The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  I pocketed my pipe and picked up my hat. “I must go. There are other people I have to see and, from what I can tell”—I tapped the side of my nose with a finger—“your lunch is ready. Can’t keep a growing boy waiting.”

  Maybe she smiled, maybe she didn’t.

  I held out my hand stiffly and she took it. I left by the side door, before she could speak again. I didn’t stop or turn around to see if she was watching me go. I would be back and she knew it. She had mixed feelings about me, of course. But, as I walked back to my car along the lakeshore, I felt better than I had in days. And it wasn’t just the sunshine. I had quite deliberately left the cigarettes on the table where she had watched me pick up my cap. She had made no attempt to give them back.

  2

  I didn’t go back the next day. All the other interrogators had dashed in, spent three or four hours with Mrs. von Zell, failed, then dashed off again. For my approach to work I had to be as different from them as Rudolf was from Bruno. I also had to give the impression that I was in no special hurry, that time was on my side and not her ally as it had been against all the others. I wanted to make it appear that I had other things on my mind—that, to me, there were more important things in life than military affairs.

  Fortunately the good weather held. In fact, it continued to improve as if the military authorities in the area had decreed that April was to be officially a part of summer. I spent the intervening day exploring the surrounding countryside: I had plans. And I spent a while on the phone talking to Saul Wolfert. As yet he had no news for me but I told him about the pencil mark around the village of Krumau on that swelling in the river Kamp. He agreed to search in the village once he had checked out the forthcoming marriages in Zurich. He was enjoying Vienna, finding it just as enticing as Maurice had—girls, coffeehouses, the architecture. I was envious. Just then I seemed to envy a lot of people.

  Two days after my first visit to Mondsee I again followed the winding road along the Fuschl Valley. I took care this time to arrive later in the morning so that the sun was well clear of the mountains and the air already hot. Again I parked in the trees at the edge of the lake. Three figures, in a low black boat, fished for saibling.

  I walked back along the empty road, aware that the heat of the day was already melting stretches of tar on its surface. It smelled fusty, not unlike coal.

  This time I didn’t knock at the door but instead I sat down unannounced beneath one of the trees in the garden. I put down the parcel I had brought with me and started to light my pipe. I reclined, listening to the sounds around me: a tractor, like a huge and insistent dentist’s drill boring into the mountainside; the creak of the tree above me; a lawn mower somewhere rasping through the grass; birds, cleverly finding the silences in between everything else. Seven or eight minutes passed before I heard a door click open.

  There was a pause. I looked around.

  “I didn’t recognize you without your uniform. What are you doing there in my garden? I told you, I do not know where my husband is.”

  I held up my package. “I have something for you. I didn’t know whether you were in, and since I’m in no hurry, I thought I’d enjoy the sun and the smells until you came out. America doesn’t smell like Europe. America doesn’t really smell. That’s one of the things I miss.”

  She sniffed.

  I held up the package again. “Music. Schubert, Chopin, Mozart’s Adagio in B.” They were the booklets I had been given by Allie, the ones Rudolf had left in Berchtesgaden. But Konstanze didn’t know that, yet.

  She looked at me, trying to work out my motives for bringing the package and her own true reaction. As before, she was pulled between an entirely natural distrust of me and an equally natural curiosity about the music. And we were both aware that she had accepted those cigarettes the last time. Until now she hadn’t realized it, but she was already compromised.

  Before she could say anything, I spoke again. “There is a price, however.”

  She kept her expression as impenetrable as she could, moving her head just a fraction. But I could see her thinking, Surely he doesn’t imagine I will tell him where my husband is just for some sheets of music?

  “Two eggs,” I said, and enjoyed the surprised look that, for an instant, passed across her face. “You may have the music in exchange for two of those fresh eggs you were carrying the other day. Beaten into an omelet, of course.”

  I couldn’t be certain she would have any eggs left, but I had gambled that, since they were such a luxury, she would probably husband them for as long as they remained fresh.

  A silence passed between us as she tried to size up what was happening. By not coming in uniform that day, I was trying to make it easier for Konstanze to accept me. I was wearing the one suit I carried with me, a rather dreary gray one flecked in white, like the stones they spill between railway lines. It was double-breasted and with it I wore a mustard-yellow tie, luckily her favorite color.

  She was wearing a smock, very similar to the one my mother used to wear before the war, only Konstanze’s was light brown whereas my mother’s was faded blue. But otherwise it had the same halter neckline, the same untidy A shape, the same pockets in front where Konstanze now hid her hands. The smock only partially hid her figure, and I found it unexpectedly arousing. She noticed this, I believe, and curiously it played its part in her decision to allow me in that day to sample her omelet. She may have felt that since I was obviously drawn to her sexually, whereas she was merely intrigued by me, she could easily retain control of the situation. She stepped back and, taking one hand from her smock, pushed open the door for me to enter.

  “Come in then. There are a few eggs left.”

  Behind my back, where I had kept the hand not holding the package of music, I uncrossed my fingers. That old trick, in use since childhood, had worked again.

