Princess Elizabeth's Spy
Page 32
“Am I going home?” Gretel asked.
“Not yet, Mäuschen,” Brandt replied, smiling. “We’re going to make sure this never happens to you. You’ll never be in pain, ever again.”
Gretel beamed. “Oh, thank you, Herr Doktor!” she lisped, as the two orderlies escorted her out. She held her teddy bear to her small body.
“Take this to the nurses’ station,” Dr. Brandt said to Elise, handing her the file. He headed towards the door.
“What should I tell her father and mother?” During the course of Gretel’s multiple ear infections, Elise had gotten to know her parents.
He eyed the cross she wore around her neck. “Just deliver the paperwork to the nurses’ station. They will take care of everything.”
Elise was taken aback by his militaristic tone. “Ja wohl, Herr Doktor,” she replied, following.
Dr. Brandt turned and frowned in response, but did not discipline her. “Go,” he said. “There are many forms to fill out.”
Elise made her way down the hallways of the hospital to the nurses’ station. She handed the file to the nurse on duty. “Another one?” the grey-haired woman grumbled, looking at the three red X’s on the chart.
“What does that mean?” Elise asked.
“It means a lot of paperwork.”
“What kind of paperwork?”
The grey-haired woman gave her a sharp look. “The kind that keeps me here, instead of home with my husband and children, that’s what kind,” she snapped, stacking Gretel’s file on top of similar folders.
Elise caught sight of Frieda, rounding the corner, who looked heavenward and pointed up with one finger. Elise caught her meaning and nodded. She held up one hand, palm out—their code for meeting on the roof in five minutes.
Before she met with Frieda, Elise wanted to check on someone. She walked down the corridor and into a ward filled with wounded soldiers in narrow white beds. Some were moaning in their sleep, some stared listlessly out the windows at the sky, others sat up in their wheelchairs and played cards.
Elise wanted to check on the temperature of a young man all the nurses called Herr Mystery, who’d been running an intermittent fever over the past few days. He had curly brown hair, high cheekbones, and was handsome enough to make most of the younger nurses, and even a few of the older ones, curious. Who was he? Where was he from? Did he have a girlfriend? Was he married? Why couldn’t—or wouldn’t—he speak?
“What’s wrong with him?” Flight Lieutenant Emil Eggers said from the next bed over, indicating the bandaged body in the narrow bed next to him with his chin. Eggers, a beefy blond, was a Luftwaffe commander who’d had a close call in France, but had survived his crash landing and was brought back to Berlin to convalesce.
“Is that really any business of yours, Captain Eggers?” Elise admonished, as she shook a thermometer and slipped it into Captain Mystery’s mouth. She might be young, but she was strict with the men, who sometimes seemed grateful to be ordered about as they convalesced.
“Well, there’s not much to do in here …,” Eggers said, trying his best to look winsome and failing.
“True, true,” Elise said, in gentler tones, picking up the chart hanging at the end of the bed frame. “He’s one of yours—a pilot. Had quite a bad crash landing. A veterinarian from somewhere outside Berlin found him and patched him up as best he could and brought him in, but he had a lot of internal injuries. This was his second surgery. We’re hoping it’s going to be his last.”
“Is he going to make it?” Eggers said. He didn’t recognize the man, but there was a code of solidarity among pilots.
She was young, but she was also a realist. “I hope so.” She removed the thermometer from his mouth and looked. A hundred and one. Not good. “His temperature’s still a bit elevated.” She made a note in the pilot’s chart then walked over to Eggers. “And how’s your leg today, Captain Eggers?”
Eggers pulled back the rough sheet and gray wool blanket to reveal a bandaged stump. “Still gone, I’m afraid.”
After, Elise met up with Frieda on the hospital’s roof.
Frieda lit a cigarette and took a puff, then handed it to Elise. “I hate this place.”
Elise accepted the cigarette and took a long inhale. “Charité? Or Germany?” she asked, blowing out rings of pale blue smoke.
“Both.”
