The Second Winter, page 20
When the door swung open across the street, Oskar dipped out of sight. Hermann emerged from the building, and Oskar’s heart pounded. He had waited for this opportunity all day, and now it was actually happening. He watched until the German had disappeared down the sidewalk, then crossed the unlit street. The glow from the windows upstairs fastened a long, smoky shadow to his feet, which darkened as it trailed him over the snow.
When he touched the button to sound the intercom, the line remained dead, and he buzzed again. Finally, the speaker hissed. “Who’s there?” It was barely a whisper.
“It’s me,” Oskar said, fumbling for words. “I was here earlier —”
“I know who you are.”
Oskar listened to the open line, breathing, unable to think of more to say.
Ten seconds passed before the door clicked open. Oskar’s hand was already on the lever. He stepped inside. The stairwell was dark. His shadow slid up the stairs in front of him. When the girl opened the door, the light chased it back down. “Stay there,” she said from the landing, and he stopped. “What do you want?” His face was red from the cold. His lips were chapped and torn. His hair was thick with clumps of ice. “If he comes back, he’ll kill you.”
Oskar didn’t speak. He wiped his nose dry with the back of a numb hand.
“What do you want from me?”
Oskar saw the huge diamond glinting on her finger. The German had given her the ring after all. Perhaps she was happy here. Perhaps he had misunderstood — perhaps nothing had passed between them.
“Why have you come back?” she demanded.
“How old are you?” Oskar asked her.
Polina peered past him, down the stairs. This late in the evening, the building was quiet. Most of the apartments were occupied by businesses. Upstairs, though, an old woman lived with her daughter and a boarder. Polina kept her voice low. “Your age, I think.”
An emotion Oskar didn’t recognize welled in his chest. “I came to help you,” he said.
“What do you mean?” When he took a step toward her, she took a step in retreat. “Stay there.”
“Are you in love with him?”
The girl shook her head.
“Where are you from?”
“From Kraków.”
“In Poland?”
The girl didn’t respond.
Through the dark that separated them, Oskar read her desperation. “Let’s go,” he said.
The girl’s mouth formed the beginning of a nervous smile.
“Now,” Oskar said. “Let’s go now. I’ll take you away from here. You can come with me — home — I can take you home.”
“I can’t leave,” the girl said.
“Why not? Of course you can —”
“He paid for me,” Polina said. “Do you understand? He is my — I belong to him.”
Oskar thought about the money the German had paid him. It meant nothing to him. But was it enough to buy her freedom? And then he remembered the pendant. He pulled the necklace from his pocket.
“What is it?” the girl asked him.
In the shadow of his cupped hand, the jewels scintillated. “We’ll give him this.”
The girl considered the necklace, then made up her mind. “We have to hurry. He only went for a drink.”
Oskar pushed past her, into the apartment. His first impulse was to leave the pendant on the desk, where he had placed the other jewelry that morning.
“No,” the girl said. “On the bed.”
This made sense to Oskar, because this in fact was the nature of the exchange. Crossing the studio, he lay the pendant onto the hard pillow. The girl stood next to him, looking at it with him. The large, pale sapphire captured the rays from the exposed bulbs and cast them back into the room, she thought, like pieces of an empty sky. Then she spit on the bed. The small wad of mucus landed beside the pendant on the pillow.
“My name is Oskar,” Oskar said.
“Mine is Polina.”
“Polina,” Oskar repeated. It was, to him, a beautiful name.
“One more thing,” Polina said. She took a step to the wardrobe, kicked the door with her heel. The mirror dropped in a single sheet, hit the rough-hewn planks, shattered into a thousand sharp pieces. The crash of breaking glass overwhelmed Oskar. A second later, a mosaic of small reflections dazzled him. He reconstructed Polina from among the shards, momentarily hypnotized by the jagged portrait. Then Polina’s shoes splintered the broken glass. She was already leaving.
