An Herzschlag verstorben. Vogel.
A HEART ATTACK.
THE GROUND BECOMES hard, the higher she climbs. Patches of snow here and there. She lost the trail some distance back, but rather than retrace her steps trying to find it, she alters course. The rain is falling steadily. Every few meters she pauses to catch her breath, the moist, sodden air condensing in thick clouds around her. She begins to sweat, opens the buttons of her cape. The path is overgrown and she is glad to have lost it, glad for the way the forest reclaims and covers everything so quickly. Some trees were taken down over the winter. The woodcutters brought the timbers down on an older, wider trail that runs about fifty meters above where she is, then descends in the direction of Sonnenmoos. Losing the lower path is a real comfort. Auch bin ich dort, wo die Wege nicht gehn, she says out loud. I am there also, where the paths lead not. The forest floor transforms itself so quickly, obliterates all traces of what once was. The old trail is gone, but overgrown, not fizzled out.
She remembers every detail of the telegram’s arrival, down to the look of pained embarrassment on the delivery man’s face as he passed the slip of blue paper across the threshold, cap tucked up tightly under his arm. She looked right at him, blank, her gaze locked. The man bowed his head and took a step backward. She could form no words, and turned back into the house. The man must have pulled the door shut before leaving. She doesn’t remember. What she does remember is sitting beside the stove, holding the slip of paper in her lap, and trembling. Just sitting there and trembling. Eva was on her way to Lisa’s with her sled. Suddenly Käthe realized that she needed to go get her; she must come home right away. She can’t remember Fräulein Kraus arriving. Had she told her to go and fetch Eva? Or was it Marie Berghammer who’d told her? Or had Marie gone to get her herself? She remembers running next door, and she remembers coming back with Marie. But how much time elapsed between all these events? And who, in the end, had gone to fetch Eva? It was all a blur, right up to the moment Eva came into the house, with Marie and Fräulein Kraus right behind her. “Papa ist gestorben,” Käthe said, flat out. And then Eva was in her arms. Where had Marie and Fräulein Kraus gone? They were standing there one minute, then they were gone. Who had taken the Zwiebelkuchen out of the oven? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what else she said to Eva, or what Eva said to her—for days. All she can recall is a growing sense of panic; walking aimlessly around the house, room to room, chore to chore, meal to meal; and then one day waking up from her somnambulations and asking Eva, “What will we do now? What will we do?” suddenly and all at once, as if there had been no passing of days, no passage of time at all, no long resistance. And Eva turned to her with clear, dark eyes and in the calmest innocence said, “Don’t worry, Mama. A widow with a child always gets by.”
Telegrams arrived. Telephone calls from everyone and everywhere. Trauns, Kämmerers, Westphals; family she hadn’t heard from in years. But no Mohrs. Where were the Mohrs? Was it possible they had all emigrated? Even Hedwig? Tante Elisabeth called, offered to give up the second floor of the Helwigstrasse house if Käthe wanted to come back to Hamburg. The rest she couldn’t keep track of. She was too distracted by all the voids and absences. There was no body to bury, no service to plan. Neighbors dropped by with food and offers of help. But she didn’t need help. The days passed into blankness. There was no further news. Nothing but silence. No how. No where. No when. No who. All attempts to contact Vogel were unsuccessful. Telegrams were returned as undeliverable. Had he left Shanghai? Was he dead now, too? Finally all she could think to do was cable 803 Bubbling Well Road. The servant Mohr had so often mentioned in his letters, Wong. And on the day she went to the post office, miraculously, a cable was waiting for her, had arrived just an hour earlier. Have personal effects will deliver. Return Saarbrücken May. In deepest sorrow. Brehm.
