Dietrich laughs, for the first time since he entered Tegel. Linke smiles back. Then he says, to Dietrich’s surprise, “I think I know you. From before.”
“Before?”
Linke tosses his head. “You know.”
Dietrich searches his memory. “I don’t see how—”
But Linke says, “That play in Charlottenburg, at the youth club. That terrible play that the SS raided. I was in it, and so were you. We had a scene together at the beginning. You were friends with the fellow who directed it. I remember. You’re the only rich guys I ever met until I went into the army.”
The play. Falk Harnack and his Georg Kaiser. Dietrich narrows his eyes, trying to remember. “Which character were you?”
“The Bank Manager, remember? I had to borrow a suit for that one.” It is a memory he clearly relishes, a high point of his life. “And I was the Policeman at the end.” Leans close and whispers, “Thought I was a dead man when the SS came in. Never ran so fast in my life. Christ, those were some days.”
Dietrich nods at his leg. “You’ve been wounded?”
“Early on,” Linke agrees with the good nature of a man who has had time to come to terms with an infirmity. “On the way into Belgium. My own mate shot me in the kneecap while we were fooling around with our pistols. Everyone was green, you see.” He steps closer. “But we had to cover it up,” he says with a wink. “Back then you could be court-martialed for fooling around. So we found a dead Belgian and said he did it. I got a medal, instead of doing time in here with you lot.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t talk about it so openly.”
Linke waves his hand. “Nobody would bother about it now. Got more on their plate than they can eat, don’t they?”
DAY 38. It is the first of many conversations with Linke, who latches onto Dietrich as a long-lost souvenir from happier times. Dietrich hears the story of Linke’s life, how he worked at Borsig through the thirties. (“Half of Wedding worked at Borsig. Pulled the Reich’s trains on our bloody backs, we did. Where’d Adolf be without us, eh?”) How he married a woman in 1935 who promptly gained eighty pounds and does nothing but complain. (“A good cook, though, and raises a garden. Even with this wartime crap they give us, I eat well.” Dietrich, listening and observing the bribes pass back and forth, decides Linke’s position at the prison has something to do with this as well. Linke likes Dietrich because he reminds him of his youth but also because Dietrich will receive interesting parcels from home.) How he has three children, all girls thank God, for the war looks like never ending, not a time for sons.
When Linke takes the prisoners to the exercise yard he often walks beside Dietrich, chattering away about something that has happened on his rounds. In this way Dietrich learns about the prison and the men forced to live in it. Most of those kept in Tegel are military men serving time after court-martial. Some were apprehended after going AWOL or were charged with sabotage—many of them awaiting execution—but there is also an assortment of screw-ups, petty thieves, brawlers. Some are junior officers or enlisted men charged with insubordination, much of it justified according to Linke, who regales Dietrich with stories of absurd orders issued from on high. He also hints, though only vaguely, that some of Tegel’s inmates might have tried to undermine actions against Jews and civilians in the East. When Dietrich asks once, point-blank, Linke looks furtively round and shakes his head. “Not many,” he says, and runs his fingertip across his throat. But Dietrich in fact meets a Wehrmacht officer, Oberleutnant Pfifer, who is awaiting trial for refusing to order his squadron to execute a village of Polish Jews. Pfifer shrugs as he tells his story, smoking the cigarette Dietrich offers him. “I knew another fellow,” Pfifer says, “who also disobeyed. He was transferred, nothing more as far as I know. I think I refused in a little too colorful language for my commanding officer, shall we say, and the man had it in for me anyway because I stood up to him at other times. Anyway, they weren’t so threatened by refusing such duty. Most officers went along with no problem.”
“Why didn’t you?” Dietrich asks as they stroll around the exercise yard.
Pfifer shrugs. “Maybe I was just sick of putting up with this commanding officer of mine. I thought if it had to be done, it was a job for the SS. They’re the ones who enjoy that sort of thing. Gives them hard-ons, you know what I mean?” He shrugs again as if to say It doesn’t matter.
