Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

The day was sunny and warm, ice cream weather, and the shop was crowded. The usual notice, No Jews, was posted in the window. Rima was already seated at a tiny table for two. When Paul joined her she ordered chocolate ice cream with chopped nuts and whipped cream. Paul asked for the same. They ate in silence. This was no place for private conversation, not that there was any such place in Berlin.

  Rima had dressed for the weather. Instead of her usual blue wool she wore a light green dress that showed her knees when she walked, or so Paul imagined. He also pictured her chiffon scarf floating as she moved. Her long ebony plait was wound round her head. She wore pumps with high heels and white socks, as was the fashion all over Europe that summer. She wore bracelets on both wrists, and on her left hand a modest ring with a red stone that might have been a ruby. She looked more like a woman than a girl. They finished their ice cream.

  “What now?” Rima asked.

  “A walk in the zoo?” Paul suggested.

  “No thank you. I hate the cages. I hate the smell. Imagine what it would be like if you had a lion’s sense of smell and all you could smell was captivity.”

  “And never fresh blood.”

  “Not funny.”

  The tables were very close together here. It was impossible to talk without being overheard. Their English attracted the attention of two women at the next table. One of them leaned closer and listened. Outside the shop window the brownshirts lingered.

  “How much did you give them?” Rima asked.

  “What they asked for, one mark.”

  “Not enough, in my opinion,” Rima said. “Good German boys out in all kinds of weather, helping the poor and the unfortunate and the families of our men in uniform. Give them another coin for me on the way out.”

  The eavesdropper looked suspicious, but went back to her conversation with her friend.

  On the way out, Paul dropped a coin in the brownshirts’ collection box. “Ah, the good loser!” one of them said, handing Paul another swastika pin and throwing a mock punch at his jaw.

  When Paul and Rima were out of sight, he put the pin into his pocket with the other one. Now both he and Rima had pins, and if they wished to put them on they could walk in the city without being accosted for more contributions. There was no possibility of either of them wearing a swastika, but unless they did so they could not stay on the streets without being bankrupted. There would be other brown-shirts on every street corner. Without the pins, there would be questions, taunts, and worse.

  “I have an idea,” Paul said.

  The ice cream shop was just south of the zoo, near the boundary with Schöneberg, called the American quarter of Berlin though few Americans lived there or anywhere else in the city. They took a streetcar to Nollendorfplatz and paid out another mark to the brownshirts who were collecting tolls at the trolley stop. The American Church was only a few steps away, in Motzstrasse, a quiet little street. The doors were unlocked. The nave, which smelled faintly of soap and wax and dust and candle smoke, was deserted. The silence inside was so complete that it seemed that even the stones had no memory of voices or music. They were alone. They sat down together in the back pew.

  Rima pointed at the large wooden cross that was the only décor apart from the stained-glass windows.

  “What cult is this?”

  “It’s for all Protestants, I believe.”

  “You come here often?”

  “Only once when I was an infant, to be baptized. I don’t remember it.”

  “Then your parents are Protestants.”

  “They don’t practice a religion. They wanted a baptismal certificate as one more proof that I’m an American.”

  “Why?” Rima said.

  “In case they ever needed it.”

  “A lot of Americans must be nonbelievers. There’s nobody here.”

  “Vespers at five,” Paul said, reading a sign. “We have almost an hour.”

  “Then I’d better begin,” Rima said. Paul started to speak. Rima put a finger on his bruised lips. “No,” she said. “No questions now. I will speak. Then, if you wish, you will speak. Then, if we both wish, we will discuss what happens next.” Rima handed Paul her identity card. “So that you’ll know my original name,” she said. “And certain other facts.”

  Her baptismal name was Alexa Johann Maria Kaltenbach. She was born in Berlin on 21 December, 1923, so she was six months older than Paul. No J was stamped in red ink on her papers, which meant that she was not considered a Jew under the Nuremberg laws.

