“Hey, you! Where do you think you’re going?” called someone from behind them. It was Werner; she recognized his slight lisp.
She couldn’t move. But Daniel turned, looking annoyed. “What is it?”
Footsteps sounded on the carpeted corridor, coming closer. “Why are you getting off? This isn’t a scheduled stop.”
Daniel’s face broke into a rueful grin. “Try convincing my girl here of that. I’ve finally gotten her to agree to go to Berlin with me for the weekend and now she’s got cold feet and is whining that her reputation’s going to be ruined! I’ll have to ring a friend of mine to drive us home so her father doesn’t find out.”
The SA fellows laughed. “Hard luck!” one of them sympathized. “All right, get going.”
“Thanks.” Daniel tipped his hat. How had he managed to think so quickly? At another time, Gretchen would have been impressed; now she was too anxious to feel anything else. Whistling, Daniel hurried along the corridor, Gretchen at his heels. He wrenched open the carriage doors and clattered down the metal steps, Gretchen following closely. They walked toward the small train station, Daniel muttering, “Act natural. Somebody might be watching.”
They stepped into the brightly lit station and pretended to study a display of maps until the train roared forward. Through the window, Gretchen watched the locomotive lumber past, gaining speed every second until it was nothing more than a black line reflecting starlight in the north. Releasing a pent-up breath, she glanced at Daniel.
“Let’s go,” he muttered. “The stationmaster’s looking at us.”
Together, they went outside and stood on the platform. The harsh wind blew right through Gretchen’s coat, and she shivered.
“That was good thinking on the train,” she said. “However did you think up that story so fast?”
He shrugged. “Habit, I suppose. When I was a reporter in Munich, I had to make up stories all the time to get potential sources to talk to me.”
It was a side of him she hadn’t seen since they’d moved to England: quick-witted, daring, confident. Despite the circumstances, she couldn’t help being glad she’d seen it again. She knew Daniel never felt more alive than when he was digging for the truth.
“I’m afraid we’re stuck here for the night,” Daniel said. “There won’t be any more trains until morning. Are there any cheap lodging houses in town?”
Gretchen knew why he asked; as a child, she’d often spent summers in Dachau at her grandparents’ farm. “Not really. This is a small town, Daniel, and it’s mostly houses. If we do find a boardinghouse with a vacancy, the proprietor’s sure to ask for our papers.”
“Which I can’t show him.” Daniel heaved a sigh. “The temperature must be near freezing. We can’t possibly camp out in the marshlands and we can’t stay here or the stationmaster will get suspicious.”
They looked at each other. Gretchen knew what he was thinking by the uneasiness in his expression: of her grandparents’ farmhouse on the northern outskirts of town, where her mother might be living.
“They won’t like having you there,” she said quickly. “But they won’t turn you in, I’m sure of it.”
“I can’t imagine the place will be under surveillance,” he said, almost to himself. “Nobody knows you’re back in Munich, right?”
“Only Herr Gerlich and Eva.” Neither added what she hadn’t said—that presumably the only people Gerlich could tell about her return were his jailers. As for Eva, they could only hope she would keep her promise to Gretchen and maintain her silence.
Daniel nodded. “There’s nothing for it, then: We’ll have to stay at your grandparents’ house, at least for the night.”
“It’s a long walk,” she warned. Her stomach cramped with anxiety at the thought of seeing Mama again. It had been so long since they’d been together, and she knew too well that Mama wouldn’t understand the choices she’d made. Did she still love Gretchen? Or were the bonds of blood and years not enough? She pushed the questions away and tried to keep her tone light.
“We’d best get started,” she said.
Hefting their bags, they began walking. Gretchen watched their breaths make white clouds in the air. A dusting of snow lay on the ground.
Dachau’s white houses looked ghostly in the night. Gretchen and Daniel headed east, to skirt the town, and walked alongside the Würm River. Overhead, more and more stars winked into life, painting the marshlands and the rushing river waters silver.
