Prisoner of Night and Fog

by Anne Blankman

  Her father had been so proud of his cobbler skills. Like the men of every trade, he had been required to complete a Wanderschaft—three years spent traveling throughout Bavaria, studying under different shoemakers before submitting his work to the guild and receiving the title of master, which meant he could open his own business.

  He had loved to tell her about those years, walking from town to town carrying a knapsack containing his only possessions, his tools and an extra set of clothes and a tin drinking cup, sleeping in fields when he couldn’t find an apprenticeship and stealing fruit from orchards when he was hungry. Finally, after receiving the coveted master title and returning home to Dachau, he had proposed to Mama and, after their marriage, had headed for the big city, Munich, to start his own shop.

  But then the war had come, and the shells had blasted away something within Papa, so the man who returned was blank-eyed and unpredictable. Sometimes, he smiled the same wide smile she had seen in old photographs, and talked with the easy charm she imagined had won her mother’s heart. Sometimes, he sobbed uncontrollably for hours, crouched in the bedroom, and Mama whispered they must all speak softly so they didn’t upset him.

  Maybe the old Papa, the good-natured, smiling man in the photos, could have found his way through the twisting corridors Germany had become after her defeat. But not this new man who shifted so readily between sunlight and shadows.

  This father lost his business and had to work for another cobbler, settling for a far smaller income. This father moved his family into a shabby two-room apartment in Schwabing, and often they didn’t have enough money to buy groceries, so Gretchen and her brother went to bed hungry almost every night.

  Sighing, she shook her head. If only she could erase most of her memories of those days, saving only little pockets of them instead. Papa taking her to the zoo, and laughing when she squealed in fear at the lions. Papa smiling when she danced in the kitchen, and scolding Mama for snapping at Gretchen to get out of the way because she had to make supper.

  She closed the armoire. There was nothing here to tell her why he had died, only reminders of how he had lived.

  She was leaving in defeat when a floorboard sank an inch beneath her weight.

  Had Reinhard hidden something here? Why would he go to such trouble? She dropped to her knees and pulled at the board, her pulse throbbing. All of the nails had been removed and the board lifted easily. A stack of newspaper clippings and an index card with her brother’s leftward-slanting writing lay in the opening.

  She snatched them up. The clippings came from the Munich Post. Peculiar. Reinhard didn’t read newspapers, but when he did, he flipped through the Party’s Völkischer Beobachter or Der Stürmer. Not the local Socialist paper that Uncle Dolf despised so much he called it the Poison Kitchen. What possible reason could Reinhard have for cutting out articles from a newspaper he likely didn’t read?

  She was starting to skim the first clipping, dated about two months ago, when a quiet, male voice came from the hall. “Fräulein Müller? Your mother is coming up the stairs.”

  Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. There was no way she could explain away her presence in Reinhard’s room to Mama. Quickly, she laid the clippings and card down, then slid the floorboard into place. She slapped the light switch off and stepped into the hallway just as her mother appeared at the top of the stairs. The Englishman Whitestone stood across the corridor.

  “Gretchen?” Mama asked. “Are you looking for me?”

  “No. I—I thought you were in bed.” She was glad the hallway was dim, for she felt a blush heating her face.

  “Fräulein Müller was advising me on the best gardens to visit in Munich,” the Englishman cut in. “She has been most helpful.”

  “Gardens now!” Mama’s smile looked forced. “First it is all the places popular in the city with National Socialists, then it is Herr Hitler’s favorite restaurants! You will know Munich as well as any local by the end of your visit, Herr Doktor Whitestone.” She glanced at Gretchen. “Good night. I’ve already locked up, and all the chores are finished.”

  “All right, Mama. Good night.”

  When her mother didn’t move into her room, Gretchen reluctantly climbed the stairs. She would have to return to her brother’s room during the night, to make sure she had replaced everything exactly and to lock the door. She heard the steps groaning as Herr Doktor Whitestone followed.

  She waited to speak to the Englishman until they had reached their corridor. The single overhead lamp threw most of the hallway into shadow, so she could scarcely see his face.