  Although I don’t think she realized it, Mrs. von Zell had just made another mistake, just lowered an important psychological barrier: she had invited me inside. That is the real reason I had stayed in the garden that day and not knocked for admission; that is why I was out of uniform. Now I was a guest of sorts, not an enemy.

  She showed me into the kitchen, a large, bright room. There was a cooking range with a large chimney on one side, a long wooden table in the center and, on the wall opposite the range, a large picture window with a view of the lake and mountains in the south.

  “Where is your son?”

  “Dieter is in the village, with Martha, our housekeeper.”

  She pulled out a chair at the end of the table. I sat down. She placed two of the biggest eggs in front of me. The shells were coated with a dusty stipple—browns and whites the color of bread, pepper, oatmeal and whiskey.

  “Won’t you have some?”

  “No.” She was firm. “I shall wait for Dieter. We always eat lunch together.”

  I was going too fast; I told myself to slow down.

  “What would you like with the eggs?”

  “Whatever is produced locally, or nothing. Some pepper, maybe.”

  “Sausage? Bread?”

  “Perfect.”

  She stood in front of the range, so erect she was almost leaning back. I watched as she cracked the eggs into the pan with one hand. The shells snapped like crisp straw in a hot sun. Below the hem of her smock her legs swerved down to the narrow ankles Rudolf had praised so well.

  “I like your smock,” I said. “It suits you.”

  She acknowledged my compliment with a nod. I knew from the letters how meticulous she was about her clothes. Every time I met her, after that, I never failed to praise her dress sense.

  The eggs slithered into the pan. The smells that began to come off the range I had anticipated, but what was unexpected was the comforting effect which the spitting of the eggs produced. It was a homey cooking sizzle that I had forgotten and it made me suddenly nostalgic. I told her.

  She was suspicious. She could not believe, I suppose, that an interrogation could t
ake this form. Nor could she understand when I made a fuss as she laid the table. She found it extraordinary, and perhaps a little false, which it was not, that I took such pleasure in knives with real bone handles, or napkins made out of flowered material. Without asking, almost without thinking, she poured me half a glass of red wine to have with the omelet. It was light, young, red as a damson and from a bottle that was already open. I realized with a jerk how much I missed a culture where wine was taken for granted.

  “When shall you return home, Lieutenant?”

  A normal question at last! That was a good sign. If we could have an ordinary, plain, dull conversation, I was truly making progress. Yet maybe that question was more than it seemed. Konstanze von Zell, I reminded myself, was not to be underestimated.

  I lied. “Not for ages yet. The American Government has made the university promise to keep my job open indefinitely, another year at least. But I don’t know where home is anymore.” I expanded upon what I had already told her about my wife and her new companion. I explained that I was not looking forward to my return.

  She was back by the range, standing in front of the frying pan. She had thrown in a piece of bread, which was smoking. She didn’t look at me as she said, “You are a good-looking man. You will have no problems.”

  “Looks aren’t everything. Some of the most happily married couples I know started off by not being in love with each other because one was perhaps much better-looking than the other. Their feelings grew.”

  I had bent my words deliberately to suit Konstanze’s situation in the early days with Rudolf. She looked across and gave me a smile of agreement. It was thin, brief, but a smile nonetheless. The first.

  She served the eggs and sausage with the fried bread, which was rusty-looking and sodden with cooking fat. She sat down at the other end of the table, not so much to be away from me as to catch the sun, fingering in through the window. She made no attempt at conversation; she distrusted me too much for that. Yet I had the feeling she wanted to talk. She sat with her elbows on the table, her arms wrapped around her shoulders. She looked out through the window, to a point far away. Again I was aroused; she looked starved of more than companionship—a healthy, full body, unused in months.

  In between mouthfuls—which were so hot, yellow and fresh that it was like swallowing the sunshine outside—I took a small book from my pocket. “I came across this yesterday, in Linz. I’m hoping to get a chance to use it.” It was called The Baroque Churches of Central Europe by an English schoolmaster.

  She stopped looking out of the window, stopped being concerned with that point, some way off, and reached across for the book. She glanced at the spine and leafed through it.

  “You play the organ at the church in Mondsee, Mrs. von Zell. Have you visited many other churches?”

  “No. I am only the deputy organist here, so I play perhaps once a week, practice twice.” She put the book down, not really a bookish person. “But I go to church every day. I have not been anywhere else.”

  Who, I wondered, did she pray for when she went to church?

  “The Mondsee church is in the book. I checked. It says the church has a wonderful altar as well as a fine organ.”

  “Yes, they both are rather lovely. The stained glass is worth seeing too.”

  She had again been gazing out the window, lost in her own private world, as remote as the mountains she could see but wasn’t looking at. Absently, she cut me another slice of bread, more a wedge really, from the outer crust of a round, flat loaf. I used it to wipe what was left of the eggs from my plate. I finished my wine.

  “That was delicious. The best fresh eggs I’ve had since breakfast.”

  She looked sharply at me, but I was smiling, and she relaxed. She shoved the book back along the table with another small smile. Her second.

