“A very close friend,” Hilde said.
Paulus had been married to this woman for two-thirds of his life. He knew exactly what she was saying, and now he understood why she was so angry. He had seen her in this state before, for similar reasons. Hilde must have caught these children in bed. Paulus was tremendously pleased. He himself had not had his first honest girl until he was twenty.
“If she and Paul are close, all the more reason to regard her as a friend,” Paulus said.
Hilde knew that she had been overruled—another betrayal. She sniffed, turned on her heel, and left Paulus with the female he preferred on this particular night. Paulus opened the front door.
“Ring the bell when you wish to be relieved, children,” he said.
3
For the next hour Rima and Paul walked Lori up and down the gravel drive, under the beeches. The gibbous moon provided more than enough light. The night was tart, a bit damp but not chilly. Lori was not yet fully conscious. Sleep was calling to her. Or perhaps, Paul thought, it was death. In either case Lori was trying to answer. When her head bowed, Rima shook her hard and shouted into her ear: “WAKE UP!” From time to time Lori stumbled or coughed convulsively and as if talking in her sleep, muttered nonsense to herself in a voice so choked that Paul and Rima could not make out the words. Paul recognized the tone; there was no mistaking it. She was furious, she was arguing with some invisible presence. Paul did not even try to understand what his mother was saying. He was afraid of what he might hear. When she lost her balance or coughed, he wrapped her in his arms, kissed her cheek, murmured her name.
“She’ll be all right,” Rima said, at the end of one long coughing spell.
“Has she caught a chill?”
“Maybe, from the cold water, but she’s strong.”
Paul said, “You have no idea.”
His mind teemed with images of the last hour. Mostly what he remembered was Rima. In her certainty, her competence, her instinct for command, she reminded him of Lori. Paulus was right—without Rima they might have lost his mother. Certainly Lori had been fighting hard to die. He had seen that in her eyes in the tub when she glared at Rima—this perfect stranger who was interfering with her will—and tried to strike her. She would slip away again if she could. He knew that as well as if his mother had whispered her plans into his ear. She wanted to die.
To Rima Paul said, “Your father taught you how to do what you did tonight?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Rima replied.
Paul waited for her to go on. Even at sixteen he believed, as he believed for the rest of his life, that nothing useful could be learned by asking questions.
“Actually,” Rima said, “I learned it from his medical books. They always fascinated me. I read them on the sly. Also I had some practical experience. My father did this same thing.”
“When?”
“A year ago, when they took the last thing from him, his house in Charlottenburg and everything in it, and gave it to someone who’s important in the party.”
“He took sleeping powders?”
“I think so. If it had been poison he would have died.”
“You were alone with him when this happened?”
“I found him when I came home from school. He wasn’t quite unconscious yet. The stuff took longer to work than he thought. He fought with me. He had a pistol in his hand—his officer’s Mauser from the war. I couldn’t understand that at the time. Why take poison and also shoot yourself?”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Of the gun? No. I knew my own father wouldn’t shoot me. For him? Yes. Terrified. You now know as well as I do what it feels like to see something like this happening.”
“But in the end you saved him, just like tonight.”
“Saved him? I wouldn’t say that. I prevented him from succeeding in what he wanted to do.”
A silence followed. Lori broke it. In a clear voice she cried, “I will not permit this!” She stopped in her tracks and struggled to free herself from Paul and Rima. She was strong, violent. After a moment Rima said, “Let her go. She’ll hurt herself.”
Paul said, “The cliffs are nearby.”
“In her condition how can she run away from you?”
Freed of restraint, and of support, Lori lurched forward, ran two or three steps, then fell. She cursed in German, coughed convulsively, cursed again. Paul fell to his knees beside her, “Mama, it’s Paul. Everything is all right. Let me help you.”
