The Secret of Lions (14 page)

She knew Heinrik was dead. She knew Willem
would never know his real father.

41

A black, almost reptilian-looking casket
held the body of Gracy’s beloved. Heinrik’s funeral was a
closed-casket ceremony, which was intended only for close friends
and family. Gracy sat alone in the front aisle next to her parents.
She stared at the casket. The man she loved was in the box.

The funeral was full of people, mostly new
faces. They were people that she’d never even known had cared about
her husband. They included guards, former guards, distant family
members, her parents, friends, the warden, some state officials, a
couple of old war buddies, and even some former prisoners.

The one figure that stood out the most in
Gracy’s mind was a man who stood in the back, far away and almost
out of sight. He stood with a pair of bodyguards. It was a face she
had prayed never to lay eyes on again, but he was there
nevertheless.

The face belonged to Adolf Hitler.

42

Even though Gracy had spent the entire,
harrowing experience staring at that ghastly box, she could not get
Hitler out of her mind. She knew he rested his eyes upon her and
nowhere else. She did not know his true intentions, but she knew
they involved her. And she feared him for it.

After the funeral was over, one of Hitler’s
guards approached Gracy.

“Frau Kessler, may I have a few minutes of
your time?” the guard asked.

Gracy stared beyond the guard for a long
moment at the dark figure that stood in the distance. She knew the
figure was Hitler. It made her gape back into the guard’s eyes.

“Fuck off,” she muttered. She pushed past
him and rejoined the crowd of family members where she felt safe.
She did not look back at him, not for one small instant, for fear
that Hitler would misinterpret her gaze as a sign of interest in
hearing what he had to tell her.

43

A sharp, intense pain in her stomach woke
Gracy abruptly. She rolled out of bed and ran to the bathroom. Her
throat tightened, making it excruciating when she vomited just
before she could reach the toilet. Some got on the floor. A second
batch made it into the sink.

Again she tried to make it to the toilet,
but before she could reach it, she felt a piercing pain in her
abdomen. She grabbed her side and fell. She vomited once more, so
violently that she hit her head on the tile. The impact of the
floor against her forehead caused darkness to overcome her. Within
moments Gracy blacked out.

Gracy came around twenty minutes later. She
sat up unsteadily, trying not to move too much. She had never been
pregnant before, but she imagined any trauma to her body would be
hard on the baby.

Suddenly, a blanket of fiery worry about the
baby engulfed her. She became stricken with concern over the
pregnancy and the life of her baby. She’d lost Heinrik already and
was terrified by the possibility of losing Willem too. She feared
that her state of grief might affect the birth of her son.

Her first instinct was to go to see the
doctor.

When she felt comfortable enough to stand,
she decided it would be best for her to skip breakfast and her bath
and head straight to the clinic. She and Heinrik had a special
doctor who was a friend of her parents. Even though he worked in a
public clinic, he held a good reputation. Dr. Levinson was a
sought-after doctor even by the prominent German families who hated
the Jews.

44

At the doctor’s office, Gracy waited
patiently for the doctor to come into the examining room to talk to
her. She no longer felt the pain in her stomach, and after
vomiting, she felt that whatever it was that had hurt was not
coming back. Her insides were evacuated. She was relieved of that
fact.

The doctor finally entered the room. He was
a short man, wearing a tattered, white coat with visible holes on
the outside of the pockets. Gracy could see his fingertips piercing
though the holes.

“Frau Kessler, how are you?”

“I feel okay now, doctor, but this morning I
felt sick,” Gracy said.

“Did you vomit?”

“Yes, Dr. Levinson. I threw up three or four
times,” she answered him.

“Hmm,” he said. He pulled a stool up to her
and began asking questions. “How long did the pain in your stomach
last? What did you eat?”

After several minutes of questioning my
mother, the doctor started writing notes on a chart attached to a
brown clipboard. As he was writing, he began talking with her. The
conversation was just small talk.

“Gracy, did you ever get that lake
house?”

“Not yet, doctor,” she answered.

