“I baked an apple pie,” he says.
In the kitchen he pulls the pie from the oven, sets it on the table, and opens a drawer. Inside, next to the knives and forks, sits the revolver. Fritz touches the metal and feels the textured grip, and the memories roll over him, tumbling together like rocks rolling from a cliff. All the desolation and all the exuberance he’d felt rebound from one remembered incident to the next; sometimes two or three memories crash together before bouncing off again, leaving him with a strange feeling of weightlessness. He pushes the revolver to the side, picks up a knife, and cuts big slices of pie, the apple chunks soft and sweet smelling. He sets the plates of food on a tray and carries it into the main room.
Veronika and Wegner have taken seats at the table. The sun is shining through the windows onto the bookshelves and the painted tile stove. Wegner lays paper, pens, and pencils on the table. Fritz puts down the tray and lines up the pens and pencils in the center of the stack of paper. Wegner grins.
“Always the civil servant, eh, Herr Kolbe?”
Fritz has to laugh at himself. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I should’ve been Foreign Minister! An ambassador, or at least a consul. It’s true. In the new Germany? Me, I . . . ah, to hell with it.”
The coffee, the pie, the chatting—Fritz realizes he’s evading again. He feels his usual urge to stare out the window, to separate his recollections from his current surroundings. Doing so wouldn’t be hard. Veronika and Wegner would put up with it for perhaps an hour or so and then leave, thinking, This man is ready for the insane asylum. Perhaps he’s already insane; he’s really not sure. Whatever he is, he’s not one to give up a fight.
As they eat the pie Fritz lets the young folks tell him the latest from the city. He watches as they prepare for the interview, sliding their plates gently to the side, Wegner picking up a pencil, Veronika forming a square with thumb and index finger and taking imaginary shots of the cabin—and of Fritz.
“So, by 1943,” Wegner says, “you’d already managed to—”
“Hold on!”
Fritz gets up, grabs the bowling-ball-size globe off a bookshelf, and sets it on the table.
“That sure has seen better times,” Veronika says.
Running his fingers over the resinous glue scars, Fritz spins the globe toward the south.
“Cape Town, South Africa,” he says. “That’s where this begins. We have to start there.”
“I’m not sure we have that much time, Herr Kolbe. We actually wanted to begin in 1943, the first time you traveled to Bern.”
Fritz stares at Wegner and taps on South Africa. His finger can find every country he’s been to without a glance at the encrusted globe.
“Cape Town, 1939,” he says. “Do you know how incredibly blue the sky gets over Africa?”
He clears the plates off the table. The sun shines on the globe, halving it into day and night.
“In 1935,” Fritz says, “the order came to raise the swastika flag in the courtyard of the Cape Town consulate. This was one part of a Nazi decree demanding that all German foreign missions start dealing with the Jewish Question. Such madness hadn’t begun gradually. It had hit like a bombshell with the Enabling Act in 1933. Once that law passed there was no holding back. That was when the delusions of grandeur started. The hysterics. The idiocy.”
Fritz feels his trusty old colossal rage overtaking him. He could throw the plates against the wall, pound on the table, scream. He makes a conscious effort not to lose control.
“We don’t have to talk about Hitler, the Holocaust, or the war yet,” Wegner says.
“This is about you, Herr Kolbe,” Veronika says. “You called for us, more or less, by way of Herr Sacher.”
“There must have been some incident that made you take action,” Wegner says.
“Relating to the Nazis? No. I hated them from the start. Deeply.”
“From that far away?” Veronika asks.
“From Africa,” Fritz affirms.
“But you returned,” Wegner says. “You went back—to Hitler’s Germany.”
Fritz lights up a cigarette. “I did, yes. I was naïve. My superior was as well. He was the one who wanted me to; I went back for his sake. Was it a mistake? Perhaps. But if I hadn’t . . .”
“American intelligence would have never gotten a source like you,” Veronika finishes for him.
Fritz likes that she said that. She’s eyeing him through her finger lens. He smiles, turns his face to the left, then the right, and Veronika says, “Click, click.”