“I would have hoped,” Dietrich says, “you might have been motivated by some concern for the Jews to the executed.”
Pfifer studies him a moment, then says, in a voice that sounds casual, “Why are you in civvies?”
Dietrich tries to think what excuse to give but Pfifer is ahead of him.
“Who do you work for? The Abwehr?” When Dietrich doesn’t answer, Pfifer’s face goes blank. “Intelligence,” he says. He drops his cigarette butt and grinds it beneath his boot. “Why are you here?”
“A mistake,” Dietrich says. “I don’t expect to be held long.” He tries to keep a friendly expression on his face. “Actually I am a pastor.”
But Pfifer is moving away, disengaging. He will most certainly be passing the word that one must be careful around the quiet man in the tweed jacket. Dietrich feels like weeping. The exercise yard is the place to meet the other prisoners, to enjoy a small amount of human contact. Dietrich has come to think of his time in prison as a stay in a monastery, with a discipline of silence, and the exercise yard is like the common meal where one is finally allowed to speak. There is no meal to share in the exercise yard, but cigarettes are sometimes passed around, and the more generous of the prisoners from time to time give out food sent from home, biscuits, perhaps, or bits of dried fruit. Dietrich is one of the sharers, partly because he knows his family’s circumstances will mean he has more than most. But it is also necessary to share if the prison is to be what it must be in order for him to keep his sanity—his pastoral charge.
So he spends the hour before exercise on his knees beside his cot, praying for all the inmates and guards. When Linke opens his cell door and leads him among them, he greets them with a smile, a question about their health or news from home. He keeps an eye out for those who walk more slowly and painfully than usual as the result of a battering by their SS inquisitors, so that he might offer them comfort. (At quiet times the distant screams can be heard from the ground-floor cellblock used for interrogations. “What have these poor little souls to divulge?” Dietrich asks Linke. Linke shakes his head. “They pick on the weak ones,” he says, “and learn what they can. Who knows what it will be? Just keep your head down.”)
They all keep their heads down as they trudge around the exercise yard in three circles. This lasts half an hour, followed by another half hour when they are allowed to talk and barter, to wander on their own and inspect their surroundings. Dietrich is the only prisoner in civilian garb except for four Italians, former aides to Mussolini being held as scapegoats in the collapse of the Italian government. Many of the prisoners wear uniforms with light bare patches on the shoulders where insignia have been torn off—the ghosts of former rank. After two weeks in the exercise yard, Dietrich knows most by name. But after the conversation with Pfifer, he finds himself isolated. When he approaches, men who once greeted him as Pastor Bonhoeffer now nod coolly and move away, pretending to be engaged in conversation elsewhere. They gossip about him. Some of the guards have told them Bonhoeffer is a nephew of one of the top military brass in Berlin and therefore receives special treatment—better food, more packages from outside. It is as though he is once more in solitary. Only Otto Linke will talk to him.
DAY 46. While strolling around the prison yard Dietrich has discovered a tomtit’s nest wedged in a crack of the masonry. By standing on tiptoe he can just see over the edge, though he is careful not to approach when the mother is in the nest. First the eggs—ten tiny speckled ovals. Then after several weeks the fuzzy heads and perpetually open mouths of the hatchlings. Dietrich no longer approaches the nest. From a careful distance
he watches mother and father tomtit tend their young, and tries to guess when the nestlings will be ready to fly away.
Back in his cell he stretches out full-length on his cot—sometimes reading, sometimes napping—for the rest of the afternoon. It is the way he deals with the early-summer heat. Formal though he is, he strips to his underwear. Once Linke arrives with a package from home and finds him thus in dishabille. The guard is surprised at Dietrich’s obvious embarrassment.
“All the fellows on this floor take off their clothes in summer,” Linke says. “After all, you’re at the top of the building and it’s a tin roof. Just wait until August. You’ll sweat off twenty pounds, like one of those Finnish saunas.”
And he leaves Dietrich alone to contemplate this miserable scenario. “Perhaps I shall be out by then,” Dietrich says to the wall.