Gretchen pictured the town’s layout in her mind. On Dachau’s outermost northern limits stood her grandparents’ farm and the old powder factory, separated from each other by a forest and a river. The powder factory was a thirty-minute walk from the station, her grandparents’ home at least another twenty. They had almost an hour’s worth of walking ahead of them.
Fog curled on the ground, and they had to step carefully between the gaping holes in the marshland, from where the big breweries in Munich had cut swaths of peat moss to make beer. As the starlight sprinkled down on the fields, Gretchen saw that the ruined farmland looked dead.
She was too exhausted and cold to talk. Daniel seemed to need silence, too, for he said little as they plunged into the forest, where the pine branches tangled so thickly overhead that they could barely see the light of the stars. Through the filigree of tree trunks, Gretchen spied the massive white concrete wall encircling the former munitions factory. It had been abandoned for years, since the end of the Great War, and she remembered playing hide-and-seek there as a child, darting between the whitewashed civil servants’ villas, laughing. Now she heard nothing but the whine of wind between the trees.
They turned left, making for the western edge of the woods. Gretchen’s legs shook from hunger, and her vision wavered. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Maybe on the train into Munich, but that had been luncheon, about nine hours ago. She stumbled over a tree root and Daniel’s hand was instantly on her arm, holding her upright. His touch felt so familiar, so right.
Tears trickled from her eyes, trailing an icy line down her cheeks. He wiped them away, his fingers twitching, a sure signal that his old injury was troubling him again.
“Are you in pain?” she asked.
“I’m fine.” He was white to the lips.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said. “Try to pretend you’re all right when you’re not. I wish you’d let me help you sometimes.”
He gave her a tired smile. “Gretchen, you don’t know how much you already do.”
She smiled back at him. They continued walking in the darkness between the trees, but Gretchen carried the heat and the light of his words with her, keeping her warm, helping her believe, if only for a moment, that they were safe.
9
THE FARMHOUSE SAT IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIELD. From far off, it looked as Gretchen remembered: a large, old house made of dark wood silvered with age. As she grew closer, breathing hard from a stitch in her side, she saw that some of the blue shutters with heart cutouts were missing or hung cockeyed. Several roof tiles were gone. The farmland her grandfather had plowed for his potato fields had surrendered to mud and weeds. Clay pots on the front steps lay on their sides, cracked, spilling dirt across the porch.
At the far end of the mud-choked fields, Gretchen stopped in confusion. What had happened here? Her grandparents never would have let the farmhouse fall into such disrepair. She shot a wary look at her surroundings, but she saw no one. Had the National Socialists sacked the place?
“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked.
“It’s a mess.” She looked over her shoulder at the outbuildings: a barn, a couple of sheds, a henhouse, but they were quiet, the doors shut, no lights showing between the wooden slatted walls. The place was quiet as a tomb. “Let’s go in,” she added, shaking off her unease.
They knocked repeatedly and had to wait for several minutes before shuffling footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. It opened and a woman, bent with age, peered out at them.
She carried a kerosene lantern, its yellowish flicker washing over her face. She wore a knitted woolen shawl over a white nightgown. A blue kerchief was wound around her head, but Gretchen didn’t need to see her hair to know who she was. Mama. She let out a half-gasping sob.
Mama stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. Her cheeks, once so fair and soft, stretched tightly over her cheekbones. She opened her mouth to speak and a strange whistling sound streamed out. Dark holes dotted her gums. She was missing half of her teeth.
Gretchen froze. “What happened to you?”
“Gretl, is that truly you? Your hair . . .” Mama stretched out a trembling hand, then let it fall, as though she were afraid to touch Gretchen.
“I dyed it.”
“Why would you do such a thing? Your beautiful hair—oh.” Mama’s expression hardened. The words seemed to whoosh between her missing teeth, making it difficult to understand her. “You did it to look like him, I suppose.” She looked past Gretchen, her eyes narrowing as they swept up and down Daniel.
Daniel removed his hat and nodded at her, his face carefully blank. “Good evening, Frau Müller.”
