The Road Beyond Ruin

by Gemma Liviero

  Erich asks me about my day. And I tell him what I want him to hear. That people are good. That people are loyal to Hitler and Mussolini and the countries that will one day rule alongside each other.

  I have become a very good liar, Papa.

  I hope you are proud of me.

  I hope that when this madness is over and you have Vivi on your knee, we will share the stories and you will tell me more about Mama, and that Vivi will get to grow up, sharing with her grandfather the same childhood years that I missed with you.

  In the meantime I will hide this letter with the others where Erich will never find it.

  Loving you, as always—more, if possible,

  Monique

  CHAPTER 27

  ERICH

  Erich notices that Stefano’s German is not so good now, under pressure, his accent far more distinguishable. It’s the nerves; they force one to falter, to revert to who one really is.

  The sight of Stefano has again put doubts in his mind. The same doubts and reasons that first drew Erich. He had to be certain of things, of facts. It is his nature. And it was Stefano also, something about him.

  Rosalind had met Erich on the pathway back to the river house that morning on her way to see him, to tell him what she had witnessed. She was raving and emotional, something he found hard to deal with. Erich was grateful that at least she did not reach the town and draw unnecessary attention. When he said nothing in response, at first wondering if he should just take the buried documents and leave immediately, she reminded him that he and Georg were close once, that he had a commitment to him, that he must not forget him, and she had opened the lid of something that had been closed for some time. She said that he owed Georg and her, and in some part of his mind, he does. But overriding those feelings of loss and her talk of commitment were also her feelings of revenge. She wanted Stefano punished. Rosalind was of the opinion that the shooting of Georg would prove fatal, or that it was unlikely she would see her husband again.

  Erich did not want to kill again. He did not want to murder this man in particular. He likes him, he admits only to himself. But Rosalind is right; there are things about Stefano he feels compelled to know, and if her suspicions are correct, then killing may be necessary. And Erich is curious whether there was any connection between him and Monique, whether he had something to do with the missing body.

  After meeting with Rosalind, he had then found Stefano on the floor at her house, on his side, sprawled slightly, his mouth open, frown lines under curls of black. He touched Stefano’s neck.

  “What did you give him?”

  “Sleeping drugs ground and blended into his tea.”

  “It was more than the usual dose, yes?”

  She nods.

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “You must find out what he knows. It is your job.”

  “It was my job.”

  She jumped as the second, louder word leaped at her.

  “You have to help me! You have your life still. You have your daughter. Now without Georg, I have nothing. It is the least you can do. Find out what he knows about us. He is hiding something. He was expecting the Russians.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It was the Russian words he used. Everyone used that term when we were lining up. I learned that line. And they seemed . . .” She was looking for the right word. “Comfortable.”

  “As if they knew him?”

  “Yes.”

  Rosalind had then offered something else that would guarantee Erich’s assistance.

  “Georg was clutching this in his hand,” she said, passing him a small photo. “He didn’t get it from my house. This is a recent picture.”

  Erich looked at the image, disappointed, though he didn’t show it.

  “I will tie him in the barn, and we will wait for him to wake up,” he said decisively. “It may be several hours.”

  Erich has not yet told Rosalind about the empty grave. Perhaps he never will. She would fall to pieces. She would see things that aren’t there.

  December 1944

  He had been a week at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Trieste, where he had recently been commissioned as a commander. It was a posting he didn’t like, that he saw no future in. One of the previous commanders had been killed in a partisan ambush, and the one just before Erich had been called away to another temporary commission elsewhere. He hoped it wouldn’t be for too long. The mostly Jewish prisoners were badly malnourished, with enough food only to keep them still working. He did not like to see them from his office, but occasionally he had to officiate over duties, executions.

  Though recently, he had become more lenient, not quick to order the deaths of so many, perhaps having foresight that it would mean little in the months to come. He had taken rooms near the camp so he did not have to spend so much time with his wife.

