by Janice Law
“No matter, you are here,” he said and handed me a ticket.
Sigi gave a curt nod and didn’t say anything. Odd that someone so chatty in drag should be so laconic in pants, even in embarrassingly short pants, but I sensed that he was not pleased. Not pleased that I was coming on the excursion? Or not pleased that I had gone directly to the station? His problem in either case.
I sat next to Oskar in our third-class carriage, and as we rattled out of Berlin, he outlined the program. A visit to the beach at Putbus, still out of season but scenic with sand dunes and quiet, secluded beaches along the Baltic. I quite liked the sound of that, I told him, and made him laugh. Oskar had a wonderful laugh, too seldom heard, and he dropped his hand onto my knee and promised that we’d have a good time. After a night in a hostel, we were in for a bicycling trip to the chalk cliffs. “Very steep, very white.”
“Chalk? Like Dover?”
“Yes, but I think higher. We’ll have a picnic and cycle back. We have a friend with a big house near the station. We’ll stay there and visit the beach. Monday night you are all better and back at the hatcheck counter. Great, right?”
I could think of a few things about the itinerary that were not great, starting with what sounded like a long bike ride.
“But you cycle, don’t you, Francis? People cycle in England?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve been on a bike.” Nan taught me as a child. I had a memory of her putting her left foot on the pedal and swinging her right, skirt and all, over the seat and pushing off. It’s easy enough, Francis, she said, and I soon got the hang of it. Both at home and at school, bikes of one sort or another became my getaway vehicles. But those had been short runs, away from the stable yard or out of sight of the rugby pitch. This promised to be something quite different.
We reached Putbus in midafternoon for Wehrsport training on the beach. Translation: running around in the heavy sand and hurdling a series of improvised obstacles. I lay in the dunes and stared at the sky. Sigi felt that this showed a lack of pluck and spirit and tried to provoke me. Good luck with that, Sigi! I could turn a deaf ear, because everyone knew I’d come through for Oskar in his moment of need.
“Straight arm thrust! Perfect bayonet form. No hesitation!” That was Oskar at his Lokal once he was bandaged up. “You might have shouted, Francis, but I’m telling you he was perfect!”
After that endorsement, anything else I attempted in the military line was sure to fall short. I told Sigi I was saving my breath and energy for other things, and when Oskar took a break from mock soldiering, I was rewarded. I was still skeptical of beaches, but I thought much better of sand dunes.
So all was good—the floor of the hostel hard but clean, the weather the next morning perfect: blue sky, mild breeze, and sea light. Even the long ride through farm country and the beech woods to the cliffs was not as bad as it might have been. The sea breeze swept away the dust and pollen, and we went at a leisurely pace, for Oskar seemed rather subdued. It was Sigi—not Oskar—who shouted for impromptu races along the road or demanded breaks for calisthenics. As the day went on, I increasingly had the feeling that the youth group was paling on Oskar, but perhaps he was just missing his family and home, where I understood that the remnants of a comfortable life still existed. He had apparently not returned to their flat since the fight.
“Where have you been staying?” I asked, thinking how nice it would have been if only Miss Fallowfield had been a tolerant Berlin landlady, instead of someone with ties to His Majesty’s government.
“Here and there. With Sigi, mostly.”
That, no doubt, accounted for his growing lack of enthusiasm for the group. “Sigi is very keen,” I said, by which I meant a fanatical idiot.
“Sigi is ambitious.” Oscar looked over his shoulder and checked that all the other cyclists were ahead of us. “He tires of the youth group. I think he may join the SA.”
“The men who attacked you! What can he be thinking?”
Oskar shrugged. “He has friends. Some people he met at the Eldorado.”
“Really!” I was surprised in spite of the fact that, like Sigi, Belinda had been seriously political and that my rascally and complicated uncle enjoyed the club as well. I couldn’t help thinking of the Eldorado as a place for frivolity, for sex and make-believe, even though my own role there was deceptive, and I had a hidden agenda.
“They are encouraging him,” Oskar continued. “Sigi wants a fight. He wants a revolution or a putsch, and he thinks the SA will lead one.”
