Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke

by Anne Blankman

  Her Jew. Mama couldn’t see him as anything other than that. Swallowing a sigh, Gretchen led Daniel upstairs to a long, dark hallway lined with three bedrooms. She pointed at his door, but couldn’t bring herself to look at him. What must he think of her, with a mother who despised him so deeply that she couldn’t call him by name?

  “There are extra blankets in the armoire,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry, Daniel.”

  He placed his index finger under chin, propelling it upward until their gazes met. “It’s fine. I already knew what she thinks of me.”

  She clung to him for a moment, listening to the reassuring thump of his heart. “We can do this, can’t we?” she asked, needing to hear him agree. “Prove your innocence?”

  “Of course.” He sounded so much like the Daniel she’d known in Munich, brash and confident, that she couldn’t help smiling. When she was with him, anything seemed possible. Somehow they would clear his name and show the world that the National Socialists were responsible for this Fräulein Junge’s murder. With foreign eyes watching Berlin, Daniel would be permitted to leave the country, and they could go back to England and the life they’d been building together. The future rolled out before her like a length of twine, long and curving but wonderfully tough and strong.

  “Good night,” she said, kissing him before slipping into another spare room. Curled up under the heavy blankets, she let herself think of the Whitestones and tears rose to her eyes. They could have no inkling how desperate things had gotten in Germany, and must be so worried about her. In the darkness, she clasped her hands together and prayed she got the chance to see them again.

  The express to Berlin didn’t leave until nightfall. A day stretched out in front of Gretchen and Daniel, waiting to be filled. After a meager breakfast of scrambled eggs, they sat in the parlor, talking about this mysterious murder Daniel was supposed to have committed. Who had this woman been and why had she been killed? Without knowing more information, though, it was useless to speculate, and finally they gave up in frustration. The investigation would have to wait until they got to Berlin; in the meantime, they had to find ways to make the hours pass.

  Daniel chopped wood for the cast-iron stoves that her mother used to heat the farmhouse; Gretchen filled the kitchen tub with fresh water and scrubbed all the dishes clean. As she went into the yard to toss out the water, she glimpsed her mother slipping into the henhouse. She followed Mama inside.

  In the dark coolness, she saw her mother reaching into the straw for eggs while hens pecked at the feed on the ground. Gretchen helped gather the eggs into a basket.

  “You said you came here from Munich,” Mama said. “Did you visit Reinhard’s grave there?”

  Embarrassment flushed Gretchen’s face. She hadn’t even thought of her brother’s resting place. She shook her head.

  “I haven’t been back myself.” Mama gently placed more eggs into the basket. “Reinhard’s friends in the SA paid for the tombstone. They said it was beautifully carved.” Her voice broke on the last word. Alarmed, Gretchen tried to touch her, but her mother shied away.

  “No, Gretl,” she said hesitantly, “there’s something I need to tell you—something I’ve been thinking about since Reinhard died. It wasn’t his fault that he became . . . well, what he was.”

  Gretchen glanced at her mother in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  For a long moment, the only sound was the hens clucking and the rustle of straw. Then Mama let out a low moan and sank to the ground, dropping the basket. “It was your father’s fault,” she said.

  Something icy grabbed Gretchen’s insides. What was Mama talking about? Slowly, she lowered to a crouch beside her mother. “I don’t understand.”

  “He wanted Reinhard to grow up to be like Herr Hitler.” Mama dropped her hands from her face. Tears trapped in her wrinkled cheeks shone like silver threads. “He was determined to treat Reinhard just as Herr Hitler’s father had treated him. It was all because of that story Herr Hitler confided to us once.”

  The words tumbled out as though Mama been holding them inside for a long time. “His father often whipped him. One night, when Herr Hitler was a small boy, he heard his father coming down the hall to beat him. He was determined to get away and tried wriggling through the window. But he couldn’t quite fit. So he took off his clothes and was almost through when his father opened the door. Herr Hitler snatched up a bedsheet to cover his nakedness. His father laughed and laughed at him. He even told Herr Hitler’s mother to come and look. From then on, he called Herr Hitler ‘the toga boy.’ Papa said it sounded as though Herr Hitler had been toughened up from a very early age.”

