The Good at Heart

by Ursula Werner

  Thus it was that Erich Wolf relinquished his memory of Marina and laid it to rest, finally and tenderly, beside Oskar and Edith, beside the horses of Niebiosa Podlaski, beside the brown curls and beautiful brown eyes of his daughter. As the bells of Birnau struck the midnight hour, he brushed the lapels of his jacket one last time. There was a knock at his cell door. Erich turned to face the soldiers as they entered.

  * * *

  The Volvo truck arrived early at the rendezvous point near the east edge of the Stierenwald, just inside Switzerland. The driver shut off the engine and left its hood open while he went back to check something under the tarp. He opened several milk canisters until he located the one that was filled with diesel fuel. Then he shut the engine hood, got into the cab, and shifted into first gear. The truck continued west toward Basel.

  By the time the orphanage master and his nurse arrived at Stierenwald, shortly before dawn, the diesel fumes from the truck’s exhaust had merged into the mist of the old logging trail and disappeared. By then, the truck was well out of Basel, heading southwest toward the ports of Lisbon.

  – Epilogue –

  1966

  Marina stood on the porch and scanned the garden for some sign of Edith. Her mother’s rubber garden boots stood on the flagstones next to the table, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, since the sun had warmed the lawn all day. Marina knew her mother; if she was in the garden, she’d have gone barefoot.

  Seeing nothing but islands of flowers rising from the sea of grass, Marina decided to check the arbor. She made her way past the waving crowds of anemones and hollyhocks, newly freed from the overgrowth that had confined them days before. They really needed to hire someone to mow and trim more regularly. The yard was so much more accessible when properly manicured. Marina had to admire Lara’s efficiency. When she arrived last week, Lara had taken one look outside and immediately hired a team of gardeners. “Rosie can’t get married in this thicket of weeds!” she’d said. “We’ll have to hand out machetes just so people can get to their seats.” The next day, four men were mowing and whacking and trimming their way around the yard, under Lara’s watchful eye.

  Marina passed underneath the arms of the apple tree, now quite gnarled, its gray bark deeply furrowed. But it still bore fruit reliably. Today Marina could see small apples pushing aside the jade leaves of one of the lower branches, the one hanging over the defunct sandbox. If Rosie had had her way, all the guests would be roasting sausages over a fire in that sandbox for dinner tonight. “Sebastian loves grilling,” she’d said. “He can tend the fire.”

  “Over my dead body,” Lara had challenged. “His only job will be to dress nicely and help me choose a caterer.” It was generous of Lara to pay for everything, Marina thought. Her fashion business must be doing very well. Marina was proud of her eldest daughter, living alone in Düsseldorf, traveling to the catwalks of Paris and Milan and New York, hobnobbing with international designers. Success suited Lara without going too much to her head, for which Marina was grateful. In recent years, Lara had become very solicitous of Rosie, eager to develop the sibling relationship that she had spurned for years.

  This wedding, for example. Lara wanted to be a part of all of Rosie’s decisions. In practice, of course, that meant that this wedding—at least the spectacle aspect of it—was more Lara’s than Rosie’s. But neither Rosie nor Marina minded ceding that responsibility. Rosie hadn’t even wanted to get married. Sebastian had asked her so often, it had almost become a joke between them. This time, however, he was able to point out the health insurance benefits of legalizing their relationship.

  Stepping into the arbor, Marina found her mother standing next to the fountain of Daphne, veiled in a fine spray of mist, shoes in hand. Edith’s gaze was fixed on a pool of tiny blue flowers that was slowly spreading along the garden path toward the lake. Forget-me-nots. Marina put her arm around Edith’s shoulders. They stood next to each other, looking at the flowers in silence.

