The Good at Heart

by Ursula Werner

  Rosie perked up. “Then she deserves a reward! We can give her some of our carrots.”

  “Yes, Rosie, I’m certain she would love that,” Erich said.

  “And the French, Erich?” Marina was looking out toward the lake, as if searching for signs of men marching in the distance. Rosie followed her gaze, but she saw nothing.

  Erich shrugged. “We’re getting conflicting reports. This morning, they were definitely heading toward the southeast border, but the telegram I picked up in Schwanfeld had them reversing course. Perhaps they heard that Captain Rodemann had been sent to engage them.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t worry too much about the French, Marina. Oskar regrets alarming everyone. He’s en route and should be here tomorrow.”

  “Opa’s coming?” Rosie gleefully bounced up and down on the horse’s back. “We need to tell Oma! Erich, will you ride me to my house? Can he, Mutti? And can he stay for dinner? Please?”

  “Rosie, I would be honored to accompany you to your destination. But about dinner . . .” He hesitated and glanced at Marina. “I’m not sure I should stay. I don’t know how Edith would feel about it.”

  Rosie readied a harsh glare and protest, but Marina was nodding. “It’s been long enough, don’t you think?”

  Rosie’s happiness was complete. She was riding a horse, a real horse, with her favorite uncle and her Mutti walking next to her. And Sofia would see her on the horse when they got home. And Erich would stay for dinner. And he could have Pimpanella’s last egg.

  “Mutti, can Erich have one of Pimpanella’s eggs?” she asked.

  “Pimpanella’s eggs?” Erich looked amazed. “That suggests she laid more than one.”

  “Two! It’s another miracle.” Marina laughed. “Probably all she has in her, but don’t tell Oskar that.”

  They made their way home. The horse’s hooves kicked up puffs of fine gray dust that swirled behind them in eddies of haze. Rosie took a moment on her high perch to look back at the yew tree. She had to squint through the small atmospheric tempests of dirt to see the dangling rope. It was still there, swinging slowly back and forth, a reminder of how suddenly things could change.

  – Two –

  Edith decided to start dinner. It had been hours since Marina and the Breckenmüllers had headed up to Birnau, and she was going to keep herself busy rather than worry. If anything bad had happened up on that hill, she would have heard by now. Max Fuchs was good at spreading news throughout town. She was going to assume all was well.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes momentarily, gathering comfort from her kitchen. She loved this house. Of course, it was nothing like what she and Oskar had imagined; they’d had no time to construct anything grand when they made the decision to move the family south permanently, away from the air raids up north. Initially, the only structure they had been able to erect on the property was the garage. The war precluded any more extensive construction. They were able to make do for their summer visits by outfitting the garage space with basic furniture. Two years ago, when the family moved in year-round, they expanded by enlisting local workmen to add a small second story and a cellar.

  Edith knew that once the war was over, Oskar would suggest they build a larger house, the one they had created so vividly in their minds. But she didn’t want to abandon this makeshift little home, with its whistling lead windows and chatty pine staircase. In any case, she had no idea where they might build a new structure. Although the property was large, the garden was already so thoroughly planted that Edith couldn’t imagine uprooting any of it. There was simply no space to rebuild. No, there would be no new house when the war was over.

  When the war was over. That was hard to imagine, for this war was relentless. And unpredictable, like a rabid animal. Your best chances of survival were to gather your family around you, get everyone as far away from the war as possible, and take shelter. Edith knew she had been lucky so far, but the events of today reminded her that, no matter how protected she might tell herself they were, the war was still out there. The crazy Captain Rodemanns of the world were still firing machine guns directly at the people she loved. And then there was Sofia. Edith sighed. Sofia’s psychic trauma from that night of bombing in Berlin was a constant concern.

  Edith heard laughter outside. Rosie’s laughter. She had thought Rosie was still upstairs. But of course that imp had probably gone out to play in the yard at some point during the afternoon. Edith was just heading across the kitchen to the porch doors to call her back inside when Marina stepped into the house from the porch. Her smiling face told Edith everything she needed to know about whether Hans Munter was safe. Edith let out a deep sigh of relief. “So, you’re back. And all is well, I take it?”

