The Officer and the Spy, page 27
‘What?’ His brow creased. ‘No, Eleni. No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
No.
Relief washed through her.
She shouldn’t be relieved.
She shouldn’t…
‘How could you have thought that?’ he asked.
‘I assumed,’ she said, ‘when she wrote to me… ’
‘I told her she should. That you’d want to help.’
‘I did,’ she said, numbly.
‘And Esther’s really fine…?’
‘She is.’ Hector kept her assured of that. He, still incandescent at her going rogue, as he put it, nonetheless always included news of Esther in the communications he sent. Eleni could only guess at the story he’d spun Helen about her own protracted absence. ‘I didn’t imagine I’d be gone this long. But she’s living on a farm, with Helen Finch, my old—’
‘Landlady. I haven’t forgotten.’
‘No,’ said Eleni, still reeling. ‘She has a puppy, friends to play with. I left her happy.’
‘Happy,’ he echoed, and, briefly, smiled.
That smile.
Oh God, she thought. Oh God…
Leave, she told herself.
Turn around and leave.
It would be such a betrayal, to so many people – the women at her work, Mr Skoulas, Pendlebury, the kapitans. Socrates, Dimitri, Little Vassili; the list was endless – if she didn’t.
‘Otto,’ she began.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, Eleni. Go.’
‘I don’t want to.’ Again, the words were out before she could stop them. ‘I don’t… ’
He said nothing.
He wasn’t going to ask her to stay.
He, drowning in his shame, would never do that.
Go.
Cheeks working, seeing little else for it, but unable any more to leave him hated, not like she had before, she set her basket down, then crossed the rubble to him, intent, however much it hurt, on giving him a final kiss farewell.
She stood before him.
He looked up at her.
His face, in the darkness, was achingly familiar: those cheekbones; that dent in his nose from when he’d been a child, sledging with his sister, who’d lost her mother too.
Instinctively, she touched her fingertip to it, then moved her hand to his head, tracing her palm over his short hair, around the base of his neck.
Still, he kept his eyes locked on hers.
Tears by now overflowing, she leant down, touching her lips to his forehead.
She made herself say it. ‘Goodbye, Otto.’
But the words rang hollow to her own ears.
It wasn’t goodbye.
It was already too late for that.
It had been too late, she realized, from the moment he’d touched her arm.
Perhaps he knew it too.
Or maybe he was asking her to stay after all.
Either way, he placed his hands to her waist, pulling her to him, and then they were kissing, properly kissing, as hungrily as they had in those ruins in Knossos, clinging to one another in the bombed-out ruin his Luftwaffe had made of someone’s home, he in his Nazi uniform, her in her Cretan dress, the moon beaming down on them, and Venus shining coldly above.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Why are you here?’ he asked her, much later that night. ‘Why are you still here?’
‘Because I need to be,’ she said.
‘You want to die, Eleni? Is that it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Not with you.’
‘Don’t ever want it,’ she told him. ‘You mustn’t.’
They talked about a lot of things that night.
Not at first. Not hidden in the rubble, where a kiss would never have been enough. Giving herself over to the inevitability of it, no longer fighting, because she didn’t want to, she pulled him to his feet, and he, not fighting either, gathered her up, backing her further into the building’s shell, the deep darkness of its stairwell, where, with his lips on her throat, her hands at his belt, he pushed her against the wall, and neither of them said a word – not of stopping, nor of the risk they were running, nor of anything – but were only silent, and desperate, and reckless, and stupid, and not alone.
Not alone at all.
‘I think you’d go to prison for that,’ Eleni said, when it was over, and he leant against her, his head sunk in the nook of her neck.
‘I think I would,’ he said, speaking for the first time in Greek, making her, for the first time, laugh.
It felt wrong.
Even after what they’d done, laughter felt too much.
She swallowed it.
‘No,’ he said, in English again, moving his head so that he was looking at her, ‘please don’t.’
‘I have to,’ she said.
Only she didn’t.
It shocked her how quickly she stopped that night.
He couldn’t stay with her for all of it. He was billeted, along with three other officers, at a house close to his barracks in Souda. (‘What’s happened to its owners?’ said Eleni. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to know,’ she corrected. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘You’re very wrong about that…’); he needed to return to Souda at a reasonable hour otherwise the others in his billet, and a man called Fischer particularly, would start asking questions.
‘You don’t like Fischer?’ she guessed.
‘I despise him,’ he said, a hardness edging his tone that she’d never heard before. ‘He’s been looking, all year, for an opportunity to get me demoted again. I’m not going to hand it to him. Or risk him finding out about you… ’
They had just shy of three hours together.
They spent them in her flat.
They didn’t return to it together. That would have been too foolish, even on a street as empty and disinterested as hers. She, key in hand, went the front way, and gave him directions around the back, through the entrance to the yard.
‘You need to look for a crooked gate, with blue paint… ’
‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll find it.’
He did, slipping through that blue gate just as she was, very quietly, easing open her back door.
‘Must we always be hiding on this island?’ he said, as she tugged him inside.
