Last Stop Vienna

by Andrew Nagorski

  I held Sabine as steadily as I could, but it wasn’t easy. My own body trembled as tears flowed down my cheeks onto her face.

  —

  Sabine’s initial condition, a nurse told me, was critical; she had lost a lot of blood. “If you hadn’t brought her here right away, she probably wouldn’t have made it,” the nurse said. It wasn’t much of a consolation.

  Feeling that I had no choice, I went to Sabine’s office and told Petra what had happened. She stared at me in disgust and disbelief. “You mean she relied on you to find a doctor for this?”

  “She was embarrassed to go to her friends.”

  “And you agreed to take care of it? You?”

  “I was told he was a good doctor.”

  “Good God,” she muttered.

  From then on Petra was a regular visitor to the hospital, seeing to it that Sabine received the best care possible. After a few days she reported tersely: “She’ll make it.” Then, seeing my expression of relief, she added: “No thanks to you.”

  Unlike Petra, who could use her nurse’s connections to visit as much as she wanted, I was consigned largely to waiting. The two or three times I was allowed in, the floor nurse ordered me out after a few minutes. “She needs her rest. Go on, now, you’ll have plenty of time for talking later.”

  I have to admit I was secretly relieved; Sabine said so little and usually had the same faraway, unfocused look she’d had in Stein’s waiting room, even when I apologized again and again. I didn’t know what more to do or say. Something stopped me from telling her what had happened on the day of the abortion, how I had changed my mind.

  Shaken, I went to see Emil. He protested that he’d never heard anything bad about Stein. “I’m sorry about what happened, but you know I wouldn’t send a friend’s girl there unless I thought he’d do a good job. What do you take me for? Besides, there’s always a risk in these operations. But she’ll be all right.”

  “I should have let her have the baby.”

  “You’re just saying that because of what happened,” Emil said, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Really, she’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t understand. I decided that I’d made a mistake when I still thought there was time to stop Stein.”

  Emil sighed. “I’m sorry if that’s what you felt. But you sounded very decided when you asked me for a doctor. I was just trying to help.”

  I nodded. It was hard to be mad at Emil, since I knew he meant it, and he certainly hadn’t intended any harm. Besides, he treated me better than anyone else in the party, except for Otto.

  When he saw I wasn’t blaming him, he changed the subject. He told me that Hitler was working hard to rebuild the party organization in Bavaria. Since he couldn’t speak in public, he was holding private meetings everywhere he could.

  “That reminds me: I’ve got another job for you to do.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure I care about politics anymore.”

  “All right, I can understand that you’re upset now and can’t think about it. But the job isn’t political—it’s the kind you like.”

  “What is it?”

  “Geli will be in town in less than two weeks. She’ll be on a school trip, and she’s never visited Munich before. I have to drive the boss to a meeting that day, so she could use an escort to show her the city. He thinks the school won’t do a good enough job, so he’s arranging to get her released from the tour for part of the afternoon. It won’t be a lot of time, just enough to give her a few of the highlights.” He paused. “You did the job so well last time that I suspect she’d like you to handle these duties. Do you think you can manage it?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Emil looked at me carefully. “Is that all you have to say? I thought you liked Geli—in fact, I thought . . .”

  “God, you always jump to conclusions. Yes, I think she’s a nice girl, but that’s all. I’ve got other things on my mind at the moment.”

  “All right. But it’ll do you good to think of something else.”

  “Fine, I said I’d do it.”

  “And, Karl,” Emil added, his lips curling into a grin, “I don’t want you bringing back Hitler’s niece all muddy this time.”

  —

  Sabine returned home a few days later. Late the first evening, when the awkward silences got longer and longer, I told her everything about the boy in the English Gardens and how I had tried to stop the abortion. “I was so stupid not to have understood earlier, not to think about the baby we could have had.” I felt the tears welling up and looked away, but Sabine drew me to her, stroked my face and kissed me for the first time since her return. She wept, too.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I thought I’d only make everything worse, since I was too late anyway.”