  I sat back. Any smoker will know that, after such a treat, only a cigarette, or in my case a pipe, can complete the enjoyment. I squirmed in my pocket and put the pipe on the table. Then, along with my tobacco, I brought out another pack of Mrs. von Zell’s favorite cigarettes. She hesitated, but not for long, and this time allowed me to light it for her. I cannot say that, in smoking together after the eggs, any kind of intimacy was beginning to grow between us. That wasn’t true. She was still stiff, still distrustful of me, still distant. But, compared with how they had been, things were easier. The tension was going, whatever she might do to maintain it. I felt more confident of what I was about to say, which, I am ashamed to recall, I had rehearsed in some detail.

  “You know, five years ago today, I was married.” I smiled sadly. “It was one of the few days in history that it has rained in California. We had invited fifty people to the reception, in a garden. They all had to fit into one tiny room. It was awful—it was because of the crush that my new wife and I had our first argument. Then two years ago today, in 1944, I remember that I was in Cambridge, making a survey of beautiful buildings in northern France and Holland. We didn’t know where the invasion was coming, or when, so we had been told to prepare a list of buildings to be spared the shells and bombs, if possible, a list to be handed out to colonels at the last minute. It would be an interesting historical document now, that list. It stretched from the tip of Britanny nearly into Denmark. Last year at this time I was in the Loire, trying to locate some tapestries that had disappeared from Chenonceaux. Funny how you remember certain dates. Have you ever been to the Loire, Mrs. von Zell?”

  “No.”

  Why was she lying? Was it because I had intruded again into her private life? Or was it perhaps because she had gone to the Loire with Rudolf to sample wines and wine was dangerous territory? Tantalizing.

  “My memories of Europe before the war—my family’s part of Germany at any rate—were of endless days of sunshine. But that time in Cambridge and last year in the Loire were just like my wedding day—wet, wet, wet. Thank God the weather is different now.”

  Smile number three. “This weather is more typical than you think. Everyone imagines Austria under fathoms of snow, but spring and summer here are much more interesting. The countryside is so mountainous, and the altitude varies so much, we have far more flowers, and birds, than flatter places. Fewer trees, maybe, but trees are much duller than flowers, don’t you agree? If you do look at the churches, Lieutenant—or should I say Professor?—don’t ignore the flowers.”

  Privately, I thought botany was beyond me. You don’t get to thirty and not know what a narcissus looks like, or an elm, without having a “block” of some sort. But I made agreeable noises about the flowers and brought the conversation back to more useful things, more in line with the plan that was beginning to form inside my head.

  “You know, I am amazed that more churches have not been bombed out of existence. The town of Donauwörth, for instance, was very largely destroyed, but Heiligkreuz, its most imposing church, survived. Innsbruck was badly hit, but otherwise churches there are intact. It probably has something to do with the many pilgrimage churches in these parts, which were usually built in the countryside, unlike in Italy, where the churches are all at the center of busy towns.”

  But I had lost her attention. There were voices on the path—her son and the housekeeper had returned. She rose and I got up too. It was, in any case, time to leave. I had more or less achieved what I had set out to do that second day—to bring her the music, persuade her to invite me in, to raise the question of dates, showing her slyly how similar we were in some respects. To show her that I was first and foremost a professor, interested in art and architecture, not an intimidating soldier.

  This time she shook hands less stiffly and smiled again. Four.

  3

  The next day was Saturday, the day of the dance. I set off early to explore the countryside around Salzburg. I visited the waterfalls at Krimml, the ones Konstanze had described in her letters as “crowded with light.” The weather was brilliant and I saw what she meant. I went to the glacier at Dachstein and I followed the Salzach River
in my car, noting its features, the countryside and the villages it flowed through. I didn’t get back to the hotel until nearly seven o’clock, leaving me not much time to change. One couldn’t arrive late at the dance; it would be like a cattle market—men would choose an available woman and then stick to her all night. Army dances abroad were like that.

  Ulrich, the Oliver Hardy look-alike concierge at the hotel, gave me two messages when I arrived back.

  The first was in Sammy’s writing; he must have dropped it off earlier in the day. It read, “Bad news and even worse news I am afraid. The bad news is that at close of business last night Confederate Paper was up twelve cents on the day, following an agreement between the U.S. and several European countries, concerning the supply of certain basics, paper included. That takes your friend Ghent’s stake to $1,062 by my calculation. The worse news, I’m afraid, is that while people don’t appear yet to have picked up the habit of insuring things—Atlantic Insurance hasn’t moved either way—Metropolitan Motors are on the way up again—don’t groan but they rose yesterday by all of fifty cents. Hope this doesn’t spoil the dance for you. S.H.”

  I sighed.

  Sammy must have come into the office that day and brought the second message with him, for it was a wire from Maurice, now back home in Offenbach, and it had been sent to my headquarters.

  “Hermann doing well after her confinement,” he had written. “But your Panama hat has seen better days. Two pups only are left; number three—a girl—has disappeared, possibly eaten by something or other. The survivors move about, squeak, eat shirts and do all sorts of unspeakable things which I shall clean up before you return. They appear to be boys so suggest Dwight and Winston unless you prefer Monty and Patton. Hurry home. M.”