  Monique did not cook well. She did not like to look at him, and when she did, she rattled him, just the look of her reminding him that he ended the agreement, that perhaps he was weaker, for a moment. He was also thinking lately that she knew too much about him. She could potentially ruin him. But in the meantime, while he was tied up in Trieste, she did not figure greatly in his thoughts. And she had their daughter to keep her occupied. It was something that he must change once the war was finished, if Monique and Genevieve made it out alive. If they didn’t, he would live with that, too. He could put the past behind him when it was time.

  There had been very little good news. Just south, the Allies had taken Florence and were still plotting and gaining strength. To the west, Paris had been taken back, and in the East, there was the monumental task of holding the Soviet line. With the help of Allied-supplied munitions, the Soviet forces were making dangerous strides across Poland and into Germany. And Georg was in the thick of it on the Eastern Front. Erich had thought a lot about him. He checked regularly on deaths. He wrote to Georg only recently and heard nothing back. Not that it surprised him. Trains and vehicles were sometimes sabotaged, and mail did not always get through.

  From his windows he could see the alpine hills where trees were lined up like marching soldiers, weighed down with the fall of snow, like military backpacks. It had been a place to hide for the Italian resistance. Many were caught there in the summer, and by the autumn hundreds had been executed. There were still many out there, a fact that strangely didn’t bother him anymore. There were other things to worry about.

  At his desk, he sat down to write a reply to his father. Horst had sent a letter asking for him to return to Berlin. There was urgency in this request, as if he would not get another chance. He put down his pen. The room was uncomfortably warm in contrast to the bitter winds outside, the same winds that whistled through the prisoners’ cells and ruffled their garb that was by then little more than threads.

  He opened mail and several telegrams that had just been delivered. He read that Himmler had reached the end of the Final Solution and he had passed the final Jews through to Poland to the camps of no return. They were unlikely to survive the camps. Perhaps prolonging their lives, he conceded, was cruel, and fueled the belief that there was light at the end of a very long tunnel. Death was quicker, the future not bleakly filled with lice, disease, and hunger. Sometimes when he looked at the prisoners, he would picture his sister in a camp somewhere, dressed in prison garb, her head shaved. He had learned that she had been sent to Sachsenhausen just north of Berlin.

  He read the first transmitted message. It was a formal letter advising that his father had died in an accident, but due to emergencies and lack of men in the field, to please delay a return to Berlin to organize the funeral. His body would be cremated. He didn’t recognize the name at the bottom of the letter, though it was on Goebbels’s letterhead. He had become more aware of unqualified people being placed in important positions, the führer becoming more erratic with decisions on human resources.

  The second letter was from his mother—dated a week after his fat
her’s letter—to advise that his father had “died unexpectedly” at his desk at the Reich office. Erich had to read the letter again, to look at the secret message beneath the words, detail that she would never put in writing. She did not give an explanation, but she didn’t have to. He had known that his father had not been well. He had learned from his mother of behavior that did not befit such a great mind. That he was less articulate, sometimes rambling. And he often went to visit Claudine in Sachsenhausen, and had been reprimanded for the visits by others from his office. His mother had tried to tell Horst that their daughter was lost to them, and there were greater causes, but he had not listened; she wrote this in a hand that was unsentimental, rational.

  His father, his mother informed him, had not left a letter of explanation (a coded message for a much more sinister death), something that disappointed Erich. He would have liked some recognition from him at the very end at least, some encouragement and message of pride in Erich’s achievements.

  He wrote back to his mother, suggesting she and his siblings return to the country house and when the war was over he would meet them there.

  He has perhaps damaged our name, his mother had written also, the words icy, bitter. But you must fix all that now. You must be what they want you to be. You must not take prisoners. You must fight to restore your father’s name.

  Erich folded the letters neatly before putting them into the fire.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Enter.”

