I agreed that this was a distinct possibility.
Nina, however, had not changed at all, still tall, confident, and now content with and proud of her children. Her anxieties about Claus were obvious—and how could a wife not be anxious, if she were married to the last knight of Europe.
So quick and deft was Claus with his fingers and his arm, that one hardly noticed that his procedure for eating was different from everyone else’s at the table. He must have worked with great persistence and determination to master his new style of consuming food. Karoline had told me once that he had been a weak child, almost dying as had his twin brother. He had stayed alive and grown to a strong man by constant effort.
During supper we talked about Aunt Hannah and her tennis rivalry with Uncle Tim. Also her swimming rivalry. The children were fascinated. Their mother warned them that we would pretend to fight but it was only pretend fighting. The Kinder divided by gender as to which one they would cheer for.
“It’s all right,” I said, “half the time when I’m playing against her, I cheer for her too. But if I don’t do my best to win, she becomes very angry at me.”
“You will win?” Bert asked.
“Oh yes,” his father said, “even when I had all my fingers, Uncle Tim beat me. However, it will be a close match.”
The food was less spectacular than at Easter years ago—potatoes, vegetables, sausage, a glass of wine and some fruit. However the spirit around the table was the same. Respect, laughter, and prayer.
As we finished the meal we heard a deep rumble as of a distant volcano, heavy, thick, hard.
“Lancasters,” said young Bert, “their engines throb, the engines on the American B-17s hum.”
“Where are they going?” I asked.
Bert frowned. He looked so much like his father that it hurt me. I had yet to father kinder who would look like me.
“South and east of here. Leipzig, Wiener Neustadt, maybe Munich, but I don’t think so.”
“I hope not,” I murmured.
“Tim,” Claus said in his most serious of tones, “there are none of us in Germany who are not in danger of sudden death. A flaming Lancaster crashed into a farm only fifteen kilometers down the river and killed everyone.”
“That’s hardly the brave RAF of the Battle of Britain,” I murmured.
“They are very brutal,” Nina said somberly, “but no more brutal than we were and are. And we started it.”
“And we must stop it,” Claus ended the conversation.
My life could end just as dramatically, especially if I persisted in my refusal to enter the bomb shelters in Berlin. Not so tragically, however, because I would leave no one behind. Only a distant memory to be listed once a year in the memorial mass of the Irish Diplomatic Service.
“Annalise will not arrive until midnight,” Nina complained over coffee and tea, the youngsters having departed for their chores or their games or their beds. “That young woman can certainly be difficult.”
“I presume,” Claus replied, “that she felt she had to work most of the day at the Luft Ministry.”
“I will meet her at the train,” I volunteered.
No one vetoed my suggestion.
“She is very, very difficult.” Karoline continued the discussion. “Von Richthofen was a pleasant man and she now has a name and an income, but he was doomed from the day the war began. Now she persists in grieving for him as if she loved him, which I don’t believe she ever did.”
“She seems to believe that every man she loves is doomed to die—her father, her brothers, her husband,” Nina said. “It is not a Catholic way to think.”
“Given her life story, it is,” I said, defending my love, “what one might expect.”
There was no doubt that the women in the family had arranged this weekend as another opportunity for Annalise and me to realize that we were in love. I appreciated the opportunity.
Yet I would have to give her more time if she wanted it. Someday, perhaps soon, I would insist.
If I could work up the nerve.
After coffee, Claus and I went for our walk in the woods. The comforting smell of harvest was in the air. The sky was still bright in a long dusk that reminded me of the Weltschmerz of a Richard Strauss opera.
“Nina knows what we’re talking about,” I said.
“She worries, with good reason … I wish we were ready this year. Now the Secret Germany must rise in 1944. The Americans will be ashore in the spring. The Red Army will push towards the Oder. It will be our last chance. It may be too late. Why should they negotiate with us? We should have struck after Stalingrad or even before the first bad winter in Russia but we weren’t ready and then I was wounded …”
“You personally will kill Hitler?”
“There is no choice. As the leader I must take the lead, all the other attempts have failed. It is for this that I survived in the desert. I will leave a bomb underneath the table at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia … . You really know Churchill personally?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s seen your dispatches?”
“I believe so.”
“We need his support—at least his passive support. Would you go to London and describe to him who and what we are—no names of course …”
“Clergy of both denominations, intellectuals, aristocrats, generals, non-Nazi political leadership?”
“Precisely. And if we dispose of Hitler, more will join us.” it
“All right, what will the General Staff do when they gain control?”
“We will arrest all war criminals. We will free those in the camps. We will appoint a president and a prime minister from the pre-Nazi era. We will pull back our troops to the Rhine and the Oder and the Alps and announce a unilateral cease-fire. We will offer to negotiate unconditionally to respond to their terms. We will agree to return Germany’s boundaries to their pre-Hitler borders.”
“Austria?”
“An independent republic again, perhaps with a Hapsburg duke as president.”
“The Sudeten?”
“Back to the Czechs.”
“Poland?”