  Suddenly pieces locked together: Papa striding toward Reinhard, drawing his belt free from his trousers. Whipping him over and over, saying someday Reinhard would be thankful. Kissing Gretchen’s cheeks or dancing with her around the kitchen while Reinhard sat in the corner, sulking. Why had they been treated so differently? Even as Gretchen asked herself the question, she knew the answer: Papa had coddled and loved her because she was a girl. Her gender had kept her safe. But Reinhard, the boy, the one who was expected to have a job someday and make a success of himself, had been treated in the same manner Hitler had. Whipped and humiliated and mocked.

  Gretchen surged to her feet. Papa, the man everyone had told her was so kindhearted. Misguided, his mind wracked by warfare, but good deep down—that was what she had promised herself the whole time she’d been living in England. Air seemed to vanish from her lungs. Perhaps the man she’d loved and missed so much hadn’t existed at all.

  “How could you do that to Reinhard?” she choked out.

  Mama’s eyes gleamed with tears. “Papa thought he was turning Reinhard into a leader. We didn’t dream he’d turn out so differently from Herr Hitler—so cold and unfeeling. And he did die protecting you,” she added, sounding defensive.

  Gretchen remembered the lie she had told her mother, a tiny piece of comfort she had hoped would help Mama get through the years. The truth swelled inside her mouth until she was bursting to let it out, but she didn’t speak. The pleading on her mother’s face was unmistakable—perhaps a part of Mama suspected that Reinhard had died in another manner, but she needed to believe what Gretchen had told her. Gretchen turned away from her mother and braced her hands on the wall, feeling the wooden splinters digging into her palms. The pain was welcome—it was something to feel besides this widening hole within her rib cage.

  “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Papa knew that Uncle Dolf was diagnosed as a psychopath when they were recovering at the military hospital together. How could he want Reinhard to be like him? How could he remain friends with Uncle Dolf and bring him into our home?” The last words felt as though they had been wrenched from her.

  “Herr Hitler a psychopath!” Mama snorted. She picked up the basket and began gathering eggs again. “As if your father ever believed in that sort of nonsense. Those mind doctors are quacks, Gretl. Papa knew they must have been mistaken about Herr Hitler.”

  The last pieces fell together in a rush. Gretchen had read the letters her father had sent to her mother during the Great War. He’d written that he’d heard the doctors talking about Hitler, but he couldn’t believe that their whispered words truly applied to him. He’d known the truth, but hadn’t accepted it. That was why he’d tried to turn his only son into a reflection of his dearest friend.

  But Reinhard had grown up so emotionless, while Uncle Dolf was all fire. Papa must have feared he’d made mistakes in Reinhard’s upbringing, to make him so different from Hitler. Eventually their parents had taken Reinhard to a doctor—and received the same diagnosis that Hitler had gotten. It had been her father’s death warrant. Maybe then her father had finally believed the truth about Hitler. Or maybe he had continued to think that psychologists were charlatans. Either way, his knowledge had gotten him killed. When the National Socialists had attempted to overthrow the Munich government, he’d warned Hitler not to let his over
wrought nerves get the best of him again—and Hitler had realized that Papa had known about the diagnosis from five years earlier and had to be eliminated to prevent the embarrassing secret from ruining his future political chances.

  Gretchen wondered if Papa had figured out what was happening, in that brief second between Hitler’s pressing his pistol into his back and firing. Had he realized that the man he’d loved as a brother, the friend he’d tried to turn his son into, had been a monster?

  The air inside the henhouse was so stifling that she couldn’t breathe.

  She shoved the door open and ran across the fields. She needed a place to hide from the world. Beside the barn, she sank to her knees and let herself cry. Poor Reinhard. He hadn’t had the chance to grow into his own person. Maybe the early lack of their mother’s touch had coiled something inside him, and their father’s beatings and jeers had only twisted it tighter.