“I wouldn’t have become a spy. And I wouldn’t have met Marlene.”
“We should discuss the ramifications of that,” Wegner says.
Fritz reaches out, lowers Veronika’s finger lens to the table, and keeps his powerful hand pressed over her fingers. She puts up with it for a few seconds, then pulls her hand away. Wegner holds his pen ready. Fritz hesitates, feeling himself getting agitated. It’s all too much.
“Herr Kolbe, this is what you wanted,” Veronika says. Her hair is roughly the same color as Marlene’s, chestnut with strands of copper red.
“The way it feels to me now, I don’t know. It’s as if Marlene were standing right there next to me in the courtyard of the Cape Town consulate when that goddamn Nazi flag came down in ’39, because war had broken out. As if she were there with me when I had to leave my young daughter behind.”
His young guests glance at each other, Veronika raising her brow like a person hearing things she already knows.
Fritz drifts through space and time back to Cape Town: there under the sun where his shadow self first began. If he had known what he would end up doing, had known all that would happen because of it, would he have gone back to Germany? He’s not sure. On the table, the globe casts an egg-like shadow over the journalist’s blank snow-white pages.
2
“I WILL COME BACK”
Cape Town, South Africa, fall 1939
Fritz’s daughter was sitting on the sofa when he arrived home that hot and humid afternoon. The screen door clacked in the doorframe behind him, dimming the sunlight in the room. He had telephoned the maid, Ida, and sputtered that he was coming home. He needed to be with Katrin now.
Katrin watched him, her fair face framed with that raven hair that always reminded him of oil paint freshly brushed onto a canvas. Fritz could barely manage to meet his daughter’s gaze. He set his briefcase on top of the bureau, poured himself a whisky until the glass was heavy and honey colored, then sat down with her. The ceiling fan stirred the air, and bougainvillea branches tapped at the window whenever a breeze from the ocean whooshed down the streets and over the yard. Fritz placed an arm around his daughter’s slight shoulders.
“What is it, Papa?”
He didn’t know how to say it. At the German consulate the staff had gathered around the radios in various groups, their backs bent forward for listening, champagne glasses ready in their hands as they waited for the news to be announced. Fritz, appalled, had closed up his office and for the first time in his life left the consulate before the workday was done. He saw no one and said good-bye to no one. He walked out the door with his head lowered, smack-dab into the sunlight, down the steps, and into the throngs on the bright city streets.
“Papa?”
Fritz didn’t want to turn on the radio but he did it anyway. Sounds rasped across the ether like a coarse file over hard wood. He turned the knob and here came the voices from faraway Germany. His hand trembled, shaking his glass. He looked into Katrin’s bright-blue eyes. She was already fourteen, and yet he still went into her room every evening to see that she was tucked in, placing a kiss on her cheek and whispering that there was no one he loved more. What should he tell her now?
“You’re acting a little strange, Papa.”
He still didn’t know what to say—he only knew that everything in their world was about to change, absolutely all of it. Katrin had to be kept far away from what was about to happen.
Blarin
g through the bars of the radio’s brown grille came the latest on the Greater German Reich and its Führer, Adolf Hitler. The announcer sounded intoxicated by the great event: “Adolf Hitler, our Führer, will soon speak to the German nation on this very broadcast.” Fritz went into the kitchen and poured Katrin a lemonade, the bottle knocking against the glass—the last time his hands had trembled like this was when his wife died, years ago. Katrin had been just a baby that he’d held to his chest, one hand cupped around the back of her head.
He brought her the lemonade, the glass glowing a rich yellow in the intense sunlight.
“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on? Papa? I’m right here.”
“It’s coming on now,” he said. He pointed at the radio as if the device were some wild animal about to pounce. Hundreds of people could be heard cheering, the transmission hissing as if the airwaves could not abide what was about to come. But it came. And though he had known it would, the words still pounded him like a hammer heavy enough to destroy planets. He couldn’t believe this was happening.
“As of five forty-five this morning, we are returning fire!”
Hitler’s rolling r’s. Fritz could imagine his plump nose, the silly mustache, those fists of anger the man couldn’t give one speech without. Fritz felt his face turning to stone.