They leaned over the railing, enjoying the morning air, growing warmer as the sun rose higher. The vast city of Berlin spread out before them, the River Spree glittering gold in the sunlight, the sound of long red Nazi banners snapping in the spring breeze, the damaged dome of the Reichstag pointing heavenward.
The long parade was still marching down Unter den Linden, the sound of cheering and music and hobnailed black boots goose-stepping on the pavement subdued now by height and distance. Directly below them, in the hospital’s circular driveway, a bus idled.
“Especially since Dr. Brandt and his cronies got here.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Frieda’s slim fingers shook as she took another drag on her cigarette.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you noticed how patient charts now have the attending physician mark a red X or a blue minus sign on them?”
“Yes,” Elise replied. “I had a red X on a patient’s chart today. I asked Dr. Brandt about it—he said it had something to do with paperwork.”
“Paperwork, right,” Frieda said, picking a stray fleck of tobacco from her tongue. From below, the noxious bus fumes drifted upwards. The two young nurses watched as a group of children was herded inside a bus by orderlies in white coats.
“It probably has to do with the mandatory sterilization, don’t you think?” Elise said.
“Something like that.”
As a Catholic, Elise opposed the Nazi’s use of forced sterilization. “How’s your husband, Frieda?” she asked, deliberately changing the subject.
Frieda’s face, pale as skim milk, flushed in anger. “He’s all right—at least all right as a surgeon who’s not allowed to cut anymore can be.” Ernst Klein, Frieda’s husband, was Jewish, and now prohibited from practicing medicine.
“I’m sorry,” Elise said. “I can only imagine how hard it’s been.”
Frieda pressed her lips together. “They’re taking away our pets, now. Can you believe? No Jew is allowed to own a dog, cat, or bird. And they’re not just given to some nice gentile family—no, they might be racially contaminated somehow. So, they’re all killed.
“Four S.A. officers came to take Widow Kaufman’s cat last night. Can you imagine—four men for one cat? Widow Kaufman was crying, but little Bärli didn’t go without a fight. We didn’t dare open our door, of course. But from the noise, I think she got a few good scratches in.”
“Little Marthe?” Elise asked. Marthe was Frieda and Ernst’s small white dove, named after Marguerite’s guardian in Charles Gounod’s Faust.
“She’s safe—for now.”
“Would you like me to take Marthe in? I’d take very good care of her until she can return to you.”
“Of course, you can still have a pet. You can do whatever you want.” Frieda brushed some loose pale hair out of her eyes. Then her face softened. “Of course, it’s not your fault, Elise. Have you heard anything?”
Berlin’s Jews were slowly but surely all being called to labor camps. Letters told them where to report, what to bring with them, and which train to take.
“I asked my mother,” Elise said. “She said she would do everything possible to help Ernst.”
Elise’s mother actually had refused to look into it. But Elise, although she was easily cowed by her domineering mother and usually bowed to her wishes, was determined to bring it up again and not take no for an answer this time.
“Thank you,” Frieda said with palpable relief.
The two young women smoked in silence, passing the cigarette back and forth, as a long-necked heron flew by in the distance.
Finally, Elise ventur
ed, “Do you ever—”
The words hung in the air for long seconds.
“—think about divorcing him?” Frieda finished. “Nein. Never. We love each other.”
“Sorry,” Elise said, crushing out the cigarette under her heel. “I shouldn’t have even asked.” In the glint of the morning sunlight, Elise caught a glimpse of a young girl with blonde hair going in the bus, holding a small brown teddy bear. Was she Gretel?
“I think that little blonde girl was my patient,” Elise said, her dark brows knitting together, blue eyes darkening. “She was cleared for an ear infection. She should be going home. There’s no reason to send her anywhere else for more tests or treatment.”
The bus engine revved, and then it pulled away, belching black smoke from the exhaust pipe.
Elise was confused. Had she missed something? “I’m going to check her file.”
PHOTO: © LESLEY SEMMELHACK
SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL is the author of the Maggie Hope mystery series, including her debut novel, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, Princess Elizabeth’s Spy, and the upcoming His Majesty’s Hope. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and child.