  She hugged me tighter. “You were, but you changed. I needed to know that.”

  “I think I have. At least I’ll try to show you that I have.”

  “Good,” she murmured.

  We sat silently holding each other, but there wasn’t anything awkward in the long silence that followed.

  Sabine finally lifted her head, drawing back just enough to look at me directly. “Does this mean you’re changing in other ways, too?”

  “If you mean taking a job with Uwe, I’ll do it if you still want me to.”

  She smiled. “You know I do.”

  We had quarreled about Uwe before the abortion. I had told Sabine about his transformation, which had astonished and pleased her. She suddenly saw Uwe, whom she had dismissed as an incorrigible rowdy who could only be a bad influence on me, as an ally. She had argued that I should go to work if he could provide me a job, and she had been delighted with his new views about politics, that it was time to drop out. Although I was already uncertain about my future in the party, I had become indignant, arguing that I was still committed to the cause.

  Now I was more willing to yield. “All right, I’ll ask him. Maybe he’ll have some part-time jobs.”

  “Why part-time?”

  “Because I have, you know, other duties.” As the words came out, I realized I was echoing what I had told Uwe, even less convincingly than before. When Sabine pushed me to explain, I avoided responding by agreeing to consider full-time work if Uwe could arrange it.

  “I have to do one thing first,” I insisted, finding that I didn’t want to capitulate completely.

  “What’s that?” Sabine asked.

  “I need to talk or at least write to Otto.”

  “Don’t start again,” she pleaded.

  “I’m not saying I’m starting up anything again. But I owe it to Otto.”

  “You owe Otto? He led you to Hitler.”

  “I’ve told you: Otto is a very rational person. I respect his judgment. He’s not blinded by Hitler—he’s not even a member of the party. And now that all the other party leaders are lining up behind Hitler again, Gregor isn’t saying anything yet.”

  Sabine was far from convinced, but she backed off slightly. She didn’t like to fight and, while suspicious of Otto, wasn’t sure where he stood.

  “I don’t know, Karl, it’s your sense of judgment I sometimes worry about.”

  “I’ll write him a letter. What’s the harm in that?”

  Her eyes, still sunken deeply into her face, clouded over slightly as they took me in. “All right, I want to believe you. Maybe this is something you should do—to help you get away from all of them.”

  I bit my lip and nodded. “I’ll do my best to sort this out, really.” I meant it.

  —

  As instructed, I waited in front of the pharmacy downstairs from Hitler’s old room at Thierschstrasse 41, where he had returned after prison. Emil had told me Geli would visit her uncle first and then be free when he left for his meeting. About six trams rumbled by on the narrow street before Emil pulled up in Hitler’s red Mercedes. “Been waiting long?” he asked.

  �
��I was here exactly when you told me to be. I’m a brownshirt, remember? I follow orders.”

  Emil laughed. “Well, the young lady must be entertaining her uncle well, because I’m a couple of minutes late, and he’s still not down here. Thank God for that. He doesn’t like waiting, not even for a minute.” He looked nervously at his watch. “And if we’re late someplace, he doesn’t like that, either. It’s always my fault, no matter how long I had to wait for him.”

  Just then the front door to the building opened. Hitler stepped out, followed by Geli. “Heil Hitler!” I saluted briskly. Hitler nodded, and Emil got out to open the back door. Geli, who was bundled in a faded brown coat, caught Hitler by the arm before he stepped in. “You promise, Uncle Alf?”

  “Yes, I promise,” he said, settling into his seat. “Now, be a good girl and do some sight-seeing with this young man. You’ll want to tell your mother what you saw in Munich when you get back.”

  Emil closed the door and got back in, offering a quick wave as he drove off. Hitler was already immersed in some papers.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Geli as we watched the car disappear around the corner.

  “Uncle Alf promised to take me on a ride in his car next time I come,” she responded happily. “I’ve never been in a car like that.”