  Paul was surprised. She saw this. “Don’t be deceived,” she said. “I have one Jewish grandparent, my father’s father, so I’m not officially a Jew. My father, however, had three Jewish grandparents, so he’s a Jew under the law even though he’s a Lutheran and has been one all his life. Two of his three Jewish grandparents were Lutherans also. My mother is of pure Aryan blood, according to the official investigation. She lives in Argentina.”

  “Why?”

  “My father drove her to France for a vacation, gave her bank drafts for all but a few thousand of the Reichsmarks he had saved, and told her to go to Buenos Aires, put the money in a bank, and wait there until the madness was over.”

  “What about you?”

  “I am still here. Stop asking questions.”

  Dr. Johann Kaltenbach, Rima’s father, believed that the present political situation, as he called the dictatorship, would pass. In his own mind he was a German like any other. He had been born in Germany of German parents, attended German schools, loved the kaisers while they reigned. In the World War he had bled for Germany on the western front. Since childhood he had gone to church every Sunday and on all Christian holidays. He prayed as a Christian at meals and before he slept. He sang Stille Nacht on Christmas Eve. He had no consciousness whatsoever that he was Jewish because his parents had never told him or his brothers any such thing. He had chosen medicine as his profession because he believed that easing the suffering of the sick was a Christian calling. When the war started he interrupted his studies in order to join his reserve unit on active service. He rose to Oberleutnant in the Reichswehr and served for three years as an infantry officer on the western front. He was wounded twice and was awarded the Iron Cross first class for bravery.

  After the war he completed his medical education and learned surgery as an apprentice to one of his professors. In a matter of a few years he was one of the most respected surgeons in Germany. He specialized in the lungs and heart at a time when tuberculosis was rampant. His practice flourished. Patients came from all over Germany and beyond to be treated by him. Often he was their last hope, and he saved many from death. His fee for a successful surgery was one year’s income of the patient he had saved. He charged nothing if the patient did not recover. He married a pretty, spirited, loving girl whose father was a learned professor of philosophy. Her Christian family accepted Kaltenbach without question. He was happy, he grew rich, tears formed in his eyes when he heard the bugle call “Ich Hatt’ Einen Kameraden,” the German equivalent of “Taps,” played at memorial services. He tithed his earnings to his church. He had a soldier’s contempt for politics. Germany was being killed by politics. He disliked the National Socialists but loathed the Bolsheviks, and in 1932 he voted for the National Socialist candidate for the Reichstag because he was one of his patients and because he knew for a fact that the man was not a traitor to Germany, while all Bolsheviks everywhere were traitors by definition. It had never occurred to Dr. Kaltenbach that his Germanness could be questioned, let alone taken away from him.

  “And when this happened just the same and they stamped a big red J on his papers and then confiscated his property and his medical practice and forbade him to treat any patients except other Jews, he thought it was a mistake that would soon be rectified,” Rima said. “He still thinks it will be rectified, that everything will be rectified. I think he believes that the clock of existence has struck the wrong hour or something, and that the people who now rule Germany are men from Mars wh
o somehow got lost in the universe and ended up on our planet. One day God, the supreme clockmaker, will notice this mechanical error and send them back where they came from and all will be right with the world again.”

  Paul said, “Doesn’t everyone believe that, even the Nazis?”

  “Maybe. But in the meanwhile Father has no patients because he doesn’t know any Jews. He never knew any Jews except for some of his patients.”

  “Jews are informing on your father to the secret police?”

  “People who say they’re Jews. Maybe some of them really are Jews. Please let me finish.”

  It was at this moment that Paul conceived the idea of rescuing Rima and her father. They could sail to Denmark aboard Mahican, as many others had done when they had no other recourse than arrest and death. He did not hear the next few words of Rima’s story because he had started to remember what he had seen two days before on the bridle path of the Tiergarten. Memories came to him like newsreel images—pictures that were quicker than the actual events, with the sound slower and louder. When a memory was unwelcome he stopped it from forming in his mind by thinking about a sport, some good moment when he had scored a goal in soccer or made a hard shot in tennis or skied through fresh snow and looked back on a turn to see his own tracks. Now he slammed a door in his brain because he had begun to see the Daimler and the booted man in its backseat and then his mother in her riding clothes, getting into the car.

