Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  She is desperately afraid she will break down. Not because she is in love with Hauptmann Weisbach, the wounded officer, though she thought she was for a week or so. But beyond their love of Rilke, they had nothing in common. Hauptmann Weisbach was a connoisseur of women and food and art, of a cynical nature, an atheist. His politics were the politics of convenience: whoever ruled, he would cheerfully follow. Even Father, political naif that he was, would have been appalled.

  Father. There was the sore point, and after her failed attempt to distract Maria with Hauptmann Weisbach, Cousin Hesi was quick to find it. Her next dinner guest had been Pastor Stählin, who had long ago confirmed Maria’s father in the village church at Bundorf.

  The meal had not been extravagant except by wartime standards. Venison stew, fried eggs, a spice cake. Maria sat happily beside Pastor Stählin and listened as he described his preparations for Palm Sunday, when children would be distributing fronds sent specially by a parishioner serving in North Africa, “an astonishingly thoughtful act of piety, wouldn’t you say, given the circumstances?” He leaned closer to Maria. “Though perhaps I shouldn’t bring it up in front of you, my child. Stories of patriotism coupled with piety must be painful for you. You feel a great conflict, I’m sure, to be forced to choose between your father and his great sacrifice on the one hand, and your fiancé on the other.”

  Maria put down her fork. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said in a halting voice. “Surely Father and Dietrich were friends and—”

  “I meant,” said Pastor Stählin, “that it must be difficult to be engaged to a man who is under such a cloud of suspicion.”

  “Dietrich hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said, and looked around for help.

  “Nothing of which we are aware,” Cousin Hesi said mildly.

  “Nor did I mean to accuse,” said Pastor Stählin. “I only wish to hold up the sterling reputation of my dear departed friend Hans von Wedemeyer. God rest his soul.”

  And he had raised his glass in a toast.

  But Maria is a loyal girl, and more stubborn than Cousin Hesi realizes. She forces herself to think again of her fiancé, suffering in prison, and finds her passion growing, once again, for Letter Dietrich and Diary Dietrich.

  But Visit Dietrich is more difficult. He is the one who smells bad, who looks older and more weary each time she comes to Tegel. She knows he is not eating well, that the already meager prison rations have been reduced, that he is allowed a bath and change of clothes only twice a month, that there is no hot water in the prison, that he has survived countless bombing raids unprotected. What a horrible person all this makes her, what an unfaithful lover, for she cannot summon up an ounce of romantic passion for Visit Dietrich despite his sufferings. Where once she hated the prison rules which kept him from holding her in his arms, now she is glad of them.

  There is something she wants to tell him, but she doubts her strength today. She can only sit and listen and wait for moments when her eyes are somewhat dry and her features somewhat composed so she can at least raise her face to his.

  Anyway, he is doing all the talking. He is as close as he has ever been to losing control of his own emotions.

  “You’re so young,” he is saying. “And yet so much more mature than I ever was at your age. When I was twenty, all I thought of was books. Reading books, writing books. But who did I help? Who did I make glad? Maria, I missed so much of life. That’s why you’re so important to me. You are so alive! When you visit, it is an infusion of energy, like turning on an electric switch.”

  He pauses to rub his scalp, which often itches. Scaling red blotches show through his thinning hair.

  “Maybe it’s hard for us to believe we love each other because we know each other so little,” he says. It is the most he will allow himself to admit. He says so aloud. “For myself, I don’t doubt that I love you. And when I start to doubt that you love me, I just don’t think about it.”

  Now is the time. Now. But not now.

  “I do love you,” she says at last, in a voice barely audible. “It’s just that I get depressed. Because of the war. And because I miss you. Mother was wrong to say anything to you. You don’t need another burden just now.”

  (She does not tell him what she told her mother in a letter, what compelled Frau von Wedemeyer to write in the first place. At Altenburg Maria ran into an old school chum who had been courted by a soldier. The girl in question did not love the soldier and told him so. A month later the soldier was killed in action. Remorse drove the girl to attempt suicide, and a white bracelet of scars around her wrist proved the story. When Maria wrote this to her mother, her tone was frantic, and what mother could not but imagine her own distraught girl wielding the razor blade?)

