The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  “Thank you, Saul. Yes, let’s talk every day. Thanks again.”

  I left the office that day around lunchtime and strolled back to the Goldener Hirsch, where I picked up my car. I had one or two places to reconnoiter and, in any case, being behind the wheel was relaxing.

  As I drove, first south to Bischofshofen, then east to Liezen, then north to Steyr and Enns, and finally west, back to Salzburg, I turned a new thought over in my mind. It had occurred to me while I was listening to Maurice talk about going home. It had grown while Hobel had harangued me and it had matured after Saul Wolfert had agreed to lay off raiding the warehouse in Krumau for a week.

  I had a week left with Konstanze, at most. After that—what? I was inclined to think that she would be able to resist me quite well. I passed meadows of young barley that would soon take on the color of Konstanze’s hair. Would Konstanze still be here when the barley was ripe? I knew I would not. When I thought of the weeks ahead I could not help but feel disappointed. A new sensation for me, to be sure.

  The road curved between the white peaks of the Hochwildstelle and the Hoher Dachstein, a geological stand-off that had been going on for millions of years. The enormity of these two mountains suddenly emphasized the puny dimensions of the BMW, and me inside it, but that in turn only directed my attention to the huge well of feelings I was harboring. There were these giant cold mountains to my right and left, totally inert, and here was I, in the middle, minuscule by comparison, but seething with emotion.

  When I have a problem making up my mind there are two stages to the decision. First, there is the stage when your intuition decides but your conscious brain has yet to find the courage of your body’s convictions. Then that conviction seeps upward, like an invisible hormone, and enters your brain. There is nothing sudden about this. It is a subtle process of osmosis in which your brain changes without your being aware of it.

  As I wound my way between the Austrian alps that afternoon, my mind was made up for me by my body. I didn’t know it until later.

  6

  The garden outside Konstanze’s house seemed curiously empty when I arrived the next day. The swing had been taken down, all the balls and other toys removed, the balcony tidied. In fact, all signs of childhood had been eradicated as if, it seemed, Dieter was never coming back.

  I remarked on this when Konstanze answered the door.

  “Oh—no! That’s just Martha. She worships Dieter and always lets him have his way. Then when he goes back to school she collects up his things and looks after them until next time. She’s like a mother hen.”

  “Did she like the binoculars?” I stepped aside to let Konstanze into the sunshine. She didn’t seem unwilling for me to be there.

  “Yes. Except for the fact that they were American-made, but Dieter set her right about that.” She smiled to herself as she said this and I began to wonder what she had planned for me this time. Usually, whenever I had made a move forward, she responded. What would she do today, after my gaff about her son’s birthday?

  For the time being she just stood in the garden, letting the sun shine on her face.

  “I thought we might venture farther afield today,” I said, trying to sound bright, breezy, innocuous. “Now that we have no Dieter to go with us and get tired, we could look at some of the large monasteries as well as the churches.”

  “Martha wants to go with us.”

  “What?” I was flummoxed. “Is she really interested in religious architecture and art?”

  “She thinks we need a chaperone.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “It’s true. She says Dieter was a chaperone of sorts. Now there’s no one. So she must come.”

  Martha I could do without. But what I said was, “What do you think?”

  “That depends,” she said, the glimmer of a mocking smirk about her lips, “on what your designs are.”

  “I don’t have any designs,” I said quickly—perhaps too quickly. I looked straight at her. “We have a pact. I played fair and did as you asked with Dieter.” I paused. “I don’t think it would be fair to take Martha.”

  She chuckled. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t dream of it. But it was worth pretending, just to see the look of horror on your silly face. To know that you can be human.”

  Before I met Konstanze I had liked to pride myself on the fact that, as with all good interrogators, I could blow hot and cold whenever I wished, to soften up the opposition. I had planned something of the kind for her at first and to begin with I had achieved it. Now, however, I had the distinct impression that she was returning the compliment. On our last outing I had blundered, and she had been chilly. Now, instead of being just as cold, as she was entitled to be, she was—for no reason that I could see—being wonderfully warm. I was the one being confused.

