The Officer and the Spy, page 14
It had been too uncomfortable, meeting Brigit on the quayside, recognizing Otto’s eyes in her wan, beautiful face, feeling the warmth of her smile, only for her to turn it on Lotte, laugh at some joke they shared, and adjust her hat maternally.
It was too uncomfortable, walking around the site with Henri, acting like she knew nothing about him, wondering if it was right or wrong that she thought he seemed like quite a nice man, picturing the arguments Otto had told her the two of them had had.
Too hard, noticing the near-constant attention Henri paid to Lotte – helping her when she stumbled in her heels, chatting with her in German, since she alone didn’t speak English – swallowing the inescapable truth that it was she, not Eleni, who was part of their family.
And too painful – no matter Marianne and Krista’s reassurances – to witness Lotte’s unabashed devotion to Otto: how closely she shadowed him, hanging on his every word as he translated Eleni’s English into German for her, laughing, at what Eleni truly couldn’t think, because she wasn’t aware she said anything amusing.
‘I must keep missing the joke too,’ Krista had muttered, wiping her neck. ‘Nothing about this is funny to me.’
She’d stayed with Lotte just now, when Lotte had paused to rest, perching prettily on what had possibly once been a pillar, beneath the scant shadow of a cypress tree. Marianne had remained with them as well, dropping exhaustedly onto the hard-baked ground, winding her plait around her head, her tanned face as flushed as Eleni’s felt. Lotte had spoken to Otto, that wheedling tone to her voice that Eleni remembered from the sea. Otto. Otto Linder. It had been obvious she’d been angling for him to stay too.
Not wanting to see him do that, Eleni had left, following her papou, Henri and Spiros, who’d already set off with Theo, further down the hillside.
She’d hoped Otto would follow her, of course.
She’d wanted to trust that he’d do that.
It had still been a relief though when she’d heard his footsteps behind her; his voice.
Come with me.
They’d slipped inside a crumbling set of walls, barely higher than his head. Not very private, but private enough. She had her back to the stone, her hand to his beating chest, and, as she tried to speak, to say what she didn’t know, she realized she was on the edge of tears.
He moved closer, saying nothing either, his green eyes intent, his sculpted features cut by the wall’s shadows, the sun’s quivering light. Tightening her fingers around his collar, she pulled him to her, kissing him, wrapping herself around him as he kissed her back. In the heat, the cacophony of the cicadas, they kissed harder, with an urgency new to her; all the pent-up strain of the past hours released at once. She felt his lips on her neck, his hands scooping under her thighs, lifting her up, making her forget where they were…
‘Otto. Otto, wo bist du?’
They both went still at her approaching voice.
But neither of them let the other go.
They kissed again, and he dropped his forehead against hers, stroking her thighs with his thumbs.
She kissed him back, closing her eyes, the happiest she’d been all day, yet closer to tears than ever.
It was hearing Lotte. Finally meeting his family, being confronted by what an outsider she was. It had hit her.
Really hit her.
The two of them came from separate homes, separate worlds. It was 2 August, and in less than two weeks, he’d fly back to his world.
Back to Germany.
There was no magic to be done. No alchemy.
This summer of theirs, like every summer before it, really was going to end, and she couldn’t bear it.
Lotte didn’t discover them.
No one did.
But for the rest of that day, their secrecy, which had become hard enough to carry, ceased feeling like a choice to Eleni, and instead became a burden that hurt.
It hurt as they left their hiding place, and wordlessly went their separate ways.
It hurt over lunch at the Villa Ariadne, where there were cool drinks, and there was plenty of shade, and place cards on the veranda table, too, with their names side-by-side.
‘I’ve been trying to recall where I’ve seen you before,’ Yorgos, opposite, said to Otto, in English, as they took their seats. ‘It was at the café, I think. I saw you there with Eleni, weeks ago… ’
‘Hardly with me, Papou,’ said Eleni quickly, mind moving to that June evening; Dimitri’s music. My heart beats so that I can barely speak. ‘We did meet though.’ She forced herself to turn, look at Otto. ‘Remember?’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking right back at her. ‘I remember.’