“Papa, what does returning fire mean?”
He pulled his daughter close to him, wishing he could keep his arms wrapped around her until this world was no longer able to harm her.
“War, my dear. We’re going to war. The worst possible thing. The stupidest thing humans can do. War, Katrin. For God’s sake.”
“So why do it?”
He turned off the radio. He didn’t need to hear any more of this idiocy, didn’t need to subject himself to the crowd’s hysterical cheering.
“Why go to war, Papa?”
“A hunger for power, fanaticism, megalomania. Endless stupidity. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Then we won’t ever go back to such a place.”
Fritz gave a despairing laugh. He placed his arms around Katrin, and her hand found his shoulder. The girl was so skinny it nearly broke his heart to even hug her.
“Exactly, Katrin. We will not be going there. My old friends Aunt Hiltrud and Uncle Werner live in South-West Africa. I know of a few opportunities there, all part of the job. It won’t be easy but we’ll make do, we will make it somehow. And now”—he grasped Katrin’s hand—“let’s go take a walk by the sea. Because a walk by the sea, my dear, can never hurt.”
“Your walks are always so long.”
“Perhaps we’ll see a few penguins.”
“But let’s not go so far, okay?”
“We’ll turn around whenever you say.”
The next day the consulate telephones shrilled incessantly, and urgent footsteps echoed down the corridors. Many of the staff had put on their swastika armbands. As fast as he could, Fritz processed departure requests and applications for German citizens who came in to give up their citizenship, contacting the embassies of countries he guessed would remain neutral.
One thing had become clear to him after the Nazis’ catastrophic policies of the last few years: this was not going to end with Germany’s shameful invasion of Poland. Hitler had already annexed Austria and taken Czechoslovakia, so his latest attack would have to bring grave consequences. Fritz felt like he was being dragged into events that never should have been allowed to transpire. Throughout the day he kept running his fingers through his thin hair or clutching at his forehead. At moments he had to breathe in deeply and compose himself just so he wouldn’t vomit. He heard people cheering out in the corridors. They saw themselves as players in a series of grand events. He wanted to smack them on both sides of their heads.
Normally he met with his superior, Consul Biermann, twice daily, but today Fritz managed to find the consul in his office only as evening neared. The old man was standing at the window, dressed as always in a three-piece suit, his bowtie knotted securely.
“It’s madness, Herr Kolbe,” Biermann said. “They’ve all gone mad.”
“Plenty of people feel otherwise, Herr Consul. What will you do?”
“That depends on what happens in the coming days. Watching and doing nothing is always a poor choice, though.”
Biermann sat at his desk, straightened his glasses, and started going over consulate plans with Fritz. “All done with reservations,” the consul said of his orders. Biermann had often said he could hardly imagine what would become of Germany if life in that splendid city of Berlin was ever reduced to what it had now become: home to thousands upon thousands of waving Nazi flags, its parliamentary system abolished by the Führer.
“He is the one who can take everything away,” he said of Hitler. “The one who decides everything. The rest of us have no individual responsibility anymore; we only follow along dutifully.”
“Many people like it that way,” Fritz said. “I don’t.”
“You are a good man. The best staffer I ever had. I truly do need you, Herr Kolbe. All is not lost, not yet.”
“That’s what I think too, Herr Consul.”
On the way back to his office, Fritz passed the small office of young Heinz Müller. Müller was responsible for the mail and radio and telegraph traffic and encoding. His pale suit hung off his scrawny frame. Fritz had always liked the boy for his reserved nature. Now he paused and asked Müller if everything was all right. Müller asked him in and closed the door. He tidied a stack of loose papers on his desk and tapped on the top page. His hands were slender like a girl’s.
“I’m afraid, Herr Kolbe,” he admitted. “But please, don’t tell anyone else that.”
“Me, I’ve had it up to here with being afraid,” Fritz said, pointing to his head.
“What do you think will happen?”
“I don’t know.” Fritz was still keeping his dread and hatred of Hitler to himself. Even here in Cape Town, so far from Berlin, it had been a long time since he could say what he wanted.
