Shining Through (50 page)

“How are we doing in England?” the man was asking Horst.

“Very well, Bruno,” Horst replied.

“But they are bombing us more and more.”

“Desperation, Bruno.” And the door swung shut.

I got busy, trying not to think about how Horst would react to the pheasant disaster. I spooned about a cup of butter over the carrots. Then I did the same with the potatoes and, as an afterthought, tossed in some dried dill that hung from the ceiling, which Else said had come from France. By the 372 / SUSAN ISAACS

time the Germans get through, I decided, the only thing that’ll be left in France will be the French.

Else came back for the vegetables. Her fair-skinned face was all flushed with pleasure. Good old Bruno had probably pinched her behind. I asked her, “What kind of a mood does Herr Drescher seem to be in?”

“He wanted more bread.” Brilliant. Some master race. She toddled out with the vegetables.

No screams of dismay had arisen over the gloppy, white-coated revolting mess I’d sent out on a silver platter. I calmed myself by saying that even if the meal was the worst thing in Horst Drescher’s life, he wouldn’t fire me. His former chef had been hit by a car on his way to the butcher shop and had two broken legs. And I had come so highly recommended…by Konrad Friedrichs, of all people.

Originally, the OSS had hoped Herr Friedrichs could find someone else willing to sing the praises of my cooking, but, already frightened, he was firm: I will
not
enlist anyone else into this foolhardy operation!

Konrad Friedrichs’s office was on the same floor as Horst’s, and so, on a Monday, he’d said, Well, on Friday I am off to Lisbon for two weeks. Then on Thursday, having spent most of the past few days listening to foreign office gossip, he called Horst and said, I hear your chef has met with an accident. Most unfortunate…but perhaps fortuitous. I have a cook—nice, quiet Berlin woman, a widow—and I’ve been wondering what to do with her. I travel too much. Don’t really need her. She’s quite capable. If you’re interested…

I arrived at the Dreschers’ villa on Saturday morning. It was a graceful stone house, set behind an ornate iron fence, on a cobblestone street. They had lived there for nearly a year; before that, it had belonged to a Jewish family who had owned a department store. They had “emigrated,” which meant they’d been rounded up and sent somewhere east. Probably Poland or Czechoslovakia. No one talked about it. Their house, from attic to basement, including the beds,

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clothespins, sterling silver, couches and extra light bulbs, now belonged to the Dreschers.

According to the OSS report, Horst loved what had become his. Alfred was quoted: “He will pass through a room and stroke the wood of his breakfront. He will discuss the value of his antique Meissen porcelain.” And I could just see him lifting a sugar bowl up to the light, peering at it with his one good eye, a small smile crossing his bland face. Horst looked even younger than his twenty-seven years. His face was still blotchy—although in the morning, the pimples were beige with dabs of Hedwig’s heavy foundation makeup. He was round-shouldered, and had a small, almost girlish build—except for his bloated, satin-vested belly. He was not the sort who got his Aryan kicks hiking in the Schwarzwald.

But if he was young, he had the tastes of an old man: beer, politics, food, culture. Not women. The report said: “He seems immune to the charms of women other than his wife…and our sources indicate he may be immune to hers as well. The couple have been married for five years and have no children.”

His main love was his work. Too bad for Germany. According to the briefing Konrad Friedrichs gave me just before I left, Horst was of almost no use in the foreign office because he had no ability to analyze intelligence or plan strategy. But he knew every single minuscule fact there was to know about his area, Great Britain. No report, magazine clipping, aerial photograph or coded message escaped his eye.

The problem was, once he absorbed all this data, he had no idea what to do with it. Sure, if you asked him the square footage of Windsor Castle he could tell you, and he knew the name, address and telephone number of every German agent in England, Scotland and Wales. He could choke you on facts; he just couldn’t think.

Still, all this information took time to digest, but so did dinner.

Horst took great pleasure in returning to his graceful 374 / SUSAN ISAACS

house, eating an elaborate meal and then going into his study to read over his reports. On the nights when he went to the opera or the ballet or the theater, where he sat in a box reserved for the highest officials, he would return and pore over his papers until two in the morning.

