Christopher's Ghosts

by Charles McCarry

  Every sentence this woman uttered ended in an exclamation point. The elderly policeman, silent and expressionless, dipped his steel pen in an ink well and entered her words in his log.

  Rima expected to be locked in a cell, but she was told instead to sit at a table in classroom posture—feet flat on the floor, knees together, hands folded, spine vertical but not touching the back of the chair, head erect, eyes straight ahead. Holding this position required strength, alertness, stamina. It made the mind as well as the body ache. It made the urethra burn. It had kept generations of children in order. It had been invented by an evil genius.

  After a long time, much more than an hour, the gaunt female, now wearing a wide leather belt from which a truncheon dangled, told Rima in ringing tones to stand up. She then placed her in handcuffs, took her by the arm and marched her to a back door. Outside, an Opel sedan waited. It was black like the Daimler and gleaming with wax, but smaller. A man in civilian clothes sat at the wheel. Rima got into the backseat as ordered. The woman got in beside her. The windows were curtained. There were no inside door handles. Rima’s hands were cuffed together behind her back. The thick cloth upholstery was dappled where it had had been spot-cleaned over and over again. Like the woman beside Rima, it smelled of strong disinfectant.

  They drove through city streets to another back door. Her handcuffs were removed. Another woman, this one broad and muscular, took custody of Rima. She walked her down a corridor, unlocked a door, and pointed a finger. Rima walked into a small windowless room. It was no larger than a closet and devoid of furniture apart from a bulb inside a wire cage screwed to the ceiling. The woman said, “After the door is closed, remain standing.” Rima said, as if to a teacher, “May I please go to the lavatory?” The woman did not answer. She closed the door behind Rima and locked it. The light went out. The darkness was complete.

  Rima walked around the room, feeling the walls with her palms, counting her steps. She had no idea why she did this, but when she was done she knew that the room was three and a half steps long and a little more than two steps wide. This knowledge seemed important; at least she knew something about her situation. She wondered what time it was. The police had taken her lavalier watch along with her other belongings and she would not have been able to see the watch even if she still had it, but she missed it. She tried to remember how many times she had looked at her watch that day. The answer was many more than usual. She had checked the time at least once a minute while waiting for the hour of her rendezvous with Paul. After that she forgot about the invention of watches. She put a hand over her mouth, afraid that she might sob with the giddy joy of the memory of that morning. She was sure that this little black room was equipped with hidden microphones, almost certainly with a judas hole through which prisoners could be observed.

  Rima was bone-tired. She lay down on the floor. A loud knock at the door awakened her. A voice shouted, “Remain standing at all times!” She stood up, expecting the door to open, the light to go on, for whatever that was going to happen to start happening. But nothing happened. She leaned against the wall, hoping for sleep. Again, just as she was drifting off, came another knock on the door. It was earsplitting. Obviously her keepers wanted Rima to know that they could see her in the dark.

  8

  By the time the light came on again, hours later, Rima was barely able to stand. Her entire body trembled, she was sweating. Her bones, her entire skeleton, ached. Her head throbbed. She had a stomachache. She was desperately thirsty and at the same time frantic to urinate. The combination of remaining upright, remaining awake, trying to make saliva, and preventing herself from emptying her bladder had numbed her mind. She was having great difficulty thinking about anything except urination. The hours in the dark literally had unbalanced her. She staggered, and now that she could see her own body again she had to remember how to stand upright. She could not tell which way was up, which down, which sideways. She was nauseated.

  A woman in uniform whom Rima had not seen before opened the door. Like the others before her she was unsmiling, but she was younger. She was slim, nice-looking, sisterly, with large blue eyes with a light in them that might have been kindness.

  “Come out,” she said.

  Rima did as she was told, catching hold of the doorjamb to keep herself from falling. Trembling, she looked into the woman’s eyes and said, “May I please use the lavatory?”

  The woman’s kindly eyes did not change expression, but she snorted as if Rima had asked for a glass of champagne. In the same harsh tone as the other women, she said, “March! You’re lucky you weren’t given a liter of water to drink and ordered to stand with your arms above your head!”