She sent an immediate reply confirming receipt of the cable, then rushed home and dashed off a letter to the captain care of Norddeutsche Lloyd. Over the next few days, she began to scan the newspapers, but news from China was sparse. Nanking fell to the Japanese in December. Only the barest outlines of the war made it into the newspapers. No news is good news, Mohr had liked to say; but no news, good news was now the motto of all Germany. She could feel herself being drawn into an enveloping ignorance, like a deep, snowy dream. It was almost comforting. But nightmares are also dreams, and with Mohr dead, waking up and dreaming on had become indistinguishable terrors.
Then, one week into the new year, an envelope arrived from Shanghai. It contained nothing but a single clipping from a newspaper called the Ostasiatische Lloyd, a Shanghai newspaper.
Jewish Comintern Agent Commits Suicide
Shanghai, 21 November
The Jew, Max Mohr, was found dead in his clinic at 803 Bubbling Well Road, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The news came as a surprise to the staff of the Country Hospital, where for the past three years Mohr had been posing as a medical doctor.
According to officials of the Shanghai Municipal Police, Special Branch, Mohr had been a member of a secret Comintern cell operating in the International Settlement. In August of this year, he traveled to Japan, where, posing as a tourist, he worked to gather information for Moscow on the Japanese war effort. Mohr arrived in Shanghai in 1934. After years of declining popularity, his literary career came to a final end when he was expelled as a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer along with other Jewish writers whose work has been categorized by scholars as of no cultural or literary value. Posing as a medical doctor and a decorated war veteran, he set up a private clinic at 803 Bubbling Well Road, which became the center of an extensive espionage operation.
Referring to this incident, Ministerrat Adolph Fuchs said that the work of unmasking subversive elements in China continues, and is more important than ever, given the present crisis environment.
The rain slows to a drizzle. Half an hour after losing the trail, she is still struggling uphill; no sign anywhere of the little cabin. The forest seems unfamiliar now, and overgrown. She can’t get her bearings, and because of the thick cloud cover, doesn’t know how high she’s climbed until, suddenly, she finds herself standing on the rim of the Kaltengruben, the deep gorge that runs like a gash down the southeastern slope of the Wallberg. She is just below the vertical cliff that forms the top of the gorge. The cabin is a good way back into the forest and slightly below where she is standing. Stepping back from the edge, she finds a dry patch of ground underneath a large spruce tree. She sits down, stretches her legs, and closes her eyes.
It has been years since she’s been up in this part of the forest. Kaltengruben had once been a favorite destination, and before Eva was born, she and Mohr would often walk all the way up it to the base of the cliff. A flat outcropping of rock makes it a perfect place to picnic. It isn’t the bare, blue vertical rock of the high Alps, but after the accident on the Gross-Venediger, Mohr had been happy for a nearby place to climb to. The entire Tegernsee comes into view up here, from Rottach all the way to Gmund.
The idea for the cabin had come to her in this very spot, on a midsummer outing with Eva. They’d brought food and water and thick woolen blankets, were embarked on the camping trip Mohr had often promised to take Eva on. Martin had been bragging all spring that his father was going to take him camping, and Eva, a girl, would not be allowed to come with them. When Mohr decided to remain in Berlin through mid-September, Eva begged her mother to take her. Käthe agreed, in part to compensate for her father’s broken promise, but also because she thought of it as a little vacation they could take, just the two of them together.
He’d been so enthusiastic about her delphinium project. They’d cleared and turned the soil together. He was happier than she’d seen him in a long time; she only wanted to give him something to return to, not just family life and a sustainable livelihood, but a writerly keep as well. He didn’t have to give up. It didn’t have to be all or nothing. They would live apart from everything here, for themselv
es, the way they’d always done. Grow flowers.
The sky was bright with a full moon. Even wrapped in woolen blankets and with the embers of the fire throwing off a steady heat, they were cold. “I’m going to build Papa a little cabin,” she said. The idea had simply popped into her head. Before Eva could respond, she was sitting up, drawing the blanket around her shoulders. “A place for him to write. Away from all the noise in the house.”
