A Good German

by Joseph Kanon

  “Trying to save you,” Jake said.

  But Professor Brandt ignored him, retreating back to conversation. “How is it you know him?”

  “Lena worked with me at Columbia.”

  “The radio, yes, I remember. A long time ago.” He glanced toward Lena, waiting for them near the edge of the garden where the sluggish water of the Spree made its bend. “She doesn’t look well.”

  “She’s been sick. She’s better now.”

  Professor Brandt nodded. “So that’s why she hasn’t come. She used to, after the raids, to see if I was all right. The faithful Lena. I don’t think she told him.”

  She turned as they approached. “Look at the ducks,” she said. “Still here. Who feeds them, do you think?” A kind of apology for her outburst, simply by not mentioning it. “So, have you finished?”

  “Finished?” Professor Brandt said, then peered at Jake. “What is it you want?”

  Jake took the photograph of Tully out of his breast pocket. “Has this man been here? Have you seen him?”

  “An American,” Professor Brandt said, looking at it. “No. Why? He’s looking for Emil too?”

  “He may have been. He knew Emil in Frankfurt.”

  “He’s police?” Professor Brandt said, so quickly that Jake looked up in surprise. What was it like to be watched for twelve years?

  “He was. He’s dead.”

  Professor Brandt stared at him. “And that’s why you want to see Emil. As a friend.”

  “That’s right, as a friend.”

  He looked at Lena. “It’s true? He’s not trying to arrest him?”

  “Do you think I would help with that?” she said.

  “No,” Jake said, answering for her, “but I’m worried. Two weeks is a long time to be missing in Germany these days. This is the last man who saw him, and he’s dead.”

  “What are you saying? You think Emil—”

  “No, I don’t think. I don’t want to see him end up the same way, either.” He paused, taking in Professor Brandt’s startled expression. “He may know something, that’s all. We need to find him. He hasn’t been to Lena’s. The only other place he’d go is to you.”

  “No, not to me.”

  “He did before.”

  “Yes, and what did I say to him? That day with the SS,” he said, running the film again. ‘“Don’t come back.’” He looked away. “He won’t come here. Not now.”

  “Well, if he does, you know where Lena is,” Jake said, putting the picture back.

  “I sent him away,” Professor Brandt said, still in his own thoughts. “What else could I do? SS. I was right to do that.”

  “Yes, you were right. You’re always right,” Lena said wearily, turning away. “Nowlook.”

  “Lena—”

  “Oh, no more. I’m tired of arguing. Always politics.”

  “Not politics,” he said, shaking his head. “Not politics. You think it was politics, what they did?”

  She held his eyes for a moment, then turned to Jake. “Let’s go.”

  “You’ll come again?” Professor Brandt said, his voice suddenly tentative and old.

  She went over and put her hand near his shoulder, then brushed the front of his suit as if she were about to adjust his tie, a gesture of unexpected gentleness. He stood straight, letting her smooth out the material, a substitute for an embrace. “I’ll press it for you next time,” she said. “Do you need anything? Food? Jake can get food.”

  “Some coffee, perhaps,” he said, hesitant, reluctant to ask.

  Lena gave his suit a final pat and moved away, not waiting for them to follow.

  “I’ll walk a little now,” Professor Brandt said, then glanced toward Lena’s back. “She’s like a daughter to me.”

  Jake simply nodded, not knowing what to say. Professor Brandt drew himself up, shoulders back, and put on his hat.

  “Herr Geismar? If you find Emil—” He stopped, choosing his words carefully. “Be a friend to him, with the Americans. There is some trouble, I think. So help him. You’re surprised I ask that? This old German, so strict. But a child-it’s always there, in your heart. Even when they become-what they become. Even then.”

  Jake looked at him, standing tall and alone in the muddy field. “Emil didn’t put people on trains. There’s a difference.”

  Professor Brandt lifted his head toward the scorched building then turned back to Jake, lowering the brim of his hat. “You be the judge of that.”

  When they got back to the jeep, Jake took a minute to look into Professor Brandt’s street, but no one was there, not even young Willi, keeping watch for cigarettes.

  Nothing had changed at Frau Dzuris‘-the same dripping hallway, the same boiling potatoes, the same hollow-eyed children watching furtively from the bedroom.

  “Lena, my god, it’s you. So you found her. Children, look who’s here, it’s Lena. Come.”

  But it was Jake who drew their attention, pulling out chocolate bars, which they snatched up, tearing off the shiny Hershey wrappers before Frau Dzuris could stop them.

  “Such manners. Children, what do you say?”

  A mumbled thanks between bites.

  “Come, sit. Oh, Eva will be sorry to miss you. She’s at church again. Every day, church. What are you praying for, I say, manna? Tell God to send potatoes.”

  “She’s well, then? And your son?”

  “Still in the east,” she said, dropping her voice. “I don’t know where. Maybe she prays for him. But there’s no God there. Not in Russia.”

