Shining Through (49 page)

It was cold, and my feet throbbed as I stood there in the early December cold. I thought: Would people from Queens and Brooklyn ever be like this? Could they ever be made so scared that their insides died? I didn’t know. But then I looked down to the street corner from where I was standing in line and saw workers on their way to offices, stores and factories.

Not a single one of them put a foot off the curb when the light was red. New York was a city of jaywalkers, of parkers at fire hydrants. Would a cabdriver’s unwritten license to say to a cop,

“Up yours, buddy,” protect a nation from a Hitler 364 / SUSAN ISAACS

and his Brownshirts? Could a Hitler arise in a nation where the average citizen never thought twice about exceeding the speed limit?

To be fair, though, when you see your neighbors being rounded up and taken away and their houses and furniture and even their canned tomatoes snatched up by Party favorites, and you never see your neighbors again…well, it doesn’t encourage a big mouth and an anti-fascist sneer.

But to continue to be fair, Hitler and FDR had come into office within months of each other in 1933. Okay, conditions were much worse in Germany; they not only had a depression, they had the heavy burden of the First World War on them. But they picked a wild-eyed, booted, hate-spewing monster who screeched to them by torchlight: You are the Master Race! And we picked a cripple with gusto and gallantry, who sat by a homey, crackling fire and urged us to have courage, to have patience, to have decency and to have hope.

I finally got into the store; it had once sold a combination of housewares and hardware, but now there was nothing even resembling the cast-iron skillet I’d thought of buying. Its inventory consisted of two items: soup bowls and potato peelers. I left with a potato peeler, but at least the store owner had not detected anything strange in my accent; I was almost positive of that.

And it hadn’t bothered him that I was strangely robust; when he gave me my change, he said, Here, Fräulein, and then grinned at me. I put my head down so he’d think I was blushing, slipped the potato peeler into my pocketbook and left.

I’m doing okay, I thought, and though I didn’t skip down the street and whistle, I felt far more confident than when I’d left Herr Friedrichs’s that morning. I was almost at the station when I saw that a side street had been cordoned off. Police. Gestapo.

I didn’t look. I calmed myself by thinking it was an area that had been hit the night before. Even though the bombings were getting worse, the authorities kept trying to prevent people from coming face-to-face with terrible

SHINING THROUGH / 365

devastation—rubble and the awful empty craters left after the attacks—especially in residential neighborhoods.

A bombing, I thought. A fact of life. And then felt a hand on my arm. I looked up. Gestapo. A face that would have been nice-looking if it hadn’t been so enraptured by its own ability to terrify. “Show me your passport,” he ordered.

It took me a second to open the clasp, and my pocketbook jiggled as I struggled. I prayed, Dear God, don’t let that hinge work now. I handed him my passport. He examined it, and then he came up close. How had I given myself away? “Is your name Lina Albrecht?”

“Yes.”

Had someone been watching Konrad Friedrichs all along?

Was that it?

“Your age?”

“Twenty-eight years.” He had a thick pompadour, kept high off his forehead with hair tonic.

“Place of birth?”

“Berlin.” Oh, God—or Oh, Olga, Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Pohl—let him buy my accent.

Was the identity check one of those random ones they’d warned me about? I was just walking too slow for his taste, or too fast. He didn’t like my looks. He liked my looks, like the shopkeeper who’d grinned. He stared at my passport, then at me, over and over and over. Was he trying to paralyze me so that when he finally proclaimed, You are
not
from Berlin! Your accent is foreign! all I’d be able to do would be incline my head in agreement.

“What are you doing?”

“I was shopping.”

“Shopping?” His eyes narrowed with skepticism, and he shook his head, as if I’d told him an outrageously unbelievable lie.

“What have you been shopping for?”

I started to rummage through my pocketbook, too frantically, I thought. Slow down. Find the potato peeler to show him. He yanked the pocketbook away from me. “A potato peeler,” I said.

“That’s what I was shopping for.”

366 / SUSAN ISAACS

Just as I uttered the words, he pulled out the peeler. “You are from Wilmersdorf,” he said. “What are you doing in this area?”

