The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  Bruno was trying to guess how fast the motor cruiser could go with all throttles open. Konstanze, for a while, was silent, pondering a question that had been on her mind for some time.

  The cruiser passed them, the chug of its engines so deep, so powerful that they could feel its vibrations on the riverbank. Together they watched it disappear.

  “Bruno.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you make love to me?”

  He lay back in the long green grass.

  “Why, Bruno? Why not?” It was a question, not a complaint. “I would like you to, very much.”

  At length he said, “I thought you might have guessed.” He sat up, biting his lip. “I only ever see you during the week, never at weekends. I have never invited you to the base. In the circumstances it wouldn’t be fair.”

  “What circumstances, Bruno? Say.”

  He looked downstream. The river was quite smooth again now, the wake of the motor cruiser washed entirely away. “I’m married.”

  She had half-guessed, of course. Her question gave her away. A strict Catholic woman doesn’t ask a man into bed, as she had just done, without knowing the answer in advance. But, when she heard his reply, she was still shocked. At first she had felt sick, then the bite in the air got to her and she shivered. The sediment of TB in her lungs made her cough. Bruno had taken off his tunic and put it around her shoulders; but she hadn’t thanked him and didn’t even look at him. She couldn’t. Despite her inexperience, however, her instincts told her that any sudden gesture—like breaking off the affair there and then—would be rash, that she would soon regret it. In the long run that might have been better, cleaner certainly and less tragic.

  That day they had made their way home on their bicycles as best they could, not speaking and ignoring the countryside all around them. That night she had written to him that she could never see him again, that it was wrong for the two of them to deceive his wife. I must say that my heart really went out to Konstanze at this point; for what this letter showed, above all, was not her anger at his deception, or her pity for his wife, or any kind of self pity on her part, but a simple bewilderment that people could behave so badly, so selfishly. As the days went by she was bewildered, too, by her own feelings. As a Catholic she was in no doubt that what she was involved in was wrong. At the same time, as she lived through the next few days without seeing him, without contact of any sort save her letters to him, with any prospect of seeing him, so she reacted as a woman in love for the first time: she was desolate, rudderless, adrift. She had written later—much later, when she was strong enough to admit it—that she never knew what it was like to cry until that week. The uncontrollable nature of the crying, I think, frightened her.

  She might have weathered it, though I doubt it, and as it was she didn’t see Bruno for a full week. But then two things happened. In the first place, they met by accident. She had gone to see the doctor, since she was feeling so ill, and Bruno had been in the town with his fellow pilots. He had left them and insisted on seeing her home. It was enough to renew her grief; she grew yet more bewildered at the strength of feeling within her and the kind of peace she felt when Bruno was around.

  There was also, I think, a second something that had an effect on Konstanze, something that made her even more attractive in my eyes. With her family upbringing, the father and mother she had, Konstanze was very familiar with tragedy. In a sense she had been prepared for it all her life and, in the affair with Bruno, had been rewarded with her very own. His unattainability was, for her, almost a natural state of affairs, no more than she had come to expect. It was invariably what happened to lovers in Shakespeare or Goethe.

  And so, after their accidental meeting, they went on seeing each other. She fell into the new relationship a bit like her father assumed a new role onstage. She never demanded to see Bruno, never made scenes, was content to have him when he could get away. She was still living with her parents, but she never told them or her sister. They knew she was seeing someone but did not question why she never brought him home.

  These were terrible, wonderful weeks for Konstanze. The weather improved so that the countryside was available to them as never before. Bruno, trying harder now because he sensed she might call a halt at any minute, was at his most enchanting, giving her little lectures about badger life, or what goes on inside a tree. In those days the rivers and streams of Europe were much cleaner than now, and Bruno would collect fresh river water and take it home for Konstanze to wash her hair in. When they were together they kept busy, moving around or concert-going: both knew that it was dangerous to slow down, that that would, paradoxically, hasten a breach.

  When she was with Bruno, Konstanze thought about nothing but that day. She made sure she always had a surprise for him: one time it might be a pair of gloves she had found; on another occasion it was a medieval map of the area on which she had marked all the places they had visited by bicycle.

  When she wasn’t with him, Konstanze was very different. The day after a jaunt, she would be ready to end it again. The affair was wrong; she was strong enough to make it on her own and, in any case, she wanted children some day. That could never happen with Bruno.

  She would go to confession. I was never very sure whether Konstanze’s confessor was good for her or not. By today’s standards, he would no doubt be regarded as terrific, since he listened to Konstanze’s story and was not very censorious. He had obviously decided that here was a young, attractive woman who had got herself into a terrible predicament and that to punish her for it only added to her difficulties. Which was fine as far as it went, except that the confessor’s approach simply meant that she was allowed to unburden herself every time she sat in the confessional. And that was undoubtedly therapeutic. The priest, I believe, helped the affair continue.

  And so Konstanze’s emotions seesawed horribly, or wonderfully, depending on the direction they were going in. One day she ate voraciously, the next nothing at all as she worried over her appearance and whether Bruno preferred her in this skirt or that—tighter—dress.