Rima stood back, watching, silent, not interfering. Her face was in shadow. Paul remembered her as she had been when she got out of bed an hour ago, her tumbled hair. Under the circumstances, it was an incongruous thought. It was absurd to be thinking of what had not happened between him and Rima rather than this ugly thing that had happened to his mother. It was worse than absurd to have a heart full of love for Rima, to feel blood rushing in his body for her, to think of nothing but her, while his mother might be dying. He was overcome by guilt, but the blood still rushed. He helped Lori to her feet. She stood still, submissive, while he brushed dirt from her clothes. Rima took her other arm. They walked to the end of the drive, then turned around and started back.
“I think,” Rima said as if her story had not been interrupted, “that my father had his pistol because he intended to shoot anyone who got between him and death. Except me, of course.”
Lori was silent now. She seemed to be walking more easily. She looked at nothing, said nothing. She was breathing normally. Paul wondered what would make a person want to die so badly that he would kill to defend his desire. But in the case of Lori, he knew, or thought he did.
Later, while the house was sleeping—Lori, too, now that it was safe for her to close her eyes—Rima went to Paul’s room. She went back to her own bed just before dawn, the moment at which Paulus habitually snapped awake and went for his morning march along the cliffs. She saw him from the window, head high, stepping out toward the sea, walking stick in hand, a large wolfhound keeping step at his heels. His head turned left and right, he inhaled the morning air to the bottom of his lungs. He was like a stag in a state of alert. The maleness of him made Rima smile. How much like Paul he must have been when he was young.
4
Next morning Rima and Lori were first down for breakfast. With a brisk handshake Lori introduced herself as if she and Rima were laying eyes on each other for the first time. In Lori’s case this may have been true. Who knew what she had seen or heard the night before? Today she was perfectly self-possessed.
“I must thank you for your help last night,” she said.
“I did very little,” Rima said.
“That’s not quite the truth, as I understand it, but you have my gratitude.”
Perhaps that’s not quite the truth, either, Rima thought, looking into Lori’s steady eyes. The pupils were still dilated from whatever overdose she had taken. Because of the enlarged pupils her eyes looked almost black and so cold that it was hard not to think that Lori was making them so by an effort of the will.
“I’m glad we’re alone,” Lori said. “We must get to know each other.”
Breakfast was laid out on a sideboard. Lori helped herself to butter and jam, bread, a piece of cheese, a slice of ham, a boiled egg. Clearly she meant to fill her empty stomach. Rima took bread and butter and a cup of coffee.
They sat down on opposite sides of the table, looking into each other’s faces. Rima was surprised by Lori’s youthful appearance. Take away the bruised eyes and the shadow of misery and she might have been a girl of twenty. She ate like a teenager—silently, greedily, everything on her plate.
“Now I must interrogate you,” she said when she was finished.
Rima said nothing.
Lori said, “It’s my duty as a mother, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“You are a nurse?”
“No, a student. A former student.”
“But you are Professor Doctor Kaltenbach
’s daughter?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
Lori switched to English. “Your father is a fine person and a great surgeon,” she said. “But you know that. I knew your mother, too. She played the viola very nicely. She is getting along all right in Argentina?”
“I believe so. Her letters don’t always come through.”
“And when they do they have been opened.”
“Sometimes it seems so.”
“You’re circumspect, I see.”
“Everyone in the Reich should be circumspect.”
Lori examined her, as if answering her own question before asking it. “You are what age?”
“Sixteen.”
“You seem older.”
Rima spread her hands—whatever you say.
“At your age that’s a compliment. Seeming to be older at your age may not be a good thing in every way, but it’s an advantage. It’s difficult at sixteen to get people to take you seriously. Especially if one is as pretty as you. How did you learn English?”
“From tutors. My mother thought it would be an advantage. She always hoped to go to America.”
“And now she’s there, in Argentina.”
“Not that America. New York City is where she wanted to be, because of the gaiety and the skyscrapers. She thought that my father could work there and be as well known as he was in Berlin and we could live in peace.”
