Shining Through (46 page)

“What if the chef wants his job back after the accident?”

“Be assured we have considered that possibility. While he is recuperating, he will be offered another position, at a far greater salary.”

“What’s the name of the official I’ll be working for?” I knew, naturally. Norman Weekes had given me his name. But I wanted to see how far Herr Friedrichs, Rex, would trust a fellow spy.

“Quiet!” Not very far. “You will know what you need to know at the proper time. It serves no purpose for you to possess this information now. So I will continue, and you will stop asking questions. This official for whom you will work has been chosen because he is known to bring papers—top-secret papers—from his office to his home to work on.”

“I know. They told me—”

“Silence! This practice of his is, of course, forbidden. But those who know of his habit are in no position to suggest that he stop it.

“As far as I am concerned, there is only one redeeming aspect to this…this sanctuary
cum
cooking school I have been forced to run. The person they have chosen to teach you the fine points is someone I know, someone from the Abwehr. This individual comes from one of the oldest and finest families in Germany, and is the only member of the resistance…whom I consider a true patriot.”

He stood up very slowly. At first I thought it was his age, but then I realized he was being careful that the bed didn’t creak.

“This individual will be risking everything to help 342 / SUSAN ISAACS

you and your countrymen.” His nostrils flared again, and you could see more than his anger as he spoke of Americans; you could see his contempt. “Your imprudent, arrogant ‘freedom-lovers.’” He put his hand on the door handle. “Now listen to me! You must not compromise this individual. You are to keep quiet about your background, your destination, your mission.

You must do nothing—
nothing
—to endanger…” He paused, took a deep breath and regained his composure. “You will be taught what is elegant, what is correct, by one who is…flawless.

Be silent. Be obedient. And be grateful!”

The past will devastate you, they’d said. So what was I supposed to think about, those first few nights in that cell in Herr Friedrichs’s basement? The graciousness of my host? The warmth of his housekeeper? When I heard him say “my housekeeper,” I pictured a lovable, pudgy old family retainer with a white apron, someone who’d have tea with me before she went off on her vacation and tell me where she kept the towels. Or someone with a quiet smile, who would nod, listening to you, as she peeled an apple in one long strip—like my Grandma Olga.

But Frau Gerlach could have posed for the witch in
Hansel
and Gretel
; she had claw hands, and the bottom of her face looked more like an elbow than a chin. She had so many warts that you couldn’t help counting them. Her personality matched her looks. She hissed “
Hure
”—whore—at me a couple of times and wouldn’t eat anything I cooked. She kept a crock of cheese in the refrigerator, and when she came in to eat, she shooed me out with insane waves of her hands, as if she was getting rid of a rodent.

When I turned out the lamp, my room with its painted window—cheaper than a blackout curtain—fell into complete darkness. But even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have slept. Air-planes droned above the house, and my stomach squeezed into a hard knot. Then came the muffled blast of distant bombing and, closer, the demented siren of police cars. And, because my window was level with the street, the SHINING THROUGH / 343

sound of feet. The second night, somebody stopped right outside, and I lay in the blackness in absolute panic, saying to myself, They’re just lighting a cigarette or they have a pebble in their shoe or…I can’t stand this. I can’t take another second.

So I thought about America—and I thought about it in English. Like a sick baby who gets a warm bottle, I wasn’t helped, but I was comforted. I thought about growing up in Ridgewood, where the Irish kids used to call the German kids “Heinies” and make fun of German last names: “Nudelfludel!” They’d howl with laughter. “Von Stupelpoop!” And we’d feel so superior that we never even called them dumb micks. Sure, it was prejudice, but from where I sat (lay) it seemed innocent. You got it out of your system, and sooner or later you got over the fear, the strangeness; the Irish and the German kids grew up and joined the same building-trades union, sometimes became friends or even got married.

I came up with all sorts of pictures I didn’t even know I had filed away: How a horse-drawn truck came rattling up Fresh Pond Road in the summer with watermelons. Getting off the subway at Seneca Avenue after work on December nights, looking down from the el platform and seeing everybody’s Christmas lights. Going to my graduation from Grover Cleveland, walking slow because my mother was wearing four-inch heels, and how Olga stopped three or four times to adjust my cap and the tassel. “A scholar!” she said to my father, and the funny thing was, even though I said, “Grandma, it’s just high school,” I knew she really meant it.