“Gracy, have you thought of a name for the
baby?”

“I like Willem,” she said.

“That’s a nice name,” the doctor said.

“Thanks,” she replied.

“Gracy, how is Heinrik? Is he still working
at Landsberg prison?”

Gracy sat silent. Her eyes welled up and
tears began falling out.

“Gracy?” the doctor asked without looking up
from his clipboard.

“He’s dead,” she finally answered.

The doctor stopped writing and looked up at
her. He had forgotten.

“I’m so sorry, Gracy,” he said.

Gracy mumbled something that the doctor
could not make out.

“I didn’t know,” he lied.

She knew he was lying. She felt it.

After a long, awkward moment between them,
the doctor finally returned to writing. He said, “Willem is a fine
name. You are fine, Gracy. There is nothing wrong with the baby.
He’s going to grow into a fine young man.” He stood and began to
lead her out of the examining room. Before they reached the lobby,
he stopped her. “Gracy,” he began saying.

“Yes, doctor,” she answered.

“Willem is a fine name,” he repeated.

Gracy nodded and walked out into the lobby.
She tried to pay the doctor’s bill, but the nurse at the counter
said not to worry about it. She told her to pay next time.

Gracy lowered her head and walked out of the
doctor’s office.

Willem is a fine name,
she thought.
A fine name.

45

Gracy sat out on the apartment’s front
porch. She sat on the steps near a small garden. She worked in it,
grooming the flowers and plants she’d planted last fall. Heinrik
would sit on the porch, rocking in his chair. Sometimes he would
read the paper if they could afford one that week or he would just
read the same old books over and over. He particularly enjoyed
adventure books like
Treasure Island
or
The Count of
Monte Cristo
. Mostly he stared at Gracy, and she never noticed,
but that was what he did.

The sky around the city was gloomy and
overcast. The sun stayed hidden far above her. The rain was coming.
She knew it. She could feel it deep in her bones. Gracy had always
had a sense of premonitions. With Heinrik around, they calmed down
significantly.

She used to joke that his presence was the
ultimate distraction, but now that he was gone, she could sense a
looming storm. She felt empty for the first time in her whole life.
It was the kind of emptiness that makes a person realize that
whenever they were sad before, they truly had no idea what true
sadness was. Gracy knew sadness. She knew it now.

Down the street, from around the corner, a
black car drove up to the front of the apartment. She recognized it
from the funeral. It was Hitler’s car. At the moment, she had been
hearing a lot about him. He came up in conversations at the
grocers, markets, or on the streets. Everyone was talking about him
lately, like he was already a famous, well-spoken politician. She
knew that his power was growing immensely. Eventually, she would
not be able to ignore him. If his popularity continued to rise, he
would end up governing the city of Berlin and possibly the entire
country.

The car stopped. The driver turned off the
engine. He rose out of the cab. He was a lanky man with a goatee.
He was handsome and appealing in a way Gracy normally did not find
attractive. He held a determined expression on his face. The man
walked to the gate, passing into Gracy’s yard.

“Frau Kessler?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, barely glancing up at
him.

“I am Ford Maelstrom. I am Herr Hitler’s
personal driver. I have come with instructions to take you to see
him. Are you willing to come?”

She listened and continued to rake the straw
at the base of the plant in the garden. After he finished talking,
she waited before looking up at him.

Finally, she stopped raking and looked up at
him. “Herr Maelstrom, you tell that man that I will never have an
audience with him,” she said, staring straight at the driver. “Tell
him that Gracy Kessler has no interest in Hitler or those Nazi
goons. I have never, was never, and will never think there is
anything genuine about his sympathies about my late husband. And
tell him that I burned Herr Hitler’s flowers and sympathy
messages.”

The driver looked stunned. He huffed and
turned up his nose. Then he walked back to the car. A moment later,
he drove off and didn’t look back.