  It was almost five o’clock. The stained glass window closest to Paul and Rima depicted Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. Its rich colors glowed in the bright light of the sinking sun. An old bald vestryman lighted candles. Worshippers began to arrive, grandmothers mostly. Some of them prayed while they waited for the service to begin. The church bell rang. The organ played soft music. Though he was not especially musical, Paul recognized many of the pieces. He had heard his mother play them all his life. The effect was peaceful, affirmative, a tidy little compliment to the Almighty. It made Paul feel at one with the strangers around him. The throaty emotion he experienced was not so very different from the one that Rima evoked in him.

  Rima was whispering now, directly into his ear. She held his hand in her own hands. Paul found the warmth of her breath on his skin and the heat of her hands on his flesh almost unbearably arousing. Having such feelings in church made the experience more intense. Rima’s scent changed, too, as she whispered. They were in the last pew. No one could see them except the vestryman, who gave them a long look, then disappeared, carrying the staff with which he had lighted the candles. The organist changed composers. Paul recognized the melody, unmistakable even to a heathen, of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

  “Paul,” Rima whispered through the music, “I know they are going to kill me. They’ll invade another country soon and close the Reich to foreigners and do whatever they like. That’s the intention. It cannot be otherwise. And I can’t bear the thought of dying before I have known love—everything about it. Everything.”

  Paul did not know what to say.

  Rima did. She said, “Will you please be my love before it’s too late? Please.”

  Paul replied, “I already am.”

  TWO

  1

  Paul and Rima could promise each other love, but the practicalities were another matter. Where would they meet? How would they communicate? How would they find privacy? How could they keep their secret? These are questions for all clandestine lovers. For Paul and Rima, they were questions of life and death. Everyone in Berlin was an informer—housewives in an ice cream parlor, the street car conductor, someone you passed on a stairway, your closest friend, your teacher. Their love was a danger to Rima’s father, to Paul’s parents, to themselves. By falling in love, these children had become fugitives. There was no safety for them. Rima knew in her bones—she had just said so—that she would be lucky to be alive at age eighteen, and Paul knew that she was right. The machine—she imagined the secret police apparatus as an enormous clanking tank that obliterated everything in its path—could take her long before that. Her father could disappear at any moment. If that happened, she would become a ward of the government and would herself vanish. No one would ask where she had gone or what had happened to her. She would cease to exist in the mind of any living person.

  The same could happen to Paul, no matter what kind of passport he carried. The United States of America was not going to declare war on Germany over a missing boy. So far the secret police had taken no official notice of his scuffle with the Youth, but by defending himself from the power of the dictatorship he had committed a serious crime. Stutzer knew every detail. Paul had given him what he needed to blackmail his parents, to make them confess to their all-too-real crimes against the Reich. The secret police knew all about the Mahican and its nighttime sails. The Christophers knew that they knew. The secret police were attacking Paul’s mother because they thought the woman was the weak link. They wanted something from her. They thought that Lori would break, that she would do anything to save her son. Even though she was the strongest of the three of them, Paul knew that they were right.

  At supper that evening, the menu was normal—an omelet with mushrooms, ham, bread, cheese, apples, no wine because alcohol drunk in the evening gave Hubbard bad dreams. The conversation was normal. Lori had received a letter from her Aunt Hilde, who wanted to know if they were coming to Rügen for midsummer, which fell on the next weekend.

  “Are we going?” Hubbard asked.

  “Of course,” Lori replied. “I’ll write to her tonight. We always go to Rügen for midsummer night.”

  “Good,” Hubbard said. “Maybe we can sail.”