  Somehow the first few traumatic days turned into weeks, then months. On the days she didn’t see Bruno she felt, she had written, that there was a hand around her heart, squeezing it so that it slowed down and hurt. She hated the way her feelings were beyond her control. She imagined bumping into him as she had done that day after the doctor’s and often walked miles out of her way in case that should happen; it never did. But on the days before she was to see Bruno, she developed a routine, getting ready to make herself extra pretty for him, planning their trips and so forth. Then, on the mornings of the days on which they did meet, a wonderful calm settled on her—or, rather, it arose from within her, the hand was released from around her heart and she knew, she wrote, that such a wonderful feeling could not be wrong, whatever the Catholic church might say.

  Up to a point the new arrangement worked. Konstanze was not a woman to plot or scheme. In no sense did she try to ensnare Bruno. Their love affair simply suited her personality as if it had been made for her. Konstanze asked only two things. First, that she be allowed to write to him at his base. It was a way of being with him. Since Bruno’s wife lived off base, and he visited her on weekends, he agreed to this. Thus the letter-writing began.

  Konstanze’s second condition was that Bruno make love to her. At first he was reluctant, for he was not entirely without honor, either toward his wife or Konstanze. And, in those days contraception was an unreliable, as well as an ugly, business. But inevitably, of course, it happened.

  It was not until this point in the letters that Konstanze’s Catholicism began to matter. As a fellow Catholic, I found her behavior and attitude extraordinary. Later, I began to understand.

  I came to realize that, as a Catholic, she regarded Bruno as her chosen love. She had no ambitions outside of this relationship and so, believed that she should give herself to him totally. She could never marry him, barring the death of his wife, but in
a sense she was willing to be a wife to him. She convinced herself that he didn’t love his wife, that she—Konstanze—was really the person he had been intended for. She knew she couldn’t have all of him, but she couldn’t live without him, either, so she settled willingly, if not entirely happily, for what she could have. In a way it was perfect that the relationship suffered a flaw; the melancholy twist to her nature actually meant that she enjoyed her unhappiness.

  She moved out of her parents’ house and found an apartment in Munich. That was a great success, and for a while, being out of the family hothouse, her melancholic streak disappeared. Though she clearly still had enormous guilt feelings about Bruno and could not stop being a Catholic overnight, yet she was able to screen them from him when they were together. She even became flirtatious—well, as flirtatious as someone with her constitution could be.

  They discovered a number of boat rides on the Isar and other rivers and would take their bicycles on board, sail downstream for an hour or so, then cycle back. Gradually—I could sense it—she began to relax. She loved picnics and was never happier than when she and Bruno had stumbled upon a new spot.

  Their favorite location was on a small river, the Amper, above a watermill. Centuries before, the ox-bows of this river had been straightened by diligent monks in order to hasten the water race and, by speeding up the mill, make it more efficient. So that made the river unusual: it was flowing water and had the mini-ecology of a stream, but at that spot it was as straight as a canal. This had made it ideal for a family of kingfishers. Their vivid blue bodies hurtled along the stream just above the water line and under the tunnel of overhanging trees, dead straight like fighter planes. Bruno, I read, loved that. He climbed the willows on the banks so he could get an early warning before the blue flashes whizzed by.

  One day they made love by the river and Konstanze teased Bruno wonderfully. I found myself grinning as I read the letter. At quite the wrong moment she had told him that a kingfisher had just zoomed past. The look on his face, at what he had missed, made her helpless with laughter.

  When he realized it had been a joke, he playfully pretended to throw Konstanze into the river. Equally playfully, she resisted. When, however, a kingfisher really had hurtled by, Bruno had looked up and stopped what he was doing. The couple became unbalanced and, screaming and laughing, they had both toppled into the stream.

  And so, after a fashion, they were happy. They had a routine, but she was more in love with him than he was with her; since he was married, that was probably for the best.

  This balance didn’t last. She had been right in her instincts: Bruno did love her and his feelings deepened and strengthened.

  For his birthday she had planned a special treat, including lunch at their favorite restaurant in Munich. It took a bit of arranging but, in the end, she managed it. It poured with rain that day so it was just as well she had decided not to have a picnic, which had been her other thought.

  They met at the restaurant and, as usual, Bruno was late. After he had taken off his soaking raincoat, and ordered his one glass of wine, and she had kissed him happy birthday, he had glanced at the menu.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed.

  “Bruno, what is it?” She appeared very calm.

  “Have you seen what’s on the menu?”

  “What do you mean?”

  For reply he beckoned to the waiter. “George, what on earth is this?”

  The waiter hurried over. “What’s that, Herr Bruno?” The couple were well known in the restaurant by now.

  “Kingfisher’s eggs, that’s what. You can’t eat them, can you?”

  “Oh, but yes. They are delicious. We don’t often get them; they are quite rare. But when we do, they always go very quickly. Would you like some?”

  “No, I would not,” said Bruno firmly, disgusted. Then, as an afterthought: “Where do you get them from? The market?”

  “No, no. They are local, from the river Amp …”

  “Where?” Bruno exploded.