It hurt on the boat journey back to Chania, through the abiding late-afternoon heat, when he sat beside her again, on the caique’s salt-crusted floor, because Krista suggested cards, they needed to form a circle, and Lotte didn’t want to ruin her dress, getting off the bench.
It hurt at the harbour, as they all said their farewells, and he turned from her, following his family, following Lotte, away.
‘Kalinichta,’ he called, over his shoulder, with a glance that briefly closed the distance between them, and hurt even more.
She didn’t trust herself to say, kalinichta, back.
If she hadn’t been with her papou, Spiros and Maria, she’d have run to the café, found Dimitri or Socrates, and sobbed into either one of their shoulders. She wouldn’t have been too proud, and they’d have listened to her, poured her a coffee, given her a hug; told her to pull herself together. She could have done with that…
It was lonely, being this sad.
But, since she was with her papou, Spiros and Maria, and since they were all keen to head home themselves, she kissed Maria and Spiros goodbye, thanked Spiros for the day, and, taking Yorgos’s proffered arm, walked with him, back to where they’d left the motor.
‘You’re quiet,’ he said, patting her hand. ‘Tired?’
‘Exhausted,’ she replied, and, in her upset, felt more tempted than ever to go on, finally tell him everything.
The silence between them continued, and she could hardly think for the noise of her unuttered truths, crowding her mind.
It would be such a relief to let them go, she knew.
All she had to do was open her mouth, start talking…
She said nothing.
It wasn’t even his rules that she feared anymore. Not now she’d pretended to him as she had, all day long. Lied to his face at lunch.
No, it was something much worse.
It was the idea of his disappointment.
Even in spite of her worry, she was so relieved when she saw Otto the next morning, waiting at his gate to walk her to the bus. She’d half-feared, after the strain of the day before – her failure to bid him goodnight – that he wouldn’t be. Or that if he was, it would be different between them. But the instant they locked eyes, in her happiness she smiled, instinctively, and so did he.
‘There was only one good thing about yesterday,’ he said, coming towards her.
‘There was a good thing?’ she said.
‘There was.’
‘And where was I at the time?’
‘With me,’ he said. ‘Doing this.’ He kissed her. ‘It was a good thing.’
‘Yes,’ she said, kissing him back, wishing, very much suddenly, that she didn’t have to go to work, ‘I suppose it was.’
‘Can you get away this afternoon?’
‘I can’t.’ Yorgos, who’d commented again on her quietness at breakfast, had declared he’d collect her from the café for the siesta, drive her to back to the surgery for a proper lunch, a proper rest. She could kick herself now for not having been more buoyant. ‘Hopefully tomorrow.’
But that wasn’t possible either. The café was busier than ever in the high summer sunshine, and Socrates couldn’t take her shift because, now that it was August, he was busy too, at his new school, meeting his new headmaster, just come from Neapolis, getting ready for September and all his new pupils.
Ioannis Metaxas was also rather busy that day, in Athens, arresting all his opposition, establishing his dictatorship with the support of the much-exiled royal family (assuredly counting on him to protect them from being exiled again), sending the island into uproar, and an incandescent Yorgos to the café again, wanting to make sure Eleni had heard the news.
She could hardly have failed to.
All along the harbour, radios crackled from shopfronts; the hum of anger was everywhere. No one was surprised by Metaxas’s move – Greece, fractured, like so much of Europe, by decades of poverty and inequality, had been driven to extremes on left and right, and Metaxas, full of promises for reform, had been building his strength on the right ever since the King had returned from his most recent exile the year before, making him first Minister of Army affairs, then Premier – but it was nonetheless shocking.
Eleni felt it.
She watched Yorgos slap his hand on the café’s bar, making Dimitri’s ashtray jump, and empathised with his rage.
She listened to him rant about what a criminal Metaxas was, Uncle Vassili nothing but a fool for supporting him, and cared.
