The Traitor Blitz

by Johannes Mario Simmel

  She did as I told her, clinging to the mesh fence which was still at least a meter above the ground at the top. "And now stand up and jump!"

  "I'm afraid."

  "Jump! Ill catch you."

  "But if the barbed wire—"

  "Jump!" I hissed.

  She stood up, swayed for a moment, and jumped, straight into my arms. Her face struck mine. I could feel her breath, clean and sweet, like fresh milk.

  "Well done!" I said. She looked at me and for the first time her sad eyes looked happy. Irina was beautiful— 94

  While she was clambering up the fence, Bertie had untied the nylon rope and put it in the trunk. Now I ran to the car with Irina. She sat between us. I drove. Two minutes later we were driving over the miserable road with its potholes, but this time I didn't spare the car. I drove as fast as I could. We were tossed back and forth.

  "You didn't think I was coming, did you?" said Irina.

  "No," said Bertie.

  "I didn't think so, either," said Irina. "Not after the way Rogge and Klein questioned me."

  "How did they question you?"

  "Oh, at first they were very polite, but they wanted to know everything. Everything! Much more than you wanted to know. They were like the officials in Prague. I felt as if I was back in Prague. I was sure they'd take me away from the camp to God knows where."

  "But they didn't."

  "No, they didn't. The telephone rang in the next room. Rogge answered it and talked for a long time."

  "What about? With whom?"

  "I don't know. The door was closed. He called Klein in and they talked for a very long time. I couldn't understand a word. When they came back they were more polite than ever. It was weird! They told me I could go to my barracks. If they needed me again, they'd come and get me."

  "They let you go? Just like that? No guards?" Bertie sounded astounded. He couldn't have been more astounded than I was.

  "Yes. They just let me go." She was trembling. "You know what?"

  "What?" I asked, trying to get the execrable road behind me as quickly as possible without breaking an axle.

  "I think it all hangs together with Jan and the telephone call. I mean, they must have found out what happened in Hamburg and lost all interest in me."

  "If anything happens in Hamburg," I said, "it could only make you more interesting."

  "So why did they let me go? What has happened, Herr Roland? What has happened?" With her last words she grabbed my shoulder, the car slid from one pothole to another, and went into a skid. I struck Irina in the side with my right elbow and she cried out with pain. "Don't do that again!" I said. "Ever! Do you understand?"

  "I'm sorry. I didn't think—"

  "Okay, as long as you don't do it again. Well soon find out what's going on in Hamburg," I said. Idiot

  "Where I come from nobody knows; and where I'm going everything goes— The wind blows, the sea flows, and nobody

  knows "

  Fraulein Louise was putting one foot in front of the other as she spoke. Her eyes were smarting from the many tears she had shed. She felt dreadful and a furious fire was raging inside her. Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. She was walking out onto the moor across a path that was barely twelve inches wide. She was breathing hard and her feet hurt. Ducks flew up ahead of her. The will-o-the-wisps she knew so well danced around her, glowed and disappeared. It was a half hour before midnight. Fraulein Louise was wearing an old black coat with a hood, and she was carrying a big bag. Out there, on the knoll, she could see figures. Her friends were waiting for her. She must not keep them waiting. They had called to her after she had gone to bed and was lying sleepless and tortured by her thoughts. They had come and spoken to her.

  "We are always there for Louise ..."

  "Louise should come to us on the moor "

  She had risen, dressed, and set out. The guard at the entrance had greeted her as she unlocked the small gate. The guard knew where she was going.

  Fraulein Louise hurried on. The bare birches were silver in the moonlight that shone at her feet. But she looked straight ahead to where her motionless friends were waiting. A swamp owl kept fluttering over her head. She's surprised, thought Fraulein Louise; she thinks I'm a juniper bush, and she can't imagine why a juniper bush can run. Yes—run. Because now Fraulein Louise was running along the path which only she and the old peasant who had told her about it knew. She hurried along in the moonlight between water holes and the deceptively floating islands of swamp grass, and for her own encouragement, she 96

  talked to herself. What she said was nothing new to her—she had known it for twenty years—but she couldn't remember where she had heard it first. Sometimes she thought her friends must have taught it to her, then again she thought of a wonderful motion picture she had seen right after the war, that had played between time and space, and decided that this poem had been recited in it and been engraved indelibly on her memory. "Under the stars, under the moon I am alone, and not alone. Past and future are always with me... in the vastness of time and space..."