“Good riddance,” I said, feeling uneasy. I was sure now that Sigi in his Sabine duds had been keeping an eye on me at the club. But I had no idea why he would be eager for me to join the youth group if he was leaving himself. One thing I did know: Cycling to the back of beyond to visit steep and magnificent cliffs was damned foolish when no one in Berlin knew where I was. I should have stayed home and reported for work at the Eldorado.
You can bet that I was on high alert for the rest of the day, especially when we descended to the beach via some rickety wooden stairs. Above us, the cliffs loomed spectrally white against the blue sky and some dark clouds drifting further out over the Baltic. At the water’s edge, the scene was dramatic and faintly sinister with the narrow, deserted beach backed by forest-topped cliffs. We took off our boots and shoes and stuck our feet in the cold Baltic water then lay about on the sand and listened to the light surf rolling the stones near the edge. The boys smoked and talked politics, their German often too rapid and specialized for me to follow. I watched the clouds and kept a close eye on Sigi.
I’d expected a bit of argy-bargy from him, but except for the usual remarks about Dolly, he ignored me. I began to think that I was wrong, a conviction that grew after he proposed a race back up the stairs. When I offered to go up first to time their arrival, he gave me his watch without hesitation. “Good idea,” he said. “You’re never going to make commando.”
Too right! I stood at the top, watched them charge up, straining their legs and losing their breath, and called out their times. Then, apparently satisfied that they had exerted themselves sufficiently for the Fatherland, we cycled back past Putbus to a hamlet near the rail bridge to the mainland. I had expected something along the lines of the hostel or—death to my lungs—a hay barn. Instead, we rolled up to a dark, imposing brick house with a steep German-style roof of red tiles. It sat in a grove of conifers, and I could see a variety of outbuildings behind. Except for the architectural style, the house reminded me of a prosperous country house in Ireland.
The master of this estate was the friend Oskar had mentioned, Oberst Kurt Weick, a tall, thin man with gray hair and dueling scars on his angular face. He was a very Prussian officer, still with perfect military posture despite a false forearm adjusted at the proper angle to hold his cigarette. To smoke, he had to lift his arm from his shoulder, which gave him an oddly mechanical air, as if he were as much machine as man, an impression strengthened by his small, chilly gray eyes, set in a permanent squint against the smoke. There was something far away in them, as if his vision were permanently fixed on some point in no-man’s-land just beyond his trenches.
When Oskar mentioned that I was a foreign friend of the group, he welcomed me to the house in near perfect English. As a friend of Oskar’s, I was very welcome, he told me. He clearly knew most of the other boys, and I understood that what he referred to as der Bund was in some way under his patronage. At a word from him, they all snapped to attention and marched smartly into the house. Of course, in this company, I was a complete slacker, but military discipline was even further from my mind than usual, for I had the disturbing notion that I had seen him before.
Yes, I was sure. The arm alone was unmistakable, and I am rarely wrong about a face. His pallid map of bony angles and scars was memorable, and as I passed him and entered the house, I noticed that he had one glass eye. Where had I seen this apparition? On t
he S-Bahn, in the street? I thought not. In my mind’s eye, I saw a homburg, a fine dark coat, a silk tie, a single leather glove. The homburg did it. I had taken it in at the hatcheck counter at the Eldorado. I was sure of it. He’d visited the club, although he wasn’t one of our regulars. Just a casual patron out for the sights of decadent Berlin or a Prussian officer with a secret yen for silks and feathers? Or was he the one who was “encouraging” Sigi to hope for a brown shirt and street violence?
“Beeile dich, Francis.” Sigi was standing halfway up the staircase leading from a dark paneled foyer crowded with mounted antlers like branches of bones.
“Ja, ja.” Up a second stair, we reached a vast attic set up with camp beds. Oskar had already grabbed two by a low semicircular window, and he patted the one next to him. Delightful idea, but even Oskar couldn’t distract me from the thought that three of us from the Eldorado was too much of a coincidence. I was already wondering if I could possibly leave undetected and how I would get off the island if I did.