  Jake had expected to stay two minutes, a simple question, but now sat back at the table, giving way to the inevitable visit. It was a Berlin conversation, comparing survivor lists. Greta from downstairs. The block leader who chose the wrong shelter. Frau Dzuris’ son, safe from the army, then trapped at the Siemens plant and hauled off by the Russians.

  “And Emil?” Frau Dzuris said with a sidelong glance at Jake.

  “I don’t know. My parents are dead,” Lena said, changing the subject.

  “A raid?”

  “Yes, I just heard.”

  “So many, so many,” Frau Dzuris said, shaking her head, then brightened. “But to see you together again-it’s lucky.”

  “Yes, for me,” Lena said with a weak smile, looking at Jake. “He saved my life. He got me medicine.”

  “You see? The Americans-I always said they were good. But it’s a special case with Lena, eh?” she said to Jake, almost waggish.

  “Yes, special.”

  “You know, he may not come back,” she said to Lena. “You can’t blame the women. The men made the war and then it’s the women who wait. But for how long? Eva’s waiting. Well, he’s my son, but I don’t know. How many come back from Russia? And we have to eat. How will she feed the children without a man?”

  Lena looked over at them still eating the chocolate, her face softening. “They’ve grown. I wouldn’t recognize them.” She seemed for a moment someone else, back in a part of her life Jake had never known, that had happened without him.

  “Yes, and what’s to become of them? Living like this, potatoes only. It’s worse than during the war. And now we’ll have the Russians.”

  Jake took this as an opening. “Frau Dzuris, the soldier who was looking for Lena and Emil-he was a Russian?”

  “No, an Ami.”

  “This man?” He handed her the picture.

  “No, no, I told you before, tall. Blond, like a German. A German name even.”

  “He gave you his name?”

  “No, here,” she said, putting her finger above her breast, where a nameplate would have been.

  “What name?”

  “I don’t remember. But German. I thought, it’s true what they say. No wonder the Amis won-all German officers. Look at Eisenhower,” she said, floating it as a light joke.

  Jake took the picture back, disappointed, the lead suddenly gone.

  “So he wasn’t looking for Emil,” Lena said to the picture, sounding rel
ieved.

  “Something’s wrong?” Frau Dzuris said.

  “No,” Jake said. “I just thought it might be this man. The American who was here-did he say why he came to you?”

  “Like you-the notice in Pariserstrasse. I thought he must be a friend of yours,” she said to Lena, “from before, when you worked for the Americans. Oh, not like you,” she said, smiling at Jake. She turned to Lena. “You know, I always knew. A woman can tell. And now, to find each other again. Can I say something to you? Don’t wait, not like Eva. So many don’t come back. You have to live. And this one.” To Jake’s embarrassment, she patted his hand. “To remember the chocolate.”

  It took them another five minutes to get out of the flat, Frau Dzuris talking, Lena lingering with the children, promising to come again.

  “Frau Dzuris,” Jake said to her at the door, “if anyone should come—”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, conspiratorial, misunderstanding. “I won’t give you away.” She nodded toward Lena, starting down the stairs. “You take her to America. There’s nothing here now.”

  In the street, he stopped and looked back at the building, still puzzled.

  “Now what’s the matter?” Lena said. “You see, it wasn’t him. It’s good, yes? No connection.”

  “But it should have been. It makes sense. Now I’m back where I started. Anyway, who did come?”

  “Your friend said the Americans would look for Emil. Someone from Kransberg, maybe.”

  “But not Tully,” he said stubbornly, still preoccupied.

  “You think everyone’s looking for Emil,” she said, getting into the jeep to leave.

  He started around to his side, then stopped, looking at the ground. “Except the Russian. He was looking for you.”

  She glanced over at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Trying to add two and two.” He got in the jeep. “But I need Emil to do that. Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  “You were never so anxious to see him before.”

  Jake turned the key. “Nobody was murdered before.”

  Emil didn’t come. The next few days fell into a kind of listless waiting, looking out the window, listening for footsteps on the quiet landing. When they made love now, it seemed hurried, as if they expected someone to come through the door at any minute, their time run out. Hannelore was back, her Russian having moved on, and her presence, chattering, oblivious to the waiting, made the tension worse, so that Jake felt he was pacing even when he was sitting still, watching her lay out cards on the table hour after hour until her future came out right.

  “You see, there he is again. The spades mean strength, that’s what Frau Hinkel says. Lena, you have to see her-you won’t believe it, how she sees things. I thought, you know, well, it’s just fun. But she knows. She knew about my mother-how could she know that? I never said a word. And not some gypsy either-a German woman. Right behind KaDeWe, imagine, all this time. It’s a gift to be like that. Here’s the jack again-you see, two men, just as she said.”

  “Only two?” Lena said, smiling.

  “Two marriages. I said one is enough, but no, she says it always comes up two.”

  “What’s the good of knowing that? All during the first, you’ll be wondering about the second.”

  Hannelore sighed. “I suppose. Still, you should go.”

  “You go,” Lena said. “I don’t want to know.”