  Rather than think more, I sought refuge in action. “Let’s sneak off,” I whispered. “Before Martha has a chance to invite herself.”

  Together, like a pair of teenage elopers, we slipped quietly across the grass and into the car. Unfortunately, the BMW did not start at first and I had to try again, making an awful din. The noise brought Martha to the window of the music room, where she was cleaning. She shouted something we couldn’t hear, but her expression said it all. The engine barked into life and we sped off.

  The BMW purred along smoothly as we headed for the Enns Valley, which I had reconnoitered the day before. The escape from Martha had tickled Konstanze just as much as it had me and put us in a relaxed, familiar frame of mind.

  Over the next few days Martha became increasingly forbidding and angry. Each morning she would come to the balcony of the house and watch in fierce silence as we left without her. If it was designed to deter me and to make Konstanze feel guilty, it didn’t succeed. If anything, it had the opposite effect. She simply made Konstanze and me feel like disobedient children and forced us closer together. Unintentionally, Martha was an ally.

  In the days after Dieter went back to school, his mother and I moved farther and farther afield, as I had hoped. We visited monasteries that were more arresting architecturally and more interesting historically than the small churches we had already seen.

  We went to Melk, which was built by the Benedictines in 1111. Positioned dramatically on top of a rock two hundred feet above an arm of the Danube, it can claim to be one of the more beautiful sites in Europe. Inside, the church is a mass of gold and reddish ocher, with little wall space that is not decorated.

  Wilhering, I explained when we visited it the next day, was just thirty-five years younger than Melk, founded in 1146. The entire abbey, except for the porch, had been burned down in 1733 and rebuilt with a glorious reddish cornice running around the entire church.

  Konstanze listened attentively to my occasional art history lectures, and she seemed impressed by my scholarship. She was a good listener and a quick learner. But even in this she insisted on equality. She was, for instance, familiar with many of the lesser-known saints represented in the stuccowork and with whom I was completely unfamiliar. People like St. Notburga, who was the patron saint of hired hands. According to legend, as Konstanze told me, this saint had refused to reap corn on a Sunday and, when forced to do so, her scythe had jumped miraculously from her hand and suspended itself in midair, just out of reach. Another was St. Dorothy, who, on the way to her execution for converting heathens, was asked mockingly to send down flowers and fruit when she got to the heavenly garden; after her death a child miraculously appeared with a basket of fruit and roses. And St. Genevieve, St. Ursula, St. Marcella … I was not unaware that all Konstanze’s saints were female.

  I was impressed by her knowledge and her devotion. More than once she was visibly moved when I described the circumstances surrounding the building of the churches or abbeys we visited. At some a vision had been seen there, or a miracle performed, or a martyr killed. Her ability to identify with religious suffering was remarkable. It was old-fashioned but it also had a link with that melancholic streak
she had grown up with. Perhaps, I thought to myself, that streak helped Konstanze become so devout.

  It was now that she began to take confession. This disturbed me even more than her prayers. What was she confessing? The little lapses in her life? Her thoughts? What thoughts? Perhaps—I imagined—she was confessing to her relationship with me. But if so, what relationship? We hadn’t so much as touched. I found myself wondering whether, in her own mind, she had betrayed Rudolf yet and whether that was what she was discussing with the priest.

  I wasn’t the first authority figure in history to want to know what was going on inside the confessional, and that provoked another thought. If she could confess her sins and be absolved, didn’t that give her an advantage in our game? She was aware that a safety valve was available to her through confession that was not available to me.

  Sitting in those monasteries and abbeys, I would be deliciously content one minute, happy that I was with the most interesting and complex woman I had ever met, and tormented by doubts the next, painfully aware of the fact that, three weeks after I had started this “interrogation,” I could not be certain that I was any further along.