These nights of the lively arts were the best nights for snooping. That’s what my friend Alfred had related to the OSS. Alfred, designer for the Nazi elite, had always managed to drop in to help his client Hedwig get ready—a very intricate process. Horst would come home, put his papers in his study, lock the room, have a lighter-than-usual supper—alone, because Hedwig and Alfred were probably doing up her corset—then rush upstairs and change into his tuxedo. He’d come down later, wait and pace, until, finally, Alfred would escort an overwrought Hedwig downstairs. She’d plead a headache, a terrible period, a conges-ted chest. Horst would look to Alfred for help. Alfred would reassure her: “My dear, look at you! I’ve made you beautiful.

You will
dazzle
them! Go, now. Go.” The first few times, he’d picked up his case and left with the Dreschers. But then Horst, the gracious host, the man who knew that in Alfred he had found someone who could truly appreciate all his fine objects, said,

“Please, stay. Have a bite to eat. And drink, if you like. I have different glasses for red and white wine. No need to rush.”

Horst was deeply grateful for the help Alfred was giving him.

He really needed help. Hedwig was definitely not an asset to his career—although that had been why he’d married her. Her father had been with Hitler since the early days in Munich, and although he was too old to hold a permanent position in government, he was a trusted—and therefore powerful—friend. But he died six months after the wedding, sticking Horst with a woman no other man, even the most politically ambitious, had been willing to take. Hedwig Drescher was lumpy, with hair so thin you could see her scalp, and tree-trunk legs. She was twelve years older than her husband.

She tried to disguise the age difference with heavy, mask-SHINING THROUGH / 375

like makeup and bright-colored dresses, but she knew the attempt was a lost cause. She was the clumsy, chunky daughter of a dumb, jovial Munich policeman. She had nothing to recommend her, not even her father’s joviality; she just had his dumbness.

No one wanted her around, least of all her husband, and yet as a proper wife she had to accompany him on his social and cultural outings.

But at least Alfred, with his charming patter and inspirational speeches, had been able to lift her out of her near-constant state of nervous tension and get her out with her husband. The OSS

report had quoted Alfred: “She gets hysterical because she wants to please him and can’t, and so she makes herself ill. She loves him, poor cow.”

Else rushed back into the kitchen, breathless. “The master says, ‘My compliments to the new cook. A fine partridge.’”

Partridge? I thought. It’s pheasant. But then I knew that at least I was safe in the kitchen.

The poor cow seemed to have her period three weeks out of the month. That’s what Dagmar, the chambermaid, told me.

“All the time cramps. But the cramps, I think they are in the head, not in the…” She used some word I’d never heard of, but I nodded my understanding.

The assassination of Alfred Eckert was almost as much a disaster for Horst as it had been for the OSS. Now there wasn’t anyone who could rally Hedwig for a night out with the Nazis and in the next few weeks, past Christmas and into the new year, 1943, I could see his pasty face getting crimson every time he came home from work, passed the parlor and saw Hedwig curled up on a chaise, squeezing a hot-water bottle against her stomach.

Not that I saw too much. I shopped in the mornings, chopped and mixed all afternoon, and cooked into the night. After that, I climbed the back stairs to my room, a cubicle not much bigger than what I’d had at Konrad Friedrichs’s. (Although at least the former owners had furnished it cheerfully: a bed with an old headboard that had a bouquet of roses painted on it, a wide strip of what—probably a hun-376 / SUSAN ISAACS

dred years before—had been a nice flowered rug, and a wood chest.)

I kept away from the Dreschers as much as possible. Once, Horst barged into the kitchen. He was giving his guest, von Ribbentrop’s personal assistant, the grand tour of the house. I was juicing a lemon and stared at Horst, and then at the guest, a man so bucktoothed it looked as if he was eating his own lip.

“Carry on, cook,” Horst said, with a grand wave of his hand.

The two of them inspected the stove and the icebox as if they knew what they were looking at. As they swept out, Horst called:

“And don’t forget! More of those potato croquettes!”

Other than that, I managed to avoid anything more than a chance “Good evening, sir” meeting in a hallway. But I couldn’t stay away from Hedwig, because she was always around, clutching hot water bottles or ice packs, reclining in a series of robes that I bet were Alfred-designed: long, belt-less, all in shades of blue—aquamarine, sapphire, royal blue—with V necks, created to hide her formlessness and to bring out her small but decidedly blue eyes.