  I looked at her and was startled by the fact that my memory must have played a trick on me. Although I remembered her from our previous encounter as alluringly attractive for a young girl, she was certainly no beauty. I could see that she was wearing the same pleated skirt as last time, since the brown coat failed to cover it completely. Her short, wavy hair still had a somewhat boyish look, and I even glimpsed something of her mother’s dowdiness in her. But then her dark eyes playfully locked on mine, and I realized that in her case it didn’t matter.

  “So let’s do something fun today,” she said. “I don’t care what I’ll have to tell my mother. She’s always too tired to listen to me anyway. But I want to tell my girlfriends I did something exciting.”

  “Like what?” I asked cautiously.

  “I don’t know. Up to you.”

  “Well, we could start out by visiting the German Museum. It’s just opened, and people say it’s very good: lots of displays of the first cars, steamships, that sort of thing.”

  “Boring,” she shot back, with a smile that took the sting out of her remark. “I don’t want to see old cars; I want to drive in new ones, like Uncle Alf’s.”

  “Afraid I can’t help you there, since my Mercedes is in the garage.”

  To my relief, she laughed loudly.

  “Look, we can’t just stand here. I’ll take you someplace you might like. But we need to go quickly, since it’s twenty to eleven.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked. “Do you have a date?”

  “Yes, with you.”

  We set out in the direction of Marienplatz. Geli wanted to stop at some of the small clothing shops along the way, but I kept prodding her along, telling her she could look at shops later. “I’m not like you, you know,” she complained about the pace. “I’m not one of my uncle’s soldiers.”

  “I noticed.”

  We reached Marienplatz with a couple of minutes to spare. People were already stopping to look up at the clock tower of the New Town Hall. “Isn’t that a marvelous building?” I asked.

  Geli nodded, taking in not just the building but the impressive square with its elegant gilded statue of Mary. But then her eyes began darting around to what else the square had to offer. “Fine, so what next?” she asked.

  At that moment, the clock chimed the hour, and the doors on the tower flipped open. The mechanical knights began jousting, and brightly colored dancers twirled about. Geli craned her neck to catch the performance. Since I had seen it several times before, I watched her watching, delighting in her little-girl look of joy.

  “That was wonderful,” she said when the figures had once again disappeared behind the closed doors. “And now what—shopping?”

  I had been thinking ahead, knowing I wouldn’t get much of a reprieve. “Not yet. Let’s go right nearby. Besides, I don’t think you have money for the kinds of shops we have here.”

  I led her a few blocks to the Viktualienmarkt, the biggest—and fanciest—open-air food market in the city. Women dressed in traditional Bavarian country costumes offered a profusion of fruit, vegetables and meats. Maybe there wasn’t much difference from other markets, but the food all looked lusciously appealing, and the prices were probably higher.

  Geli picked up a large onion. “Put that down, Fräulein,” commanded the toothless woman in charge of the stall.

  “I was just admiring its size,” Geli retorted.

  “You can buy it first and admire it later.”

  “Well, I was going to buy five kilos for the birthday dinner we have tonight,” Geli huffed. “Now I’ll have to look elsewhere.” With that, she turned on her heel. “Come on, Karl.”

  I suppressed a grin and trotted after her. When we had ducked around to the next row of stalls, she burst out laughing. “You see, Karl, I know how to shop without spending any money. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “You can play tricks on a peasant woman, but don’t try stunts like that in the stores here.”

  “Want to bet?”

  I realized where this could be leading and backed off. “All right, I believe you. Come on, there are some really beautiful churches to see.”

  “Churches? I told you, I want to see the shops.”

  “Don’t you have plenty of shops in Vienna?”

  “What kind of question is that? Of course we do. But people recognize me there. Here nobody knows me.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Be patient.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed to take her to a street with fancy shops—Maximilianstrasse, back in the direction from which we had come. Geli gaped at the displays in the windows: the gowns, the coats, the hats, the jewelry. “Let’s go in there,” she said, pointing to a haberdasher’s shop.

  Before I could say anything, she was inside.

