The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  I had studied our army maps overnight and had brought the local one with me. We could escape Mondsee by the back roads to meet Konstanze’s condition. It meant taking the least direct route a couple of times but the day was so glorious no one minded that. None of us spoke for a while, each of us adjusting to what the other’s company felt like. There was plenty to see.

  Eventually I could no longer avoid the more important roads and we found ourselves in a line of traffic, army trucks mainly.

  “I thought we’d start with Krimml,” I said above the noise. “I’m told the waterfall there is wonderful and I thought it would be more fun for Dieter than spending the whole day in dreary churches.”

  “It’s ever so high,” Dieter piped up. “We went last year, with Daddy. It takes the water six and a half seconds to fall from top to bottom. Someone timed it.”

  “The church is interesting, though,” I added, again falling back on what I knew from the letters. “It has some fine mosaics showing the lives of the saints, which is unusual for a baroque church.”

  “What’s a mosaic?” said Dieter.

  His mother answered, sounding a little bit like Sammy Hartt, except that she wasn’t trying to flatter anyone or ingratiate herself. She was genuinely interested in the subject and quite knowledgeable. It had been a good ploy of mine to raise the topic; Konstanze relaxed as she spoke to her son.

  It took just over an hour to arrive at Krimml, not bad considering we didn’t go through Salzburg. Dieter was a definite speed fanatic, urging me to go faster whenever we could. At Krimml, Konstanze insisted on going to the church first. “Dieter will be tired later, so I’d like him to have a quick look now.” She led the way inside, marching purposefully and pulling the boy with her.

  The church was an all-white building on the outside with the now familiar twin towers. Once inside Konstanze made no immediate attempt to view the decorations or the pictures, but walked down the main aisle halfway, stopped, lowered herself on to one knee and crossed herself. Then she slid into a pew to pray. Dieter, beside her, copied her movements. He’d been in similar situations before, in Mondsee.

  This posed a problem for me. What did I do? I was not a religious man. I was eager to ingratiate myself with Konstanze, to make her like me, but religion is one of those things people have difficulty lying about—even me. So I hesitated. I knew she might think less of me if I didn’t say a short prayer, but I had my own conscience to think about. A malleable commodity, I know, but there was still a little of it left. In the end I sat a row or two behind the other two, looked about the church and waited.

  As she raised her head and slid back onto her seat, I rose and walked forward, down the main aisle, looking up at the dark, carved pulpit. She might assume that, behind her, I had been praying also. She followed me, our boots clacking in unison on the white marble floor. I pointed out the carvings on the pulpit, which were scenes from Paul’s conversion (her favorite story as I knew, but was not supposed to know). She was pleased, as I had intended her to be; the day was going well. As we circled around the nave, looking up at the pulpit, the pictures, the ceiling and down at the mosaics, I found that I returned with ease to my old lecturing style. My gestures and mannerisms came back from my subconscious where they had been buried. Students had told me that I had a way of hesitating, of biting my bottom lip, when I wished to indicate that I had reached a point about which even I, as a professor, was uncertain. I had forgotten this, but it came back now, as strong as the tide.

  Mrs. von Zell was no ordinary student, and it was she more than I who set the tone and the flavor of our relationship that morning. She listened to me civilly enough for a while but then let me know that she saw me for what I was—an educated but godless professor who saw only stones, carved wood and paintings where she saw—well, the glories of worship, love, pity, the search for companionship, for meaning.

  “Don’t whisper, Professor,” she boomed at one point. “There’s nothing shameful here. If you don’t believe in God, there’s no one to overhear you. If you do, He can hear you anyway.” It was a reprimand to emphasize that she could tell I did not spend my time in churches as a worshiper, and that whispering was my way of keeping my distance. But she made it a joke nonetheless and we both managed to smile.

  We took some postcards of the church, which, as a sentimental hoarder of things, I knew Konstanze would appreciate. We sat in the churchyard writing. I had a brand-new pen which Dieter admired, the latest issue from the Army, with an eraser on the end. Konstanze, with her passion for pens, liked it, too, I could tell. But she didn’t say much.