He pronounced every word precisely, separately, slowly, pro-longing the threat. And oh, did it work! I was so scared, and he was electrified by my fear. He moved in on me, pressing his face against mine, a horrible cheek-to-cheek. Looking sideways, I could see the almost invisible dots on his skin where he’d shaved.

“Well? Why are you in Alexanderplatz?”

“I heard the store here had potato peelers. The kind with the rounded top.”

“What?”

“So you can scoop out the eyes,” I whispered.

“And for that you came all the way from Wilmersdorf?”

“Oh, yes. I’m a cook. Please, my work passport is in there.”

He jerked himself up, away from me, and groped through my pocketbook; he threw my handkerchief on the sidewalk. “I work for Herr Konrad Friedrichs, of the foreign office.”

He pulled out my work passport and scrutinized it as if positive that any minute he’d discover something I could be guilty of. A gust of wind came and blew away my handkerchief. He held the work passport up, so the sun could shine through it. I took a fast glance as he examined my papers. His face was in profile; he had a thick plug of yellow wax in his ear.

Suddenly he shoved the pocketbook back into my hands and slapped my identification on top of it. “All right,” he said. “Get going. And no more loitering.”

“Yes. I won’t. Thank you.”

I walked down the street, clutching all the papers that registered me as a citizen of the Reich—allowing me to work and live—tight against my chest. When I turned the corner I walked faster, but then slowed myself down. Easy. Put your pocketbook in order. Here in Germany, kiddo, neatness counts.

On that last night in the basement cell of Konrad SHINING THROUGH / 367

Friedrichs’s house, I forced my mind to travel, to get back where it could be at ease for a few hours, to go home.

I thought about how my mother, who used her tweezers the way a carpenter used his hammer, had worked on her beauty, but after my father was killed in that fire, before she actually started boozing, she was never able to get the seams of her stockings straight. The first sign she was falling apart. She’d come out of her bedroom and call, How’re my seams, Linda, lamb? and after a couple of times when she’d gotten so upset she’d cried, I learned to say, Straight as an arrow, Mom.

And then my mind drifted into Manhattan, and I thought about having lunch in the conference room of Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley, with Gladys Slade controlling the gossip with the same thoroughness (but more seriousness) that Roosevelt would insist on in running a cabinet meeting. When I thought how the small talk about Mrs. Avenel’s pushiness and Mr. Post’s carrying on with Wilma Gerhardt and Mr. Nugent’s vague resemblance to Ronald Colman had once been the high point of my days, and how lying awake and inventing moments with Mr. Berringer—who in my imagination I dared to call John—had been the crowning glory of my nights, I realized what had become of me.

Well, not what had become of me, because I really didn’t know, but at least that from where I had started to where I had wound up had been one hell of a trip.

And there was no return ticket. That night—and every night I was in Berlin—I had some bad moments. To be honest, bad half hours, bad hours. Lying in my bed, my motor racing, I wasn’t able to concentrate on anything but one thought: I’m
stuck
. Caught. What border could I run to and say: Hey, let me across! I don’t belong here! I’m from Queens! What person could I throw my arms around and cry: Oh, God, I want to go home! Help me!

I made myself get control. I thought about John. It wasn’t easy. Not because it brought me any pain, but all I could conjure up as I lay in that miserable excuse for a bed was an 368 / SUSAN ISAACS

image: his handsome face, his remarkable body. Images. John coming out of the shower. John’s face when he glanced up from editing a brief, or looming over mine during sex. John with me in his arms. John with Nan in his arms.

Hey, I thought, no matter what’s happened, this guy is still your husband. That didn’t help. Trying to feel something for John was like forcing myself to fall in love with air. I couldn’t.

I felt no passion, no anger, no longing, no loss. Right before I finally fell asleep, I thought: The only thing I really feel is curiosity; simple curiosity. I mean, how can you love someone and feel absolutely, explicitly, indubitably nothing?

2 3

I
f he’d lived in the United States, the best a guy like Horst Drescher could have done for himself would probably have been to own a small business—one renting wheelchairs and artificial legs, or manufacturing paper party favors—and been vice-president of the Lions Club; he’d never make president, because most of the members would think anyone who would wear a satin vest was a jerk and unfit for the highest office. He would live in the suburbs, because city life would be too much for his nervous-wreck wife, Hedwig, but since he fancied himself so urbane, he wouldn’t want to be too far away from concert halls, the theater and expensive restaurants.