Naturally, I thought about John. I played “If it’s 3 A.M. in Berlin, what time is it in Washington?” It didn’t matter, because whatever hour it was, in my mind he was always with Nan. I envisioned him at his desk, on the phone with her, or at the house, listening to music with her in his arms, the way I’d found them, or up in the bedroom; she’d run her finger over her old monogram on the pillowcases and the top hem of the sheet, then run her finger over his lips and say, Oh John, being with you like this is so wholly, unequivo-344 / SUSAN ISAACS

cally right. And he’d probably do something like kiss her hand and quote some poem they both knew in French. And she’d say,
Mais oui, mon amour
. But then she’d hesitate: We’re in limbo, my darling. I hope you realize that. I can’t believe…She just disappeared?

In a manner of speaking, he’d say.

Do you know where she is?

I can’t…

Oh, I know you can’t tell me. You’re right not to. But how long do we have to live like this, sneaking, pretending? Oh, John, this
has
to be resolved. When will she come back?

And he’d say, I don’t know, my beloved. Maybe six months from now. Maybe never.

That Saturday, Frau Gerlach, warts and all, left for Würzburg.

An hour later, my teacher, the individual from one of Germany’s oldest and finest families, walked into the kitchen carrying a mesh shopping bag filled with groceries. She wore a burgundy skirt and a cashmere sweater set that was such a pale pink it was almost white. She held out her hand and said, “Margarete von Eberstein.” I’d been up to my elbows in herring, so I quickly wiped my right hand on my apron, held it out and explained,

“Herring.” It was only when she started to laugh that I added,

“Lina Albrecht.”

She pulled off her cardigan, tossed it onto a chair, pushed up the sleeves of her pullover and demanded, “How is old Konrad treating you?” Margarete possessed two qualities that I hadn’t seen in any of the hundreds of Germans I’d met in the past two years: vitality and humor. She wasn’t beautiful, or even pretty.

And despite the “von,” her bones were no more aristocratic than mine were. But she had dazzling blue-gray eyes and a wonderful smile. “Is he as condescending as ever?”

“Pretty much,” I admitted.

“I know he is a…special friend of yours, perhaps, so forgive me, but he is such a dreadful snob. He adores me without qualification. It’s so tedious.” Margarete’s energy was a little overwhelming. As she spoke, she whirled around SHINING THROUGH / 345

the kitchen, grabbing a crock of vinegar from the shelf, a paring knife from a drawer. She plunged her hand into the sack of flour, rubbed a bit of it between her fingers and made a face at the texture. “Nothing has been good since those bastards came in—in

’33.”

“Don’t you think you should be a little more careful?”

“Why? Will you turn me in?” Before I could answer, she said,

“Lina, if you and I and our friends are going to succeed, we must be very, very careful. But there are occasional moments when there is nothing to fear, and we must take advantage of them,
glory
in them, because they allow us the chance to be what we truly are: human beings.” She took an apple from a basket, quickly cored it, sliced it, and gave me half. “Now let’s talk about German cuisine. Meat and potatoes. All over Europe they think of it as banal. Leaden. Greasy. Olive oil for the Italians, peanut oil for the French, butter for the English, and for the Germans—bacon grease.”

“Don’t forget lard.”

“No, we mustn’t forget lard. Lovely, light, delicious lard. But what I want to show you is fine German cooking, the sort you must be doing to please the person for whom you will be working.” I wanted to say something, but I was chewing a piece of apple. Margarete held up her hand. “No names,” she warned, but then she flashed her fabulous smile. “No descriptions, either.

Don’t tell me, ‘The man I’m working for is a bald dwarf who lunches with Rommel’s wife every other Thursday.’ The less we know about each other’s…activities, the safer we will be.” She reached into her shopping bag and pulled out a large package wrapped in white butcher paper. “Today, we are going to roast veal and prepare sauerkraut—but sauerkraut in champagne sauce.” She pulled out a small bottle. I glanced at it: French champagne.