  “Well, Hans is not dead, at least. He seems mostly all right.” Marina shook her head in disbelief at all that the bürgermeister had endured that day. “The doctor is keeping him overnight, just to be safe.”

  “Thank God.” Edith reached for the checkered apron hanging on a wall hook and pulled it over her head. “Absolutely insane, that captain, shooting randomly into the town. I feared he might not come to his senses.”

  “I wouldn’t say he came to his senses, exactly,” Marina started. “He was reminded of his true objectives. He’s off now, marching again to find the elusive French.”

  “Now, that’s a blessing.” Edith fumbled with the strings of her apron. “But what restored our dear captain to sanity?”

  Marina looked over at the door that led from the kitchen to the living room and opened her mouth to say something, then stopped. Edith was too busy with the apron to notice. She had the right string in her right hand, but the left one eluded her. She was reaching back, fingers outstretched, grasping for it, when she felt two large hands clasp her own.

  “Edith.” It was a voice she knew very well, a voice she had once heard daily in their home in Berlin. A deep bass, like a slow wave rising from the bottom of the sea, almost as familiar to her as Oskar’s own tenor. She had not heard the low resonance of that voice in five years, and the sound of it again, unexpectedly here in her kitchen, made her reach for the counter to steady herself.

  Erich. Edith had always thought of him as God’s atonement for her precious Peter, the baby He had taken from her. She had always felt that fate brought Erich to her—he was in need of a mother; she was missing a son.

  She stood still, her eyes moistening with tears. That day before the war, when she’d realized what Erich had done, she had been so angry with him, she spent the next five years refusing to see him. Marina and the girls had met with him in Berlin, and even once or twice in Meerfeld after they moved, but she hadn’t gone. Initially, she had felt so profoundly betrayed, interpreting his transgression as disrespect for everything she and Oskar had done for him. But it was more than that. She had loved him deeply, loved him like a son—yes, that was it, she thought of him as her son. But of course he wasn’t. She had to keep reminding herself of that.

  Edith had held on to her hurt for a long time, longer than she needed to. Meanwhile, the war dragged on and battles were waged that she knew Erich was a part of, and she could not help but fear for him. As she feared for Marina’s husband, Franz. And if she was completely honest with herself, hadn’t she feared for Erich more? Hadn’t she cooked him more breakfasts? Hadn’t she lived with him in the same house, washed his clothes, cleaned his room? After Stalingrad, when Franz came home a shattered shell of himself, Edith almost screamed. If this could happen to Franz, what about Erich? She had felt desperate to see him. And that desperation slowly dissipated her anger.

  Erich’s grasp of her hand was tentative—of course, she had made him unsure of her—but he did not let go, and she did not try to wrest her hand free. After a long silence, she turned around and looked up. He had not changed at all, those deep brown eyes of his still calm and steady. “My, my, is it possible you have gotten taller, Erich?” She was going to stay in safe territory.

  Erich laughed. “Taller? No. Defin
itely much grayer, but not taller.”

  “Well, I must be shrinking into a crone, then.”

  “Who’s turning into a crow?” Rosie interrupted, skipping into the kitchen and jumping onto Erich’s back. He let out a small “Oof!” of surprise, then clamped her shins against his torso with his arms, held her feet in his hands, and twirled her around upside down. Edith heard someone giggle in the doorway. Sofia had come downstairs at last.

  “You get the next turn, Sofia,” Erich assured her, slowing his turns and easing Rosie onto the floor so that she could crawl forward between his legs.

  Rosie immediately scrambled over to her sister and began pulling on her arm. “Sofia, Sofia! Come see the horse! There’s a horse in the yard and I rode her. And you can ride her too!”

  “A horse?” Edith thought she had misheard.

  “Yes, Mutti, a real horse,” Marina said. “I believe it is mowing our clover at this very moment. But don’t worry, Erich will return it right away.”

