Last Stop Vienna

by Andrew Nagorski

  Persuading myself that I was doing Otto’s bidding, I caught up with Emil, whom I hadn’t seen since he drove Hitler and Geli to my outing. I saw him dropping off the boss one evening at Thierschstrasse. I had lingered there on several occasions, hoping to catch a glimpse of Geli. Emil parked the car around the corner, away from the tram tracks. I hurried to catch up.

  “Emil, it’s been a while,” I called. He looked up and smiled, but it was perfunctory.

  He shook my hand. “Too busy to see old friends?” he asked with only a trace of the old mockery.

  “It’s you who’s always busy.”

  “The boss keeps me busy, what can I say?”

  “And Geli?”

  “Not as busy on that front as I’d like to be.”

  “At least until the wedding, I guess.”

  “The wedding is postponed.”

  “Why?”

  “Hitler told Geli that he had no objections to the marriage, but that she’s very young and she should give it some time.”

  “How much time? She’s what, twenty now?”

  Emil nodded glumly. “Almost twenty-one. He said two years.”

  “Two years?”

  “Yes, two years.”

  “And you and Geli, you’ll wait that long?”

  “Geli says I should be patient. She won’t disobey her uncle.”

  I proposed going for a beer—more for lack of anything better to say than out of a real desire to prolong the conversation.

  “Thanks, but I have some errands to run,” Emil said.

  Relieved, I turned and crossed Thierschstrasse, not sure what to do next. I had my head down, trying to sort out this news, when I stopped short just before colliding with someone. It was Geli, standing defiantly in front of me on the sidewalk, her arms crossed and her upper lip curled up in a familiar grin.

  “What does it take for you to notice a girl?” she demanded. “You would have walked right by me without seeing anything. Why can’t I ever get your attention?”

  “Geli, you’re not serious.”

  “I’m deadly serious.” She raised her hand to her face as if wiping away a tear, then slyly looked at me to measure the effect. I laughed, and so did she. “So why haven’t you visited me? I’ve missed you, I really have.”

  “I’ve heard you’re always busy.”

  “Not too busy to see you.”

  She cast a quick glance over my shoulder. I turned and realized she was checking the window of Hitler’s apartment, which I recognized by the statue of the Virgin mounted into a recess alongside. No one was at the window.

  Geli leaned forward, close enough for me to feel the warmth of her breath, offering a hint of the taste that I remembered so well. “I’m going inside; it’s number forty-three, the third floor on the right. Follow me in a minute or two.”

  Before I could respond, she was off, crossing the tram tracks to the other side of the street.

  I walked back to the corner I had just come from and strode briskly toward the same door, not looking to my right or left as I pushed it open.

  It was late afternoon, and the hallway was nearly dark. I found the stairs and tried to force myself to climb them slowly, but when I heard a door slam behind me as I passed the first-floor landing, I took the remaining steps two at a time and knocked quickly on her door.

  Geli opened it immediately, grabbed my hand and led me through a small common room to her room. The other rooms leading from the living room were closed, but I sensed that the other tenants were around and she wanted to be sure we didn’t run into them.

  As soon as she had closed her door behind us, she laughed and put her arms around me as she had when we were behind the tree, burying her head in my chest. A small candle provided the only light. “You’re panting, Karl. Too much excitement for you?”

  “We’ll see,” I managed.

  She looked up and slowly raised her lips to mine. I tried to respond as gently, but in a moment I had my arms firmly against her back and, then reaching down lower, pressed her against me.

  “Wait,” she said, but it was only to step back and pull me toward her narrow cot. Our bodies joined and detonated even before we had managed to struggle free of our clothes, before I had managed to unbutton more than the lower part of her blouse and reach up under it. After the first time, we stripped off everything and I held her tight, stroking and exploring all the places I had dreamed of. We started over, less frantically than before.

  “God, I wanted to do this,” I murmured. “I want you, love you.”

  She ran her hands through my hair and pulled my head down between her breasts. “Be quiet, Karl, don’t spoil anything. Quiet.”

  I was content to lie like that forever. Or at least until our bodies began their rhythmic movement again, this time ever so languidly until I felt a slow, aching release. We didn’t speak a word or move apart.

  The next thing I remember was Geli shaking me awake. “Karl, you’ve got to get up. It’s two o’clock. You really do have to go.” She put her forefinger on my lips. “And don’t make any noise.”

  “When can I come back?”

  She kissed me once more, this time stroking me where I felt blissfully sore. As she felt me responding, she squeezed me almost harshly, then pushed me away. “Is tomorrow soon enough?” she asked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  And so began the strangest and happiest interlude of my life. I didn’t recognize it as an interlude then. I thought it was the beginning of something that would last forever, more powerful than all the obstacles and logic arrayed against it. Doesn’t everyone experience something like that at least once in their lifetime? If not, I can only pity them.

  Geli set the rules, and I was happy to follow them. If she had said that I should walk over hot coals before returning to her several times a week, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But all she demanded was that we meet in complete secrecy, that I keep to the rest of my private and public routine as if nothing had changed and that I shouldn’t ask too many questions. Or talk about the future.