But first we had dinner, laid out in a banquet-size dining room. We sat on benches at a long trestle table. The floor was stone, the walls white-washed brick, the decor more antlers. Somewhere, the oberst’s ancestors must have shot a powerful number of stags. Everything from the furniture to the massive fireplace was plain and functional like the fittings of a military barracks, but the food was good—the first real beef I’d had since the Adlon. The hotel’s lavish restaurant with its soft-footed waiters, silver trays, and covered dishes seemed an age away, and yet my visit with Uncle Lastings had led to everything that had happened since. Perhaps even to this dinner, an idea that gave me pause.
There were toasts with steins of beer and bursts of military and patriotic song. I alternately watched Sigi and Oberst Weick. Sigi was very active, always the first with a toast or a song. He wanted desperately to be noticed, but the colonel was not really interested in him. Instead, Weick’s eyes strayed to Oskar, a bias that was completely understandable. Oskar was beautiful and fit, with a natural dignity. One of nature’s bloody aristocrats is what Uncle Lastings would have said, another unexpectedly useful category.
I followed his glance and smiled at my friend, but out of the corner of my eye I saw that Weick was also watching me, the stranger in his house. Had he noticed my overwhelming attractions? Probably not when Oskar was sitting beside me, but he was interested. For although I told myself it was just my imagination, whenever I glanced in Weick’s direction, I met his chilly eyes—both real and glass—focusing on me.
When dinner was over, I asked Oskar if he thought that we might ask to see the grounds. “We need to walk off that splendid dinner,” I said to Oberst Weick, when we approached him.
“Of course.” He made a gracious gesture, turned mechanical by his false hand and forearm. “You can see Stralsund from the headland. Perhaps others will wish some exercise?”
But they wished to sit before the fire and worship at his feet. I had the feeling that there would be war stories, possibly maps, certainly an exchange of political hopes and fears, and complaints. Awkward for one of the erstwhile Allies!
“We will not be long,” Oskar said. He had picked up on the atmosphere, but he did not want to seem unappreciative. There are some serious disadvantages to nice manners. Once outside, he lit a cigarette. Although our host was a chain smoker, he did not approve of the boys smoking while “in training.”
“Do you know the oberst?” I asked as we crossed the gravel drive in the long northern twilight.
“Not well. I’ve only met him a couple of times before. He is a distant relative of Sigi’s, I think.”
“Really.”
There was a long pause during which I debated how candid I should be. We’d come within sight of the stables, beautifully built but smelling all too strongly of horse, before I said, “Do you trust him? And Sigi?”
Oskar gave me a look.
“I feel I should leave,” I said. “I feel I should leave tonight.”
“Without telling the group, you mean?”
“That’s what I have in mind.”
I’d half-expected Oskar to laugh and tell me that I was imagining things. Instead, he said, “Sigi doesn’t like you, but you are quite safe. With me and the others.”
“And the oberst?”
“I know nothing bad of him. He makes you uncomfortable?”
I shrugged. Oskar was a patriot awaiting the resurgence of his country. This was not the moment to discuss Uncle Lastings or the mess he’d left me. “Perhaps it is just his injuries and that mechanical arm.”
“We are used to such,” Oskar said in a heavy tone of voice and threw away the butt of his cigarette.
At the edge of the lawn, we could see the water and the rail bridge. Distance contracted the span, but it still looked tricky and dangerous.
“Come back inside. It would be rude to leave now,” Oskar said, putting his arm around my shoulders and leaning his head against mine.
I was really very fond of him, and I let myself be persuaded that my reservations about Sigi and our host were an unbecoming timidity. Usually, when I am accused of cowardice, it means I’m in for something unpleasant, but I put this wisdom aside, thinking that I might slip away later if either Sigi or the oberst did anything to put the wind up, as Uncle Lastings would say. And, admittedly, inside I found that all was harmonious. Literally.
We had another round of beer and singing before the fireplace, accompanied by an accordion that the oberst must have kept for just such occasions. One of the boys played quite well, mostly marches and patriotic numbers that got the group singing and stamping their feet in unison, but a few dance tunes, too, so that the company was up and hopping, boots clattering on the stone floor, shouts ringing off the high timber ceiling. I flirted with Oskar and kept a weather eye on Weick.