  We left the church and explored the town; the waterfalls were to be saved until after lunch. Krimml was a small place, built on a steep slope just below the tree line, so it was pleasantly leafy. There seemed to be nothing but patisseries, but eventually we found a restaurant proper with a terrace that overlooked a skating rink. I ordered wine, an Austrian Welsch-Riesling, and we chose to eat fresh trout from the local river. While we waited for our food Dieter ran off to take a closer look at the skaters.

  I got out some cigarettes, more of the type Konstanze preferred, and as we sat in the sun, smoking. I thought what a good-looking couple we must make. Under normal circumstances I would have enjoyed my time with Konstanze, even though her child and her religion would have made her a difficult prize. But that day in Krimml I was in a hurry. I had ten days to get somewhere with her, ten days to develop our relationship to the point where she would help me. I had to move fast, to create a cocoon around us in order to distort her perspective. And to do that I had only one weapon, the personal information and the inside track the letters gave me. They had already helped me enormously, providing me with details about her love of music, her concern with dates and all the other things I had used to gain her attention and sympathy, and they had been invaluable in speeding me to the point where I was now sitting in this restaurant with her in the sun. Sooner or later it would become obvious to her that I had access to her most intimate thoughts. What then? Should I try to stage-manage things so that she gradually realized what had happened? Or would it be better if I suddenly revealed all? It might ruin everything but, on the other hand, it might advance our intimacy rapidly. What kind of man was I to be thinking in such manipulative terms anyway? My instincts were to keep quiet and use the letters as much to my advantage as possible. Slowly, slyly, I would plot my course, at least for the time being. Konstanze was very clever, very cunning, and would realize soon enough where I had found my information and what I was up to. She might even know where those booklets of music had come from.

  The waiter brought the wine and she looked at me and said, “That’s a coincidence, that was one of Rudi’s favorite wines. I didn’t recognize the name when you ordered it but I know the label. He always preferred the Austrian Riesling to the German. He said they were softer, more feminine wines. The actual word he used was ‘shyer.’”

  Fortunately I was squinting into the sun as she said all this, so I could smother my reaction. She was speaking of a wine I had selected quite by accident. I looked at the label, as she was doing, and my heart changed gears. The wine came from Krumau, the town that was circled in pencil on the map in her sewing room.

  “Was your husband an expert on wines, Mrs. von Zell?”

  She savored the Riesling before replying. “An expert amateur, I think you would have called him. That’s what he called himself. But”—she looked around, searching for Dieter—“we agreed not to mention him. It was my fault this time, I know, but you mustn’t encourage me.”

  Dieter came running up, hot and excited from the skating rink, as our food arrived. Mother and child had an easy relationship. She did not talk down to him but neither did she stand for any nonsense. Dieter was well-mannered and polite. He was, at the moment, mad to go skating and his mother agreed he could, but insisted he eat his lunch calmly first. I said I would pay for the rent of the skates as my gift for the day. Dieter looked delighted but Konstanze wa
s thoughtful.

  But I still had to move things along, using my inside knowledge. I waited until we had finished the fish and Dieter had dashed off again to the rink. “I’m a terrible skater,” I said, looking after him. “How about you?”

  She shook her head from side to side, smiling. “Awful.”

  “In fact, I’m not athletic in any real sense,” I went on. “I always left those activities to my brother. I can’t run very fast, or swim well or water ski at all. The only physical exercise that I ever get in America is bicycling.”

  Music had started up at the skating rink, a raucous, repetitive organ piece—hardly church music. She put her fingers in her ears, smiling at me. She was relaxing.

  “You know, if you had not laid down your rule—that we get away from Mondsee—we could have gone bicycling around the lake today. It would have been marvelous in this weather, and good for us to get some exercise.”

  She shook her head, wildly, as if she were trying to shake the skaters’ music out of her brain. “No. Dieter would soon have tired; and we would not have seen many churches that way, would we? No cathedrals or abbeys?”