Oskar took one last look around the barren room, then followed her down the stairs to the street. They left the door open behind them, swinging in the wind on rusty hinges.
An hour later, when Hermann left the bar, his head was light. Fortune had smiled upon him, to be sure, and he had celebrated. A glass of champagne had turned into a vodka tonic and then another. He could still taste the oil of lemon on his tongue. Walking home, he hardly noticed the snow. He was turning over his conversation with his commanding officer. His request for a transfer back to Berlin would be considered favorably — that is what he had been told. In less than a month, he would be able to return with his newfound treasure to Germany. His future would be secure, his daughter’s, too. The electric light flooding from the windows upstairs led him back to the building. When he reached the lobby, the door was latched shut again. He searched for his key, twisted the frozen lock, stepped inside.
He was halfway to the stairs when he realized that the lobby floor was covered in snow. Hermann was so used to it on the street that he almost failed to see it. He stopped, swiveled around. How had snow gotten inside? He squatted down to examine the seal at the base of the door, rubbed his eyes behind his spectacles with a finger and thumb. The buzz from the alcohol was wearing off. When he tried the switch on the wall, the lamp was out. He drew his pistol before climbing into the shadows.
At the top of the staircase, he fumbled with his keys, unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched. On the floor above, a door inside Fru Jensen’s apartment opened and slammed. Hermann jumped, then relaxed. Fru Jensen or her daughter had left the door open downstairs, that was all, and now it had blown closed again in the wind. He slipped his pistol back into its holster, pulled off his gloves. Unable to find the right key, he tapped on the door. When Polina didn’t respond, he tapped a second time, louder. The lights were burning. She was awake, certainly.
He was reaching for his pistol again when a leather sole scraped the tile in the dark behind him. His finger snagged the holster. The gun’s barrel tangled with the flap. And before he could draw his weapon, a man emerged from the haze. A Luger was trained on Hermann’s forehead.
“Don’t move,” the man said.
Hermann relaxed his grip on the butt of his own pistol. The Luger was cocked, aimed to kill. Hermann let his eyes focus on the man behind it. His arm projected toward him at a ninety-degree angle. His limbs were taut beneath his suit. His posture was stiff, tense. Still, there was something cool about him. He wasn’t afraid. And then Hermann noticed the smile on the man’s face, and his blood ran cold. This man is a killer. “Where is Polina?” Hermann asked him. That this was his first question of this assassin came as much of a surprise to Hermann as it did to the man in the fedora.
Franz Jakobsen shook his head. “You can hand me your gun.”
Hermann complied. There was no point in trying to resist. This man wanted money, that was all anyone wanted — and he had money to give him. He had no use for it any longer. After all, he had the jewels.
“Now, open the door.”
Once again, Hermann complied. Where before he had had trouble with the keys, his hands were steady. He turned the lock, opened the door. The broken mirror on the floor gave him a small start. The apartment was empty. “Where is Polina?” he asked again.
“You mean the girl who was here?”
Hermann led the man into the apartment. Their eyes met as the man closed the door behind him. “What did you do to her?”
Franz offered Hermann another smile. “You were in love with her.”
Hermann noticed the use of the past tense, and once again ice ran through his veins. This man will kill me. “At least tell me that you didn’t hurt her.”
Now Franz’s smile extended into his eyes. “She left with the boy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The boy who sold you the jewelry — I followed him here. Now do you understand? Those jewels didn’t belong to him. They don’t belong to you, either. They were stolen from a family of Jews whose passage we had guaranteed as far as Sweden. I’m here to reclaim them — I’m here because he led me here —”
Hermann barely heard the man. “And she left with him,” he said.
Franz responded with a wink. His teeth glistened. “He came back to collect her just as soon as you left.”
Hermann reached for the back of a chair, held himself steady. “I have money,” he said.
Franz shrugged. “I’m not interested in that.”
“I have two hundred reichsmarks here, but I can get more — a lot more —”
“Where is the suitcase?”
