, Mareth? Aren’t we all German patriots? I didn’t realize that one had to join the party and wear a swastika to be a patriot.”
“You have a swastika on your uniform!”
True enough: on the right breast of his uniform jacket, an eagle clutched a swastika. “That’s just part of the uniform. I stay out of politics. I’m a military officer. I have to follow orders.”
“And so does my father, Max, and so do I, and so does everyone in Germany because there’s nothing else we can do—nothing at all or we’ll be shot or, worse, guillotined, because that’s what the Nazis do now. So what should I do? Tell Reich Minister Lammers that he is a dangerous fool? Interfere with the S.S. and get arrested by the Gestapo, like you?”
“And that was my fault? I’ve been away two years fighting for my country. How was I to know that I was in more danger from the Gestapo than the Royal Navy? How was I to know that I would be in less danger as a prisoner of the British because the Geneva Convention would protect me while I have no protection from the German police except, by the grace of God, from your father, who is one of the few Nazis powerful enough to keep me from being shot.”
Max picked up the carafe of wine and a glass from the bedside table, walked across the room, and sat in one of the two large chairs by the window. He poured himself a glass of wine, then turned and looked at Mareth, who watched him silently. “So your mother and father will entertain Nazis but won’t deign to meet me—a decorated navy officer—because my father is a shopkeeper instead of a storm trooper? Because I wear a blue uniform and not a brown one? Is that it? Is that why your mother won’t even allow me into her drawing room?”
“How dare you say that, Max. How dare you,” Mareth said, her voice rising. “
You don’t even know my mother! She hates the Nazis and she hates my father for staying with them. They’ve barely spoken for years.”
Max upended his glass of wine. “You’re right, Mareth, as always. I don’t know your mother. I wonder if I even know you anymore.”
Mareth sat on the bed, looked down, pressing her hands to her temples. “You don’t know what it is like here now. You don’t. Even my mother had trouble with the Gestapo. And it was very embarrassing to my father and it made everything between them even worse.”
“What? What happened to your mother?”
“She was collecting ration coupons from friends and we gave them to Jews. Someone reported her—the chauffeur, she thinks—and the Gestapo arrested her.”
“They actually arrested her?”
“Yes. I was in Berlin when she was arrested. Someone called my father and he had to call one of Himmler’s adjutants and say something, make something up, an excuse, I’m not sure what. They let my mother go and said it was a misunderstanding.”
“Why did she do it? Are the Jews starving? I can give you some of my ration coupons.”
“Starving? Of course they’re starving. They only get half the rations we do, and often not even that. Don’t you know this?”
No, he didn’t. Mareth continued. “My mother used to go to a jewelry shop in Kiel. It was owned by a Jew, Herr Wertheim. She shopped there even after they published her name in the Kiel newspaper as someone who patronized Jewish businesses. People hissed at her on the street, hissed at her—the lower-class people especially.
“I once went to Herr Wertheim’s with her. A bully-boy storm trooper was standing in front of the shop and he heckled any Germans who thought about going inside. When we went to enter he blocked our way and asked why Aryans like us were going into a shop owned by a dirty perverted Jew. ‘Because we choose to,’ my mother said. ‘Now out of the way, you oaf.’ And the storm trooper stood aside. But do you know what he did, Max? Do you know what he did?”
Max shook his nead no.
“He called us whores who fucked Jews. Dirty Jew whores! He actually said that to us, to her. My mother is a Countess! She was a lady-in-waiting to the Empress! Her great-great-grandfather was court chamberlain to Frederick the Great, and that vulgar boy said that to me, to her, there on the street. Language like that. My mother pushed him aside with her umbrella and we went in, while he continued to call us Jew-fucking whores. And then one day we went back, and the shop was closed and Herr Wertheim was gone.”
“Where?”
Mareth looked away from him. “To a resettlement camp in the East, I think. I don’t know. That’s what someone told us.”
Max looked away from her—silence between them now. He didn’t want to know more. He had his own problems. Everyone had to take care of themselves in this war. He poured another glass of wine and looked out over Paris, the City of Light, mostly dark now from power cuts—except for buildings commandeered by the Germans.
The water ran in the bathroom sink, then he heard Mareth walk across the room to him. She put a hand on his shoulder but he didn’t look up, just continued to stare out the window, so she sat in the other chair, reached across the space between them, and took his hand. After a moment he looked at her. Neither spoke. She gripped his hand very tightly. Max stared silently at her, then flicked his eyes toward the bed. Afterward, they slept the night en-twined together.
_________
In the morning he showered and while toweling off he watched her sleeping body moving rhythmically as she breathed. His future, their future, had once been his solace, but he felt less certain of it now. Germany would still win, just not quickly. The stubbornness of the British, along with their vast naval power, allowed a river of food and arms to flow from America, keeping England alive even as the Luftwaffe pounded London. And in the midst of the struggle with England, the Führer had been forced to launch a surprise attack on the Soviet Union in order to forestall their imminent attack on Germany. In the first four months they killed or captured over four million Soviet soldiers, about as many as the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht said they had in their army. Since all of their fighting men had been annihilated, the Soviets had to surrender. Except they didn’t surrender because they had more than four million soldiers—many more. OKW had been completely wrong in their estimate. Every time the Wehrmacht shattered a Soviet army, another appeared as if Stalin needed but to sow dragon’s teeth after each defeat and another million Russian soldiers appeared. The Führer said they were winning, that the Red Bolsheviks were about to collapse, that brave men of the Wehrmacht had preserved the Reich against the Asiatic hordes of Russia for a thousand years to come. And the Germans were winning. Guderian was one hundred kilometers from Moscow. Two weeks ago the head of the Reich Press Service had even said the war with the Soviets was over and Germany had won. So even though the war against the Soviets was over and they had won, it wasn’t and they hadn’t. Each day he saw long columns of gray-clad troops moving toward the Gare du Nord to entrain for the East. And as Max watched those columns march by, he could see the life he’d imagined with Mareth receding farther into the distance with each passing battalion.