  It was while I was sitting in the nave at Sonntagberg, a magnificent church on the top of a hill, where you can see for fifteen kilometers in every direction, and which has a striking fresco above the altar, a masterpiece by Daniel Gran in gray, green and gold, that I first began to concede to the feeling that had formed in my unconscious the day I drove in that large circle from Salzburg. At last I could see that there was an alternative to my plan for worming information out of Konstanze. I believe that in the stillness of the church, the late sun washing the plasterwork beneath the dome, I actually whispered my thoughts aloud. I could let the interrogation fail. I remember repeating the sentence to myself, amazed that the church walls around me didn’t tremble and fall down. Konstanze had finished praying and had disappeared into the confessional. The more I thought about my change of plan, the better I liked it and the easier it seemed to bring it off. Three other interrogators had failed before me, so it would not look suspicious. Hobel was a fool and there was no way that he would succeed where I had failed. It meant that a handful of Nazis—Bormann, maybe, Eichmann perhaps, Mengele—would scramble to safety in South America. But, I found myself thinking, the war was over; it was time to put away wartime things, as Maurice had said. And did all that matter anyway, if I could persuade Konstanze to come back to America with me?

  Then I would check myself. These were ridiculous, even dangerous, thoughts. Probably treasonable. I had my job to do; I had been an anti-Nazi all my adult life. And, for all I knew, the feelings I had developed for Konstanze were part of her counterplot, her plan to resist me. She had made me fall for her so that I would have the ideas I was now having, so that I would think along precisely these lines.

  As these subversive notions raced in and out of my mind, Konstanze had still not appeared from behind the confessional curtain. Sometimes I could hear the murmur of her voice, or the brief, gruff tones of the priest as he replied. But never could I decipher what was being said.

  I got up and went outside to try to catch whatever breeze there was and clear my mind.

  In this uncertain and unsatisfactory way we visited monasteries at Garsten and Christkindl, Krems and Schlierbach, Traisen and St. Pölten.

  The more monasteries we visited, the more expert Konstanze became at recognizing the style of Prandtauer, a fresco by Altomonte or a painting by Troger. Being Konstanze, she was not content to be the passive recipient of the knowledge I gave her. She had to twist it to her own use. Troger she called “the Dragon” because she spotted his aptitude for painting this mythical animal; Altomonte she called “Adolf,” since he seemed unusually keen to paint people with mustaches—very rare in religious art where the male figures are either clean shaven or bearded. These were not idle nicknames, as I had to admit. Konstanze was making points about both painters that I had overlooked.

  Nonetheless, it was also true that I was giving Konstanze something—knowledge which fitted well with her religious devotion, something that added to her understanding of religion and that could not fail to produce a growing intimacy between us. I was pleased. The letters, or rather the fact that I had read them, began to bother me more and more. It had been wrong. I wanted to make amends.

  For a couple of days, as I recall, the pattern of our expeditions changed. Sight-seeing and lunch played less of a part. We concentrated on the churches and the monasteries, sometimes visiting three or four a day. In its turn this produced a change in us. Whatever the reason for our initial “pact,” by this point the relationship had taken on a vigor of its own. It had its own humor, its own rhythms, most important, its own satisfactions. We were now growing more at ease with one another. Sometimes, if I inadvertently revealed something gained from the letters, as when I drew her attention to a nougat factory in Wels, knowing that nougat was her favorite, she would sink back into silence for a while. But these periods got shorter and shorter.

  For two days we concentrated on religion and on architecture. For my part, I was so anxious to preserve the tone of things that I stopped going into the office. I had nothing to say to Hobel, Sammy’s news seemed unimportant. I called Saul each night, as arranged, and managed to delay his raid on the warehouse in Krumau. I said my end of the investigation was “too delicate.” And so it was, though not in the sense he thought I meant.

  Although it may have been a treasonable notion to consider deliberately failing in my duty, it was one which would not go away. I had no idea whether Konstanze’s feelings would ever be such that she would leave Austria, leave Rudolf and return to California with me, but the day we visited Christkindl gave me hope.