46

Every week, usually on Monday or Tuesday,
for the next several weeks, Herr Maelstrom drove by her apartment.
And every week he made eye contact with Gracy. Sometimes he would
get out and approach the house. Typically she would go back through
the front door and slam it or she would talk to him, but never did
she treat him with kindness. She did not want to give him the wrong
impression. She had absolutely no interest in meeting with
Hitler.

Maelstrom disdained returning to Hitler
after Gracy’s rejections. He feared the outcome. Many times Hitler
overreacted and threatened Maelstrom’s job or even his life.
Occasionally he accused Maelstrom of purposefully sabotaging
Gracy’s disposition. Most of the time, however, Hitler seemed to
expect her to reject his advances. He did not feel any guilt for
having her husband murdered. He obsessed over her. The more she
rejected him, the more he obsessed.

Months passed and Gracy’s belly grew. With
the state of the failing economy in Germany, she hastily depleted
her remaining savings. Her parents sent her money as often as they
could, but they were also feeling the depression. Her
brother-in-law, Heinrik’s only remaining relative, told her he
would soon have to stop giving her money. He had his own children
to look after. It was becoming hard enough for him to provide for
them. And eventually, she lost touch with him.

Gracy’s parents continued to support her and
the unborn child, but she knew that they were rationing out their
own money in order to accomplish this. She tried to find work, but
having little experience in anything except music and gardening,
she was finding it difficult to secure employment. Florist shops
were not hiring. In those days, people were not really buying
flowers.

Gracy was in her kitchen when someone
knocked on the front door. She expected Maelstrom. She walked to
the front door, wiping her hands on an old apron. Two figures stood
in the doorway. One was a man from the bank whom she recognized;
the other was some sort of policeman.

He wore civilian clothes, but she recognized
his demeanor. He looked like a policeman. She could tell. He stood
a certain way. His hair was cropped very close to his head and she
saw a bulge in his jacket that looked like a gun. Living with
Heinrik, she had learned to recognize certain things about military
and policemen.

“Yes, can I help you gentlemen?” she
asked.

“Yes, are you Frau Kessler? Heinrik
Kessler’s wife?” the banker asked.

“Yes, that’s me. As you can see gentlemen, I
am very pregnant. So what is this all about?” she asked
impatiently.

“Frau Kessler, can you come out here on the
porch please?” the police officer asked.

Gracy opened the screen door and stepped
onto the porch. “What is this about?” she repeated.

“Frau Kessler, this is a bank statement and
a foreclosure document. It is a document that, upon your inspection
of it, you will notice bears your late husband’s signature,” the
banker said. He was a short man. He had been combing tendrils of
his hair over the bald spot on his head.

He held out the documents so that Gracy
could see that Heinrik’s signature was on them. She tried to reach
out and grab the papers to get a closer look, but he jerked them
away. It seemed the banker was afraid to let go of the
documents.

“You said foreclosure?” she asked.

“Yes, Frau Kessler, your husband had taken
out a significant loan from our bank. This loan has been neglected
for the last six months or so. It seems that several attempts have
been made to contact you about this matter. We have postage
receipts from several dates over the last six months. You have
neglected to respond to any of these claims and so now we are here
to present you with these foreclosure papers.”

Gracy reached out and grabbed the set of
papers from his hands.

“What are these?” she asked.

“The bank is seizing your assets. That means
everything you own is now ours, every stick of furniture, every
bush in your yard, and everything else in this apartment. You can
no longer stay here. We will give you thirty minutes to vacate the
premises.”

“What?” Gracy asked. Her jaw dropped in
shock. She had no idea what to do.

“Better take this chance to gather up your
things, Frau Kessler,” the police officer said.

While Gracy was talking with the banker,
Ford Maelstrom walked up to the gate and entered. Suddenly, Gracy
had a grave suspicion Hitler was behind Heinrik’s loan and the
foreclosure. Why else would Ford Maelstrom show up at that exact
moment?

“Frau Kessler, what is going on?” Herr
Maelstrom asked.

“These men are here to foreclose on my house
and all of my belongings. They said Heinrik had unpaid debts and
that because I never responded to a letter they are going to take
my house,” she said. She began to tear up.