Mama glared at him. “Why are you here? Isn’t it enough that you took my daughter from me? Do you have to come back and rub my nose in it?”
“Mama, please.” Gretchen laid a hand on her mother’s arm. “It wasn’t Daniel’s fault that I had to leave Munich.” The words she longed to say felt heavy in her mouth: It was Uncle Dolf’s fault; he’s the real monster! But she didn’t dare say them. She and Daniel needed to remain on Mama’s good side, if they wanted to be allowed to stay.
“We just need a place to spend the night,” Gretchen said. “Please, Mama. We won’t be any trouble, I promise.”
Tears clogged her throat. She couldn’t believe that she had to beg her own mother for shelter. This was what Hitler did to us, she thought bitterly. His insidious lies had torn them apart. For the thousandth time, she wished her father had been assigned to any regiment besides the 16th, in which he had met Hitler during the Great War. There was no telling what their lives might have been like, if not for that one turn of fate.
Sighing, Mama held the door open for them. They slipped past her into a filthy parlor lit by the glow of Mama’s lantern. The fireplace looked cold and black, and the box where Gretchen’s grandfather used to keep the woodpile was empty. Ice crystals glittered on the wood-paneled walls. Months of rain and wood smoke had darkened the windowpanes. The watercolor painting above the mantel had been ripped; someone had stitched it together with red thread.
“What happened to the farm?” Gretchen asked. “Where are Oma and Opa?”
“Your grandparents are dead,” Mama said dully.
“What?” Gretchen gasped. “What happened to them?”
“They fell ill last winter.” Mama curled a hand over her mouth, hiding her missing teeth. Each word was accompanied by a soft whistling sound. “Pneumonia.” She walked into the kitchen.
The backs of Gretchen’s eyes stung. Not Opa, who liked to smoke pipes in the evening and tell stories about his childhood, back when artists had flocked to Dachau to paint the ever-shifting landscape with its play of sunlight and shadow. And Oma, who smelled of cherries and could roll a piecrust perfectly on her first try and used to guide Gretchen’s young fingers on knitting needles.
Daniel wrapped his good arm around her. “I’m so sorry.”
She buried her face into his shoulder, counting her breaths. One. Her grandparents had been old. Two. She and Daniel were still alive, and they had to do whatever it took to stay that way. Three—she stopped, remembering that Hitler had taught her this calming method years ago, when she had been anxious about a school exam. She’d rather drown in grief than use any of his tricks. Even if they worked.
She pulled back from Daniel. He smiled a little, running his knuckles down the side of her cheek. “Go and talk to her,” he said quietly. “You haven’t seen each other in ages. I don’t want to get in the way. I’ll stay out here.”
How did he know what she needed, without being told? She nodded her thanks at him and followed Mama into the kitchen. This room was worse than the parlor: The cast-iron stove was cold and coated with a layer of grease, and the brown linoleum-topped table was gritty with spilled food. The tin bathtub her grandparents used to fill with water from the well sat in the middle of the floor, its bottom wavering under a film of soap-scudded water.
How could Mama live in such filth? At the boardinghouse, she’d been a stickler for cleanliness, washing the linens, scrubbing the lavatories, scouring the windows with vinegar, and beating carpets on the back steps. What had happened in the past eighteen months to change her so completely?
“You must be hungry,” her mother mumbled, but Gretchen laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and guided her down into a chair.
“Please,” she said. “What’s happened here?”
Mama sighed and undid her kerchief. Her hair fell forward like a curtain, shielding her face. Silver threads glinted among the blond strands. “After they died, I couldn’t keep up with the farm. There’s so much work to be done, and I can’t afford to pay anyone to help me. . . .” She trailed off.
“And you?” Gretchen forced herself to ask, praying the answer wasn’t what she suspected. “What about your teeth?”
Mama cradled her head in her hands. “It was the night you and your Jew left.”