Hermann was still grappling with his thoughts. It had been too good to be true, that this boy could drop this jewelry into his lap without consequence. Of course it belonged to someone else. He would lose it now, just as he had already lost Polina.
“The suitcase,” Franz said. “The jewelry. Where is it?” He surveyed the apartment. There weren’t many places where the German could have hidden it. “You can bring it to me, or I can look for it myself when you are dead.”
Hermann felt his will collapse. “I will get it for you.” He waited for the man’s tacit approval, then crossed to the wardrobe. The satchel was sitting inside, tossed casually into a corner. When he pulled it out, the jewelry clinked. He carried the bag to the desk. “It’s all here,” he said. “All of it.”
As Franz examined the satchel’s contents, Hermann sat down on his bed. He began to bury his head in his hands. Then, on the lumpy pillow where Oskar had left it for him, he caught sight of the sharp, crystalline edges of the pendant. Eyeing the assassin, he picked up the necklace. This was the first time he had seen it, and the icy purity of the stones blinded him. Although he recognized how senseless the impulse was, it was suddenly important to him to keep this one piece of jewelry out of this other man’s grasp. Stealthily, he lifted the small leather case where he kept his War Merit Cross from the nightstand, and he slipped the necklace inside.
The rustling noise pulled Franz from his contemplation. When he twisted around, though, Hermann’s elbows were resting on his knees again. “You have what you wanted,” Hermann managed to say. But he couldn’t find the strength to look at the man, even as he approached the bed.
The man’s footsteps rang in Hermann’s ears, louder and louder, then stopped. The building fell completely still. Then the report of the Luger shattered the silence. Hermann heard the gunshot before the bullet reached his temple. A split second before it happened, he knew that the lead would spill his soul against the wall.
Afterward, Franz lay the corpse onto the bed. Hermann Schmidt was light in death, he thought. He had noticed how heavy some dead men become. The first man he shot had been short and insubstantial, but he had become a sack of bricks — he had barely been able to lift him enough to clean out his pockets. This German was as weightless as a bird. A puddle of blood was pooling beneath him on the dusty floorboards. Franz was careful not to let it touch his shoes.
After Franz was gone, the studio remained awash in electric light. Hermann’s blood blackened. On Hermann’s pillow, next to the indentation where the pendant had lain, Polina’s wad of spit calcified into a scab of tiny alabaster crystals.
THE WALL
18.
East Berlin. August 12, 1961.
Not quite a decade before Angela Schmidt would pay a visit to her aunt in East Berlin, Gerhardt Bloch packed the last of his books into a suitcase lying open on the sofa in the small sitting room of the apartment he shared with his wife. At the height of the afternoon on yet another humid day, the heat was stifling. A tall, thin man with long arms and a bony chest, he was dressed in an undershirt that was patchy with sweat, tucked into a pair of lightweight trousers. The air was so dense that it was difficult to breathe. Still, he didn’t want to open a window, not even a crack. Their apartment was on the third floor of a large tenement, and the neighbors’ windows were barely ten feet away. Their only view was of the narrow alley between the buildings — and not a thing happened in the Blochs’ apartment to which their neighbors weren’t privy. It was the same for everyone. He and Martina knew all their neighbors’ secrets as well. The couple across the alley had been acting out the same argument for years now. The husband was convinced that his wife was unfaithful, and she was paying dearly for this imaginary slight. The melodrama was an ordinary one, so it was easy enough to dismiss these people as fools. It was important to remember, though, just how quickly information could find its way to the State Security Service. Gerhardt stopped to assess his work. The suitcase was nearly full. There wasn’t room for anything else. Only his books. His collection of stamps and coins — though he had owned them since he was a child — would have to stay behind.
“Are you sure you need to bring so many?” Martina asked him.