The next morning as he is preparing to go out to the exercise yard, Commandant Maetz pays a visit.
“I understand you’ve been suffering from the heat,” Maetz says. As though to express his sympathy, he takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his own face.
“It is very warm,” Dietrich agrees, “but I must learn to live with it.”
“It’s cooler on the ground floor,” Maetz says. “I can put you down there.”
Dietrich smiles his gratitude and starts to thank the commandant when a thought stops him. “What about the others on this floor?” he asks.
“I can’t move everyone,” Maetz says.
“And this cell? Will someone downstairs be put here?”
“Of course. There are only so many ground-floor cells.”
“Then I can’t move. It wouldn’t be right.”
Maetz looks surprised. “But I promised your uncle—”
“You can tell Uncle Rudi,” Dietrich interrupts, “that I appreciate his concern. But I can rest far better in the heat than in the knowledge I am passing on my problems to another prisoner.”
When Maetz is gone he kneels by the cot to pray, then walks to the exercise yard with a feeling of joy. He has not betrayed this his pastoral charge despite grave temptation. He looks around him at the three circles of trudging men, wondering which he has saved from the third-floor heat. He wants to love them all and wants them to love him. None of them knows this. None of them speaks to him.
DAY 54. In the exercise yard, they are done with their circles. Dietrich strolls, hands in pockets, toward the tomtit nest, then stops short and stares. The nest has been torn apart. The smashed bodies of the ten baby tomtits are scattered across the hard ground amid bits of twig and feathers. As though someone has ground them beneath the heel of a boot like cigarette butts.
He feels ill. Imagines the distress cries of the parent birds, who are nowhere about. When he looks away he sees many of the men are watching him. He turns back, takes out his handkerchief, and, one by one, gathers up the bodies of the baby birds. Behind him he hears laughter. Look, the pastor is going to have a funeral. He ignores this and stuffs the handkerchief into his pocket, not caring how eccentric his actions appear. On the way back to their cells they pass by the kitchen. Dietrich bends quickly and drops the tiny carcasses behind an overflowing garbage pail. He knows the prison rats will visit and make a meal. Death for life, he thinks bitterly.
In the emptiness of his cell, thoughts of Maria grow stronger. When after a month in prison he at last was allowed a letter from her, he had been ecstatic for days, had read and reread, folded and unfolded the letter until the flimsy wartime paper was coming apart. Then came a second letter, and a third. He was in an agony because he was allowed to write to no one except his parents and so could not tell her how much he loved her.
Maria’s letters were much the same as they had been before his imprisonment—chatty, full of energy and youth and simplicity and ardent expressions of her affection. She was riding her beloved horse through the fields around Pätzig, she was helping her mother bake a cake, in her room at night she was making lists of furniture and linens she would like to have in their house once they were married, was even picking the music for the wedding service. He fell in love all over again, this time with the Maria of letter and memory and daydream, who always smiled except when she remembered her father and brother and needed comforting by Dietrich, who in the daydream kissed her and held her close.
In fact he had never kissed or held her. He had never been alone with her.
But in his mind, in his mind their house existed, complete with the furnishings Maria had described to him in her letters. In his mind they had done much, much more than kiss. For though he did not possess the imagination of a novelist, isolation and longing fed his dreams so that the Maria of his mind became the greatest pleasure of his bare existence. And when he had done talking with this Maria, they made love, their amorous exploits passing before his eyes like a motion picture projected against the blank wall of his cell.
Today he has nothing from Maria, but a letter has arrived from her mother, Frau von Wedemeyer. It is short but not unfriendly, kind even, as if her Christian duty to write to the prisoner has overcome her dislike of him. She wishes him good health and hopes and prays they will see him at Pätzig before the leaves turn, “so that you may share in the good fruits of the earth which summer bestows upon us here in the country.”
He closes his eyes and tastes the produce of Pätzig—the plums and apples and blackberries, the bread baked with fresh-ground flour, the beets and carrots and peas and potatoes swimming in butter. When his own meager supper of turnips and potatoes arrives it is all he can do to eat it, and afterward he weeps like a child.