Slowly, Gretchen lowered herself into a chair. Even through the haze of the months, she remembered each detail of the final hours she and Daniel had spent in Munich. They had caught a train to Dachau, intending to beg her grandfather for his car so they could drive over the border. They’d been walking near the old powder factory when Mama had appeared. She had assumed they would avoid the town center and keep to the outskirts, to decrease the risk of running into their pursuers. When she had warned them that SA men had already arrived at the farmhouse, Gretchen had seen their chances of escape evaporate like mist. Until Mama had given them her life’s savings and they had hiked to Ingolstadt, where they’d boarded a train bound for Switzerland.
“When I got back to the farmhouse,” Mama said, her voice hissing between her missing teeth, “the SA men were beating Opa. They wouldn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know where you’d gone.” She raised her head, tears shining in her eyes. “They tore the painting over the mantel. You know how Oma loved that picture. Then they hit me.” She touched her lips.
They must have hit her many times, to knock out so many teeth. Gretchen felt sick. This was her fault. While the SA had attacked her mother and grandfather, she’d been hiking through the countryside with Daniel, safe and unhurt and starting a new life.
She took her mother’s hand. Mama’s fingers felt cold, and the backs of her hands were knotted with blue veins. They’d never been pretty hands. Red from preparing meals for other people to eat and washing clothes for the boarders to wear. Nails broken and skin mottled from endless labor to keep Gretchen and Reinhard fed and clothed.
But Gretchen had loved those hands. They had protected her.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. Tears streamed down her cheeks. For once, she didn’t try to stop them.
“I know, Gretl,” her mother said. She didn’t squeeze Gretchen’s hand back, but she didn’t let go either. “Just as Herr Hitler would be, if he knew what had happened. The Party has grown too big. When it was small and within Herr Hitler’s control, it was a good organization. Now it’s expanded beyond his grasp and there are rogue members doing wicked deeds in his name.”
Gretchen snapped her head up to look at her mother. Thin and pale in her old nightgown, her face painted yellow by the light of the lantern on the table. This was what Mama told herself, so she could keep going. Alone on a dying farm, abandoned by the people she’d thought were her friends. Oblivious that the man she admired so greatly had killed her husband and ordered her son’s death.
“Uncle Dolf isn’t who you think—” Gretchen stopped. Her mother�
��s eyes were steady on hers. And bright with tears.
Gretchen glanced at the dirty kitchen and thought of the fields that probably wouldn’t yield many potatoes in the fall. What harm was there in letting Mama believe what she needed to? She had no power, no influence, nobody to listen to whatever she might say. The truth seemed crueler than a lie.
Gretchen clutched her mother’s hand. “Yes, Mama,” she said. “I’m sure Uncle Dolf would be very sorry, if he knew.”
10
HER MOTHER TOASTED BREAD FOR GRETCHEN AND Daniel. As they ate in silence, Gretchen watched Daniel sneaking glances around the kitchen, his expression pensive. She realized a city boy like him had probably never seen a home without running water or electricity before. This must seem like another world to him.
She thought of the Whitestones’ kitchen: bright with electric light, an icebox full of fine cuts of meat. And the cupboards in her family’s old kitchen, so often empty, when they had lived in an apartment and Papa had been alive. She could still hear Papa’s hoarse mutter that he wasn’t hungry. But she’d seen the way he’d looked at the pieces of turnip on her plate. He’d been starving, and had pretended he wasn’t so she and Reinhard would have something to eat. His hatred for the Jews made a horrifying kind of sense: He’d needed someone to blame, and Hitler had suggested an easy scapegoat.
When they were done eating and had thanked Gretchen’s mother for the meal, Mama took their plates, careful not to touch Daniel’s fingers. “Gretchen, you may stay as long as you want,” she said without looking at him, her voice shaking. “You’re welcome to live here.”
Gretchen’s heart ached as she watched her mother carry the dishes across the room. “Mama, I can’t. Daniel needs me.”
“Fine,” her mother snapped. Her back was ramrod straight as she stacked the plates beside the dirty ones on the counter. “Go to bed. Your Jew can have the spare room at the end of the hall.”
Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke Page 8