  A vast black area stretched out on her right, an area void of life. That was the place where there had been a fire last year, a fire that had burned and smoldered from Easter until winter. It had still glimmered under the first snow. Only the drainage ditches had prevented all the peat on the moor from burning up. Five hundred acres had been charred black, down to the sandy ground. Then the wind had come and scattered rosebay seeds over the black peat coal and they had taken root. The following spring the whole burned area was covered, at first with green; then, in the summer, buds had appeared on the long clusters and they had opened and blossomed, bright red in spite of all the rain, a rosier red where it had stopped burning later, and all this where before there had been smoke and destruction and scorched earth. Acres of wild rhododendron 1 Fraulein Louise had looked out of her window at this rose garden and enjoyed the sight. But now the flowering was over, and the scorched earth stretched out black and dreary again. It would take years, decades, to regenerate.

  All this and what follows Fr&ulein Louise told me in the course of my frequent visits. I visited her often—not often enough, though, not nearly often enough. But I was writing in such a fever, with only one thing in mind—get on with it! Get it donel My knowledge of so many deadly secrets had to be put in writing, and what I wrote had to be protected. I had to be cautious. But by this time Fraulein Louise liked me, and even more important—she trusted me. "You are a good man," she said. And when I protested, she said, "Well, all right, maybe not. But you'd like to be a good man."

  "Yes. That I would."

  'There you are," said Fr&ulein Louise, and went on to tell what happened that night, and here I am, writing it down.

  If, unlike Fraulein Louise, one didn't know that they were eleven men, one would have sworn that they were eleven osier willows standing on a knoll that rose out of the moor at the end of the path, between brush and reeds, in the mist and pale light of the moon. By the time Fraulein Louise reached them, she was breathless. The Russian greeted her first. "At last Little Mother has come. A very good evening, Louise."

  "Good evening, my happy ones," said Fr&ulein Louise, as the others greeted her, too.

  The Russian was a stocky fellow. He had on the olive-green uniform in which he had fought. He said, "It is good that Louise is with us again."

  "And can you imagine how wonderful it is for me?" said Fr&ulein Louise.

  The will-o-the-wisps flickered over the moor. The Russian had been a famous clown before the war, before he had had to become a soldier. But without the mask of makeup, he looked serious.

  "You know, of course, what has happened," said Fraulein Louise, and her eleven friends nodded. "And you also know that Irina got away, probably with those two reporters. They managed to push over the pillar and it took the fence down with it. That's how she must have got out. I saw the place on my way here. And the tracks of their car. You saw it, too, didn't you?"

  Again
her friends nodded.

  "Did you see them get away?"

  "Yes, Louise," said the American. He was very tall and, like the Russian, in uniform.

  "This Herr Roland, and the other one, the photographer— they're miserable sinners. They are still wholly worldly."

  "But there is still hope, even for them," said the Jehovah's Witness. He had a gray-and-white-striped suit that looked like pajamas. A faded yellow stripe ran down the legs of his trousers. In one hand he held a red book.

  Is that just something you believe, or are you sure?" said Fr&ulein Louise.

  "We still know much too little," said the Ukrainian, who was wearing a leather jacket, corduroy pants, and shabby shoes with wooden soles. His face looked like a ploughed field—so many wrinkles, so eafffiy and old. "Actually, we know almost nothing."

  "But you believe it," said Fraulein Louise, "and believing is safer than knowing."

  "Yes, we believe it," said the Pole. "But that isn't important. Louise must believe it." He spoke urgently. He too was wearing his uniform, which was incredibly shabby.