But it didn’t take over for her. Not like it did for him, and Dimitri, and so many others (save Uncle Vassili) on the deeply anti-royalist island. She knew it should have, but she also knew that it was Tuesday, 4 August, and she and Otto had just eleven days left.
To both of their despair, they didn’t get an afternoon to themselves for the rest of that week. Either Socrates was busy again, or he wasn’t, but Eleni was, with Yorgos, who on Wednesday did the unthinkable and reorganised his appointments so that the two of them could drive into the mountains, and he could rail at Uncle Vassili to his face.
‘Much difference it will make,’ said Sofia, when they got there. ‘He says this is a new beginning, that the country will be saved… ’
‘Saved?’ said Yorgos, striding inside. ‘Saved?’
‘Saved,’ said Sofia, and rolled her eyes at Eleni. ‘Come, little doll—’ she took her by the arm ‘—we can agree to eat at least. I’ve made yemista.’
The next two days, it was Otto’s turn to be caught up; they were Lotte’s last on the island – she was leaving that Saturday, back to Berlin’s Olympics – and Henri had organised for the six of them to go on another excursion, stay overnight at a pension in Elounda. They didn’t return to the villa until late Friday, for Lotte’s farewell meal.
Eleni had to ride to the café by herself, both of those mornings.
Walk home from the bus stop alone.
It was horribly quiet.
It came to her, as she passed Nikos’s deserted gate on Friday night, that she was getting a taste of what it was going to be like once they’d all left.
It wasn’t a nice realization.
Worse, was picturing Otto inside the villa, with Lotte, smiling at her, talking to her; being nice.
She tried to stop doing it, but it was impossible.
When, the next morning, Yorgos drove her to the café for her short Saturday shift, she managed to keep up her side of the conversation – agreeing that snapper would indeed be nice for their dinner; thanking him for his offer to return to the café later and collect her – but in her head was imagining Otto at the air strip, bidding Lotte goodbye, because it was entirely impossible not to do that either.
She saw what could only be Lotte’s plane leave, at just after one.
She was clearing a table of congealed coffee cups when she heard the roar of its engines and stood straighter, raising her hand to her brow, damp in the day’s pounding heat, following its arc upwards. She squinted, watching it become smaller and smaller, and, as it did, felt such an easing within her: of a pressure she’d hardly acknowledged was there.
Lotte was gone.
No longer here.
It took her aback, how relieved she was.
She hadn’t absorbed, until that moment, just how much her presence on the island had begun to prey on her.
How miserable she’d become, ever since Knossos, knowing that whenever Otto had left at her side, it had been because he’d had to be at hers.
At Henri’s insistence, they’d all gone to the airstrip to bid Lotte goodbye, bar Marianne, who’d stayed behind at the villa, safe from the notice of the SS henchman Lotte’s father had despatched to collect her.
‘It’s fine,’ Marianne had insisted, as they’d left her in the driveway.
It hadn’t been.
They’d all felt it, even Lotte, who – dressed immaculately for her journey home, in a suit, gloves and hat, a scarf with a diamond Swastika pinned to it – had apologised to her, before getting into Nikos’s motor.
She’d shared a room with her and Krista, back in the hot, tiny pension Henri had just subjected them to in Elounda. (‘Poor Papa,’ Brigit had said, ‘he doesn’t have much luck with hotel arrangements.’) Otto’s had been adjacent. He’d heard the girls through the wall, talking. He hadn’t paused to consider what they might be saying; he hadn’t really cared, and besides, he’d been too immersed in making the last adjustments to his house. But it had occurred to him, as he’d measured Eleni’s swimming pool (I won’t have it any way but with you), that he could have been back in Grunewald, listening to the three of them chat there. They’d sounded like the friends they’d used to be.
There’d been no sign of that ease though, in Lotte’s stilted farewell to Marianne. Her awkward embrace.
‘I’ll never tell anyone you were here,’ she’d said, doubtless meaning well, certainly making Marianne feel worse.