  “… the river Amper. The eggs are quite expensive and the monks can use the money.”

  “Damn mon—” Bruno was in the middle of speaking when Konstanze and the waiter could hold out no longer. Both of them collapsed into laughter.

  “Chump,” said Konstanze, lifting a package onto the table. “You’d believe anything. I hope you like this: happy birthday, darling.”

  Bruno, who had been bewildered for a moment, before he realized he was having his leg pulled, now marvelled at Konstanze. As a pilot in the Luftwaffe, he was used to being treated as little short of a god, by women especially. That Konstanze thought of him as all too mortal he liked. In fact he more than liked it.

  By the time Konstanze had moved out of her parents’ house it was already 1934. As the year turned into 1935, and Bruno was promoted, it became clear that he was falling more and more heavily for Konstanze. His letters became longer, more intimate. Hers for a time became responses to his whereas before it had been the other way around. He began to talk of having children. I gained the impression that Bruno had become a little frightened at the strength of his feeling for Konstanze and often tried out new thoughts, new ideas, on paper rather than bring them up in conversation. Whether it was the lovemaking, which Konstanze described in vivid and moving detail later, or whether Bruno’s marriage was deteriorating for different reasons, eventually, he introduced into one of his letters the dreaded word. Divorce.

  In one sense, of course, there was nothing either of them wanted more than for this to happen. But Bruno, now quite miserable, insufficiently appreciated Konstanze’s Catholicism, which forced her to forbid divorce despite the love she felt for him. Also, her sense of the tragic was still with her after all this time. She would not let Bruno leave his wife. She had achieved a kind of tragic happiness. I imagined that she thought of herself as an amalgam of Lear’s Cordelia and Faust’s Margareta.

  At this point I noticed—with a start—the first chalky streaks of daylight slithering into the room; the cathedral bells would soon be sounding six o’clock, but I was still wide awake, engrossed in my reading.

  The more Konstanze’s insistence on her tragic stance grew, the more bewildered Bruno became. He wanted to tell his wife about their affair; Konstanze forbade it. He wanted her to come to a dance at the base with him, but she had been to confession again and the priest had told her plainly that what she was doing was a sin. She could certainly not appear in public at a dance. He wanted a photograph of her to carry in his wallet; she said it was “too dangerous.”

  His letters became more frequent than once a week, and his writing, once so precise and level on the page, became unwieldy and difficult to read. He declared his love for Konstanze repeatedly in the letters of these weeks, so much so that it became monotonous and his were the only pages of the entire correspondence that I began to skip over. Then he began to discuss his wife, not her faults, as one might have expected under the circumstances, but her strengths and the reasons he had fallen in love with her and married her in the first place. Konstanze didn’t recognize the warning signs. I’m not sure that I would have either, but, when his revelation came, it was not quite the surprise to me that it obviously had been for her.

  His wife had guessed there was another woman. The two women had never met and never did meet, but Bruno could not have gone on loving Konstanze for very much longer without any wife in the world guessing that something was wrong. They were lucky to have had the time they did.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I saw that Bruno’s untidy scrawl was the first outward sign of what was going on inside his head. The second sign may have come when he started singing his wife’s praises to Konstanze. He may have felt that he would lose both of them, when his wife found out about his affair, and threatened to leave him. His letters made it clear that his wife wanted to divorce him; that she was trying hard to find out through his friends who Konstanze was, so that she could cite her in the petition.

  Konstanze
, of course, was devastated all over again, only more so this time. Over the previous weeks she had learned to relax with Bruno, to hold the awful truth of his adultery—and her complicity—in suspension. It had never gone away entirely but it had become manageable. Now, like a huge black weight, her sin engulfed her. She could not see other women in the street as other than wives who might be wronged by someone such as she. She could look no other woman in the face, nor yet herself in the mirror. She broke down three times in confession, the third time so badly that the priest was moved to come round to her side of the confessional and comfort her. One day she had to travel out of Munich in connection with her job, and the bus went near the spot on the Isar where Bruno had first told her he was married. Again, the deep sobs were unstoppable, to the bewildered concern of the other passengers on the bus.

  After this short trip, and the anguish and public discomfort it had caused her, Konstanze had returned to Munich with her mind made up. Bruno should do all he could to save his marriage. She still loved him and would remain faithful to him, but she would not marry him, even if he was divorced, because she could not recognize that divorce; her church forbade it. She advised him to devote all his attentions to his wife for a while.

  Konstanze’s strength, or stubbornness, must have been thoroughly perplexing to Bruno. She refused to see that his wife might never take him back and he could not believe that Konstanze would wait for him while he tried to make a new start with his wife. In his eyes he was losing both of them.

  Briefly—very briefly—his letters became viciously angry. He accused Konstanze of being a masochist and a sadist, of reveling in the mess they had all created. Konstanze, I have to say, did not entirely disagree. In reply to Bruno’s short, angry period, she wrote him a considerate, loving letter, in which she set out many of her own feelings on meeting him. It was from this letter that I was able to reconstruct much of their earlier relationship.