  "What you want to do is all that matters," said the German student, the youngest of the eleven. He was wearing green overalls and dirty boots that reached up to his calf. The student was the only one who addressed Fraulein Louise with the intimate Du; all the others used the more formal Sie when they talked to her. Fraulein Louise looked at the student and again was strangely moved. He always reminded her of something in the past of her long life. She never could recall exactly what, and there was a chronic pain in this unclear memory, but it was a sweet pain.

  "Our Louise wants to go to Hamburg," said the student, "as quickly as possible. She has put on her winter coat and taken her bag along because she is in such a hurry. Should she go to Hamburg? Is it in our interest?"

  The others were silent.

  "Children!" Fraulein Louise cried passionately. "Both of them were children! My poor Karel, and Irina, too. They murdered Karel and kidnapped Irina. God knows where they've taken her. I can't let this happen! I won't let it happen! I—" She was struggling for breath. "I have to find Irina, and I have to find the person who murdered my Karel. And this person has to be saved. For he has killed! A way must be found for Karel to forgive him and save him, and that is why this person must leave this world!"

  The eleven were silent.

  "You agree with me!" cried Fr&ulein Louise, who was becoming more and more agitated. "You know I'm right. You know that there is a higher justice, and that in this case there will be no higher justice unless I attend to it!"

  The eleven men looked at her and said nothing. . "Talk!" Fraulein Louise begged. "Please talk! If you don't

  talk, evil will triumph. Injustice and cruelty will continue to rule the world, the same injustice and cruelty you suffered until you were redeemed!"

  The SS man, tall, with a long narrow face, who had once owned a pickle factory in Seelze, near Hannover, said sadly, "I I didn't suffer. I brought suffering upon the innocent." He was wearing the black SS uniform with the high boots.

  "But you have acknowledged it," the Dutchman said in a consoling tone. He was wearing an old civilian suit and a shirt with no collar.

  "The innocent whom you made suffer have raised you to a higher sphere," said the Russian.

  "I suppose so," said the SS man dolefully.

  "And you lie in the moor with us," said the Pole.

  "Not with you," the SS man said sadly.

  Fraulein Louise knew what he meant. The Nazis had stuffed their dead in sacks, weighted them down with stones, and thrown them ipto the swamp, but the SS man had died while the camp had been under British jurisdiction, and the British had buried their dead in a more civilized fashion. They had chosen a place behind the camp, where the earth was firmer, and had dug the graves there and buried their dead Nazi prisoners in wooden coffins.

  "You lie in the same moor," said the Russian. "You died here, like us. What difference does a sack and a few stones or a wooden coffin and a grave make? None at all."

  "Where we are now r ," said the Ukrainian, "all people are equal."

  "Then see to it that there is justice!" cried Fraulein Louise. She was getting terribly impatient.

  "Justice isn't up to us," said the American.

  "Why?" cried Fraulein Louise.

  "Because it harms justice."

  Fraulein Louise lost her temper. "Justice is harmed only when nothing's done about it!" she cried, and at that everything went dim. When she could see clearly again, the eleven men were gone and Fraulein Louise found herself surrounded by eleven stunted osier willows, all alone out on the moor.

  "Oh, please!" she begged. "Please don't leave me! Come back!"

  But none of the eleven came back.

  Fraulein Louise fell on her knees, wrung her hands, and

  whispered, "I shouted. It's my fault that they disappeared. I shouted, and when I shout they disappear."

  A squadron of Starfighters on a night flight roared across the moor, their red, green, and white navigation lights blinking; but Fraulein Louise paid no attention to them. She was crouched so low that her folded hands and forehead touched the cold earth. Sobbing, she whispered, "Forgive me. Please forgive me. I won't shout again. Only please, please come back. I am so alone. I need you so. For the love of Christ, I beg of you, come back."

  A slight gust of wind blew across her and to her boundless relief she heard the Dutchman say, "We are here again, Louise."