  Maybe, if things had been different, she and her brother could have been friends.

  Or perhaps he still would have grown up broken and emotionless; she couldn’t pretend to understand all the mysteries of the human mind. But her beloved papa had helped to shatter what should have been whole in Reinhard. The man she’d adored and whom she’d needed to believe in so badly.

  She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Surely the answers weren’t this easy, though, were they? Her parents’ mistreatment of Reinhard must have affected him, but that couldn’t be the sole reason he had turned out sadistic and distant. There had to have been something else within him, something that had been in him from the start.

  Maybe Hitler had been involved in shaping her brother’s personality, too; he’d certainly spent a lot of time with them while they were growing up. He’d taught them that they were special, separated from the so-called mongrel races because of their Aryan blood. Had Hitler’s teachings given Reinhard permission to hurt others—because he thought they were subhumans and didn’t matter?

  And what about Hitler? Had his upbringing, which she knew almost nothing about, warped him into a hate-spewing politician? She thought of his brother and sisters and shook her head. She’d once met his older half sister, Angela, a kindly, middle-aged lady, and she’d heard stories about his other siblings. They had sounded ordinary enough. Certainly Hitler’s childhood must have helped to form him, but it wasn’t the only factor.

  Gretchen rested her burning forehead in her cold hands. How desperately she wished Alfred were with her right now. But she could imagine what he would say: Reinhard may have been ill-treated but he was responsible for his actions. He chose to harm people, just as Hitler chooses to hate. We are each our own person, separate from our family, not wholly formed by our experiences. We decide who we want to be.

  Resolutely, she got to her feet and brushed dirt from her stockings. Maybe the Papa she’d loved and mourned had been her own creation. Her real father had been either deluded or wicked; at this point, it hardly mattered which. He was gone, and now she’d never know him. But she was alive and whole. And she chose to see with her own eyes, however painful and ugly the view.

  11

  GRETCHEN KNEW SHE WOULD PROBABLY NEVER see her mother again. They embraced, stiff as strangers, but she saw the pleading in Mama’s eyes before she and Daniel started on their long trek back to the station to catch the night express to Berlin. Pleading for what? Gretchen wondered as they walked across the snow-dusted marshlands. Forgiveness for hurting Reinhard? Or had Mama been silently asking her to stay? Gretchen was incapable of doing either.

  It was a long night on the train, fractured by a dream of Papa beating Reinhard. She had woken up, the smack of Papa’s belt on her brother’s flesh echoing in her ears until Daniel had heard her crying, and had wrapped his good arm around her, asking, “What’s wrong?”

  Out of habit, she glanced around their first-class compartment, even though she knew they were alone. Then she told Daniel about the way her father had “trained” Reinhard, the words hesitant at first, then spilling out so fast she barely stopped for breath. Daniel didn’t speak until she was finished, but his arm tightened around her a few times. When she was done, he had said, sounding furious, “Don’t you dare start feeling sorry for Reinhard. When I think about what he did to you . . .” He trailed off.

  In the moonlight streaming through the curtain, she saw the muscles in his throat constricting as he tried to talk. “Whether or not your father mistreated him, your brother still chose to beat you. Nobody made him do it.”

  “Maybe my father did, by raising him like that—”

  “No.” Daniel’s tone was sharp. He held her close, his breath a warm flutter on her cheek. “Maybe your brother was predisposed to act a certain way because of the things your father did to him and the people he grew up around. I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I don’t believe that we can blame our actions on our upbringings. If we could, then nobody would be responsible for anything they do.”

  For a moment, she was silent, thinking. There were no simple answers, and she doubted that she would ever fully understand the inner workings of Reinhard’s and Hitler’s minds. But she had to admit that she agreed with Daniel: People were accountable for their actions.

  The tension melted from her body, leaving her muscles as smooth and pliant as liquid. She turned into Daniel’s embrace and slept undisturbed until dawn.

  Early in the morning, they got off at the Anhalter Bahnhof. The station was crowded with passengers: thin-faced, shabby, clutching umbrellas and wax-wrapped sandwiches, the two things that Daniel said Berliners never left home without.