  “Oh no! Not right away,” Rosie whined. “Can’t we play with it for a while? At least until dinner? Please?” She elbowed Sofia lightly and whispered in her sister’s ear. Sofia nodded, suddenly animated.

  “Please, Oma?” Sofia chimed in.

  Edith could not resist Sofia. She suspected that Rosie knew it. It was not the first time that she admired the slyness of her youngest granddaughter. “Okay, fine. But she’s not spending the night here, is that understood?”

  Rosie and Sofia danced in celebration, then ran outside. Two seconds later, Rosie ran back in. “Oma, can I have the carrots you set aside for me today?”

  “I thought these carrots were for Pimpanella,” she said, picking them up from the counter.

  “Pimpanella won’t mind,” Rosie said, grabbing them from Edith’s hand. “She’s excited about the horse too.”

  “I highly doubt that,” Edith said to Marina and Erich as Rosie ran back outside. “You two might want to go out to make sure the girls don’t try to put any of the chickens on top of that horse. And try to let Erich be seen by the neighbors. Maybe it will stop all the gossip about Pastor Wiessmeyer.”

  Erich stopped at the threshold. “The minister?” he asked.

  “Stop it, Mutti,” Marina said. “Let’s not get into that again.” She turned to Erich. “There’s nothing. I’m married. Everyone knows that.”

  “Of course they do, my dear.” Edith pulled out the heavy iron stewpot and banged it onto the stove. “But your husband has been away for a long while, and everyone wonders at the extraordinary amount of time you spend having tea with the minister.”

  “Surely,” Erich offered, “sharing a cup of tea with a man of the cloth is a safe activity.”

  “He’s not Catholic,” Marina said, pursing her lips. “So no, he’s not safe, not as far as Blumental is concerned.”

  Edith pictured Johann Wiessmeyer, envisioning his gentle eyes widening at the implication that there might be something dangerous about him. “It’s a bit silly, really. The man himself is lovely—you would like him, Erich. It’s just that Marina refuses to adjust to the difference in attitudes down here. She acts as if she’s still in Berlin.”

  “Mutti, we drink tea, for heaven’s sake. In a public café. If people find that objectionable, then so be it.” Marina grabbed Erich’s arm. “Come on, General. Let’s go out and be seen.”

  Edith swallowed the rebuke she was readying. She had been fighting Marina’s rebelliousness for years. Before the war, it was a question of propriety, of Marina not calling undue attention to herself. These days, it was more often a question of survival. Marina was headstrong, always would be, and there was, Edith had learned, very little she could do about it.

  Best to accept the things you cannot control, she thought, looking at the potatoes and leeks lying before her on the counter, and exercise control where you can. Soup was entirely controllable. She grabbed a potato and picked up a paring knife.

  – Three –

  The bells of Birnau were chiming seven o’clock when Pastor Johann Wiessmeyer arrived at the foot of the Stahlberg hill. Though he was already late, Johann took a moment to listen to the four E major notes leaping over each other. Tireless chimes, Johann thought, sounding every quarter hour, day and night. Steady, inexhaustible. The Birnau bells could be heard even beyond the surrounding fields, well into town, where they competed with the more modest bells of Johann’s Protestant church. Their call was bright and cheerful, open and inviting, like the church they inhabited.

  Johann looked over the lake to the Swiss border. The first time he saw that slate expanse of water—years ago, with his sister Sonja and her Jewish husband, Berthold, in the car—the mental and moral struggle he now knew so well had just begun. Sonja and Berthold had left Berlin early. “They’re only boycotting Jewish businesses and firing Jewish professors now,” Berthold had said. “Later, who knows?”

  Johann remembered clearly the first day of that 1933 boycott. He was still in the seminary then, and had just stepped out of the underground station at Alexanderplatz. Walking toward Kaiserstrasse, he saw storm troopers blocking an elderly woman who was trying to enter a butcher’s shop emblazoned with a white chalk Star of David. The woman must have been at least eighty, possibly ninety years old, judging from the deep curve of her back and her skeleton-white hair. She was irate and undaunted by the uniforms in front of her. “I will shop where I shop! I will buy meat from whomever I choose to buy meat from!” she shouted, raising her straw shopping basket and shaking it at the men. Her defiance and outrage should have been widespread, but weren’t.