  Sometimes we met at her place when she gave the signal—a repositioning of the potted plant on her windowsill. These encounters were in the very late evenings, her room was almost always only lit by a single candle, and she insisted that I never linger afterward. More often than not, we met for an hour or so during the day in the room of one of her friends who was conveniently out when Geli gave the other signal, a red ribbon tied around the right curtain, indicating we could meet that afternoon. I could count on getting either signal or none by noon, which made it easy for me to check while Sabine was at work.

  I stumbled through my life with Sabine then. It probably helped that I had been distracted and unresponsive before, so Sabine saw it as a continuation of my earlier behavior. But, at Geli’s insistence, I tried to maintain the pretense that nothing had changed. I did make love to Sabine on some of the nights when I hadn’t been able to be with Geli. Sometimes I did so with an intensity that astonished and pleased her, at least briefly, but she must have sensed that in those moments I was in another world. Still, she clung to me afterward, sometimes with tears in her eyes. We talked less and less. She didn’t press me to tell her the truth. If she had, I’m not sure I could have kept my promise to Geli.

  Now I recognize the odd parallel between Sabine’s willingness not to ask questions and my own to put most questions aside when I was with Geli. I drank her in, I savored her, I couldn’t get enough of her, and if the price was skirting so many obvious topics, I was willing to pay it. That is, so long as I could keep seeing Geli, so long as I was convinced she was as hungry for me as I was for her.

  And I was completely convinced of that even when our meetings became less frequent, when I had to pass her building repeatedly before I saw the signal I was waiting for. After a few days of absence, we devoured each other; there was no holding back. Whatever doubts I had felt dissipated. She was mine then, all mine. That was all that mattered.

  I would wait, I
told myself, however long she wanted me to before we would and could align our lives with that central reality.

  —

  Of course I should have realized that I was living only a dream. And reality was already beginning to cast a lengthening shadow.

  I casually mentioned to Geli that I’d seen the young girl Maria whom I had once spotted leaving Hitler’s apartment. It was in a bakery near the center of town. She was buying rolls and a couple of pastries, and at first I hadn’t recognized her. She no longer looked as young as I remembered, although it was obvious she was only a teenager. But her eyes had a frightened look, and she moved in an odd way, slowly for someone her age. The left side of her face looked slightly swollen, as if she had just come from the dentist.

  Geli turned pale and wanted to know everything. Was Maria still visiting Hitler? Had I seen her going in or out of his apartment? What was she wearing? I hadn’t paid particular attention to what she had on, so I couldn’t answer even the last question. “You must know more than you’re saying,” Geli insisted.

  “You know that the only girl I really notice is you.”

  It was as if Geli hadn’t heard my lame attempt to lighten the mood. She turned her back to me. When she finally spoke, it was so softly that I wasn’t sure I heard her right. “I’m frightened.”

  I asked her of what, but she didn’t respond.

  Another time she started on her own. She had pulled me to the bed as soon as I came in, which was nothing unusual, but there was a rough edge to her lovemaking, a fury, that astonished me. It also kept me aroused longer than ever, turning the situation around. I was now in control in a way I never remembered before, feeling a boundless power to drive out whatever it was that tormented her. She came again and again until I finally let go, with both of us collapsing. She kissed my neck and held me, then caught me off guard. “I saw her myself this time.”

  “Who?”

  “I saw her, and I knew right away what she had been doing.”

  “Who?”

  “Maria, who else? Are you saying there are others?”

  “I’m not saying anything—I’m just trying to understand what you’re saying.”

  “Ignore me, Karl, please. I didn’t mean anything. It’s not important.”

  “You know I can’t ignore you. What is it that’s bothering you about this girl?”

  “It’s not her, it’s him.”

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t know what he wants from us—Maria, me, anyone else I don’t know about. He can be so charming, and then he gives you this look that . . .”

  “That what?”

  “Scares me, scares me so much.”

  She wouldn’t say anything more, and I tried to reassure her that she was imagining things. Yes, I tried to reassure her about her uncle. When I look back at that period, that’s what makes me feel most ashamed. Instinctively sensing but not admitting that something was changing already, I just wanted everything to continue the way it was: with my rushing to her whenever she repositioned the flowerpot or tied a red ribbon around the right curtain. With my mind already envisaging her by the light of a single candle, incandescent, irresistible.

  —

  Now that I wasn’t living in the barracks and had other duties, I wasn’t fighting street battles, but I still heard about them. They took place from time to time, less organized, more random. I had seen the broken windows of storefronts afterward and heard the boasting of brown-shirts that they had taught someone a lesson, usually a communist someone. The communists were still the enemy, and they still fought back, sometimes furiously.

  When I was summoned to my unit one afternoon, I found several of the men badly bruised and battered. Some were bandaged, and a couple had their arms in slings. The mood was sullen.

  “Private, we need you today,” an officer with a black eye announced to me with no preliminaries. “We’re calling anyone we can. Quite a few of the regulars are out of action for a while.”

  I saluted but didn’t feel the enthusiasm I tried to show. It had been a long time since I had drawn this kind of duty.