  “Sometimes I think that except for finishing my Ethics, my life is over,” Dietrich is saying. “I don’t want it to be like that. I want to have children, raise a family.”

  Now she cannot hold back the tears.

  “Please tell me that it is love and not pity that brings you here,” he says.

  “It is love,” she sobs, not at all sure of anything except the kindness of falsehood.

  He says, “Then tell me what I must do.”

  “Allow me to be sad. I can’t explain and I can’t make it go away.”

  “But we two are still in this together?”

  “Yes,” she says, at the end of her strength. She half-turns to Linke as though imploring him to call time.

  Dietrich is nearly ill with relief. “Maria,” he says, “I have an idea that may make things easier. Suppose you leave Bundorf and come live with my parents. They’re at Sacrow now with Christel and the children, away from the bombs. You could visit me much more often.”

  And Linke, watching her face, is reminded of his girls when they hear the air-raid sirens.

  “No,” Maria says. “Hesi can’t spare me. No. Not yet.”

  DAY 427. It is June, a warm day, and the shutters of the sick bay are flung open. The planes have not come for days. Now everyone knows why.

  The RRG has issued a terse announcement. Allied troops have landed in Normandy.

  On a cot in the corner, a man who is one of the more fervent Nazis breaks down in tears. Others curse or talk quietly among themselves.

  Kranz the orderly goes by with a bedpan in each hand. “We’re done for now,” he says.

  A man at the chessboard replies, “Not yet.” He stares intently at the pieces, his finger resting tentatively on a rook. “They’ve still got to get across Europe, and no one fights like a German defending the Fatherland.”

  The weeping man wipes his face with the back of his hand. “At least we’ve still got time to square things with the Jews for what they’ve done to us,” he says. “If God preserves our Führer long enough.” He turns to Dietrich. “Will you pray for us, Pastor Bonhoeffer?”

  Dietrich, who has been lounging near the doorway, goes rigid as though he has been struck. “I’ll not pray for you, you whining piece of shit,” he says. And leaves them in astonished silence.

  After supper Linke comes to his cell.

  “You’re the talk of the sick bay,” he says. “Not what they’d expect from a pastor, they’re saying, your response to Schütze Riefenstahl, and unchristian as well.”

  Dietrich is mending a tear in his trousers. He doesn’t look up. “Nothing says a Christian must listen to such whining without giving it a deserved response,” he says.

  “To refuse prayer—”

  “Selfish prayers! Hateful prayers! ‘Save me, O God! Be with me, O God! And by the way, let’s kill all the Jews!’ Such prayers are blasphemy.”

  “It is natural,” Linke insists stubbornly. “People want to live. That’s all.”

  “Oh yes. But no one needs prayer to live. Not anymore. No one needs God to live. It’s power that ensures survival, my friend. Raw power. And that is why I must deny that power.”

  Linke sits on the cot and crosses his arms to keep off the cold. “I pray,”
he says. “My family prays. To keep us safe.”

  Dietrich starts to answer and swallows his words. He does not want to hurt Linke, who has continued to smuggle Dietrich’s letters outside, carrying them out of the prison tucked in his waistband. At what cost to Linke if he is caught?

  “Linke,” Dietrich says, “it is the only time people ask for God.”

  “What?” Linke says.

  “To keep us safe,” Dietrich repeats. “Or to destroy those we call our enemies. Otherwise people don’t need God. They’ve outgrown God. People can’t be religious anymore. Oh, there are plenty of people who call themselves religious. All the good people who still fill the pews of Germany’s parishes each Sunday, no matter if the swastika hangs above the altar. All the narrow-minded pietists out saving souls while the world goes up in flames. The good Christians who despise Jews. They all claim they are religious. But they don’t live as though they are.” He shakes his head. “No, Linke, religion is dead. And a good thing too.”