  “Thank you for warning me,” she said, wondering how he had known that she wasn’t supposed to be in her brother’s room.

  “I must speak plainly.” Whitestone hesitated. “Originally, I came to Munich on sabbatical from my clinic to observe Adolf Hitler close up, perhaps write about him for a psychoanalytic journal. I chose your boardinghouse because of your family’s well-known closeness to Hitler. But I have seen something in this house that troubles me.”

  He looked at her, his expression unreadable. “I overheard your brother on the telephone the other night, speaking to one of your friends. He was most insistent that she tell him where you had gone. And he charmed the answers out of her so cunningly . . .” Whitestone shook his head. “It’s probably nothing,” he murmured. “The actions of a protective older brother.”

  Her fingers closed around the doorknob, ready to turn it and dart into her room. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken.” He looked embarrassed. “One of the hazards of my profession is seeing darkness where there may only be light. I’m sure I must be mistaken.”

  Confused, she nodded as he bid her a good night, and she went into her room. Even though Reinhard was somewhere else tonight, she locked the door and leaned the chair under the knob. Then she stood still, listening to the sounds in the room next door. Splashing water, washing his face in the basin most likely. The rustle of a mattress. Good. He was settling in for the night. As she undressed, she wondered who this new boarder truly was. And what his concerns were about her brother.

  Morning sunlight had lightened her red curtains to pale pink before Gretchen woke to insistent knocking and her mother’s voice saying she had better hurry downstairs to help with the breakfast or the boarders would be cross.

  She shot up in bed. No. She had fallen asleep before she could sneak back to her brother’s room to lock up.

  As fast as she could, she put on stockings and a white dress and shoved her feet into espadrilles. She could lock Reinhard’s door on her way downstairs. He would never know what she had done.

  But when she opened her bedroom door, her mother was waiting for her in the hallway, glaring. It would have to wait until after breakfast.

  Gretchen was still drying dishes when the doorbell rang. Geli stood on the front steps, powdering her cheeks. She snapped her compact shut and smiled at Gretchen. As usual, she wore simple clothes: a sundress in soft green, a broad-brimmed straw hat, and espadrilles.

  “Gretchen!” Geli beamed. “I’m so glad to have caught you at home. I’m inviting you on my little escape—a picnic on the Chiemsee with Uncle Alf and some of the old dears. Won’t you come along with us?”

  “I’m afraid I have to go to work today—”

  “With Herr Hanfstaengl? Why, he’s sitting out in the car right now.”

  Gretchen peered over Geli’s shoulder. Hitler’s red Mercedes was parked at the curb, its engine running. The chauffeur sat behind the wheel, with Hitler beside him. Eva’s boss, Heinrich Hoffmann, sat in the jump seat, and Hanfstaengl was in the back with Hoffmann’s pretty teenage daughter Henny, her head covered with one of the tight-fitting caps—brown leather in the winter, white linen in the summer—that Hitler kept in the glove box to protect the women’s hair. Everyone waved.

  There was no way to refuse politely. “Thanks, I’d love to,” she said, wishing she meant it. But now she looked at the smi
ling men and wondered if any of them had been involved in her father’s death.

  The drive out of the city went quickly. The soot-choked air became a bracing mountain breeze; the cobbled streets became wide green fields, the waving grasses shimmering with gold. Trees cut a jagged line along the horizon—towering pines that seemed to pierce the sky’s bright blue canopy.

  When the Mercedes encountered another car on the long, lonely roads, Uncle Dolf urged the chauffeur to drive faster. “We mustn’t let them beat us!” he shouted, and Geli clapped her hands with delight.

  Everyone except Hitler sang songs from Viennese operettas to pass the time. Hanfstaengl waved his arms, conducting an invisible orchestra.

  Gretchen looked away from the fields rolling past. Uncle Dolf had twisted around in the front seat to gaze at her. Had he guessed that she suspected someone had murdered her father? That she believed someone within Hitler’s beloved Party had been been involved in Papa’s death? Uncle Dolf’s face flushed when their eyes met, and he turned away quickly, as though he had been caught looking at something he shouldn’t.