  His lieutenant advised that there was a truck filled with Italian resistance members.

  Erich briefly looked into the fire and could hear his father telling him that life is a process that we must endure, that it is important to respect and honor our leaders, but within reason. But above that he could also hear his mother telling him to be strong, to ignore the false messages of hope—to forget about hope. Hope is weakness. It is the doing that will get him places. Take him where he should go, enable him to be who he should be.

  “Shoot them all,” he said calmly.

  “Yes, Herr Steiner.”

  There was no more time. They must win the war here at least. They must kill every single person who was betraying them. He would not wait there while the enemy edged closer.

  Present-day 1945

  Erich turns to Rosalind and asks her to get the medicine bag from the house. She nods as if she has already seen this coming. She is calmer now and exits the barn.

  “Where did you get it?”

  Erich is talking about the photo of Monique that he has thrown in Stefano’s lap.

  “I found it in the room upstairs.”

  “The photo is recent, taken with Genevieve. There was no such photo in the house.”

  “Perhaps you missed it.”

  Erich watches him. Stefano’s expression doesn’t change. There is nothing that gives the lie away. He is used to scrutiny; he is used to lying. And he is lying. Erich would have seen the photo, destroyed it.

  “Where did you get it?”

  Stefano looks down, very briefly. “I took it from Rosalind’s place. I liked it. Bella ragazza . . . She is very pretty. What does it matter? When Georg was upset the other morning, I thought it would pacify him to see it. Monique seems to have that effect.”

  Stefano shifts slightly, swallows hard.

  “Did you meet the female prisoners in Sachsenhausen?”

  “We were separate from them, but there were times when we spoke.”

  “Did you meet a girl there called Claudine Steiner?”

  Stefano ponders.

  “Yes, a German girl. Fair. I met her briefly.”

  Erich’s heart quickens, though he assumes the answer to be a lie. If his suspicions are correct, Stefano would have been told everything about him.

  “Did you know her?” asks Stefano.

  “Not well,” he says. A lie for a lie.

  Erich can hear a noise from the house. The slamming of a drawer, something smashing. It is Rosalind. When she is in a mood, she breaks things, like she did in Georg’s house. She is unbalanced. He spotted this early, the first time he visited the river, and Georg put up with her because Georg could. He saw the best in everyone, even Erich for a time. But Erich has seen the worst in Rosalind.

  “Yes, Claudine and I attended the same school,” says Erich. “She was active politically. She was anti-Nazi. She used to scratch nasty things about Hitler into her desk.” And Erich would scratch them out, on the desk at home, though he doesn’t tell him this. Stefano would not understand about loyalty.

  “She must have followed her parents, no?”

  “Perhaps.” He is thinking that his father had never truly been supportive of the Reich’s master-race plan. Horst did not vocalize it, but it was what he didn’t say. And Erich has no doubt that his mother knew his feelings, too.

  “My father was an engineer,” Erich says. “A good one. He designed tanks for the war. He would have had a mechanical company now without the war, and I would have worked with him.”

  Stefano is staring at him, hanging on every word, and Erich likes this, feels the need to share this. He feels the need to share it with Stefano. He wonders whether they could have been friends before the war. He had picked up signals. Small ones.

  Rosalind returns with a medical bag and places it near Stefano.

  “What is that?” says Stefano warily.

  “It is your end,” she says, attempting to sound spiteful, but Erich detects some nerves, too, that lessen the impact of the words.

  “Because of a photo? Of a few words of Russian?” says Stefano.

  “Because you are not what you say you are,” she says. “Because you are pretending to be someone else. And you had my husband shot.”

  “It isn’t true,” he says. “I want to go home to my sisters and my mother. There is no reason to kill me.”

  Erich has been wrong about people before. He was wrong about Monique, about his father, even Stefano briefly. It is unlikely that he is wrong about him now. Stefano had come here to kill him, of that he feels certain.