  This was the game which, time and again, we would play in the days to come. I would invent a conversation, starting with something I had remembered from the letters. My side of the exchanges were designed to show how similar we were, to give her yet more reason for liking me, so that at the end of our time she would want to help me find the coins. Her responses were invariably wary. It was some time before she realized I had read all her letters in close detail. Usually, as on that first day when we discussed bicycling, the conversations were left unresolved; they just trailed off and each of us would read into them what we could.

  We lingered over the coffee, feeling the sun radiate off the tablecloth between us, warming our faces. Dieter eventually came back from the rink, his shins aching from the exercise. Konstanze rubbed them briskly but wasted no more attention than that on him. We were ready to explore the waterfalls.

  To some people the falls of Krimml are more impressive than either Niagara or Victoria. I had been to neither but the setting of Krimml, overlooking the beautiful Inn Valley, must take some beating. The water, boiling and giddy with millions of bubbles, launches itself down a three hundred-foot twist of rainbow to a waxy green pool below.

  Standing by the pool at the bottom, deafened by the roar, we watched the same bubbles, now silently simmering. Here the waterfall created its own climate, cold and damp, the rocks behind us permanently wet from the spray that escaped the pool. Behind the falls itself a natural cave had been formed in the stone at the insistence of the water. Dieter, being too small, could not see over the concrete balustrade designed to protect people just like him. I signaled silently to Konstanze to ask if I might lift him up so that he could see the cave. She nodded her consent.

  He was heavier than I expected. He looked lean but, as I held him, I could feel that he was in fact quite chubby. Many children in Europe, this close to the war, were still suffering its nutritional effects—undernourishment, vitamin deficiencies and so on. Not everyone of course, but these things were not uncommon. As I held Dieter aloft, and his young imagination searched the cave for demons and serpents and vipers, I wondered if his chubbiness should be a clue for me. His green and red sweater was nearly new and of fine quality. For the first time I wondered if those gold coins were helping to keep Mrs. von Zell and Dieter in reasonable comfort. Shaken, I thought: Perhaps that’s why she can get eggs—she pays in gold.

  Dieter signaled he had had enough and I put him down. Back at the car, I suggested we take the quiet road back, the one which stuck close to the river Inn; then we could find somewhere pretty to have tea. Dieter enthusiastically agreed but his mother insisted that we head straight home.

  “He’s exhausted; he won’t enjoy the tea and we won’t enjoy having him lolling about all over us.”

  So that was that—but she was right. We had not gone ten minutes that afternoon before the swaying of the car and the sweet air had sent Dieter fast asleep on the backseat. At Mondsee I was able to lift him up, carry him in and hand him over to Martha without so much as a murmur.

  2

  The next day I had to disappoint Dieter, who, I know, was looking forward to a second jaunt. I had to disappoint myself, come to that. When I had arrived back at the hotel after the Krimml expedition, I found a note addressed to me from Hobel. “Please come to the office tomorrow. And keep lunch free.”

  It turned out that a party of American and British journalists were in town and Hobel wanted me to brief them over lunch on the workings of the art recovery unit. They were like most journalists, a suspicious bunch, aggressively unashamed of their ignorance in both military and artistic matters, certain in themselves that, however philistine they were, their readers were even more so. I am sure they thought me a strange bird, if I do say so myself, with my old-fashioned pipe and a command of several languages. I am afraid that I was unable to hide my contempt for them and lunch was not a success.

  That afternoon I had a long conversation on the phone with Saul Wolfert. He was making progress. It had been fairly easy to check the forthcoming marriages in Zurich, the Swiss being a methodical and puritanical nation, and his inquiries had convinced him that Aubing, or von Zell, or whoever he was, was not going to be married in Zurich. So he had a suspect who lied, who had a reason to lie, and that interested him much more. He had already dispatched two men to Krumau with orders to be discreet and not do anything that might frighten von Zell away. If they did find him they were to watch him for a while. We needed the coins back, or what was left of them, but we also wanted to destroy the underground conduit if we could. I told Saul about the Welsch-Riesling from Krumau that had been von Zell’s favorite. That encouraged him still further.