  "Please forgive me for shouting," said Fraulein Louise, and her friends nodded.

  The Czech radio operator, a little man with a funny face, wearing a British uniform, said, "Formerly, when I was in Louise's world, I often shouted. For joy. Or in anger. But as a living man to the living. You can't shout at a dead man. He has to disappear if you do. Has to."

  "It was only because I'm so desperate," said Fraulein Louise. "I want to see justice done. I must look for Irina. I must find little Karel's murderer. Don't you agree that this is something I've got to do?" She looked from one to the other.

  The American pilot said, "When there is something one feels one has to do, it will succeed."

  "It will?" Fraulein Louise was overjoyed. How strange! Before they had disappeared her friends had seemed doubtful about her going to Hamburg. Now they had apparently changed their minds.

  "Yes," said the American pilot.

  "But why is Little Mother in such a hurry?" the Russian wanted to know. "Time..." He paused, and then went on, "Time is an earthly thing. We don't recognize it anymore. In our world all things are timeless. But that which Little Mother calls time in her world is working for her. So she should not be impatient. The

  "But not always in my world," Fraulein Louise said softly.

  "No. Not often. But then it is victorious in our world. So what does it matter?" asked the Russian.

  "It matters a lot to me," said Fraulein Louise. "I can't wait that long."

  The Ukrainian peasant who had died here when it had been a forced labor camp, said, "A higher power than ours will help Louise and go with her. And any strength we can give her with our hopes and prayers shall accompany her."

  "It isn't enough!" Fraulein Louise sounded desperate. "I'm all alone in the world. Do you expect me to fight the all-powerful evil on this earth all by myself?"

  The SS man shook his head and said, "Louise is a brave woman. If she sets out to fight evil now, with all the strength at her command, it doesn't really matter if she succeeds or not. Don't ask for success."

  "But I must!" said Fraulein Louise. "I have to! I am of this earth! I couldn't bear to fail!"

  "Because you are still alive, and that is your misfortune," said the SS man.

  "What do you think?" Fraulein Louise asked the Frenchman who had been court reporter in Lyon and had died here as a prisoner of war. He was wearing his old uniform, with boots and puttees, and was also quite young. He had a slightly ironic twist to his mouth. "In principle I must agree with our friends," he said. "But t
here's been much too much action on this earth, with evil results. It might be best to leave this thing to a higher power. We have not yet attained it, but we can sense it better than Fraulein Louise." Whereupon Fraulein Louise began to cry softly.

  "I believe you," she said. "I shall soon be with you forever. I love you. But I can't understand you. Why can't I understand you, today of all days?"

  "Because we are your friends," said the Jehovah's Witness in the white-and-gray-striped jacket and pants, who had once been a savings bank employee in Bad Homburg. He raised his hand with the red book. "Little Karel was torn out of an evil world and has entered our good world. What blessed fortune! Everything in life is predestined to enter into God. And if anything happens to Irina, she will be happier than she is now. Everything is following a good path, the path that has been ordained by Almighty God."

  "Listen, my friend," said the Norwegian cook who had been arrested as a Communist and brought to Neurode. He was very 102

  I tall, taller even than the American pilot, and he was wearing his concentration camp outfit with the red stripe of the political I prisoner on his chest. "As long as people don't live together in friendship and peace, there will be oppressors and oppressed, murderers and their victims. That is why I believe Louise should take up the fight. More and more of the living are fighting for what is good."

  "I agree with the cook," said the Dutch textbook publisher.

  "You would do what I want to do?"

  "Yes," the Norwegian cook and the Dutch publisher said simultaneously.

  "You understand me!" cried Fraulein Louise with renewed hope.

  "I would act, too," said the Polish artilleryman who had once studied mathematics at Warsaw University.

  "You, too?" cried Fr&ulein Louise.

  "Of course, me too," said the Pole.

  "Are you a Communist?"

  "I was when I was alive. And when I moved into higher spheres, I absorbed everything that was good and eternal."