Eva was curled on her side, bunched in her blanket like a cocoon. She’d brought the pillow from her bed with her, a smart detail that Käthe had overlooked for herself.
“A tree house?” Eva asked sleepily.
Käthe poked the embers with a stick. “I was thinking of something sturdier. A little house where he can go and work, even in winter.”
“And sleep and cook?”
“Sleep and cook, too. Why not?” Her prodding kindled a little flame and their faces were illuminated in flickers of orange. A few moments passed, until Eva broke the silence. “Why doesn’t Papa want to live with us?”
“He needs to go where there is work,” was all she could think to answer.
Construction of the little cabin began right away. It was summer, 1934, and still hard times for many locals. Käthe was overwhelmed with helpers, several of whom were glad to work simply for a meal and something to do. The site was chosen and cleared. If it was a little more remote than seemed convenient or necessary, it had as much to do with the workers’ wish to have the project drag on for as long as possible as it did with her feeling that the deeper into the forest he had to go, the happier Mohr would be to work there. For Eva it was a fantasy come to life. She was delighted to have a secret to keep, a surprise for Papa. She would return from school every day leading her gang of little friends. They would clamor to be allowed to go up and watch the men at work. It went far beyond what Käthe had originally planned, was bigger by half, and fitted with real amenities—a stone fireplace, shuttered windows, bookshelves, even a basin that drained through a pipe to the outside. On the day it was finished, Strohschneider and two other men hauled up the old sofa from Mohr’s study. She followed with a supply of kitchen utensils, a pot for coffee, a kerosene lamp, and a stack of woolen blankets. The men drank schnaps and teased Eva and her gang about the little forest men who would make good use of the place when no people were about.
Mohr returned from Berlin in late September, having detoured on the way back through Prague. Looking back, it should have been obvious that he was preparing to leave. But things are always obvious looking back, including the fact that she was doing her best to ignore what was unfolding right under their noses. What was wrong with that? Why not ignore it? One doesn’t dwell on every detail of an unfolding threat, but tries to escape from it—even if escape involves the selfdeception of looking the other way. She liked to tell herself that ignoring politics was also a political act.
It was late afternoon when Mohr arrived back at Wolfsgrub. No sooner had he stepped from the taxi and swept Eva up in his arms than she began begging him to go on a walk. “In the woods, Papa. You and Mama and me!”
There was more hugging than was typical for Mohr. Käthe was surprised by his extravagant, passionate kiss. And the fashionable new suit. A jacket from Hurwitz & Sohn, and a pair of Scherer trousers. Normally, he would arrive as innocuously and unceremoniously as possible, drop his bags in the hallway, pull on his workboots. If work was under way, he would join in as if he’d been present all along, picking up the thread of conversation or interrupting it to relate some absurd incident he’d experienced on his way home.
They walked straight down to the field in the glow of sunset. The crop was just ready to be harvested, the flowers lush and heavy. Beautiful blue delphinium. They walked among the rows together, flushed with a rare pride and surging with happiness. She took scissors from the pocket of her apron, cut a large stalk, and offered it to him. Eva rolled her eyes and giggled with embarrassment as he drew her into his arms and, for the second time, kissed her extravagantly. “A field of flowers,” he said, holding her around the waist. Then he threw up his arms. “Lass die Winde los!” Let loose the winds.
THE RAIN BEGINS to taper off. She opens her eyes, momentarily disoriented. Deep green moss grows in large patches on this slope, is particularly lush along the walls of the ravine. She stands up to orient herself, but the cloud cover makes it difficult. She decides to descend along the rim of the gorge, then turn back into the forest. If after a while she doesn’t come across the cabin, she’ll return to the ravine, descend again, and so on, traversing back and forth until she finds it.
She starts down, and after a short distance, just a few steps into the
forest, notices what looks like a fresh gash on the trunk of a big larch tree. It looks as if the bark has been slashed and peeled. As she draws nearer, she can see that the bark has not been stripped, but carved. Letters snap into focus: Drecksau Hitler. Filthy pig Hitler.
