In the sick bay they work in the dark with candles, tending the wounded. The lights flicker on—an emergency generator thrown into service? Dietrich scarcely has time to wonder. Then his ears pop and his head slams against something hard. It takes him some time to realize he is sprawled on the floor. His ears ring and it hurts to lift his head, but he does so slowly and opens his eyes. Everything is black. His hand is lying in a pool of something wet. He thinks it is blood but smells his fingers. Alcohol. It soaks his shirt sleeve, and the acrid burn of it clears his head. He sits up. Beyond him matches flare, candles. A cold blast hits his face and curtains flap like limp birds. The windows have been blown out.
Dietrich stands and wobbles toward the candle. An arm holds the candle, an arm attached to the body of Kranz, the medical orderly, who turns his head, says, “Nothing we can do now.” The circle of candlelight moves around the room. Each cabinet has toppled over and spilled its contents—pills and bandages and scissors and sutures and shards of broken glass caught in sticky pools of medicine.
“Maintain the blackout! Maintain the blackout!” a guard calls from the doorway.
Kranz says, “How?”
The blackout curtains are in shreds. The orderlies look around in the dark for something else but soon give it up. “It doesn’t matter,” someone says, perhaps Dietrich. “The electricity is out again anyway.” This time for good, though they don’t know it.
In the dark they tie bandages around the wounded, try to staunch their bleeding. No way to stitch up wounds until daylight, and then only if the supplies are salvageable. Someone goes in search of extra blankets, for the December air has rolled in and settled like a weight.
Kranz mutters as he works. “Beasts. They’re beasts, the English. This on Christmas Eve. Monsters.”
(In England, Dietrich’s nieces, Sabine’s daughters, pass a bucket each day in their school with a poster that reads “Ten Shillings for a Bomb on Berlin.” The girls, who now speak English with no trace of a German accent and are desperate to appear well to their friends, sometimes drop a spare penny into the bucket, though they don’t tell their mother and father.)
“We’ve done the same to them,” Dietrich says without looking up from bandaging a head wound. “Done it first.”
Kranz is unconvinced, continues to complain as if Dietrich has not even spoken. Kranz does not care what has been done first to the English. And even Dietrich, who cares very much, believes it indeed to be a monstrous thing for anyone to bomb a city on Christmas Eve, whoever bears the original blame. But also monstrous to say so if one is German and burning Jews every day of the year. There is no place to escape the hideousness of humanity, he thinks as he works, unless one is God, who seems to have managed the feat quite well.
Every window on the south side of the building has been blown out. Dietrich sits on his stool wearing his wool jacket, coat, shawl, hat, gloves. A fringe of snow decorates the windowsill in the cold Christmas dawn.
A stamping of boots in the corridor. The military escort has come to take Pfifer to the firing squad. Dietrich remains in his cell, for Pfifer has refused to see anyone. He hears the condemned man sob, hears his bad leg drag along the stone floor as he is taken out.
“It’s all a lie!” Pfifer is crying. “You’re treating me like a fucking Jew! Like a goddamn fucking Jew!”
Dietrich wants to pray for Pfifer, but the only word that will form in his mind is Please. Addressed to no one. He stares at the Advent wreath from Maria, which hangs on the wall. Beside it he has posted a reproduction of the Madonna and Child depicted in the Chichester roundel—an old present from George and Hettie Bell—which arrived in a package from home on his request. The happy mother and child. He takes it down and puts it beneath the cot.
He says, God is absent.
Silence.
The ancient Israelites never uttered the name of God.
He says, is absent.
The light in the window is white with promised snow. He shivers, pounds his hands together, and analyzes the tingling of his fingertips. The movement of blood, he surmises, can be mistaken for the presence of God.
He stands beneath the window and listens for the crack of the rifles.
DAY 265. EVE OF THE EPIPHANY. A new year. 1944. This year cannot be worse than the one previous, Dietrich writes on a scrap of paper. Then he rolls a pinch of stale pipe tobacco in the paper and smokes it. He thinks of this as his burnt offering. (During an air raid the previous night he lay on the floor of the sick bay and listened to a fellow plead over and over O God O God O God without himself feeling the slightest emotion.)
Maria is visiting. She sits with her back to the guard, a boy of seventeen who is playing solitaire with studied indifference, pretending not to listen but listening very carefully indeed. Because it is obvious Maria is close to tears as soon as she enters the visitors’ room.
“Has something happened?” Dietrich asks.
She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell him it has been the worst Christmas of her life.
“Nothing,” she manages to say. “Nothing new. It’s just that I’m so—” she looks up with a face full of despair. “It’s just that I’m so tired of it all.”
Dietrich waits.
“Tired of everything. The war. Death. Coming here to see you.”
She claps her hand over her mouth and stares at him.
“I don’t mean—” she says. Then, “I mean seeing you here. Not seeing you.”
“I understand. It’s a long journey and a depressing end to it. If only we could be alone.”
“Yes!” She leans forward. “Would they not allow it?”