  Linke blinks. He knows what is wrong with Pastor Bonhoeffer. Too long in prison. “You’ll feel better in the morning,” he says. “Get some sleep.” Then he remembers why he has come to the cell. He places a package on the cot.

  “Apparently your sister has been here,” he says. He goes to the door and hesitates. Hopes Pastor Bonhoeffer will send him out with some word of comfort. When none is forthcoming, he goes out shaking his head.

  In the clear white light of that June evening Dietrich opens the single book from the package. Luther’s commentary on Romans. He flips the pages slowly.

  WORD FROM HANS

  He knows Dohnanyi has been sending messages from his own prison cell by the same means, letters underlined in books, and that Christel has in turn corresponded with General Oster, who has been forced into retirement but is still free and in touch with the resistance. As the message comes clear, Dietrich stands and begins to pace back and forth back and forth

  UNCLE RUDI ARRIVES 20 JULY HOLD FAST

  DAY 471. 20 JULY 1944. He has kept more and more to his cell. In anticipation. He sits on his stool beneath the window in a square of sunlight. Listens to the sounds of prison ritual. The tramping of feet in the exercise yard. (He has asked Linke if he might stay inside. His back hurts, he claims.) The footsteps of a passing guard. A clattering sound from an open door of the building across the way where the midday meal is being prepared.

  The square of sunlight moves. Dietrich follows it for a time, then gives up and remains in shade.

  From the city, sirens. Not the too familiar wail of air-raid sirens, but the urgent claxon of emergency vehicles. A rumble of engines. Tanks and trucks? Does he hear shouts? Gunshots? Are Wehrmacht units loyal to the resistance moving into place, preparing to take over government installations? He strains to listen. From time to time he gets up and looks out the window. Berlin is a maze of piled sunlit brick etched in shadow. Intact buildings stand alone like stumps. He sees movement, or perhaps only the shadows of passing clouds.

  In the late afternoon Dietrich hears clamor outside his window. A group of guards, Linke among them, are talking excitedly among themselves, gesturing. He hears the words Hitler and assassins. “Who would believe it?” someone says. The rest is lost to him, words erased by a soft summer breeze. The guards disperse.

  He waits.

  Before long Linke has come to his cell, closes the door behind him, sits on the edge of the cot.

  “Have you heard? Someone has tried to kill Hitler!”

  He hears tried and understands he is a dead man.

  “My God,” he manages to say.

  “Yes, it’s true!” Linke continues. His face is flushed, neither from joy nor disappointment, but from being the first to impart great news. “The Führer has just been on the radio. And Goering and Dönitz along with him. It was Wehrmacht officers who tried it, can you believe?”

  Dietrich shakes his head no.

  “A bomb. In a briefcase they think. It was placed under a conference table where Hitler and the officers were meeting to discuss the Eastern Front. Several of them were killed but the Führer was spared. They’re naming an Oberst von Stauffenberg as the culprit, it seems he left just before the bomb went off, very suspicious, they’re looking for him now. I’d not like to be in his shoes. And they think there are others. ‘A small clique of traitors in the officer corps,’ Hitler said.” Linke stops to consider the implications of this. “Knobloch has heard of Stauffenberg, the fellow’s a decorated hero, Knobloch says. Why would someone like that try to kill the Führer? And the other officers? Unless they think the war is lost and it’s the only way to save their hides?”

  “Perhaps,” Dietrich says, “they did it because it was the right thing to do. Because Hitler deserves to die for what he has done to Germany and especially for what he has done to the Jews and to Europe.”

  Linke crosses his legs, folds his arms. “They would kill you if they heard you talking like that,” he says.

  Dietrich nods. He feels light-headed.

  “Of course I’m not going to tell,” Linke says. He leans closer. “Do you think we’ll lose the war?”

  “I hope so,” Dietrich says, testing his new freedom. “It’s what we deserve.”