Otto had seen the effort behind Marianne’s smile.
‘The day will improve,’ he’d told her, ruffling her hair, just as he’d been doing for the past eighteen years, ‘I promise.’
‘It’s fine,’ she’d repeated. ‘I’m going to sit out on the veranda, play my cello.’
‘Well, don’t do that,’ he’d said, recalling how it had ended the last time she’d played so upset. ‘Seriously… ’
She’d laughed at that, at least.
She’d still looked shamefully abandoned though, standing alone in the sunshine as they’d all driven away, her plait on her shoulder, hand raised in a wave.
‘I really am sorry,’ Lotte had repeated, in the motor.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Brigit had told her.
‘It is a little bit,’ Krista had whispered to Otto.
He’d been inclined to agree.
There’d unquestionably have been less need for their furtiveness had Lotte only been stronger; the kind to insist to her father that she’d wanted Marianne there with them.
The kind to stand up for her friend.
But that was all old news. Much as Otto had blamed Lotte for their ridiculous situation, he’d blamed himself more for going along with it.
And, as they’d drawn closer to the airstrip, he’d found himself feeling almost sorry for Lotte too. She’d been so silent throughout the drive, staring through the window, her pale cheeks tense, one hand to her throat, covering – whether by accident or design – her diamond pin.
‘I don’t think she wants to go,’ Krista had said to Otto, in another whisper, as they’d piled out onto the runway.
‘You don’t think?’ he’d said.
The plane had been waiting, its propellors stilled.
Lotte’s father’s envoy, smoking beside it, had clicked his heels, heil-d, then carried Lotte’s several pieces of luggage into the hold.
With a tight smile, Lotte had hugged Henri and Brigit goodbye. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said, ‘thank you so very much.’ She’d hugged Krista as well. ‘I’ve had the best summer of my life.’
She’d come to Otto, stalled.
Realizing what she’d wanted, pitying her more, he’d nonetheless only held out his hand.
‘Thank you for all our card games,’ he’d said.
She’d taken his hand, delicately, but said nothing.
The stormtrooper had called for her to come, and she’d darted him a wary look, like a cornered animal, and scuttled off in her heels to climb aboard the plane.
Uncomfortable as it had been, watching her go, the second the plane had lifted off, it had felt as though the warm, thyme-rich air had filled with oxygen.
Otto had expelled a very long breath.
Krista, beside him, had smiled.
‘The best summer of her life,’ Henri had said, as they’d driven home. ‘She had the best summer of her life.’
Even Brigit had seemed more relaxed, humming, holding Henri’s hand.
Otto and Krista had left them now at the villa, sitting on the terrace in the sunshine. Pausing only to collect Marianne, they’d got straight back into the motor, and driven, quickly, to town, the busy harbour.
The day will improve.
Already, it had.
The girls were sitting outside in the thick of the café’s packed tables. Otto had introduced them to Socrates – not at school, but making the most of his Saturday freedom to be here, with Dimitri, ready to wait tables until nightfall for no wage at all (Do you think that it might be… well… possible… that he and Dimitri are… well, a bit… more… than friends?) – and, leaving them to give their orders to Dimitri, had come into the small bar, where Dimitri had told him, in his broken English, Eleni was making orange juice.
Her least favourite job.
He paused in the doorway. She had her back to him, her hair gathered up in a roll, with a pencil stuck through it. She wore her blue dress; the same one she’d been in at Knossos. All the way up her back were tiny, pearl buttons. Above the faded material, her skin was dark; he saw the perfect curve of her neck, a single escaped curl clinging damply to her skin.
The gramophone was playing.
‘Cheek to Cheek’ again.
It was loud. She hadn’t realized he was there. He smiled, seeing the absent way she raised a segment of orange to her mouth, sucking on it.
He hadn’t been with her since Wednesday morning.
Just three days, and it felt too much.
Casting a cursory glance at the oblivious crowds outside, he went to her, wrapping his arms around her waist, feeling her start, then relax, and lean back against him as he kissed the side of her neck.