  As they joined the throngs of people streaming out of the station, Gretchen caught the black flash of four men’s uniforms. They stood at the entrance, their heads swiveling as they surveyed the people walking past. SS men; she recognized the death’s head emblem on their caps.

  Her legs shook so badly she wasn’t certain if she could keep walking. Who were they looking for? Had they guessed that Daniel had come to Berlin, or learned that she was back in Germany? If she stopped and reversed direction, people might wonder why. Somehow she forced herself forward. She glanced at Daniel. He stared straight ahead, his lips compressed into thin lines.

  They walked on the edge of the crowd, so close to the SS men that she brushed against one of them as she passed. His eyes flickered over her without interest, and then went on to the people behind her. She let out the breath she’d kept inside. The men hadn’t been looking for her or Daniel. Hitler didn’t know she was in Berlin. They were still safe.

  She followed the mass of passengers outside into air so bright and cold that her teeth turned to ice. The city exploded all around her: double-decker omnibuses trundling along the avenue, an S-Bahn train roaring overhead, a streetcar rumbling closer while its cables shot off blue sparks, and gleaming automobiles gliding past.

  The sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians. By the station entrance, a couple of men were singing a folk song, their caps on the ground to catch spare pfennigs. Strips of traffic-blackened snow lined the curbs.

  A wall of smells hit her: roasted chestnuts, perfume, cigarettes, car exhaust. Berliners’ crisp accents wrapped around her like a cloak; they sounded so different from the slower, blurred sounds of the Bavarian dialect that she was accustomed to. She had been to the capital once before, but the trip had lasted a matter of hours, and time had turned the memory into a distant haze. She had forgotten what an alive city Berlin was. The panic from the Reichstag fire almost two weeks ago seemed forgotten now, or at least skillfully hidden. Here, Hitler seemed far away, as though his influence hadn’t yet touched the capital.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Daniel gave her the first genuine smile she’d seen since they’d found each other at the train station.

  “You’ll find it very different from Munich.” Hefting his bag with his good hand, Daniel started walking, Gretchen falling in step beside him. “Liberal, diverse, full of art and culture and painting and music.” He frowned at
a group of SA men across the street. They stood outside a café, laughing, patting their pockets, probably looking for cigarettes or loose change for a cup of coffee. “At least, it was when I was growing up.”

  They walked faster. When they’d woken at dawn, they’d decided to go to his parents’ house first, to beg them to flee the city. Daniel was certain it wouldn’t be long before Hitler initiated a sweep of mass arrests in Berlin, as he had just done in Munich. The Cohens’ religion—and who their son was—meant they were in danger.

  Daniel hadn’t been in touch with them since he’d returned to Germany because of the new decree that had suspended privacy for letters and telephone calls. Now he didn’t dare call them or send a telegram. If they went to his parents’ street, though, he thought they should be able to tell by watching the house if it was under surveillance. It seemed the safest option.

  They took an S-Bahn train to the Waidmannslust district on the northern outskirts of the city. As they walked from the station, Gretchen heard church bells pealing eight o’clock. The houses were small and tidy, set back from the streets by narrow strips of lawn. There was no clang of streetcars, no rumble of omnibuses, only the high-pitched giggles of children playing hopscotch. This part of Berlin was another world.

  Clutching their suitcases, they walked down the quiet road. Although Gretchen hadn’t seen the Cohens’ home before, she recognized it, for Daniel had described it so many times: a tiny white house, surrounded by trees. Stripped of their leaves, the cherry and apple trees were black lines against the snow-scattered grass.

  There were no men in brown or black uniforms walking the street; no faces peering through windows down at them. Her heartbeat slowed. The house wasn’t being watched; Daniel had been right.

  Together they went up the front steps. Daniel’s mouth had relaxed into a smile. He rang the bell. They listened to it chime inside the house, then to the clicking of footsteps coming nearer. The door opened and a slender, dark-haired woman in a green woolen dress stared at them. Then she let out a low sob and flung herself into Daniel’s arms.