  If Linke is shocked he doesn’t say so. He slumps on the cot deep in thought. Then he says, “I just hope the British and the Americans get here before the Russians do. And I hope someone gets here before Marta and my sister-in-law drive each other crazy. They can’t stand each other’s cooking, and Eva is always yelling at our girls. And you should hear them arguing over which radio program to listen to. It’s hell, eleven people living in three rooms.”

  Yawns and stretches and goes out. Dietrich cannot move. Listening to Linke’s last banalities he has realized with a shock that the world will go on without him. That the world goes on without God.

  Maria and Suse

  COUSIN HESI had been observing Maria with great concern for weeks, and writing faithfully to keep Frau von Wedemeyer apprised of the girl’s condition. When Maria returned in mid-July, exhausted, from a long trip to Berlin to see Dietrich, Hesi put the girl to bed in the tower room and went at once to her writing desk. Maria spent the next two days in bed, claiming she was too tired to get up. Hesi wrote to Pätzig again.

  Frau von Wedemeyer wrote back, I really must put my foot down.

  And Hesi wrote a third time. Patience. I believe she may come to a decision herself. She did not say that she was writing at the breakfast table while a pale Maria sipped a cup of hot cider and nibbled a biscuit, the first solid food she had attempted. Did not say that the girl had fainted twice the previous day and been put to bed once more.

  Cousin Hesi finished her letter, sealed it, and laid it on a tray for a servant to take away.

  “Do you have something for Dietrich?” she asked Maria.

  Maria shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “I don’t recall your going so long between letters.”

  “I can’t write him. I don’t know what to say. Nothing that will help him, anyway.”

  Hesi placed her hand on top of Maria’s thin one. “Perhaps,” she said, “the truth would be best.”

  “The truth?” Maria stared at her, then burst into tears.

  “The truth,” Hesi persisted. “That you don’t love him as a woman should love a man she would marry. That you have been kind for his sake because of his unfortunate circumstances but the burden is becoming too great for you to bear.”

  When Maria continued to sob, Hesi added gently, “Am I right?”

  Maria threw down her napkin and ran from the room with her hand pressed to her mouth.

  Maria was hunched in a chair by her window, reading, when the children burst in with news of the attempt on Hitler’s life. She was shocked, uncertain whether to feel frightened or relieved, assumed the war must be going very badly indeed and might end soon one way or another. She wondered if Dietrich had heard and what he might be thinking. Had she known any more, she could
not have written the letter.

  She spent two days composing it, writing paragraphs and crossing them out, filling the margins with her revisions in a cramped hand to save precious paper.

  I have tried so hard to put off writing this to you. More than anyone I am aware of the difficulty of your situation, for I have seen you more than anyone. I don’t want to hurt you, because you see, I do care about you very much. But I’m afraid it is unavoidable. It is because of me, my fault, my lack of strength. Please believe me, dearest Dietrich, it is me, not anything you have done.

  The truth is I have come to doubt whether I love you in the way a wife should a husband. Not, as I said, because I have ceased to care about you. Only I realize something I did not last year, when I was so distraught over the deaths of my father and my brother. The love I bear you is not a romantic love, there is no passion in it, no fire or desire. I believe I am capable of these feelings, Dietrich, but I do not connect them with my love for you. Do you understand? Please tell me I have not hurt you very much.

  You so often seem reserved and formal when we visit. Perhaps you feel as I do and have not known how to tell me?

  (This last she wrote several times and crossed out, put it back in the final draft. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but she convinced herself it might be true.)

  I am reading again a letter you sent me some months back. In it you wrote how important it is, because of our separation, to feel free to tell each other everything. To not hold back. That is what I am trying to do, to be honest with you. It is not fair to you if I am not honest.

  You mustn’t think there is someone else. There is not. It’s just that I can’t say what I feel for you. There are many ways to love someone and you are dearer to me than any man, almost as dear as my father was to me. I doubt I shall know anything more for certain until you are released and we can meet freely, face to face and alone. Then I shall know, and if I still feel as I do, you will not be so upset because you will have your old life back once again. Please let me know this letter has not upset you too much.