  After supper, each under his own reading lamp as if God were in his heaven and all was right with the world, Lori wrote her letter to Hilde while Hubbard read the three-week-old Saturday Evening Post that O. G. had saved for him. He laughed at the Post’s cartoons, devoured every word of fiction in every issue, especially the serialized novels of James Warner Bellah, but never read the articles. Hubbard did not trust journalism, did not believe that it could ever approximate the truth because everyone lied to journalists. Paul held a volume of Balzac, his summer reading assignment, in his lap. The book might as well have been printed in Sanskrit. The type swam away. He could not concentrate. He was still in the American church with Rima’s breath in his ear, her leg against his, his hand in her hand.

  “Paul,” Lori said, “time for Schatzi’s walk.”

  The Christophers had no servants. When the cleaning woman, who also did the laundry, came on Wednesdays, Lori locked up her husband’s manuscripts and sent him out for a long walk while she stayed home and supervised. Otherwise they did their own chores, with Lori as maid of all work, Hubbard as dishwasher, and Paul in charge of odd jobs. One of these was to take the family schnauzer for a walk. The little dog was one of several thousands in the city whose name was Schatzi—“Sweetheart.” It had belonged to a dog-loving Social Democrat who fled Germany and left it in their care. At nine-thirty Paul took Schatzi out on its leash as usual. The nearest public grass was six blocks away, in a small wooded park with gravel walks and a fountain at its center. Paul had arranged to meet Rima by the fountain at ten o’clock sharp. They had decided in the American church that they must always behave as if they were under surveillance. The streets swarmed with dog walkers and cigar smokers. Paul noticed no one following him, but it was impossible to be certain in this sea of potential informers that he was not being watched.

  Rima waited by the fountain as arranged. To Paul’s surprise, she led a dog of her own, another kind of small terrier. She wore a head scarf, ends tied under her chin. She walked slowly away down one of the wider gravel walks. He waited until she was far ahead and then, keeping his distance, he followed. She turned onto a narrow path, then into the trees. Here there was no artificial light at all apart from the distant glow of street lamps beyond the park’s spiked iron fence. They were alone. The earth beneath their feet was spongy, d
amp. He smelled ferns, rotting vegetation.

  “Whose dog is that?” Paul asked in a whisper.

  “It belongs to a neighbor, an old lady,” Rima replied, also in a whisper. “I’m doing a good deed.”

  With a few deft movements, Rima leashed the dogs to trees. Then she took Paul’s hand and walked him a few steps away from the dogs. She took his face in her hands. She whispered, “Can you see me?”

  “No.”

  “Nor I you. It’s all right. We have four other senses. Wait. I’m going to take off my scarf.”

  After a moment, she shook her head. Her hair, no longer braided, fell free. It was perfumed. He smelled her skin. He did not move.

  Rima said, “I look different now.”

  “I wish I could see you.”

  Rima said, “There are other ways to see.”

  Paul could barely talk. He said, “What?”

  “Do something,” Rima whispered.

  Paul groped in the darkness and put his hand on her hair. He stroked it, put his nose into it, put both hands under it, touched her cheeks, lifted the hair, which was thick and silky but less heavy than he had expected, and much longer. It fell to her waist and below. His arms were around her now. Her body moved inside her clothes. They were very close. She put her arms around his neck and moved even closer. Their bodies brushed. She kissed him on the lips, her own lips fluttering. He imitated this. She took his lower lip between her lips. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Rima touched his tongue with her tongue. He had had no idea that such techniques existed.

  Rima pulled him closer, pasting herself to him. She was a strong girl, slender and muscular. She made no noise. She was in a state of total concentration, he could feel it. Suddenly she stopped kissing and turned her face away. She was crying. He touched the tears and whispered her name.

  She said, “Ssshhh.”

  She clung to him, arms around his neck, the length of her body still against his body, but now she seemed relaxed. Many moments later she stepped back. He let her go. By now he could see much better in the dark. Her face was almost visible. He saw her pale hands twisting her long dark hair and realized that she was braiding it. She wound the plait around her head, pinned it, and re-tied her head scarf. She took his face in her hands. She kissed him, a chaste affectionate kiss.