  Edith had, over the years, made a more solid peace with her losses than had Marina. When the news reports and photographs of the death camps appeared, when the truth of the Führer’s genocide was revealed, Edith finally understood Oskar’s disappearance. She saw it as her punishment, she told Marina. Her penalty for silence and acquiescence. Not that she knew what she would or should have done had she known the truth back then, but that was no excuse. Deep down, Edith knew that she had been afraid: afraid of the Führer, afraid to confront the possibility that such horrors were happening in her backyard, afraid that the man she loved most in the world might somehow be involved. She had chosen ignorance. And Oskar was taken from her. As so many souls were taken from so many others. All Edith could do now was accept, she said, and try to remember him, them, everyone who was lost, with love and apology.

  Marina, on the other hand, had spent years trying to learn her father’s fate. Of course, Marina bore a more direct burden of guilt for Oskar’s disappearance. For she had realized—when Edith remembered and told her about the half-filled pail of coal Oskar had brought up from the cellar that day—that her father must have seen the Polish girls. That he had offered to go with Captain Dietz that night because he feared the refugees would be discovered by the soldiers. That he went in order to protect Marina and the rest of their family.

  It was a heart-wrenching realization. She longed to explain herself to her father in person, to persuade him that she had had no real choice in bringing danger to their home. Would she also have apologized to him for putting him in such a difficult position? Perhaps. Certainly she would have thanked him for protecting all of them. But she never had the opportunity.

  Marina did not understand why the Führer never released her father, if in fact he had been imprisoned, as she and Edith assumed. When Johann left for America, when the refugee operation in Blumental shut down altogether, and especially when Marina herself was not arrested, why did Oskar not return? Days turned into weeks and then months, without any sign of him. Marina’s love for her father, fueled into a frenzy by her guilt, demanded some sort of answer. Even after the war ended and the Führer committed suicide, and his entire dark regime dissolved, there was no information. No sign of Oskar in any of the jails or detention camps. All of Marina’s inquiries, through both unofficial and official channels, led nowhere.

  Out of desperation one day, Marina ransacked Oskar’s old Biedermeier desk. She pulled apart its cabinets and dismantled its shelves, even pressed on panels of wood looking for secret compartments. Yet she discovered nothing new or extraordinary. Only piles of official papers, and various notebooks that she’d scoured and been unable to decipher.

  She did, that day, find one small black binder that had somehow wedged itself into the runners beneath one of the middle drawers. But it turned out to be nothing more than a log, in Oskar’s handwriting, of all the telegrams he had sent from the field telegraph machine he kept at home. The log covered the year 1944. Flipping through it, Marina saw numerous entries for Oskar’s last two days, July 19 and 20. But, as with all of the correspondence logs he kept, Oskar had recorded only the initials of the recipient in Berlin to whom the telegrams were sent. G.S. She had no idea who that person was; nor did Edith, when Marina showed the log to her. And there were no public records of Third Reich personnel that they could consult. The log book was, like everything else, a dead end.

  Erich’s fate, on the other hand, was certain. So was Franz’s. The Führer issued a public statement the day after the assassination attempt, reassuring the public of his own safety and well-being and daring anyone with information about the conspiracy to remain silent. The statement closed with a list of names, all the conspirators who had been tried and executed. Erich’s name headed that list. A week later, Marina received a letter informing her of Franz’s death on the beaches of Normandy.

  Marina was better able to accept the loss of Franz, perhaps because she had, ever since Stalingrad, been mourning the gentle naturalist whom she had first loved.
That beautiful, quiet man had really died in the snows of a Russian winter, and the soldier who went to Normandy was nothing more than his ghost, awaiting the bullet that would free him to fly with his birds.

  Erich’s death was different. Initially, she simply could not grasp the reality of a world without Erich Wolf in it. His disappearance was too abrupt, and swept away with it were all her dreams for the future. She was also angry with him, angry that he would have taken part in an assassination attempt at a time when the war was so close to ending. That he would have chosen to put his life, and by extension their life together, in jeopardy by engaging in such a foolhardy task. She was angry that he had left her alone. For solace, and because she knew Erich would have wanted it, Marina had his horse, Arrakis, shipped south and boarded in a nearby barn. For many years, she rode Arrakis daily, and for hours at a time. To her, the dark Arabian was an extension of his former master. Sitting on his back was as close as she could come to having Erich right there with her, arms encircling her waist and holding her tight.