  Rima and her custodian walked rapidly down a long corridor, lighted every two meters by bare bulbs in cages like the one in her cell. With every step Rima expected to lose control of her bladder. If she did, what would happen? She knew that she would have to clean up after herself, but what else? The silence in this place was deep, as if Rima were the only prisoner. She wondered what had happened to Blümchen. If the little dog were here and alive Rima surely would hear her. There were no clocks, no pictures, no bulletin boards, no brush marks in the neutral gray paint on the walls, nothing to see except locked doors.

  At last they turned into another corridor and stopped before a door. Rima’s guard unlocked it and gestured for her to go inside. “Touch nothing!” the guard said. “Remain standing at attention at all times!” The door closed; she heard the lock turning.

  This room had a window, small and high and barred. To Rima’s surprise, it was still light outside. A bare desk and a wooden chair stood in the middle of the room, a small white sink in the corner. Rima wondered if she dared use it, but she was sure that she was being watched through some sort of spy-hole, and what would the punishment be for urinating in a sink in which members of the secret police washed their hands and drew themselves glasses of water? Rima had never before in her life thought so much about punishment as she was now doing. Until noon on this day she had hardly thought about it at all. Now she thought of nothing else. Not even Paul.

  The lock turned, the door opened. Rima was standing with her back to the door, rigidly upright, heels together, hands by her sides. She did her best not to tremble, but her body would not obey her commands and she shook from head to toe. She was deeply frightened. She feared that she would at any moment wet the floor like a puppy. She did not know whether to remain as she was or turn around, but what she had learned already about this place and its rules told her to do nothing that she was not told to do.

  A man in a gray civilian suit, swastika in his lapel, sat down at the desk. He was younger than she expected. He was extremely well-groomed, self-possessed, quick in his movements. His clothes fit him perfectly. His starched shirt was snowy white, the knot in his dark-blue necktie was expertly tied. He placed a file in the exact center of the desk, opened it, and read with complete absorption. Rima remained at attention. This was a much more fatiguing posture than merely standing up. In the dark she had slouched, shuffled, shifted her weight from one hip to the other. None of this was possible now. She did not know how much longer she could control herself. She pressed her thighs tightly together. In spite of herself she drew a sharp wet breath through her teeth. Without looking up from his reading, the man rapped on the desk three times. Rima felt that she might faint. Who knew what this signal might mean? The slim woman appeared almost instantly. The man behind the desk pointed at Rima. The woman said, “Come!” She led her down the corridor to another door and put her key in the lock. She had only one key, but it seemed to fit all doors. Rima though that she was going to be put back into the dark, but when the woman pulled the door open she saw a lavatory inside. It was spotlessly clean.

  The woman said, “Be quick! Do not keep the major waiting after he has done you such a kindness.”

  Information! Rima felt a spark of triumph and a rush of fear. She was in the hands of the secret police, she knew the rank
of the man who held her fate in his hands. It was a high rank. She knew that he had the power to lock her up forever or let her go free if he wished, and the authority to impose any of the many possible penalties that lay between freedom and standing upright in a dark room for the rest of her life with her arms above her head.

  Rima already had some information about this man. From Paul’s stories, she recognized the major as the man the Christophers called Stutzer. He was writing in the file when Rima was returned from the lavatory. Without being told—she was already trained a little—she stood at attention before him. He went on writing for some time. Then he closed the file, recapped his black-and-gold fountain pen, and placed it precisely in the center of the file. The pen was embossed with a swastika, gold on a red enamel button.

  He said, “You are aware that sexual intercourse between Jews and Aryans is forbidden by the laws of the Reich?”

  “Yes, H…” The H sound escaped her before she could stop it, so she did not make the cardinal mistake of calling him major, thus revealing that she knew something about him, however small the detail. She changed the form of address to the all-purpose sir.

  He gave her a knowing look, as if he knew precisely what she had just prevented herself from saying. He said, “Your age?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “How do you know so much sexual intercourse at the age of sixteen?”