  Confusion prickled her skin. He didn’t suspect anything, not if he was embarrassed. But why should he be? She studied the back of his head: the familiar fall of dark hair, the strip of pale skin above his shirt collar, the slender seashell shape of his ears. Somehow, he looked different, though he was supposed never to change but to remain her beloved Uncle Dolf forever. Instinctively, she sensed that something had altered between them. But she couldn’t guess what it was, or why it seemed to matter so much.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  15

  THEY PICNICKED BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE lake. It was his favorite spot, Uncle Dolf said as they spread woolen rugs on the grass and the women unpacked the baskets of food: cheese and salami sandwiches, roast chicken in wax paper, apple tarts, flasks of coffee and tea, and, for Hitler, a bottle of mineral water.

  The talk drifted like the gently lapping lake waters, soft and dreamlike. Gretchen barely heard a word because she couldn’t stop staring at the surroundings. It had been nearly two years since she had last left Munich, after the stock market crash had sucked away any spare pfennigs for train tickets. Besides, her grandparents insisted on motoring the thirteen miles from Dachau to Munich in their old car. They said they preferred to visit the big city, but she had overhead them, once, telling Mama that Reinhard would no longer be welcome in their house, not after they had caught him stealing eggs from the henhouse and throwing them on the ground—a costly waste they couldn’t afford.

  Gretchen pushed the memory away. It didn’t matter now; Reinhard wasn’t here to ruin things for her. She took a deep breath of the tree-bark-scented air. She had almost forgotten what a forest looked like, dark with pines, so beautiful she stared, the sandwich lying neglected on her lap.

  Finally, the others were finished, the baskets packed, the rugs rolled up. They sat on the soft white sand, listening to Uncle Dolf talk about what he would do when he was elected president. A motorway would run from Munich to Salzburg, and a large restaurant would overlook the lake shore.

  Uncle Dolf drew in the sand with a stick, sketching the modern university he wanted to build, with a yachting school, a heated swimming pool, and first-rate sporting facilities.

  Lovely dreams. Somehow, though, when Gretchen listened to Uncle Dolf, she forgot how fantastical his ideas sounded. They were no longer dreams, but a reality just out of reach. A glorious, golden future that seemed so sweet after the years of scraping along, the years of shame and want after Germany’s defeat in the war. When she heard him talk about how great their empire had been, and how great it would be again, she felt almost giddy with relief. Soon it would be over, this miserable existence of soot-stained alleyways, gnawing bellies, her brother’s footsteps on the stairs. Soon, if Uncle Dolf was right, everything would change. Somehow, she would be free.

  Geli stood, dusting sand from her hands. “Come, ladies, it’s time for swimming.”

  As she followed Geli along the curving shoreline, Gretchen glanced back at the men, still sitting on the sand, Uncle Dolf talking on and on. His strident tone and his quiet expression were so at odds, she wondered if he spoke of matters completely different from the ones in his head. His skinny, awkward face had softened into something she had never seen before: He looked, for all the world, like a man in love.

  And he was watching Geli.

  Impossible. She hurried to keep up with the women, her mind spinning. Uncle Dolf didn’t have lady friends. In the twelve years she had known him, she had never heard of him taking a lady to the cinema or a play, or dining with a pretty girl or walking in the park with a woman. Instead, he had always surrounded himself with men.

  Her espadrilles sank in the sand. Papa had occasionally teased Uncle Dolf, calling him a monk, but she had been too young to understand the word’s significance. A man who didn’t notice the swell of a woman’s bust, or the slender lines of her legs. A man who had shut all the doors of his heart to love or desire. What sort of substance made up such a man’s soul?

  But he looked at Geli as though he loved her, his face relaxed, his eyes gentle. With such open longing, it nearly took Gretchen’s breath away.

  Henny nudged her shoulder. “Are you ill? You’ve gone so pale.”