Tossing his towel aside, he slid into bed beside Mareth and fell into a heavy sleep. The maid awakened them at noon. She smiled at the two of them, apologized, began to slink out of the room. Max told her to come back in two hours.
Mareth grinned. “Why two hours?”
Max worked his hands down her flanks, bent to kiss her stomach, her hip, the inside of her thigh. Glancing up through her blond fleece, he said, “Maybe you’d rather make it three?”
“If you can last that long, Herr Oberleutnant.”
“Endurance is the hallmark of a naval officer.”
Mareth laughed and put his head in a scissor lock between her soft thighs. “Then we shall have to test this officer.”
The maid never did get to clean the room that day.
Toward evening Max dressed in his new uniform, creases pressed to a sharp edge by the hall porter. He had been forced to go to a French military tailor and pay for the uniform with his own money, and it hadn’t been cheap. Fortunately, he was able to pay with occupation francs, a currency the Germans printed and forced the French to accept.
A Kriegsmarine staff car called for Max at 1900 hours. The streets of Paris were quiet. The only vehicles Max saw also belonged to the Wehrmacht. Sidewalk cafés were open and filled with German soldiers having drinks, the lucky ones with French girlfriends. Others, weary of drinking or out of money, queued at the Deutsches Soldatenkino, special movie theaters set up for the German military and off-limits to civilians. In some of these theaters, Max had heard, bicyclists from the Tour de France earned extra ration coupons by pedaling stationary bikes to charge the batteries that powered the projectors.
He saw Parisian gendarmes patrolling the city as they normally did, although they were supported by heavily armed contingents of German military police, distinctive with their gorgets hung round their necks, the word Feldgendarmerie picked out in luminescent paint.
At every major intersection, wooden supports had been erected to hold the numerous small signs that gave directions to the various German military installations in the city. When the Feldgendarmerie stopped them to allow a small convoy of horse-drawn army wagons to pass, Max saw a mishmash of wooden arrows pointing to, among others, General der Luftwaffe Paris, the Reichsbahn, the Organisation Todt, and the Army Remount Service, which worked to find the several million horses needed each year by the Wehrmacht to pull wagons and guns. They went through the intersection and drove down the Place de l’Opéra, past the Kommandantur, headquarters of the military governor, where armed troops stood a watchful guard.
Max smoked quietly in the backseat. He had never met General Admiral Saalwächter, although his book on naval warfare was required reading for every cadet at the Marineschule Mürwik. The dinner invitation had come as a surprise, and though it was an honor, Max felt nervous,
almost lightheaded. He didn’t know why the Oberfelshaber der Marinegruppenkommando West would personally wish to see a mere Oberleutnant, no matter what kind of tribulations Max had survived. “Will we be on time?” he asked the driver.
“Time? Seven and fifteen,” the driver said in heavily accented German.
“No, are we going to be on time? We have to be there by seven-thirty.” Max said the last two words loud and slow—“se-ven-thir-ty”—as if he were speaking to someone completely daft.
“Ja, ja, mein Herr. Not be late.”
What was his accent? Russian? How could that be? They were at war with Russia. “Are you Russian?”
The driver smiled in the rearview mirror, showing off a mouthful of steel teeth. “All drivers for Herr Admiral, Russia,” he said. “White Russias, hate Communists. Kill Communists.” His teeth flashed in the mirror as he drew a finger slowly across his throat.
Max nodded and leaned back. It was a long way from the Bolshevik Revolution to driving a Kriegsmarine staff car in Paris twenty-five years later. At least he still had all his teeth.
Saalwächter’s office and the headquarters of Marinegruppenkommando West occupied the French Ministry of Marine on the Place de la Concorde, commandeered by the navy from the French government. But the admiral had invited Max to his official residence nearby and the car arrived at 1925.
“Time, mein Herr.”
“Danke,” Max said. He tipped the driver—probably against regulations, but who cared?
He took the salute of the two German sailors in the striped sentry boxes, went up the stairs, and rang the bell. An orderly admitted him. “Oberleutnant zur See Maximilian Brekendorf reporting as ordered to Herr General Admiral Saalwächter.”
The orderly led Max to a small dining room. “Herr Admiral Saalwächter will be with you shortly, Herr Oberleutnant.”
The table was set for only two. Max hoped he remembered what all the forks and spoons were for. Part of the entrance exam to the Marineschule Mürwik had included a formal dinner for the candidates with naval officers and their wives, this last intended to restrict admittance to proper gentlemen. Fortunately for Max, the headwaiter from one of the large hotels in Kiel had retired to Bad Wilhelm. For the price of one rabbit per week, he gave Max lessons in table manners: which fork to use for fish, which for salad; which glass for white wine and which for red; when to drink brandy and when to drink schnapps; how to eat shellfish; how to serve a cake or pie; how to carve a goose. And that was just the beginning. There were also long hours of instruction in social deportment: when to wear gloves and when to remove them; how and when to bow; to offer your hand; present your calling card; reply to invitations; thank the hostess; talk with your dinner partner; sit while wearing your sword. Later, when he had become a cadet at the Marineschule Mürwik, there were mandatory ballroom dancing lessons for all the Seekadetten—not that he or any of his crewkameraden had been called upon to waltz in the last few years.
An Honorable German Page 16