“Nineteen thirty-nine borders—Europe as it was before the Munich surrender of the English and the French.”
“And the Russians?”
He shrugged.
“Who knows what they will do? We will concentrate all our forces east of Berlin. Stalin will know that we may very well be able to beat him along the Oder Line. He will not want a battle with the Americans, who will be able to advance into the heart of Germany without resistance. He is a cautious man. His ambassador to Stockholm has been negotiating a separate peace with Himmler and Ribbentrop for over a year.”
“Thin, Claus.”
“I know that, Timmy. I know that. Yet, should we succeed, many lives will be saved. Three million Jews in the concentration camps, a million German soldiers, a million and half Russian soldiers, a half million perhaps British and American soldiers … We will say these things when we go on the radio if we are successful.”
“Risky, you’re saying, but it’s worth the risk?”
His response was in the tone of voice one would expect from Der Ritter in the Bamberg cathedral.
“At least they will know in the years to come that some Germans were willing to give their lives in a struggle against the Antichrist.”
“And Nina and the kinder?”
“They may kill them if they choose for blood revenge. I think not since Himmler wants to make peace as much as we do. Our family has endured martyrdom before in its history.”
So had mine as far as that goes, but not with such pious intensity.
“I shall tell all of these things to Winston and to him only.”
“they will let you see him?”
“I think so, especially if he’s seen my dispatches. Moreover, perhaps I have not said it before, but my Old Fella has enormous influence with Winston, more than anyone else in the House of Lords. He sends the prime minis
ter a case of the best Middleton’s Irish Whiskey and Winston sends him a case of the best Glenlivet Scotch.”
“And they both consume the entire gift?”
“We have a dozen cases stored in the cellar of Castle Ridgeland. I don’t think there are any such at 10 Downing Street.”
He laughed, the same easy, relaxed laugh, I had heard so many years ago on the banks of the Neckar River.
“You will take care of Annalise. She is not enough of a noble to be immune to Himmler’s wrath and she will be involved in the rising, there’s no way I can keep her out of it.”
“As I promised, I will do all I can, even if that means carrying her away by force.”
He laughed again.
“I don’t believe that will be necessary, Timmy.”
On that note he returned to the Schloss lest Nina worry in his absence and I walked on to the old railroad station.
It was 2230 and the train from Munich was due in at 2330, a schedule which meant very little even in times of peace. I had been shown the door to Annalise’s room—discreetly distant from mine but not impossibly so—and given an old key to the Schloss which weighed more than one of my .25s. Everyone had claimed that they needed sleep to prepare for the weekend. Patently, however, they wanted Aunt Hannah and Uncle Tim to have time together.
I said the Rosary sitting on the single bench of the station, my eyes on the bright moon and the clear sky. A bomber’s moon it used to be called. Now the mass bomber formations of the RAF preferred overcast skies. After the first wave of bombers had outlined the target with fire bombs, all the remaining waves had to do was to drop their bomb loads within the fiery rectangle.
In the great distance, I saw occasional beams of red light that mean fire or might only be the aurora borealis. I thought I heard explosions too, far, far away. Maybe only a summer storm. I did hear planes overhead, perhaps returning home, flown by sergeant pilots, because His Majesty’s Government would not risk commissioned officers on flying coffins like the Lancasters.
But as Friday turned into Saturday, the sounds went away, save for an occasional chirping cricket, a peaceful summer evening during the worst bloodbath in human history.
One o’clock, 2:00, 3:00 … still no train. I was sleepy. My love had been incinerated in Munich. Perhaps a Messerschmitt night fighter would do the same to me.
“It is you who sleeps here on the platform?” Annalise asked. “Would they not accept you in the house?”
“What time is it?” I asked, my tongue thick as though I had been drinking.
“A little before four,” she said. “The train was late, as always. I was sad that they had sent no one to greet me. Then I noticed this bundle of clothes on the bench and I asked myself whether it might possibly be His Excellency Timothy Herr Baron of Ridgewood and the ambassador of the Republic of Ireland.”
She was laughing at me. How wonderful!
“Not quite the Republic of Ireland yet, Aunt Hannah … Give me your case. I’m sorry I failed in my duty to welcome you to Schloss Stauffenberg … I was afraid you had died in an air raid.”
If I had been wide-awake and thinking clearly, I would have embraced her, quietly and moderately of course. As it was I could only stumble and bumble as we walked down the street to the Schloss.
“God has not seen fit to call me home,” she said seriously, “though I am always ready to answer such a call.”
“You’ll live into the next century, Aunt Hannah.”
“Why do you call me that?”
“That’s what the children at the Schloss call you. I warn you that I am Uncle Tim and they are placing wagers on the outcome of our tennis match tomorrow.”
“That is not proper,” she protested without much vigor.
“Complain to their parents. I urged the little girls not to bet on Aunt Hannah in the match.”
“That was very improper. Of course I will win … I trust our rooms are properly distant.”
“I would characterize them as properly but not impossibly distant.”
She laughed again.
“You Irish are terrible!”
“We do our best.”
Yet another laugh.
I opened the door to the house.