  Marina trembled involuntarily at that memory. “So many more flowers this year than last,” Edith said with a sigh. Marina did not remember how many of the small blue flowers there had been the previous spring. Edith extended her arm and stretched out her fingers, measuring the expanse of blue with her hand. “Last year they were just up to my middle finger,” she said. “Now they’re past my pinkie.”

  “I wish memories were that tenacious,” Marina said. Because the memories she had of her father were fading. Only isolated snapshots remained: the way Oskar pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks when he first lit his pipe; how he used his finger to follow the type as he read a newspaper; how his forehead wrinkled when he laughed. Perhaps that was why she kept returning to her memories of Erich. She didn’t want to lose him, as she feared she was losing her father.

  Edith kept gazing at the flowers. “They spread themselves like souls,” she said quietly.

  Marina did not understand. “Memories?”

  Edith continued as if she had not heard the question. “You see the one flower, which blooms and then disappears. Its roots creep underground, this way and that. Eventually, those roots send up stems from which countless other flowers bloom.” She reached for Marina’s hand. “Our memories of the people we love fade over time, and we fear it means that we are forgetting them.” Marina nodded, teardrops forming at the corners of her eyes. Edith’s voice was tranquil and subdued. “But what is really happening is that their souls are becoming more and more a part of us, and of everyone else who loved them.” She turned and looked at Marina, wiped her daughter’s eyes. “They continue blooming through us. We can no more forget them than we can forget ourselves.”

  Marina dropped her head against her mother’s frail shoulders. She had not wanted to cry today. But it was impossible not to feel the loss. “I still miss them all so much,” she said. “On a day like today, they should all be here. Especially Sofia.”

  It would be three years this September since they found Sofia’s note on the kitchen table: I cannot bear being outside the blue anymore. I love all of you so much. Weeks later, her body was found in the lake. The pockets of her skirt were filled with the heaviest stones that could fit. She must have just walked into the water, kept walking as it reached her knees, her thighs, her waist. Continued even as it touched her chin, entered her mouth, covered her eyes. Would she have gagged then? For months, Marina had nightmares of drowning. She hoped Sofia had been in some sort of trance, that she had not really felt the water wash over her scalp and take her, finally, for its own.

  Sofia would have loved celebrating the changes in Rosie’s life. Perhaps Rosie could even have pulled her sister away from the maelstrom of internal pain and calamity that she had endured ever since Oskar’s disappearance. The promise of life fighting the seduction of darkness. But Sofia had never been a fighter. That was Rosie. Sofia’s defense had been withdrawal. The blue space that she gave herself to was her only solace. “Sofia would have liked these flowers,” Edith said finally.

  “I think that’s why Johann suggested them,” Marina said.

  “Oh, Johann! That reminds me, my dear. You have a letter from him in the hallway. That is, what? The fifth letter this week, I believe.”

  Unexpectedly, Marina blushed. Johann’s letters had been a godsend. For years, the family had received an occasional letter from Brooklyn, but when he heard about Sofia’s death from Edith, Johann wrote to Marina daily. His letters were filled with thoughts on life and death and God and the human spirit and humorous anecdotes about the oddities of his church members. He shared tales of his exploits as an uncle to his sister’s rambunctious children, and proclaimed the advantages of leading a choir in a nursing home, where no one could hear well enough to know that they could not sing. He told Marina about Pola and Nadzia, both of whom had settled in New York and married, and both of whom subsequently sent Marina their own letters of gratitude. In short, he bombarded Marina with hope and love. Almost three years of daily letters. Lately, Marina was responding as frequently. It was much cheaper than telephoning, and she found herself wanting to talk to him every day.

  “Mutti! Oma!” Rosie’s voice carried clearly across the garden.

  “Ah,” said Edith, turning around. “We are being hailed by the queen.”