He shakes his head. “I’ve asked. Not even Uncle Rudi can arrange it. Bauer’s orders.”
“I hate him,” Maria says.
“You must be patient. Hating him does no good, and it isn’t becoming.”
She can almost hate Dietrich as well when he takes such a tone with her, but she won’t say that, will hardly allow herself to admit it before turning away to some other thought.
Instead she says, “It’s hard because in some ways I’ve felt I know you well and then when I come here I realize I know you so little.”
“It takes time,” he says.
“Or rather,” she continues, “I know three of you. There is the Letter Dietrich I write to. That Dietrich I try to console so that you may be strong and brave and withstand your suffering. There is my Diary Dietrich. I tell that Dietrich everything. And then there is Visit Dietrich. Prison Dietrich.”
She stops.
“A very different Dietrich indeed,” he says, his voice hopeless because he has glimpsed something of the future.
“No. Yes. Just that I dread to visit you because I never know how it will go.”
“It’s my fault,” he says. “I am so much alone now, and have been all these months. It is difficult for me to be around people, it tires me so, and as for sharing intimately with you—”
He takes her hand and squeezes it, not in the caressing romantic way she longs for but like a man caught in a swift current and in danger of being borne away.
“But I talk to you every day on my walks,” she says. “Then I can tell you anything. In all my life only father has been like that. If only you could be there in the woods with me. Then we would be intimate.”
He presses her hand to his mouth. After a moment she takes it away.
“I have something to tell you,” she says, and looks away. “Mother says I must confess it. I danced.”
“Danced?” he repeats, puzzled.
“Danced. With someone. There was a New Year’s party at the von Kleists. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Diest was there on leave, you’ve never met him, he’s a nephew of Frau von Kleist’s and he’s been in North Africa. You know how bad the fighting has been there. He looked very sad, and I danced with him. I didn’t think it was anything bad, but Mother says it is because I am engaged. She says if I take on a burden I must bear it.” She hesitates, wonders if her cho
ice of words has once again been unfortunate but is too upset to consider the matter clearly. “So Mother says I must confess to you what I have done. I hope you aren’t angry?”
In his mind he sees the tight assured smile of Frau von Wedemeyer. “I’m not angry,” he says. “It was a natural and kind gesture on your part. I am the one in prison, Maria, not you.”
“Oh,” she says, and smiles for the first time. “Oh, I am so relieved to hear you say it. It has worried me ever since. And the night Mother and I argued about it I went outside for a late walk about the grounds because I could not sleep and it was such a clear cold night I could hear the Berlin guns. All the way to Pätzig, can you imagine? Of course, I thought of you at once and felt ever so terrible.”
He is glad for the cold clear night, glad she heard the guns and thought of him. It is the first word of comfort he has received on this visit, and the last, for the time allowed visitors is soon up. When the guard says, “One minute,” they stand.
Dietrich says, “A safe trip home, dear Maria.”
Maria says, “I’m not going back to Pätzig. One of the teachers at my old boarding school in Altenburg has had an emergency appendectomy. They need someone for the next six weeks, and I have accepted the post. Mother wasn’t pleased, but I insisted. I need to get away from her for a while. Except it’s so much farther from Berlin.”
“Not impossibly far,” he says.
“It may be harder to get away,” she says.
“Time,” says the guard.
“Please,” he says. “Please come. You don’t know how I look forward to it.”
“Time,” the guard says again and opens the door. Maria goes to it, turns back with a puzzled look on her face as though she has one more question to ask, then disappears.
DAY 324. The letters from Maria do not arrive so often.
She has finished her teaching stint at the boarding school in Altenburg. But instead of returning to Pätzig, Maria has gone to stay with her father’s niece, Hedwig von Truchsess, who is raising her children alone in the family manor near Bamberg while her husband serves as an officer in France. Cousin Hesi, as she is known in the family, is worn down by her duties in the neighborhood—the “old family” in the castle must ever be a source of strength and support for the people of the surrounding district—and by her brood of overactive children. In letters to Uncle von Wedemeyer’s widow she has complained of her weariness, and received in return letters of despair over loss of husband and son, and over the future of Maria, who is throwing herself away on an older man, and one in prison no less. Cousin Hesi, secretly pleased to learn of someone with troubles greater than her own, in turn has written copious letters of comfort which moved Frau von Wedemeyer to tears. It was not long before it was agreed that a prolonged stay at the castle in Bundorf might be just the solution to both their problems. At first Maria resisted. She knew the von Truchsess children to be a handful, and she was homesick for Pätzig. She decided to try Bundorf for a few weeks, then persuade her mother to allow her to come home. But then she stepped from the train onto the station platform of a fairy-tale valley, carrying her large black suitcase, to be met by a servant and pony cart from the castle. Like the heroine of a Johanna Spyri novel. The servant pointed out the castle well before they reached it, a fantasy of stone towers and battlements perched upon a cliff wall. In the leisurely halfhour it took to navigate the twisting road up the hill, the castle vanished and reappeared like a sorcerer’s tempting vision.