  It was true. While Jake waited and worked the crossword puzzle in his head-Tully down, Emil across, trying to fit them together-Lena seemed oddly content, as if she had decided to let things take care of themselves. The news of her parents had depressed her and then seemed to be put aside, a kind of fatalism Jake assumed had come with the war, when it was enough to wake up alive. In the mornings she went to a DP nursery to help with the children; afternoons, when Hannelore was out, they made love; evenings she turned the canned rations into meals, busy with ordinary life, not looking beyond the day. It was Jake who waited, at loose ends.

  They went out. There was music in a roofless church, a humid evening with tired German civilians nodding their heads to a scratchy Beethoven trio and Jake taking notes for a piece because Collier’s would like the idea of music rising from the ruins, the city coming back. He took her to Ronny’s, to check in with Danny, but when they got there, drunken shouts pouring out to the street, she balked, and he went in alone, but neither Danny nor Gunther was there, so they walked a little farther down the Ku’damm to a cinema the British had opened. The theater, hot and crowded, was showing Blithe Spirit, and to his surprise the audience, all soldiers, enjoyed it, roaring at Madame Arcati, whistling at Kay Hammond’s floating nightgown. Dressing for dinner, coffee and brandy in the sitting room afterward-it all seemed to be happening on another planet.

  It was only when the lush color changed to the grainy black-and-white of the newsreel that they were back in Berlin-literally so, Attlee arriving to take Churchill’s place, another photo session at the Cecilienhof, the new Three arranged on the terrace just as the old Three had been that first time, before the money started blowing across the lawn. Then the Allied football game, with Breimer at the microphone winning the peace and fists raised in the end zone as the British made their unlikely score. Jake smiled to himself. In the jumble of spliced film, at least, they had won the game. The clip switched to a collapsing house. “Another kind of touchdown, as an American newsman makes a daring rescue—”

  “My god, it’s you,” Lena said, gripping his arm.

  He watched himself on the porch, arm around the German woman as if they had just emerged from the wreck, and for an instant even he forgot what had really happened, the film’s chronology more convincing than memory.

  “You never told me,” she said.

  “It didn’t happen that way,” he whispered.

  “No? But you can see.”

  And what could he say? That he only appeared to be where he was? The film had made it real. He shifted in his seat, disturbed. What if nothing was what it seemed? A ball game, a newsreel hero. How we looked at things determined what they were. A dead body in Potsdam. A wad of money. One thing led to another, piece by piece, but what if you got the arrangement wrong? What if the house collapsed afterward?

  When the lights came on, she took his silence for modesty.

  “And you never said. So now you’re famous,” she said, smiling.

  He moved them into the swarm of British khaki in the aisle.

  “How did you get her out?” Lena said.

  “We walked. Lena, it never happened.”

  But from her expression he could see that it had, and he gave it up. They moved into the lobby with a crowd of British officers and their Hannelores.

  “Well, the man of the hour himself.” Brian Stanley, tugging at his sleeve. “A hero, no less. I am surprised.”

  Jake grinned. “Me too,” he said, and introduced Lena.

  “Fraulein,” Brian said, taking her hand. “And what do we think of him now? Very Boy’s Own, I must say. Come for a drink?”

  “Another time,” Jake said.

  “Oh, it’s like that. Enjoy the film? Apart from yourself, that is.”

  They passed through the door to the warm evening air.

  “Sure. Make you homesick?” Jake said.

  “Dear boy, that’s the England that never was. We’re the land of the common man now, haven’t you heard? Mr. Attlee insists. Of course, I’m common myself, so I don’t mind.”

  “It still looks pretty cushy on film,” Jake said.

  “Well, it would. Made before the war, you know. Couldn’t release it while the play was on and of course it ran forever, so they’re just now getting around to it. You see how young Rex looks.”

  “The things you know,” Jake said. Another trick of chronology.

  Brian lit a cigarette. “How are you getting on with your case? The chap in the boots.”

  “I’m not. I’ve been distracted.”

  Brian glanced at Lena.
“Not by the conference, I gather. I never see you around at all. The thing is, you got me thinking a bit. About the luggage and all that. What occurred to me was, how did he get on the plane in the first place?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it was a scramble. You remember. Had to pull strings just to get on the damn thing.”

  “So what strings did he pull?” Jake said, finishing for him.

  “Something like that. There we were, packed in like sardines. The Honorable and everyone. And then one more. All very last-minute.

  No bags, as if he hadn’t expected to go. More like he’d been summoned, if you see what I mean.“

  But Jake had leaped ahead to something else-how had Emil managed it? No one just walked onto a plane, certainly not a German.

  “I don’t suppose they found any travel orders?” Brian was saying.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Of course, it may have been the old greased palm-I’ve done it myself. But if someone okayed it? I mean, if you’re so curious about him, it might be useful to know.”

  “Yes,” Jake said. Who had okayed Emil?

  “You never know with the army-they keep a record of everything except what’s useful. But there must have been some kind of manifest. Anyway, it’s just a thought.”

  “Keep thinking for a minute,” Jake said. “How would a German get here?”