  Marina laughed, grateful to be pulled out of her reverie. “Actually, I think Lara is probably the queen. Rosie is only a princess, even if it is her wedding day.”

  “No, of course, you’re absolutely right. Lara is, was, and always will be the queen.”

  The two women left the arbor just in time to see Rosie running down the hill in search of them. She was wearing her wedding dress, which she had put on the moment she woke up that morning, so that she would not have to change later in the day. Marina had not seen Rosie in the dress since they’d chosen it months earlier. She was glad that the tailor had been able to accommodate Rosie’s seven-months-pregnant belly.

  “Stop running! Stop running before you fall, you crazy goose!” Lara cried, appearing on the porch. “They’re right there, Rosie! Look, they’re coming up from the arbor.”

  Rosie slowed and looked in their direction. “Oh, hello, you two!” She stopped and stood beaming at them. “How’s the garden?”

  “Oh, my goodness, what a question!” Lara ran over to Rosie and draped her arms over her sister’s shoulders. “Don’t distract them with questions, Rosie. If you get Oma started on the garden and how her flowers are, we’ll never get her dressed.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Edith said, leaning on Marina. “Anyway, who cares if I’m dressed? No one will be looking at me.”

  “So you think, Oma,” Rosie said. “But you need to look your best anyway, for my sake at least. And Lara has a surprise. She found a minister!”

  “Really?” Marina had given up hope of finding anyone affiliated with any religion to officiate at the wedding. Rosie’s pregnancy was too visible at this point. And this part of the country was too Catholic. “Who is it?”

  Lara ignored her mother’s question. “Oma, let me help you upstairs.” She took Edith’s hand.

  “Thank you, Lara. You are my queen.” Edith winked at Marina as she was led inside.

  “I’m so happy the sun came out,” Rosie said, looking up at the sky. “Do you think it will stay?”

  “Sweetheart, you are your own sun today.” Truly, Marina thought, Rosie’s beauty was transcendent. Lara had pulled Rosie’s hair back loosely, into a low, slightly tousled bun, and had woven Edith’s beloved gänseblümchen into her curls. A few free tendrils framed Rosie’s face, which was radiant with joy.

  Rosie laughed. “You’re right, you’re right. If it rains, we’ll tell the guests to share towels.” She put her hands on her stomach. “Oof! Somebody’s waking up.”

  Marina reached out and felt the skin under Rosie’s dress distend as the baby repositioned itself. “What is that? An elbow or a foot?”

  “Who know
s? As long as there’s two of each.” Rosie suddenly looked up. “Aha, here he is.”

  “Who?” Marina asked, following Rosie’s gaze.

  “The minister.” A man was approaching them from the garden. He had entered the yard from the lakeside gate. But he was not walking along the path next to the cherry tree, which would have been the most direct route. Instead, he was making his way out of the arbor, where Marina and Edith had stood a few minutes earlier. Marina squinted, but he was still too far away for her to see him clearly. “Well,” Rosie said, turning toward the house. “I’m going to go check on Sebastian. See if he’s put on his trousers yet. No groom should go without trousers, right?”

  “At least not until nighttime.” Marina smiled. “But, Rosie, tell me before you go—who is this man? Where did you find this minister?”

  “Oh, we had to go far afield to find him. He’s come a long way.” Rosie gave her mother a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. “But if you’re nice to him, he might stay.”

  Marina watched the stranger draw nearer. There was something familiar about his walk, slightly lumbering because of his large frame, and his face too, its shape so round, with wire-rimmed glasses . . . and then she knew.

  – Acknowledgments –

  This book would not be what it is without the support and insight of so many friends and colleagues over the past decade. Working backward in time, I begin with enormous gratitude to Trish Todd, who embraced a fledgling story and, together with an extraordinary team at Touchstone, crafted it into a work of art. Equally heartfelt thanks to Leigh Feldman, for her early faith in the manuscript, her expert guidance, and her unfailing humor. And to Ilana Masad, for plucking me out of a mountain of pages and opening a new door. I feel blessed to have such skillful and enthusiastic champions.