DAY 55. Through Commandant Maetz he sends a message to his Uncle Rudi, with whom he has not communicated in years. If I may ask one favor only, it is that my fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer be allowed to visit me, and that I be allowed to write to her. I promise to bother you with no other requests.
DAY 61. At last a black Mercedes carries Dietrich, handcuffed between two guards, to the War Court Building in the Witzlebenstraße. It is a painful journey. Since his imprisonment, the buds on the trees have exploded in bursts of limegreen. Dietrich stares out the car window like a country boy seeing the city for the first time, at the lindens some still in their ranks, others strewn about and broken by bomb damage, the shops with boarded facades, the masses of people passing on foot and bicycle with their disheveled clothes and subdued faces. Berlin has never looked more beautiful.
At the War Court he is hustled up a flight of stairs to a bare room with dark oak floors and woodwork. A bookcase, desk, and two chairs are the only furnishings, a picture of the Führer the only decoration. Not anyone’s office, he decides, only a place to conduct interrogations, and a mercifully civilized-looking place. He has heard horror stories about the Gestapo interrogation cells in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße—of tubs where heads are held underwater, boards of electrical wires hooked to genitals, concrete floors streaked with the blood and excrement of beating victims. This place could have witnessed nothing like that—it is too clean and simple, the floor too polished. Dietrich sinks gingerly onto the chair across from the desk. His heart, which has been beating rapidly, slows, his breathing becomes more even.
Then he is aware of the low murmur of voices behind the double oak doors on his right. The voices rise and fall, and one is familiar. The doors open suddenly by some invisible hand and he sees Hans von Dohnanyi, seated in an office that is the twin of the other. Dohnanyi’s back is straight and he glances sideways at Dietrich, his eyes quick behind his glasses. He appears to be unmarked and, though thinner and with an air of weariness, in decent shape. An SS officer seated across from Dohnanyi rises and comes through the doors. Dietrich—surprised by the suddenness of his isolation’s end—staggers to his feet and salutes, his Heil Hitler bouncing insincerely along the bare wood floors. He strains to keep Dohnanyi in his line of vision.
Judge Advocate Bauer says Heil Hitler quietly, and pulls the doors shut behind him.
“Pastor Bonhoeffer,” he says. �
��We meet again.”
Dietrich wonders if Bauer is referring to his arrest or if he recalls their earlier encounters. Bauer comes so close Dietrich could put his hand on the other man’s shoulder if he wanted. They are of a height, though Bauer is more slender, and younger in appearance because he has not lost much of his light brown hair. Unlike Dietrich, he does not wear spectacles, but he keeps a monocle on the end of a string in his breast pocket for reading fine print. He regards Dietrich in a not unfriendly manner.
“Your brother-in-law does well,” he says. “He seems to cooperate.” A slight emphasis on seems.
“May I speak with him?”
“No,” Bauer replies, as pleasantly as if he’d said yes. He goes to the desk and sits down, opens a folder lying on the polished surface and studies a few documents, monocle held between thumb and index finger. Without looking up he says, “I would ordinarily have gone to the prison to conduct this interview, but I thought you might enjoy an outing.”
“Thank you,” Dietrich says, feeling like a small child being handed a sweet.
Bauer nods genially. “I expect in return your cooperation.”
“I shall do my best.”
“Good.” Bauer looks up with a pleased expression. “Because of course, Pastor Bonhoeffer, you are concerned for the welfare of your parents, are you not? And especially fond of your fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer?”
Bauer waits a moment, until the fear registers clearly in Dietrich’s face. And no doubt, it was the mention of the fiancée which elicited it. “Not that Fräulein von Wedemeyer is in any danger. After all, she’s done nothing wrong. Has she? Though if one looked closely, one might find something irregular. Women can be so careless with their ration books, and then they have such loose tongues, terribly indiscreet sometimes. Anyway, I assume I shall have your full attention and cooperation during these little discussions of ours.”
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