  Those early days in Berlin seemed so distant now. Was it fear of losing their own jobs or latent anti-Semitism that had kept his university colleagues from signing those very early petitions protesting the government’s increasingly oppressive actions in the name of racial purity? Johann thought of himself as a man who tried to live God’s truth in every aspect of his life, but looking back now, he realized how insignificant his actions had been. Writing and delivering carefully worded treatises and essays, affirming the presence of God in every man, regardless of race . . . such mild slaps to the lily-livered evangelical community. Over time his statements became bolder—the true Church must embrace both German and Jew—and he sought audiences outside academia. But he succeeded only in drawing attention to himself, and spent more than one night in jail, released only to the care of his cousin Gottfried Schrumm, an attorney in the Defense Ministry.

  It took the emigration of his beloved sister to truly awaken Johann’s spiritual imperative. Sonja, only eleven months younger than he, practically his twin and certainly his best friend throughout childhood. She was his partner in four-handed piano back when Johann thought he might be a musician. Later, when he decided to study theology, and the rest of their academically minded, agnostic family questioned that decision, it was she who defended his choice. “He has talked to me about God every night since we were babies,” she told them. “No one knows more about God than Johann.”

  At the University of Berlin, Johann dated the raven-haired, ravishing Beate, while Sonja, unwilling to be left behind, fell in love with Beate’s brother, Berthold. But impetuous and romantic Beate was bored with Johann’s quiet philosophies, and she ran off to Spain with an artist. The only union between the two families would be Sonja and Berthold’s.

  By Kristallnacht, in 1938, Sonja and Berthold had been married for five years. Even though Johann had baptized Berthold as a Christian, the young couple did not feel safe. So while Jewish shop owners swept up the splintered glass of storefronts, Sonja tearfully began packing up her home. Johann was too worried for her safety to try to dissuade her. Eight months after Berthold’s conversion, Johann found himself driving them to the Swiss border late at night, with fabricated credentials that Gottfried had provided. This very border, just on the other side of the lake.

  Watching Sonja and Berthold disappear into a blanket of fog that night, Johann saw an opening, an opportunity to act
in a manner consistent with his beliefs. The border here was porous: a large lake, dense forests, small towns and roads. What was required was a guide, a shepherd who knew his way around. A pastor. And to Johann’s good fortune, two years later, a vacancy arose in a small parish here in Blumental.

  A loud “Oof!” interrupted Johann’s reverie. A boy’s voice. Johann looked over to the East Blumental station, the small satellite train depot that had stopped serving passengers since the war began. “Verdammt nochmal!” cursed the voice from somewhere behind the wooden building. Johann followed the trail of profanity-peppered grunts to the back of the station, where he saw a familiar dusty-haired, scrap-clad boy trying to position a boulder underneath one of the windows.

  “Need some help with that?” Johann decided not to say anything about the curses. Shame and remorse already colored Max Fuchs’s face. He surveyed the enormous rock and marveled that scrawny Max had enough strength to move it any distance at all.

  “Pastor Johann! Oh, well, yes, but, yes, thank you, sir,” Max stuttered, uncertain whether he had been caught in a transgression.

  “And what exactly am I helping you with?” Johann asked as he rolled up his sleeves and squatted next to the boulder.

  “Well, Willie was helping me earlier today, but we couldn’t move it all the way to the window, it was just so heavy.” Max’s words poured forth in a torrent while Johann put all of his strength and weight into moving the massive block of stone. The boy spoke like a rain-swollen brook, ideas splashing over banks and running every which way. “Oh, uh, that way, Pastor Johann, to the right, that’s it, yes. So I didn’t really want Willie’s help because I didn’t want to share the glory of catching the spies. I want to catch the spies all by myself. Yes, up against the window, there. I haven’t seen any yet but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. I mean, isn’t this a perfect spot? And I know Willie will want some credit, who wouldn’t? Yes, perfect. Thank you so much, sir.”