  “No.” Somehow, she managed to lift each foot, push it forward, across the fine white sand. Geli had gone on ahead and already slipped into a clump of trees. “Uncle Dolf—he looked at Geli so oddly—”

  “You’ve caught him mooning after her, I suppose,” Henny said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know! Herr Hitler is in love with her.”

  Henny was eighteen, a mere year older than Gretchen, but something had always separated them as solidly as a wall. It wasn’t politics—both of their fathers had joined the Party in its early days—but something running far deeper than that, like the currents moving along the ocean floor, unseen but felt. It was something that embarrassed Gretchen, but as she followed Henny along the curving shoreline, she admitted its source to herself—it was class.

  So she didn’t dare ask Henny what she meant about Uncle Dolf and Geli. It was absurd, of course, a middle-aged bachelor in love with his nearly twenty-years-younger half niece.

  Still, she turned and looked at the men. Hanfstaengl and Hoffmann lolled in the sand, their shirtsleeves rolled up, the sun beating on their faces, while Uncle Dolf and his chauffeur skipped stones along the water’s surface. Even from this distance, she heard Hitler’s shout. “Twelve jumps! What an excellent throw.”

  Today he wore traditional Bavarian clothes: leather shorts, a white linen shirt, a pale blue linen jacket with horn buttons. He waded into the water, his knobby-kneed, pasty legs disturbing the crystalline surface, creating small ripples that widened with distance until finally they reached her, yards away.

  Geli’s laugh cut into her thoughts, and Gretchen hurried to join the girls.

  They stood in a thicket of sloe trees along the shore. Sunlight slanted through the branches, gilding the girls’ skin with gold as they slipped out of their clothes.

  “The water looks divine!” Henny rushed into the lake, her slender legs churning up the water.

  But Geli hesitated and glanced back at the men. “My uncle’s watching me again,” she murmured, so quietly that Gretchen had to strain to hear. “He’s always watching me.”

  Gretchen looked, but Uncle Dolf was peering in the opposite direction, up to his ankles in the water, his hands clasped behind his back. The bottom of his shorts was wet, as though he had turned away so quickly he had splashed himself.

  “He isn’t watching now.”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter,” Geli muttered. “Nothing does.” Her fingertips brushed Gretchen’s bare shoulder, her touch light and cool. “You’re so young, perhaps you don’t know about love yet. Loving someone is one t
hing, and being loved is another, but being loved by the one you love—that’s paradise. And I don’t think I shall ever have it. Some men aren’t capable of loving you back.”

  Geli’s lips firmed, as though she wished she could pull her words back inside. But she said nothing more and raced into the lake after Henny. Gretchen stood stock-still, her hands gripping a tree branch, the rough bark cutting into her palms.

  What had Geli meant? Unease whispered up Gretchen’s spine. Geli had almost sounded—no, she couldn’t be right—but Geli had almost sounded as though she loved her uncle. Even though she complained about his rigid rules and his possessive behavior, a part of her cared for him. And he didn’t love her in return, not in the way she needed.

  Gretchen stared straight ahead, at the sun-drenched water where Geli and Henny splashed. My bride must be Germany, my only love the Fatherland, Uncle Dolf had said so many times. Until now, she had believed him.

  Gretchen stepped out from the trees’ protection. Ahead, the lake’s surface glittered as though thousands of diamonds skipped across it. The men’s voices reached her from where they stood along the shore, their forms so darkened by distance that they were mere silhouettes against the sand.

  Naked, she ran across the shore. She let the water pull her, sinking like a stone beneath the surface and down toward the doubts that threatened to drown her.

  The sun was falling into a pool of oranges and reds by the time Gretchen reached the boardinghouse. Although her stomach protested because she had missed supper, she decided to change out of her sandy clothes before digging through the icebox for whatever scraps she could find. She darted across the front hall, praying the old ladies sitting in the parlor wouldn’t call to her, and none did.

  Breathing a sigh of relief—that obstacle past, at least—she fitted a key into the lock on her door, frowning when the tumblers didn’t click. Perhaps she had forgotten to lock it; she had been in a rush this morning to help Mama with breakfast.