Eventually, the group ran out of energy. Cycling, calisthenics, races, and the oberst’s beer had worn us out; the party broke up. We said Gute Nacht and dankeschön to our host and climbed the two flights to the loft. Upstairs, I glanced through the windows. The moon was down; the fields, black; the Baltic, a distant sliver of gray; the town on the far shore, reduced to a few tiny pricks of light. Walking to the bridge in pitch-darkness did not seem like such an attractive idea. I lay down on my cot, put my coat under my head, and pulled up the blanket. I’d had just enough of boarding-school dormitories to acquire a knack for falling asleep amid the snores and farts and giggles of other boys. I was gone almost instantly, and the light was gray in the low windows when I next raised my head.
Two lines of cots with sleepers rolled in their blankets against the morning chill. A bird singing. The rustle of something exploring the attic wall—country houses all have mice. Unless they have rats. I sat up. No one moved. I looked over at Oskar’s cot and my heart jumped. Empty. Of course, he’d gone looking for a chamber pot or made the trek downstairs to the WC. The oberst had been generous with the beer, and it would be a good idea if I made the same trip.
I stood up in my underwear and felt around for my shoes. I saw that Oskar’s were gone. And his pants. Proper German courtesy? Do not wander down to use your host’s WC in your underwear? I’d like to think so. I located my pants and put them on. Also my shirt, as I noticed that Oskar’s was gone, too. And his sweater. Did he need a sweater to visit the WC? I pulled on mine anyway. Then, carrying my shoes, I crossed the attic to the door and the stairs, reminding myself not to hurry and to gently ease the door open. Then downstairs. What time was it? Having gone to bed so much earlier than usual, I had no idea. Maybe three? Maybe four? I returned from the Eldorado in the wee hours and woke when the sun was high.
The hall and stairs on the second floor had a carpet runner. I put on my shoes but walked carefully, listening for running water, the sounds of Oskar in the WC, a quiet and private place with possibilities. Which one was the door? It wouldn’t do to open the oberst’s roo
m, no indeed. I stood in the hall for what felt like a quarter of an hour with an impatient bladder and a growing anxiety. Oskar was clearly not using our host’s facilities, and I decided not to go looking, either.
Down the main stairs, past the antler forest of dead stags, to the big oak door. In the dark foyer, I felt for the bolt and found it drawn. Someone had gone out ahead of me, and who would that be but Oskar? He had lied to me. He knew more than he’d revealed about the oberst, or else he was also suspicious of him or of Sigi, or he had, for who knows what reason, decided to leave without warning. I was getting out. I yanked the door, which opened with a grunt and a scrape, and stepped into the mist and damp. I took a leak on the lawn and started down the drive.
I was approaching the wall and the gate when I heard an accelerating rattle on the gravel behind me. I turned to see three big shepherd dogs, heads down, tongues out, racing toward me.
Chapter Fifteen
I don’t like dogs. And dogs don’t like me. Most of the time we avoid each other, but there was to be no nonaggression pact with these beasts. Leaping and slavering, they came out of the mist like Teutonic Hounds of the Baskervilles and, forgetting everything I knew about animals, I sprang for the gate. I got my hands on it, touched the substantial chain, and in sheer terror, leaped as high as I could to grasp the shafts of the spikes that decorated the top of the ironwork. The dogs were right behind me, barking and snarling now, as excited as hounds with a fox. I tried to swing my legs up high enough to get over the gate, but I was so stiff and short of breath with nerves that my first attempt failed.
A big breath. I swung my legs again, but before I could get my feet clear, one of the monstrous dogs grabbed my pant leg and set itself to pull me from the gate. It was a muscular, determined animal, and I saw a ghastly end and no final letter to poor Nan before I heard a faint whistle, so high as to be almost inaudible. It must have been a ghost whistle for monster dogs, because they stopped demanding my blood, although the one animal kept a death grip on my trousers. I turned my head cautiously, my arms beginning to tremble with the effort, and saw Oberst Weick walking unhurriedly down the drive. He was smoking the inevitable cigarette and carrying a pistol.