  “I know very little, sir.”

  “Until you were tutored by some Aryan with whom you went to bed last night?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You do not deny that you copulated with an Aryan this very morning?”

  Rima’s heart beat harder. Her breath came faster, she felt sweat on the palms of her hands. How could even a major know such a secret? How could she answer his question? If she lied and they did know about her and Paul—had they planted cameras in the Christopher’s apartment as well? had someone spied on them?—she would be entirely in their power. The result would be the same if she betrayed Paul and told the truth. They would never let go of her. They would take him.

  Stutzer did not wait for her answer. The look on his face, the careless way in which he turned a page of the file, were meant to tell her that he already knew it.

  Without pausing, he said, “Your father is the Jew Israel Kaltenbach?”

  “My father is the surgeon Professor Doktor Johann Kaltenbach, sir,” Rima replied. “The name Israel was given to him recently.”

  Under the Nuremberg laws, all male Jews were required to have the name Israel added to their papers. All Jewish women were Sara on official documents. This made it possible for the authorities to determine their race at a glance, as if the red J already stamped on these papers might be overlooked.

  Stutzer said, “Do you yourself have the name Sara?”

  He knew perfectly well that she did not. He knew the details of her identity card. It was in his hands.

  Rima said, “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  Rima answered respectfully. “Because I have only one Jewish grandparent.…”

  He interrupted. “Which?”

  “My father’s father, who married a Christian.…”

  “Married a what?”

  “Excuse me, please. An Aryan. My mother is an Aryan. So were both her parents, of course. Under the laws of the Reich I am therefore not considered a Jew.”

  “Correct. But in your own mind are you an Aryan like your mother or a Jew like your father and grandfather?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “But you consider that you are entitled to engage in sexual relations with an Aryan because the Jews in your family have always done so?”

  “I don’t understand your question, sir.”

  Stutzer said, “I don’t understand you, Sara. You don’t know whether you’re breaking the law by fornicating with an Aryan, but you do so anyway. Why are you so reckless?”

  Rima saw that this man was implacable, that he did not care how stupid he seemed, that he would keep on asking the same question until he had the answer that he wanted. If she gave him what he wanted, she was lost. If she betrayed Paul and herself, she would be lost in a larger sense, and lost forever. She remained silent.

  Stutzer said, “It must be love. Yes, that must be the answer. I ask you this very simple question: How do you see yourself? Are you an Aryan or a Jew? I mean in reality, not according to a technicality of the law.”

  Rima said, “This has never been made clear to me, sir.”

  This was a risky but truthful answer. She did not know and, as far as she could tell, no one knew where she stood in the official directory of races. In limbo, she supposed, like an unbaptized child wandering outside heaven in the next world. The Reich was itself a next world—the party itself kept saying so—in which the rules were made by an inscrutable, all-powerful father who knew the secrets of every heart. The secret police were his angels.

  Stutzer said, “But what in your own mind do you think you are?”

  “Truly I do not know,” Rima said.

  “Then I will inform you of the facts,” Stutzer said. “You are a Jew who for legal purposes is not considered a Jew, but is a Jew just the same.”

  Stutzer gazed benevolently across his desk at Rima. He had just stated an evident truth. His face told her that he hoped for an argument so that he could refute it with ease. Rima was shaken by his calm assurance that he knew everything. No one who came before such a man had any hope at all.

  He said, “It must be difficult for you, who looks something like an Aryan, who believes in her mind that she is an Aryan, to realize that in fact you have always been a Jew and nothing but a Jew. Did you know this? Did your parents tell you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what did you think you were?”

  “A German, sir. A Lutheran. A human being.”

  His pink lips curved in a tiny smile. He knew that Rima’s words had slipped out, that she regretted them, that she had frightened herself. He said, “But now you discover that you are none of those things and never were, that it was all a fraud perpetrated by a Jew, your father, on his own child.”

  Again Rima was being invited to betray someone she loved. First Paul, now her father. Who next? She had no one else except her mother, and she was far away and safe, and an Aryan. Rima remained silent.