Fritz felt as if he were buried under heavy stone. The heat he usually liked so much now felt intolerably oppressive, the ring of the telephone made him angry, and the Hitler salutes in the corridors—along with the gloating of many staffers—made his stomach hurt as if he’d swallowed a live crab.
On the following afternoon, September 3—two days after the attack on the poor Poles—Biermann summoned him to his office. Fritz found him there holding a cream-colored sheet of letterhead.
“The Declaration of War from the British and French,” Biermann said.
Fritz closed his eyes. The giant no within him was welling up so fast he thought he might burst.
“It’ll be a massacre,” he said.
“The gentlemen in Berlin didn’t figure on this move,” Biermann muttered. “Everyone back there is quite horrified, especially because of the British—though surely not Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, an Anglophobe,” he added. Biermann told Fritz he felt nauseous just hearing the name von Ribbentrop. It used to be that types like von Ribbentrop had no chance in the Foreign Office. The Office, according to Biermann, had always been the home of great diplomacy.
“We can do little from here, Herr Kolbe,” he said.
Fritz didn’t know exactly what Biermann meant by this, but the consul’s words solidified his decision not to return to Germany under any circumstances.
“Churchill is a strong-willed man,” Fritz said.
Biermann, who’d met Churchill once, agreed and called him an impressive figure. He looked at the letterhead, folded it down the middle, and stuffed it into an inside pocket of his jacket. “A historic document,” he said.
“Proof of the abyss, Herr Consul.”
Biermann adjusted his bowtie and positioned himself at the window. “Included in all these senseless directives now coming over the teleprinter are several intended to remind us here at this post that the Negro is generally inferior to the German race.” The consul tapped his finge
rs on the window frame. “How’s your daughter dealing with all of this?”
“Do not ask. Your wife?”
Biermann shook his head.
As Fritz left the consul’s office, he glanced back for one more look at the man. In the sunlit window Biermann was like a statue, a flinty relic from an age long past.
Back in his own office, Fritz shut the door, set the telephone handset next to the phone’s base, and drew the curtains. Laying his suit jacket aside, he pulled his tie off over his head, took several deep breaths, and cocked his arms back. First he shielded his face with his fists, then he swung: leading with his left, throwing right hooks, then jabs. Dancing around his imaginary opponent he kept on swinging and ducking, then he stopped and, shifting his weight, swung again, holding off for a moment before picturing himself landing one hit and then another. After a few minutes his shoulders and chest were wet with sweat. He kept on boxing, hammering on his dimwitted, flag-waving opponent, laying him out on the floor. Fritz boxed until he could barely lift his arms, until they gave way and his knees went weak.
At his sink, behind a Chinese dividing screen he’d had a colleague bring back from Peking, he splashed water onto his face and stared into the mirror. His blue eyes looked severe, his brow puckered with lines, and his cheeks shone like polished wood. He didn’t like his face when it looked like this. A hand towel draped around his shoulders, he sat at his desk, gave the globe a spin, and looked at his two photos in their golden frames.
The first one was a portrait of his deceased wife, Katrin’s mother, taken long ago now. Next to it was a photo of Katrin, who’d gotten her black hair from her mother. God, was that girl pretty! And so curious about the world—her ears perked up whenever he recited tales from the old travelogues he loved to read to her. He was the one she’d come to when she had her first period. Fritz had coughed and said he needed a whisky; Katrin had mumbled back that his response wasn’t exactly helping. Despite feeling helpless, he’d told her that her becoming a real woman was pretty amazing, and that without its happening there couldn’t be any children . . . He’d stopped when he’d noticed the way she was eyeing him. She only had to say “Papa”—that long a on the end extended in admonishment—and he stopped and stared at his feet. As if all that wasn’t enough, she’d then asked him when she would finally get breasts. He’d said, “Er” and “Uh,” not really sure where to go with that conversation or even where to start. He’d begun to tell her that her mother had had rather small breasts and that they were actually quite pretty, but Katrin had cut him off and suggested that maybe it was better not to discuss it.
The Honest Spy Page 2