  Christkindl is not a monastery but a pilgrimage church, near Steyr, completed by Prandtauer and known for its altar, which shows God, a dove and a child, and for its globe-shaped tabernacle. Konstanze had been in confession and, as we stepped out of the church into the afternoon sun, she said, “Would I like America, Walter? Would Dieter?”

  Her question came out of the blue, or out of the gloom of the church porch, and so it may have sounded more significant than she meant it to. Certainly, in my mood, I took it as significant.

  “Dieter would love it,” I answered quickly. “That bit is easily settled. It’s a boy’s country. There’s plenty of space—more space than anyone knows what to do with. Sports and games galore, a very different wildlife—coyotes, raccoons, cardinals, different kinds of owls, buffalo. Seventeen-year-olds have their own cars. He would love it.”

  She smiled, agreeing.

  “As for you, I don’t know. It’s not a truly religious country. There are a lot of religious groups, and many kinds of bossy interfering puritans, even among the Catholics, but the Church has no sense of history; and it is, of course, the century of science. So on both counts there is no real humility. However, the land itself is beautiful. San Francisco Bay is probably the most beautiful large bay in the world. My house overlooks it. Some mornings a mist rolls in from the ocean, like a huge layer of cotton batting. Occasionally the Golden Gate Bridge pokes up through the wool. It is an eerie but wonderful sight, and typically American. They have interfered with natural beauty and improved it! You would love the climate in California; it’s like April in Austria throughout the year. No snow, lots of fresh fruit and flowers, lots of crayfish.

  “Both of you would love the Rockies—raw, red, hard and bony, not at all like the mountains here. No pretty flowers or soft green grass, but deliciously cold rivers, clear and shining with trout. The clothes are ugly—you wouldn’t like that—and so are a surprisingly large number of the people. But, away from New York, their manners are open and welcoming. It’s not just a different country or continent. It’s a different mood.

  “In the office we have a man who is a genius at speculating on the stock market. At least I hope he is because some of the money he is using is mine. But he says, for instance, that now that the
war is over America is the place to live. Europe will get going again but it will never be as prosperous as the United States. In twenty years, he predicts, everyone will own a car and a television set. And who knows what else?”

  I knew it would take more than one conversation to convince Konstanze to come to America, but I had made a start. Mention of cars gave me the idea to repeat my invitation to teach her to drive. That might lead somewhere too.

  She was nervous at first, but I kept her on the quiet lanes until she had mastered the foot pedals and was sure that her perception of speed and stopping distances was safe. As in other things, she was a fast learner, and the more practice she had, the more she enjoyed driving and the more she wanted to do. I was content to be the passenger for a while, as this allowed me the chance to examine the map and I was able to locate some of the more out-of-the-way churches and monasteries.

  Indirectly, this arrangement led to one incident we had while Konstanze was at the wheel that caused us much merriment. We had been to Garsten, a Benedictine abbey church with some of the finest stuccowork anywhere. Garsten is on a narrow tongue of land between the river Steyr and the river Enns, so that there is no shortage of water in the area: lakes, marshes, small rivers and streams which occasionally, but especially in spring, flood the roads. We had come to one of these spring fords and Konstanze had stopped the car just where the water began. She was, she said, nervous. Owing to the layout of the river, which ran alongside the road for a while before crossing it diagonally, the actual area of metal under water was quite extensive. I told her to drive slowly through the stream to avoid doing any damage to the engine and as a way of ensuring that water did not splash into the carburetor or distributor.

  That was my mistake, for Konstanze drove so slowly that, right in the middle of the water, she stalled. Though she was at first mortified at what she had done, she was soon helpless with laughter after I, complaining, had removed my shoes and socks, rolled up my trousers and then stepped into the water to push the car clear. What man can keep his dignity under such circumstances? In fact, she was so amused that I was tempted to believe that she had stalled the damn thing on purpose. I was very uncomfortable in the cold water but that only made her laugh the more, and eventually I joined in.