“Aren’t you a little nervous about walking down the street with champagne and half a calf?” I asked. “The penalties for dealing in black market goods—”

“Lina,” she said, unwrapping the meat, “I am a trusted employee of the Abwehr. My father’s family has been eating fine veal since before the Hundred Years’ War. And my 346 / SUSAN ISAACS

mother, who is very beautiful and very charming, was a great actress. She’s retired now, but in the late twenties and thirties she was a favorite of our Führer, and his affection for her has never diminished. Should I feel afraid?”

“No,” I answered her. “I guess you should feel pretty good.”

Margarete turned to me. Her hand came out of the shopping bag, and she was holding a bunch of parsley as if it was a delicate bouquet. “I will feel very good,” she said quietly, “when every single goddamned Nazi is dead.”

All the men on the streets of Berlin were in uniform. Those few who weren’t were either doomed or people to be afraid of; you knew instinctively to avoid both. The women were more like me, in dreary coats of
Zellwolle
, a fake material that from a distance looked like wool but up close looked like a scouring pad. It did nothing to keep you warm.

Now and then, one of the wives or mistresses of men in power would glide by, wrapped in a cloud of French perfume and yards of fur; the invasions of France and Scandinavia had done wonders for the women of the powerful. In London I’d heard that Goebbels was trying to get them to play down their privilege; he’d even put an end to their morning horseback rides in the Tiergarten, the park in the center of Berlin. He didn’t want the masses to be resentful. Ha. One look at Margarete’s cashmere sweater collection and her fox coat and her gold earrings in those days of standing on line for an hour and a half just to buy a turnip should have caused a riot of resentment. But either the Nazis’ women were the German equivalent of movie stars—they lived sumptuous lives on everybody’s behalf—or people were too terrified to show their resentment.

I was perpetually terrified, but who—even the most innocent—would not be? The second time I left Herr Friedrichs’s house, I’d seen three Gestapo men beating up a middle-aged man outside a bakery. The man’s head was in the gutter, his body on the sidewalk; one of them stamped his boot down, again and again, on the man’s stomach, and SHINING THROUGH / 347

his head jerked with every blow, The other two just said, “Move along,” to the people on the street, mechanically, because not a single person stopped or even slowed down. Maybe no one was innocent.

I’d finally gone outside, seven days after I arrived in Berlin.

All my papers were in order—my passport, my workbook and my ration card. The OSS may have sent men parachuting in the dark and going splat onto concrete high-ways, but everyone said they were great with documents. I hoped so. Herr Friedrichs had looked at all three of them, as well as the card I didn’t have to carry, my
Ahnenpass
, my ancestry passport, which proved Lina Albrecht’s Aryan descent. All he said was, Adequate. They had to be more than adequate, because there could be an identity check anywhere, anytime. It was all up to the discretion—and the mood—of the Gestapo.

The picture on my passport had been taken in England. It showed me in three-quarters profile, so if you looked close, you could really get a good idea of how stupid-looking the braids were and how washed out I looked without any makeup. Or maybe I’d just gone pale that day because right before they took the photograph, they put my right and left index fingerprints on the card. I remember I’d gotten that numb feeling again when I saw the partially filled out passport and pictured that if it had been made out to Linda Voss instead of Lina Albrecht, there would be a giant “J” stamped on the left side.

But dead Jews don’t need identity cards. One of the OSS men in the boarding house in London had mentioned, quite casually, that there were still about forty thousand Jews in Berlin, but then he’d added, No. Wait a second. Probably a lot less by now.

They’re in the middle of another roundup. More deportations and the usual deaths. I’d asked, What do you mean by, usual?

And he’d answered, Suicides. The ones from Eastern Europe don’t know what’s going to happen to them. The ones in Berlin are starting to understand.

I had to go to the fish store that first day. And even though I traced and retraced the seven blocks on the map and in my 348 / SUSAN ISAACS

mind, the walk never seemed to end. Good German that Lina was, she kept her eyes down and minded her own business, but I worried that something in my stride, something in the way I carried my pocketbook, something in the way I looked at a traffic signal, would give away that I was an American.

My heart pounded so hard I could hear it inside my ears. I was going to meet my contact. Once I became a chef, I’d be giving all my information to the fish man. Now I was just going to introduce myself, to say, “Good morning. I hope the walleyed pike is not as bony as it was last Thursday.”