She approaches cautiously, glancing around, frightened but also slightly amused. She runs her fingers over each letter. They have been carved deeply, with patience and care. Recently. Sap still oozes from the exposed wood. She feels oddly vulnerable, as if she is being observed from a distance. If the message is heartening, there is also violence in it. She is wary, but curious, and tries to imagine who might have been driven to such a thing. It is juvenile in its rawness. And yet the way each letter has been carved—deeply and with care. It is not only an impulse but a marker, something to return to, and have others return to, and that implies a motive beyond the mere expression of forbidden speech. There is something odd about it. Some man—certainly it was a man—walked up here—most likely alone—and carved his message in the trunk of the biggest larch tree he could find. But he carved the letters on the side of the tree facing the gorge, not facing downhill. He hadn’t intended the message to be visible to someone walking uphill, but to someone approaching from Kaltengruben, someone who knew to look for it.
She is suddenly anxious again. Is there some connection with her abandoned cabin? She scans the woods. The rain has stopped and the clouds are lifting. The light has shifted from lead to silver gray. She searches the ground and finds a large stick, snaps off the twigs, tests it with a few stabs into the soft ground. It feels good to hold on to something firmly. She is aware of the strength in her arms, the return of a physicality that, over the winter months, has been submerged and distorted. From above comes the sudden mooing of an elk. She stands still, listens. A few minutes later she hears it again, higher up. The animal is moving away. She feels a momentary connection, another solitary being moving through the forest.
Five minutes later she comes upon the cabin. The wooden shingles of the roof are green with moss. The stones of the chimney blend into the damp mist. The area that Strohschneider worked so hard to clear is now thick with undergrowth. The trailhead is still marked at the top by two small piles of stones that Eva had gathered and set into place one afternoon with Lisa and Rosi.
She doesn’t go right down, but regards it for a time, leaning against her staff. How strange it looks. Solid, yet also grown over; abandoned, yet also settled in. She and Strohschneider had argued over the stone foundation. She wanted a simple little wooden cabin that blended into the forest, nothing more. But Strohschneider had been right. Imagine how sad it would be now to come upon a collapsed wooden shack.
On the morning after Mohr had returned home from Berlin, they had led him up here. It was September. The leaves had already turned and were falling, a thick carpet of red and orange and yellow. They had a clear view of it, perched at the edge of a small outcropping. Approaching from below, it almost seemed too grand. Freshly planed wooden planks and new shingles, with two sets of windows facing the valley. Mohr had been strangely quiet all the way up. Eva pranced ahead along the trail, bursting with excitement. Käthe became anxious. It hadn’t felt extravagant as it was being built. The weeks and weeks of hard work annulled any thought of extravagance. In fact, she had fe
lt that by building it, she was earning the right to have it, and on the day it had been declared finished, she’d told Strohschneider that it looked as if it had always been there, that it belonged.
At the first sight of it, Mohr stopped in his tracks. Eva had already reached the clearing and was calling to them to hurry up. Mohr’s face remained blank, expressionless. He showed no sign of surprise, or even of curiosity. She took him by the hand and led him forward, her heart pounding now with excitement. He allowed himself to be led, but with the reluctance of someone being shown something that has been declared perfect in advance.
They came into the clearing, hand in hand, and stopped to take in the view. She resisted the urge to point out all the details. In the dappled light of morning, they struck her as all the more perfectly arranged. She withdrew the key from her pocket, was about to hand it over, but changed her mind and beckoned him to follow. An old brass padlock was fixed to the door, one final little touch. It sprang open easily. She pushed open the door and stood aside.
Mohr entered slowly, his face completely expressionless. He stood in the center of the cabin, taking it all in.
She felt the moment draining away. “Well?”
“Look, Papa!” Eva pointed to the kettle hanging from a hook in the fireplace. “You can cook and make coffee.”
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