  The brownshirts weren’t supposed to be operating in the open, but small groups felt free to attack targets of opportunity. From what I could gather through brief snippets of conversation before our unit prepared for action, the target this time was a printing shop where they had fought and lost a battle a few days earlier.

  “What kind of a printing shop?” I whispered to Erich, one of the few from our original Berlin group who was still on assignment. The only difference was that now he was a sergeant. And his face appeared frozen in a permanent scowl. I no longer felt any connection with the young man who had arrived with me in Munich ages ago.

  “What do you think?” he snarled. “A commie printing shop. Commie Jews who outnumbered us last time and caught us by surprise. We thought there’d only be a few of them. It’s a small place, but they were ready for us, the bastards.”

  We moved out, not in formation but infiltrating the target zone in groups of two or three.

  As darkness fell, we had the place surrounded, although whoever was in the printing shop probably hadn’t detected anything unusual yet. Erich, who was calling the shots on the ground, had ordered everyone deployed out of sight until he gave the signal. I found myself in a back alley wishing I were anyplace else. My churning stomach reminded me of the fear that accompanied me during my first battles, and I felt I was spinning backward in time. Except it wasn’t exactly like before. Then I hadn’t any doubts about the need for what I was doing. Now I wasn’t sure. Otto’s admonition that I had to keep the party’s trust now felt like a burden I wasn’t sure I wanted to shoulder anymore.

  I heard Erich’s whistle, and then there was no more time for thinking. In a way, I guess I was relieved. We must have been an intimidating sight, rushing the shop, breaking down the door, shattering the windows and flailing away with our truncheons. I felt my head clearing and my body kicking into gear as I swung away at the handful of defenders until they became a blur of blood, mangled limbs and screaming faces. It was them or us at that point, and I was as determined as any of my comrades to emerge victorious. They didn’t run until we had mauled them completely. Once they escaped out the back door, we really got down to work, smashing the presses and every piece of equipment in sight. I bashed as energetically as the rest of them.

  But when I paused to catch my breath, I felt drained. I was empty. The adrenaline rush that usually kept me pumped up for hours after such a battle wasn’t there.

  As the others finished the destruction, I drifted to the back of the shop, near the door where the communists had fled. My eyes focused on the pamphlets and posters strewn across the floor. There were hammers and sickles, caricatures of capitalists smoking big cigars as workers in chains served them. There was a swastika emblazoned with a skull, and I felt the old anger against the reds return. Then I noticed the words splashed across some of the covers—“Power to the Proletariat,” “Nationalization,” “Where Workers Rule.” My mind flashed back to the pamphlets I had seen on Otto’s worktable.

  There was a sudden commotion, and the door behind me burst open. Several brownshirts intercepted the young woman, and her arms flailed briefly as she took several blows from her welcoming committee.

  I pushed my way forward and saw her lying on the ground, blood trickling from her mouth. Her blouse was torn, and one of the men ripped it further, exposing a shoulder and breast. Someone laughed. “Who the hell are you?” Erich demanded.

  She was shaking, but her eyes blazed defiantly. “My husband, the printer,” she whispered, then caught her breath and continued. “Don’t hurt him.”

  Momentary silence. Then a shout. “He’s here, all right.” A brown-shirt next to me pulled a small man wearing a grease-stained apron from under a table that had remained standing.

  The woman strained to get up. “Don’t hurt him, please,” she repeated. Erich pushed her back down.

  Her husband
lurched forward, but I seized him by the shoulders. Just then the brownshirt who had found him punched him hard in the face. His blood splattered onto my shirt and face as I released him and he dropped to the floor.

  But he wasn’t ready to be silenced. “Let us go,” he said, managing to pull himself onto all fours. “I’m just a printer, and she hasn’t done anything.”

  Erich stepped toward him and kicked him hard in the stomach. “Just a printer, right?”

  “Erich, let him go, let both of them go,” I heard myself saying. “We’ve taught him a lesson—a lesson he won’t forget. Let’s get out of here.”

  He rounded on me. “Have you gone crazy now that you can’t be bothered with doing the real work around here? Just a printer, just a Jewish commie printer.” He wheeled and pointed at the woman. “And she’s a Jewish commie printer’s whore.” He spat in her direction. “You want us to let them go. Sure, we’ll send them home, back to their warm bed. Let’s give them a proper send-off, men.”

  The printer and his wife were lifted to their feet, the rest of the woman’s blouse and most of her skirt torn off in the process, and they were both shoved out the door.

  “Satisfied?” Erich asked.

  I turned away.

  —

  Somehow I didn’t get into serious trouble, although it wasn’t for a lack of trying on Erich’s part. The captain who had dispatched us heard both of us out and decided I was guilty of irresponsibly questioning the NCO, but then I had backed off. Erich was still furious, but the story among the men was that I didn’t have what it took anymore, so it was probably just as well that I wasn’t on regular duty.

  I wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe the men were right after all. I had fought the communists in numerous battles before, and these were still the same bastards. I knew they were working against us Germans, for the Russians, for the Jews. Why had I wanted Erich and the others to stop? Why had this victory felt so empty? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that in Berlin the Erichs of the movement were attacking Otto’s printing operations, that they were acting as if he, we, were the real enemies.