“So she saw it coming, what we have now in Germany?”
“Maybe not the entire reality, but she guessed enough to realize what it would mean for my father.”
“And your father?”
“If you know him,” Rima said, “then you know the answer to that question.”
Lori nodded. “I’m curious about how you met Paul.”
Rima took a moment before she answered. This was not because she had to summon memories. Those were always with her—not as memories, but as the most vivid things in her mind in every moment of the present. She could not get Paul out of her head. She had never before understood the entire meaning of that cliché, but now she did. Clichés, she realized, were clichés for a reason.
“I saw him for the first time last summer, in the Tiergarten, near the Neuer See. He was just standing there in the middle of a lawn, looking at the world.”
“A figure in a landscape.”
“No, a boy in the midst of life. He was very still but entirely alive. That’s what I noticed.”
“And you decided that he was the one for you?”
“Yes. At that moment.”
“You’re very frank. I admire that. Did you approach him then?”
“No. The authorities were in the midst of ruining my father, taking everything away from him. It wasn’t possible to know where this process would end.”
Lori interrupted. “You didn’t want to involve Paul?”
Rima said, “I decided to wait and see what happened to my father.”
Lori said, “So you set your cap for him, you spied on him, you became a mystery woman in his eyes, you made him grateful to you, and at last you captured him.”
“I would not have chosen those exact words to describe what happened,” Rima said. “But yes, those are the essentials.”
Lori said, “I see. And why exactly did you come to Rügen yesterday?”
“To be with Paul.”
“You love him?”
“Of course I do.”
“He loves you?”
“He has said that he does.”
Lori paused, eyes locked with Rima’s. “And there is no other reason that you came here yesterday?”
“Yes, but I can’t answer your questions about that. I’m sorry.”
“You are not pregnant?”
“No.”
Lori coughed into her napkin—deeply, almost consumptively, as she had done the night before. Her bruised eyes watered; she dried them on the napkin. “I may understand your reasons better than you think,” she said. “I’ve seen you before, you know. You were watching me by the Tiergarten the other day. You were walking Miss Wetzel’s little white dog.”
“Yes, Mrs. Christopher, and you were getting into a black Daimler.”
“You identified everyone in the car?”
“I recognized the man, Mrs. Christopher.”
“Whom have you told?”
“Only Paul. He had seen the same thing happen on another day.”
Lori bit her lower lip, the first visible sign that her emotions were engaged by this conversation. Her pupils had grown smaller while they talked. She said, “You realize that I should hate you for all this, do you not?”
“As a woman, I understand such a feeling. But I think it is wrong.”
“You consider yourself a woman?”
“Didn’t you at my age?”
This made Lori pause, even smile briefly with her fierce eyes. “Perhaps a year or two later than sixteen,” she said. “And if as a woman you think what you think, then what is your opinion as an intelligent human being?”
“I think I should not have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I am afraid—very much afraid, Mrs. Christopher, that it’s going to cost me everything.”
Lori looked at Rima without expression, then shook her head as if to rid it of a notion or an impulse. “Perhaps not, or at least not yet,” she said. “They saw you too, you know. They may well think that you can be useful to them.”
Rima was taken aback. What did this woman know? She said, “I am prepared for that possibility.”
“Are you indeed, Miss? Be careful. Many others have thought the same thing and most of them are dead.”
Lori folded her napkin and drew it into its silver ring, then rose from the table. She touched Rima on the shoulder. Rima looked up at her.
“You are gorgeous,” she said. “Paul is a lucky young man, but he is very young, younger than you. Take precautions when you’re with him. You know what to do?”
Rima nodded. “May I ask you a question?” she said.
“Fire away.”
“Do you hate me?”
“Of course not,” Lori said. “I’m all booked up in that department.”