  “No answer?” said Stutzer.

  “I do not wish to argue with you, sir.”

  Suddenly he was like an uncle. “Oh-ho!” he said. “About what? Argue! Perhaps you can persuade me.”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “So you won’t even try? Why not?” Suddenly he was human, smiling, arching a thick eyebrow. He was almost flirtatious. He looked at her as a man looks at a pretty girl. She knew the look. Every day a hundred men looked at her in that way.

  Rima said, “Because I am afraid of you, sir. That is the truth of the matter.”

  “Afraid of me? Why?”

  “Because I have done nothing wrong, yet here I am.”

  “You have done nothing wrong?” Stutzer said. “You can’t be serious. You have stolen a valuable dog from Miss Hulda Wetzel and you have consorted sexually with an Aryan male. That is not the end of the list of your crimes. Far from it.”

  “Miss Wetzel paid me to walk her dog,” Rima said. “I would certainly have returned it safe and sound if I had been able to do so.”

  Stutzer showed her a look of exaggerated surprise. “You are arguing, therefore you are making a mistake,” he said. “True, you only argue about the dog. We don’t care about the dog. It is the other matter, the violation of the racial laws, the illegal fornication, that you must answer for. Also an even more serious matter we have not yet discussed.”

  Perhaps half an hour had passed. Rima was still standing at attention in front of Stutzer’s desk. Up to now she had experienced tremors in her knees and hands and a backache. Suddenly she developed a twitch in her cheek. She could feel it, but not control it. It must ce
rtainly be visible to Stutzer. He would be amused by it. It was a sign of his mastery, a sign of her weakness. Her entire body began to tremble. Her brain was powerless to stop this. She was, she knew, the picture of guilt and fear.

  Stutzer gazed at her in mock astonishment. He asked no questions because it was obvious that Rima was in no condition to speak or even think. He offered her no help, no encouragement. He gazed at her face, her body. It was a slow, methodical, openly sexual examination—a human moment, the last thing she had expected from this man.

  “Ah, you’re beginning to dance,” he said.

  In a powerful voice, not at all like the almost soothing one he had been using up to now, he called out a name.

  “Fleischer!”

  The young female guard with the sympathetic eyes came in immediately. She must have been standing right outside the door, waiting for a command.

  “Into the dark with this one,” Stutzer said. “And then coffee for me. And a large drink of water for Sara, here.”

  Before she was locked into a cell, Rima was given a liter of water to drink. It was served in a heavy glass beer-garden stein, difficult to lift. Rima drank slowly, gripping the stein in both hands.

  “Quick, quicker!” Fleischer said. Again her wide sky-blue eyes seemed sympathetic, but Rima realized that this was a trick of the light or her own imagination. This woman’s eyes would brim with kindness and understanding even if she were beating someone with a whip. When Rima finished the water, Fleischer ordered her to face the door, come to attention, and hold her arms above her head.

  “The hands must not touch,” Fleischer said. “The feet must not be moved. Under no circumstances, not even if you peepee like a stupid little bitch, will the arms be lowered. Do you understand?”

  She shut and locked the door behind her as she left. The lights went out. Rima held her arms above her head as ordered. She had expected this to be uncomfortable, but she discovered in less than a minute—she counted off seconds in her head—that it was painful, then excruciating, then insupportable. Her brain sent urgent messages to her nerves and muscles to cease doing what they were doing. When its warnings were disregarded, the brain sent more warnings—pain, tremors, tears, involuntary sobs. Rima kept counting seconds. After counting to three minutes, she knew that she could not possibly continue to hold this position. Suddenly the lights went on. The judas hole opened, Fleischer’s eye appeared—filled, no doubt, with what would appear to be compassion. The lights went out. Rima began to feel faint. The urge to urinate was much stronger than it had been before. She clenched her teeth to keep from sobbing, she wrapped one leg around the other to control her bladder. She lowered one arm and gripped her crotch. The lights went on. Whoever was watching her through the peephole hammered on the door. Rima felt warm water running down her legs, soaking her stockings. She fainted.