That’s what he would have been in America. In Nazi Germany, Horst Drescher, at age twenty-seven, was one of the most fortunate men in the foreign office. The army couldn’t go near him; he’d been born blind in one eye, and his feet pointed out so far it looked like he was doing a Donald Duck imitation whenever he walked. So he was fortunate. And powerful. Not because of the work he did, although he was chief of the British Section and worked at least twelve hours a day. And not because of his skills in diplomacy and language: anyone in the foreign service, from janitor to ambassador, could see through his so-called subtlety in two seconds flat. And the two times I overheard him speaking English to someone on the phone, it was so incredibly, stiffly German-accented that he sounded like a kid from Queens in a game of soldiers who got stuck with playing the Nazi.

369

370 / SUSAN ISAACS

But that’s what he was, the Nazi. His fanatical party loyalty was the reason he had risen so high in that huge gray building on Wilhelmstrasse. That, and the fact that for one week Hitler had gone on a rampage, calling for “young men, new blood” in government. He got what he deserved: Horst.

In the same year that
Mein Kampf
was first published, 1925, when Horst Drescher was ten years old, he joined the
Deutsches
Jungvolk
, the junior version of Hitler Youth, and he had been a true-blue believer ever since. He wasn’t loyal for any personal gain. He believed in Hitler and in what he stood for: the Master Race. What kind of ten-year-old boy wants to spend his time glorying in Aryan superiority instead of throwing a ball? According to the OSS report, little Horst Drescher. “He is a passionate believer in Hitler’s racial theories, and apparently believes himself to be an example of all that is noble, manly and cultured.” The report went on to say that Horst also embraced all the other Nazi notions:
Lebensraum
, anti-Semitism,
Führerprin-zip
—everything, the whole ball of
Weltanschauung
.

Well, almost. Adolf the Ethical was a vegetarian. Horst Drescher would eat anything that didn’t get up and walk off his plate—as long as it was washed down with a big glass of pilsener and a little glass of schnapps.

But when I started working for him at his beautiful stone villa in the Dahlem neighborhood, I didn’t know that. All I knew was what the OSS knew, and their information had come from Alfred Eckert, who had most likely dashed off something like “A callow youth who fancies old-fashioned German food, and a lot of it!” to pad out a too-short report. Some pencil-pusher at OSS

naturally put a giant asterisk on that one. “Drescher, Horst: Born 1915 in Magdeburg. *Weakness—German cooking!!!” The OSS

had passed on the word to Konrad Friedrichs. And when in desperation he’d gone to Margarete von Eberstein and, without naming names, described the person whose house I was supposed to slip into—and how impossible the task seemed—Margarete had declared, I can help.

Sure, but on my second night at the Dreschers’, I loused SHINING THROUGH / 371

up the pheasants. Else, the downstairs maid, who did the serving, came charging in from the dining room. “You must hurry!

They’re waiting for the next course!” I looked at her, a little surprised. They must have inhaled the appetizer.

I opened the oven. “Oh, my God!” I had been warming the roasting pan and the vegetables on low heat, but when I’d put in the birds, I’d obviously forgotten to turn up the oven. Else sidled over and we both stared at four barely cooked pheasants; they looked like they had been hanging around a hot kitchen instead of actually roasting.

“What are you going to do?” she squeaked.

“Hide them,” I said. They looked more wounded than dead; red juice was oozing out of the cavity. “And pray.” I grabbed the pot of white sauce I’d planned to use on the carrots and poured it over the pheasants. It covered them like a heavy sheet. Then I decorated the platter with all the greens, lemon slices and capers I could grab, thrust the platter into Else’s hands and said,

“When you walk through that door, smile. And
don’t
be afraid.”

Since she had a brain capacity equal to one of the pheasants’, she did what she was told, unquestioningly, and marched toward the dining room with a wide and empty smile on her face.

As the door swung open, I got a glimpse of Horst’s back, and the profiles of his wife, Hedwig, and his dinner guest, a somewhat older man, with a nose so upturned and flat that it looked like a pig’s snout; the man had been Horst’s beloved
Deutsches
Jungvolk
leader and was now the chief Party functionary in Saxony.