Maria has since had plenty of time to explore the castle, her family’s ancestral home. She climbs staircases that spiral inside stone towers, walks beneath rows of ancient paintings and timbered ceilings, opens heavy oak doors onto oddly shaped rooms, discovers hidden nooks and crannies and passageways. Her own room is high in the west tower with a bay window that faces the sunset. (Faces away from Berlin, she realizes, then quickly forgets.)
At Bundorf she hears story after story of her father’s childhood, and, when she writes to Dietrich, adds to these her own nostalgic memories of Hans von Wedemeyer and his simple piety. Simplicity indeed, Dietrich recalls as he unsuccessfully tries to recall one conversation of substance he had with Hans von Wedemeyer. But of course he could never say this to Maria, can only reflect on it grumpily as he waits for her ever less frequent letters.
Because she brings up the subject again, he repeats his dislike of Rilke’s poetry.
She writes back that under Cousin Hesi’s influence she has also fallen in love with the poems of Bergengruen (“I know you will not approve”).
He scoffs that Bergengruen is too explicit, not a writer who will last.
She replies she likes explicit poetry.
He recommends Kierkegaard and Cervantes.
She is trying to read his own book, Discipleship. But it is hard going, she is mostly lost in it. She confesses this.
She writes, Theology seems to me an intellectual approach to what should be a matter of faith.
He admires her forthrightness even as he wonders about the thoroughness of her education. That is where he puts the blame, it must be the fault of her parents and of the boarding school at Altenburg, not of Maria herself. If only he were out of prison and able to spend time with her, he could remedy the situation.
He longs for a letter like the ones she used to write, filled with dreams of their life together after prison—a house in Pomerania or the Grunewald, filled with French sofas, Dutch porcelain, English silver services, oak bookcases.
But Maria seldom thinks of the imaginary house. Cousin Hesi has introduced her to an officer who is staying in the neighborhood while recuperating from a leg wound. Hauptmann Weisbach has come to the castle for dinner, and afterward, when Maria asks him shyly, “Do you like Rilke, Hauptmann Weisbach?” he says at once, “My God, I adore Rilke!”
DAY 325. Berlin suffers through its first daylight air raid. Dietrich waits it out in the sick bay, whose windows have been fitted with makeshift shutters in place of glass. “It is the end of us,” moans Kranz the orderly. “If they no longer need the night for protection then even God cannot save us.”
They huddle in darkness because the shutters have been closed to keep out as much cold as possible, and are only opened when the orderlies make their rounds.
“Look at us,” Kranz says again. “We hide in the dark like rats and the enemy flies in sunlight.”
“Shut up,” someone says. “What is worse, their bombs or your mouth?”
Someone else says, “Maybe they will pass over us. Maybe they’re on their way to Stettin. It’s Stettin’s turn, isn’t it?”
And another says, “Pray for us, Pastor Bonhoeffer.”
In the darkness Dietrich sighs. He is glad no one can see his face. “Oh God be our rock and fortress,” he says aloud, and tries to invest his voice with conviction. While with each inhaled breath he silently prays
Forgive us our sin
our most obvious and original sin
as we all
myself included
long for the planes to bomb Stettin instead of us
DAY 349. Linke is in tears. He sits on the edge of his cot with his face buried in his hands. His house has been destroyed in the bombing. Fortunately Marta and the girls are safe—they were hiding in the basement shelter and neighbors managed to dig them out. Only a few cuts and bruises. But the house is a ruin. The family will move in with Linke’s brother in Moabit.
Dietrich says nothing. He has learned in prison that words of comfort are little more than gibberish. A hand on the shoulder is better.
Linke gives over the letter which was his excuse for visiting Dietrich’s cell. It is from Frau von Wedemeyer. Dietrich opens it as if it might go off in his hand.
Maria is unhappy, writes her mother, very very unhappy. I can’t help but believe it has to do with her most recent visit to the prison.
He stops reading. Maria has been to see him within the week. And in truth she was unhappy, as she has been lately, though she denied
it and would not tell him what was the matter.
He takes off his glasses and wipes them on his sleeve, replaces them on his nose and continues.
And not just the most recent visit, for each one seems to upset her more and more. Frankly, I think it is a great strain on her. Put yourself in her place, a young girl visiting a man in prison, a man she has hardly had a chance to become acquainted with under normal circumstances. I know this is not your fault. And I have been corresponding with your mother and your brother, Karl-Friedrich. You are a member of a remarkable family and I have no doubt of your suitability for Maria, once the war is over. As we all pray it will be soon. In the meantime I do wonder if it is generous of you to insist on Maria’s loyalty.
Dietrich and Linke sit side by side until it is time for the guard to fetch the dinner trays.
DAY 378. She tries not to cry, sitting across the table from him with the guard looking on. Linke this time, who has managed to trade duties because Dietrich wants him there, because he can say things in the presence of sensible, comfortable Linke that he could not with another. But Maria does not know Linke and she does not want to break down in front of him.
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