5
Better than anyone else, Lori knew that Rima had saved the family from the embarrassment—and in the Christophers’ case, something worse than that—of letting the secret of Lori’s suicide attempt out of the house. Had they called a doctor, he would have been obliged to report his visit and the particulars of the emergency to the police. They would have investigated and passed the information on to higher authority. There would have been another detention, another interview. Heydrich himself would have interrogated Lori the next time he abducted her from the Tiergarten, drove her to his confiscated hunting lodge in a wooded section of Berlin, and entertained her at lunch with his theatrical conversation, his painful manners, his learned appreciation of her piano playing. He had perfect pitch just as Lori did or so he claimed, he was hopelessly in love with her, the most perfect Aryan female he had ever seen.
“You are from folklore, from art!” he had told her, kissing her palm on the day that Rima saw her getting into the Daimler. “You are the eternal German beauty, do you wonder that I love you?”
He kept Paris clothes for her in a closet at the hunting lodge and required her to change into them when, as he put it, she called on him. He gave her gifts of jewelry and perfume, once a Julius Blüthner grand piano that had belonged to Franz Liszt and later to a famous Berlin pianist who—how should he put it?—no longer played in Germany, just as the former owner of his hunting lodge no longer lived in Germany. Lori could not touch the keys of this magnificent instrument without nausea, but during her hours in captivity she played it for Heydrich, who preferred the romantics and also, though he was slightly ashamed of this, the operettas of Lehár and Strauss. To Heydrich, their love, as he called it, was, as he put it, a sublime operetta, tuneful and gay and sometimes (he admitted it), marked by foolish misunderstandings.
In fact
, Lori did not misunderstand her situation in the least. Her trysts with Heydrich were the price for his staying his hand against Paul, Hubbard, Paulus, Hilde and everyone else to whom she was connected by blood and friendship. The secret police knew the identities of the people she loved. None of them was safe. Heydrich really did have the power to do whatever he liked in Germany. His popular nickname was Der Henker, the hangman. In her own mind Lori called him Die Spinne, the Spider. The entire German people was caught in his web. He could, if the whim took him, sentence them all to death and in their enthusiasm for obedience they would shoot each other down to the last two men alive, who would thereupon enter into a murder-suicide pact.
When he wanted to be alone with Lori without the possibility of interruption—to spare her worry, as he put it—he would order the arrest of Hubbard, and now that Paul was home from school, of Paul, too. This was the reason for their detentions, for the endless, pointless interviews with Stutzer. Even though he knew all about them, Heydrich never referred to the crimes of which the Christophers were undeniably guilty—the smuggling of a large number of fugitives out of the country aboard the Mahican. Nearly all of these people had been Jews, a few had also been Social Democrats, some really were or for fashion’s sake had pretended to be communists. Some of them even managed to take their money, or some of it, out of Germany with them. Helping such people—enemies of the state, enemies of the people, racial and political scum—to escape justice was treason. A capital crime. Heydrich knew all the names, all the dates, all the details of the Christophers’ nighttime rescues. Lori knew that he knew. On his whim she could be shot or tortured and then shot. Or beheaded or impaled on a meat hook. So could Hubbard, so could Paul because he had stowed away on a couple of their night sails to Denmark. Heydrich was capable of shooting Hubbard and Paul or tripping the guillotine himself and requiring Lori to watch. And then, sentimental fool that he said he was, not shoot her because he could not kill the thing he loved.
Lori was not glad to be alive on Midsummer Day. The lingering effect of the opiate she had taken the day before clouded her mind and still struggled with her brain for control of her body. She did not know which opiate it had been. She had thought that so-and-so many grams of the stuff would kill her, which was all that mattered. The dose she swallowed had not been enough. Her body had saved her by being stronger than the drug. Now, the morning after, she was chilled, she shuddered, her legs were weak and made small involuntary kicking movements. She had vomited the huge breakfast she had eaten almost immediately after she ate it. She tasted vomit, she smelled it for hours afterward.
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