  CHAPTER 28

  ROSALIND

  Rosalind crouches beside Stefano and from the bag retrieves the vial of liquid that will end his life. It is a lethal drug that Erich had meant for Georg. The fact that she considered giving it to her husband gnaws at her conscience.

  “I’m innocent of everything,” Stefano pleads with her softly.

  She glances at him, and an odd feeling of doubt surfaces that she must quickly abandon. She must never again trust men like Stefano, those who have lied to her. She reaches inside the bag for a syringe. Georg is dead because of him.

  “I’m not who you think. I’m not your enemy.”

  With shaking hands she draws the liquid into the syringe while his words echo in her head. She is remembering his kindness toward her and the boy. And she thinks of Michal then, wherever he is, and wonders about his survival without Stefano, without his mother.

  “You should trust me,” he whispers.

  She is alive because of him.

  Rosalind turns to look at him to search for truth. In the moment that she meets his eyes, her vengeance wavering, she feels a sudden jabbing pain in the back of her arm that forces her to drop what she is holding and grip the affected area. She stands, briefly disoriented, and turns to see Erich, just behind her, with eyes that are cold and pale gray, and, more alarmingly, empty. Then as her eyes wander downward to his hand, the situation is made clearer, and the horror of it exposed. Erich holds a syringe, with the remains of dark liquid in its base.

  She attempts to run from the barn, but the ground beneath her seems to sway, and she loses her balance and stumbles forward, her hands finding the earth. Then the world is black, then white, lots of flashes in her eyes, and someone moves close, and then she is floating. She is being carried, and then there is nothing. She is once more in darkness.

  She can hear voices, and someone laughs as she wakes on the attic bed upstairs. She has to force h
er eyes to open, and when she does, Georg is there on the side of the bed. He is staring at the empty space beside the bed, as if she doesn’t exist. He can’t see her, and then he can. He is staring at her, through her. He tells her he doesn’t care. That she had this coming; then he is gone and Monique is there in his place. She is asking, “Why?” She says it again, over and over, until Rosalind can’t stand it anymore and covers her ears.

  She wants to be sick, but she is too tired, and then there is blackness again.

  May 1945

  She was filthy, no shoes. Ahead of her she could see the other homeless who had fled the city, scrambling from destruction, from the Russian forces, to walk the open stretch of roads, with nothing but their lives. But there was no desire for companionship among them. It was a race to reach the bodies on the side of the road—civilians caught in the crossfire as they fled the city in previous days, and German soldiers still clinging to their guns in a final futile fight—to search their pockets and belongings for food and water. She was like an animal in the wild that must do everything to survive.

  Several trucks lumbered and roared toward her. She was frightened at first, but someone yelled they weren’t Russian. The trucks were open at the back, filled with Allied soldiers in dull-green uniforms. They called out to her in English, but she kept her head down. She was afraid to look them in the eye. One soldier asked her in German whether she was all right. She didn’t look up. The soldiers seemed effusive, celebratory. Several laughed and cheered. They had won, they yelled. The war was over.

  The other people on the roads to nowhere in particular were not celebrating. They were like her: desperate, suspicious, and possessive of everything they could find. Compassion had disappeared, replaced by self-preservation. As the night drew near, and the distance between the other travelers grew wider, she stopped to take some shoes off a German soldier who appeared to have shot himself. Sometime after midnight, the moon only half-full, a dog yelped repetitively. She followed the noise and found it tied up outside a house, suggesting that no occupants were inside. She let the dog free to forage like her, then drank from its water bowl as it ran off into the darkness. She scrounged the bin inside the house but found nothing. In the shed there was a sack of dried barley, and she took a handful. It was difficult to swallow, but it was something. Then in a cupboard she found a jar of pickled onions and shoveled them hurriedly into her mouth one after the other. She could not remember the last time she’d had a full meal. In the hospital she had missed many breaks. She was exhausted both mentally and physically.