  I reported all this to Hobel, or rather to his secretary, since he was out somewhere. She listened and said she would pass on the message, but I could tell she was disappointed I had not already been fired.

  “I didn’t see you at the dance on Saturday,” I said politely.

  She sniffed. “Dance? It was a riot. The men here are rude and contemptible.”

  “Then they have a great deal in common with the women.”

  It was unfair of me to stoop to petty exchanges, but I was in a bad mood all day that day. I felt that I was wasting time in not being able to get to Mondsee. I spent what was left of the day at Mozart’s house in Salzburg, which I had not yet seen, then had dinner alone in the hotel.

  As I ate I considered my moods during the day. I had hated having lunch with those journalists but, as the wine began to relax me, I had to admit that it had been an entirely reasonable request of Hobel’s to have me brief them. There was no imminent development in the von Zell case and I was the ranking officer in the area, with the experience and the knowledge. Why then was I so moody?

  I sipped my after-dinner coffee. The letters I had read were supposed to have given me an advantage over Mrs. von Zell. Yet, sitting there in the hotel, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t feel as though I had the upper hand. Not by a long shot. For the first time it crossed my mind that I might lose the game.

  The following day was a Thursday and was marred by the ice-cream incident.

  It had started well enough. Dieter was waiting on the swing in the garden when I pulled up outside the house. All the doors and windows of the building were wide open as the unseasonably warm weather continued. After just a few days of sunshine we were all behaving as if we were used to such a glorious climate, could rely on it and assumed it would continue forever. I sounded the horn to call Dieter’s mother from the house and then got out of the car brandishing two long, French-style baguette loaves.

  My plan that day was for us to follow the Salzach River, a device to remind her of the romantic times she had spent on or near rivers, years before with Bruno and her husband. South of Salzburg the river slips through succulent countryside, rich meadows of barley studded with knots of birch. We c
ould picnic at a spot I had in mind, a place I had reconnoitered over the weekend, and in the afternoon there were churches to visit at Kuchl and Golling. Besides the bread, I was equipped with all sorts of treats including a bottle of Welsch-Riesling, which I was trying to keep cool under my seat.

  When Konstanze appeared it seemed as if she, too, had thought of having a picnic. She was dressed in a pair of dark green trousers, with a yellow shirt under a white sweater. As she walked across the lawn to where I was gently beating Dieter’s head with one of the baguettes, I noticed that she had washed her hair again that morning; it was silky and fluffy and had been pinned back with two bright yellow combs. Her face was blotched from washing—a clean but imperfect look. Her well-kept beauty was to please herself, not me.

  “Eggs,” I cried. “That’s what we need—hard-boiled eggs. I have bread”—and I tapped Dieter’s head again with the loaf—“cheese, salami, wine and an army map of the Salzach, showing churches and picnic spots.” As she came close I could smell the soap she had scrubbed her face with and I felt an unwinding inside me. “You look good enough to eat too,” I said before I could stop myself. Several expressions competed for her features—a shy, embarrassed smile, suspicion and anger at my tactlessness in front of the boy. But embarrassment won the day and more blotches marked her cheeks. She covered by stooping down and shooing Dieter back into the house to fetch his jacket, just in case.

  “Give me five minutes to boil the eggs,” she murmured to me, straightening up. “I have some honey, too, if you like that.”

  I waved expansively, as if the sunshine were an endless gift. “We have all day.” Was honey expensive? I wondered. Where did she get it? How did she pay for it? How did she pay for anything?

  It was barely noon as I nosed the BMW into the green Salzach Valley and turned south, upstream. The Salzach is not one of Europe’s grandest rivers but it is one of the most beautiful. Its valley is narrow, its course straight and fast, its waters clear, except where the cold rocks punch the flow into white rapids. At that time cars were a real luxury and, between villages, we more or less had the road to ourselves. Before long I spotted the wooden bridge that led across the river. A narrow lane wound behind some trees, emerging as no more than a track between the water and a strip of meadow beyond. I stopped the car and the engine died.