Gerhardt hadn’t heard his wife enter the room. He raised his eyes from the suitcase. The smile that creased his lips was a sad one. He didn’t try to say any more than it expressed. He didn’t even shrug. He simply looked at Martina.
“They have bookstores in Munich,” she said.
Gerhardt returned his attention to the suitcase. He had read each one of these books, over and over, some of them until the spines were starting to disintegrate. He picked one up, flipped through the pages. “ ‘That is no country for old men,’ ” he said, in English.
“If we had an automobile,” Martina said, “we could take everything we will miss.”
“If we had an automobile,” Gerhardt echoed, closing the book.
“That is my point,” Martina said.
Gerhardt shook his head. He returned the volume of poetry to the suitcase. His fingers lingered on the leather cover. “Perhaps you are right — I can simply leave them. Maybe there isn’t anything I need after all.”
“We agreed one bag each,” Martina said. “We can’t carry more. I only wonder if you think it best to take these books. They’re heavy, too —”
“This one,” Gerhardt said, still touching the book’s cover, “I bought on the very same day that I met you — did I ever tell you that?”
“In 1936?”
“September 3, 1936.”
Martina smiled. Her eyes dropped to the floor. “I wouldn’t have guessed that you would remember the date,” she said.
“After I met you — you were with your friend, Frauke, at the café, of course — I walked across town, on my way to the university, and I stopped at the bookstore. I was looking for something specific. In fact, I remember that, too. Fear and Trembling, by Kierkegaard. I ran across this volume, though — it was sitting on the table in front, it had just arrived from England — William Butler Yeats. I had never read him before. I picked the book up, and it fell open to a poem with a title that caught my attention. ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ It was such a beautiful name.”
The room fell silent. Martina’s gaze was still directed at her husband’s feet. She raised her eyes to the suitcase but didn’t manage to lift them higher. “You’re doing this for me,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“It’s the right thing to do,” Gerhardt reassured her.
“We don’t have to go,” Martina said.
“Clothilde and Barend are in Munich,” Gerhardt said. “They’re expecting us tomorrow. Angela, too — I know how much you are looking forward to seeing your brother’s daughter. I know how much Hermann’s death still haunts you.”
“Your life is here.”
“My life is with you, Martina.”
Once again, the room fell silent.
“And the Kierkegaard?” Martina asked at last.
“What?”
“The book you were looking for — Fear and Trembling — did you find it that day?”
Gerhardt tapped the side of the suitcase.
“Well,” Martina said, “after all, it isn’t that far to walk. From here to the Brandenburg Gate. Thirty minutes, not more. And it will be the last time we ever have to take that walk —”
“What about you?” Gerhardt asked her. “Have you already finished packing?”
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
“You’ve made the tough choices — you’ve decided what you want to carry?”
Martina nodded.
“Well then,” Gerhardt said. He closed the lid of the suitcase, fastened the clasps. “Let me get dressed, and then it’s time. No reason to wait any longer.”
“I’ll get my suitcase,” Martina said.
She was on her way into the hall, and Gerhardt was lifting his own suitcase off the sofa, testing its weight, when there was a knock on the door. It wasn’t a soft knock — it was a rap, a staccato burst of five or six hard taps. Martina’s footsteps ceased. Their echo, though, seemed to hang in the air.
“Gerhardt?” she whispered.
Gerhardt set the suitcase back down on the sofa, crossed to the hall, where Martina was standing transfixed, staring at the front door. “Are you expecting someone?” he asked his wife.
“Who could that be?” Martina whispered.
Gerhardt gave his wife’s elbow a caress on his way to the door.
“Let’s not answer it,” Martina said, again in a whisper.
A second time, the rap of knuckles on the solid-core door reverberated through the small space. Gerhardt hesitated a moment longer, then reached for the knob. When he pulled the door open, Martina stopped breathing. A man in an olive uniform took half a step inside.
“Gerhardt Maximilian Bloch?” the policeman said.
“That is me,” Gerhardt said, “yes — what can I do for you?”