  A middle-aged saleswoman dressed in a well-tailored long skirt and jacket was accepting payment from an elderly man who was buying a present. When she had finished with him, she glanced skeptically in Geli’s direction and asked haughtily, “What can I do for you?”

  Geli pointed to a red hat with a feather. “I’d like to try that one on.”

  The saleswoman took it off the shelf and pointed to its price tag. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Geli said, already taking it from the woman and placing it at a jaunty angle on her head. She looked at herself in the mirror on the counter. “I don’t know,” she added. “This may not do. It’s for a rather formal occasion, after all. Do you have anything of better quality?”

  I turned away as if examining other hats, but I caught the look of surprise in the saleswoman’s eyes when she began to recognize that she might have miscalculated. Suddenly she was eager to help, pulling down several more hats of different shapes and colors. Geli tried each one on and rejected them all. “What about the fur hats?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course, we have lovely fur hats. Mink or sable?”

  “I really prefer sable.”

  The saleswoman disappeared into the back room, and Geli gave me the mischievous look I remembered so well from our first outing.

  When the woman came back reverently holding two sable hats, Geli looked at them scornfully. “They’re so simple, you know,” she sighed. “And the colors aren’t as rich as the ones I saw earlier.”

  The saleswoman stood there, speechless.

  “Karl, you have to drive me to my lunch. We mustn’t keep the baroness waiting.” She turned back toward the woman. “I’ll come back when you get another shipment. When will that be?”

  “We should have some new hats in next month, but—”

  “Fine, till then,” Geli gaily replied. And we
were out the door.

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the store, snorting with laughter. “You see why I can’t shop in Vienna? This is so much fun.”

  “Your car, Fräulein,” I said, holding open an imaginary door.

  “Yes, hurry,” she replied, pretending to step in and sit down. “My servants are waiting to dress me for lunch with the baroness.”

  I checked the time. “We should get back, really. It’s a bit of a walk across the English Gardens—and I don’t want anyone reporting to your uncle that I didn’t get you back to your group on schedule.”

  We walked toward the park just as we felt the first misty drops of a cold drizzle. Dark clouds moved in, bringing along a more insistent rain, and we stepped up our pace. With the pension already in sight, the rain started to come down very hard.

  “Is this going to happen every time we meet?” Geli asked, not seeming to care.

  We sought cover under a couple of big trees, but they didn’t offer the kind of shelter the trees in the countryside had, only a bit of patchy protection. Geli unbuttoned her coat, slipped it off and held it over her head as a shield from the rain that was still getting through. I saw that she was wearing the same white blouse with the frayed collar.

  She caught my glance again. “Don’t you want to come under here?” she asked, motioning me under her coat.

  I stepped toward her. “You must be cold. I know I am.”

  “This should warm you up,” she said, taking my right hand in one quick motion and placing it on her left breast. She pushed it away just as quickly. “That’s it, no more. Thanks for the tour. I knew you wanted to do that.”

  I stood frozen.

  Her lips lightly brushed my cheek, and she ran off to the pension through the rain. “No need to take me the rest of the way,” she called over her shoulder.

  After she had disappeared with a final wave, I reluctantly turned around and headed back slowly through the park. The rain was coming down harder than ever, but I didn’t mind.

  Chapter Nine

  The ceremony was simple. Of necessity. It wasn’t just the fact that we had so little money. Sabine would have liked a church wedding, and she would have somehow scraped together enough to pay for it if that had been a possibility. But no priest would marry a Catholic and a Protestant. And she knew that there was no chance I’d convert to Catholicism. I’ve never had much use for any religion, and I wasn’t about to pretend for the sake of a wedding. So we had a plain civil ceremony officiated by a squat, dour bureaucrat with thick glasses that kept fogging over. Although it was a cool autumn day and the room wasn’t overheated, he kept wiping sweat from his narrow brow and flaccid cheeks as he took care of the formalities. He dabbed at the drops of sweat that plunked down on his papers with the same wet handkerchief, only smearing the ink further. I could see the disappointment on Sabine’s face at first, but then our eyes met, and she put her hand up to her mouth to suppress an attack of the giggles.