Her suffering room, the parlor, was right opposite Horst’s study. Even if he went out at night and I was positive Else and Dagmar were asleep, I couldn’t try to jimmy the lock when she was lying on the chaise—giving off occasional moans—with a full view of the study door.

How long, I worried, could I visit Rolf and stick messages into fishes’ mouths saying, Sorry. Can’t get into study. Wife always lying in parlor opposite. Will try again.

I got embarrassed thinking about what Norman Weekes must be saying, as he and his Harvard crew rolled their eyes in hopelessness and honked. Well, what
can
one expect when one recruits such a relentless plebian. But I got genuinely upset at the thought of Edward. On one hand, I knew my sneaking past him, collaborating with his adversary the minute he left the country, going against everything we both knew he believed in, would make him hate me. On the other hand, I still hoped for his admiration. For some reason, I wanted him to think—even if it was way in the back of his

SHINING THROUGH / 377

mind—that Linda was doing a decent job. She’d even picked up a few tricks from him, the champion spy.

So one night when Hedwig was sprawled out on the chaise in a turquoise robe and impenetrable makeup, having missed a Wagnerian opera because she wept and said she had the flu, I stood at the open parlor door and said, “Madam, it would please me if you would allow me to make you some tea with honey. It would help your throat.”

“
No
. I don’t like tea.” Nasty. Pouty. Unable to get her mouth to form a “thank you.” And she had an awful whine. She was really worse than a cow. I had increased admiration for Alfred, that he hadn’t lost control and plunged his pinking shears into her heart.

“Milk with honey, then?” I suggested. She hesitated. “And perhaps a biscuit?”

“I’ll try,” she sighed.

Two minutes later, I came rushing back with a tray. “Madam, if I may suggest…”

“What?”

“It might help your chest if I put a bit of brandy in the milk.”

If I’d taken even an eyedropperful of his beloved schnapps, Horst would have known in a minute. But there was a dust-covered case of brandy in the basement, and my guess was he’d forgotten it was there. “Just a touch.”

“Whatever,” she murmured.

“Would you like to have it down here?” And then I tossed off what I hoped sounded like a casual suggestion. “Or up in your room?”

“Well…” she said, gazing out of the room, probably overwhelmed by the thought of the stairs.

“I could help you upstairs, Madam, and then come down and reheat the milk to the proper temperature.”

She held out her hand for me to help her, like Greta Garbo dying in
Camille
.

Twenty minutes later, Hedwig had enough brandy in her to make her sleep until the following afternoon. And I went down and knelt before the locked study door.

378 / SUSAN ISAACS

Horst guarded his key to the study as if it would open up the gates to heaven. Still, I solved the locked-door problem easily enough, even though jiggling the handle, a hairpin and a larding needle didn’t work. I figured there
had
to be an extra key. In any well-run house, the wife isn’t going to let the husband walk off with the only key in his pocket and not be able to let the maid get into his study to wax and dust and vacuum. I leaned against the locked door and asked myself, Where would a good housewife, where would my Grandma Olga, put the extra key?

It wasn’t in the silver chest, my first choice, and it wasn’t underneath the record player in the parlor. But finally I found it upstairs in the linen closet, under a pile of heavy damask tablecloths. Big ones, for when the table was opened to seat twenty.

For their holidays. I touched the tablecloths; they were so rich.

And I couldn’t help thinking how little in common that nameless family of Jews had with my family of Jews. It was like comparing apples and oranges…or me and—I almost laughed thinking about it—somebody like Edward Leland. I closed the closet door slowly, and I was easing my way down the hall—a weird, ice-skating motion they taught us in Training School, which was less apt to make a board squeak than tiptoeing—I thought about apples and oranges. Both fruit. So maybe Edward Leland and I…the tablecloth family and my family…In a world of barbarians, the light of simple human decency is so overwhelming, so blinding, that you no longer see things like old silver and Yale and fancy accents.

I stopped thinking and went down the stairs. They taught us stairs too: Sit on the top step, brace yourself with your hands and then gently, slowly, lower your backside. If someone catches you, the instructor had said, grunt with pain and hold on to your ankle and accept any offer of help. Don’t forget to limp.