“And certainly not to be trusted with the keys to a house.”
“Alas, it won’t open bedroom doors.”
A third laugh. I was doing pretty well for someone who was still probably dreaming.
She was wearing a plain black dress and her blond hair was tied up in a black scarf. It didn’t matter. My Gothic princess was still impossibly lovely.
I showed her to her room, opened the door, placed her bag on the floor, put my arm around her and brushed my lips against hers, somewhat more slowly than I had at the door of her apartment in Charlottenburg.
“Good night, Annalise.”
She leaned her head against my chest, all too briefly.
“Good night, Herr Ridgewood. Thanks for welcoming me.”
17
“HE WILL neither propose to her nor proposition her,” Nuala Anne said wearily. “You Irishmen are faint-hearted lovers.”
“Frightened lovers.”
In the midst of a heavy spring downpour we were driving (i.e., she was driving my car) into the Northwest Side, an obscure no-man’s-land with old two-story houses, often two flats, always nicely painted and flawlessly landscaped, searching for St. Ibrahim’s Church and its pastor Father Ibrahim Ibrahim.
“Frightened that the woman will say yes or that she will say no?”
“Both … Anyway, our mutual friend is quite incapable of propositioning his Gothic princess.”
“I know THAT. But he should have offered marriage and left that dangerous country.”
“For Ireland?”
“Where else?”
“She would have turned him down.”
“You think so, Dermot?”
“She had to be around for the grand sacrifice.”
Silence from me wife as she pondered.
“You may have the right of it, Dermot Michael Coyne. She’s a strange one, that Gothic princess. I know her and I don’t know her.”
Changes of mind are rare for me wife.
“You still think she’ll end up in Ireland?”
“Even if he has to drag her there.”
We pulled up in front of a small, nondescript church of brown brick, next to a school which seemed to have four rooms and a tiny parking lot with the inevitable basketball backboards. Did Assyrian kids really play basketball?
The church, Nuala Anne had informed me, had been Russian, which was in fact, a branch of the Ukrainian Catholic rite from a different spot in the Carpathian Mountains. The congregation had moved west to Jefferson Park and built a new and larger parish “plant” and the Cardinal had turned this one over to the eager Assyrians.
The rectory was a small house made of similar bricks, almost a lean-to attached to the sacristy—all very compact and tidy, designed I suspected to resist incursions from the Poles, immediately higher in the food chain, and especially the Irish from downtown (the Chancery).
Father Ibrahim Ibrahim, pastor of St. Ibrahim’s parish, was a tiny young man who fit perfectly into his limited space. He wore a small beard, a small pectoral cross, and spoke in a staccato voice with small gestures. His skin was lighter than that of the Assyrians we had met and his waving hands and accent suggested some French influence. He was inclined to be uncooperative until he saw Nuala and then he smiled and became a charming gentleman. Such is me wife’s impact on most clerics.
“His Eminence Sean Cardinal Cronin asked that I talk to you,” he said, dipping his head at the mention of the local Prince of the Church as he would halfway through the Nicene Creed, “so I will be happy to do so.”
His smiles were like the rest of him, small and neat.
“Desmond was indeed charming,” he rushed on, “and remarkably fluent in several languages, especially Arabic, which he spoke with a strange, but not unpleasant a
ccent. He asked about an ecclesiastical institution in northern Iraq that he might work with. He wanted to learn Aramaic, which is the language of Jesus himself as well as ours, though to be honest, I’m not sure we could have understood the Lord, since languages change so much across time. He also wanted to learn Kurdish Farsi, which is a barbaric version of the Persian the Iranians speak, also barbaric. I did my best to discourage him. There would certainly be another war in Iraq and it would be very dangerous in the Kurdistan as the Kurds hate everyone, especially Christians.”
He paused for breath. His recitation had obviously been carefully prepared.
“Even Americans?”
“They hate the Americans less because the Americans helped them to build their little enclave. However, they do not trust the Americans.”
“With good reason,” I said.
“How did Des react to your discouragement, Father Ibrahim?” Nuala asked in her thickest Galway accent.
“Like the Irish do! He listened politely and smiled. He was a little crazy of course. He had made up his mind.”
In the background young voices began to sing hymns in a foreign language, Assyrian I assumed and doubtless very old hymns. Father Ibrahim ran a typical American parish, a fact certified by the scuffed basketball in the corner of his office.
“I told him that all our efforts now are to get the Assyrians out of Iraq. Saddam—a vile degenerate—nonetheless was secular. He protected us from the Muslims. Now there is no one to protect us but the American army, which realizes we are Christians like themselves, though very strange Christians.”
He waved his hand as if to dismiss the American skepticism. The rural and small-town folk who were fated to fight the war had doubtless never seen an Assyrian before, much less a Babylonian which was a very bad place.
“So after ten millennia we are finally forced to leave and gather our people elsewhere in the world, some to Lebanon or Egypt, some to Britain or Spain, but most to this wonderful country which does not want us because of our skin color but lets us in anyway.”
“You have a typical American full-service parish here,” I observed.
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