‘I think we must,’ she said.
He looked around, eyes raking the darkness, taking in her simple living room, with its high, shuttered windows, woven rugs, and old-fashioned furniture, all provided by her landlord: the second of Pendlebury’s allies, after Mr Skoulas, whom she’d approached on her return to Chania, asking for his support.
‘It won’t be so dangerous,’ she’d insisted, when he’d protested at her plan to stay, ‘or certainly no worse than it will be anywhere else I might get sent. Not if you help me. You can do that here…’
He more than had, and not only by giving her this flat. Over the winter, sometimes he’d come by with boxes of black-market food, as heavy as any her papou had packaged up.
‘This is quite a hideaway,’ Otto said.
‘It serves the purpose,’ she agreed.
He turned his attention back to her. ‘I have… endless questions.’
‘So do I.’
Yet still, they didn’t ask them. They were together, somehow they were together, in the midst of so much that was hideous, and it felt too raw, too tenuous for Eleni to do anything other than step towards him, even as he reached for her, the two of them kissing again, with no less intensity than they had in the rubble, just more time. She pulled him with her, into her bedroom, with its wrought-iron bed, tugging at the stiff buttons of his uniform, needing him to not be wearing it. He helped her undo them, his hands brushing hers as he wrenched his jacket free, needing, she no longer doubted, not to be wearing it either.
Then he moved away from her, just slightly, running his hands around her face, to the nape of her neck, loosening the knot of her headscarf so that it fluttered to the floor, and her hair, which had grown much longer than it had used to be, spilt down her back.
He watched it fall.
‘Look at you,’ he said.
‘Can you tell it’s dyed?’ she asked.
‘Yes—’ he kissed her neck, unfastening her zip ‘—obviously… ’
‘No, I meant if you hadn’t known me before.’
He paused. ‘You’re asking whether your disguise would fool a Nazi?’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘Fine,’ he said, running his fingers up her exposed spine, turning her legs liquid beneath her, pulling her dress from her shoulders, ‘I think it probably would. And these—’ his eyes found her stockings ‘—definitely would.’
She laughed again at that.
Took a little longer to stop herself.
And closed her eyes as, lifting her onto the bed, he pulled those thick stockings, inch by inch, from her skin.
There was no more talking then, either.
That came after, as Eleni lit her bedside oil lamp, and, in the flickering glow, they lay wrapped in her eiderdown, facing one another on the pillows.
There really was such a lot for them to talk about.
Too much, for the couple of hours they had left, but they did their best, their words, held back for too long, flowing between them as freely as they ever had – under their tree, on the bus, in her garden – slowly filling in the years that had passed.
They spoke, before anything else, of his mother.
‘How did it happen?’ Eleni asked. ‘You said it was complicated… ’
‘It was.’ He moved, looking at the ceiling, the pillow’s feathers creaking. ‘Very.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘Please.’
So, he did.
He didn’t hold back, like he had in the letters he’d sent from his training camp, but confirmed what she’d already pieced together: that he’d loathed his time there. He’d had no one he knew with him – all of them in Munich had been sent to different camps – only scores of Hitler Youth graduates, and commanders who’d drilled them relentlessly, until he – falling in, marching to their rhythm, heiling their heils, colluding in his failure to do anything else – had made himself numb, because he hadn’t known how else to manage it.
‘Your letters were… everything,’ he said. ‘When I was reading them, it all went away.’ He looked at her. ‘You have this… knack… for making life feel possible.’
She touched her hand to his face, feeling that old swelling in her chest, her throat.
She’d almost forgotten how he did that to her.
She really had almost made herself forget.
He reached for her hand, took it in his, and went on, reliving how everything had crumbled that spring of 1938, after Germany had annexed Austria, after that partner at his father’s firm, Friedrich, had found out about Henri helping Jewish families with their visas.
‘He and my father were never that friendly. Papa was senior to him. He’d always won more cases, brought in more clients… ’
‘Friedrich was jealous?’
‘Bitter. He had friends in the Gestapo. He gave them Papa’s name. Lotte’s father told her he’d done it, and she asked him to help us, so he said Papa should join the party, that it would prove his loyalty.’
‘Did it?’
‘It must have. He wasn’t arrested. I went back to camp thinking it was behind us. Then you wrote about Paris, and I should never have said I’d come, but I wanted to. I requested leave, booked my ticket… ’ He broke off. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to do anything more. You need to believe that.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘I think I always have.’ It was part of what had made his not coming so impossible to accept. ‘I found the way you told me… harder… ’
‘I know.’ His brow pinched. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight… ’
‘Because of your mother.’
‘Because of a lot of things.’
He told her that he’d received a wire from his father, two days before his train for Paris. ‘He asked me to come home, said that he couldn’t tell me why. I knew that something bad must have happened. I assumed it was to do with him. I didn’t think… I couldn’t… ‘ He stopped, jaw set against his grief.
Saying nothing, knowing there was nothing she could say, she held his hand, and waited for him to be ready to go on.
The lamp crackled beside them, and, in the lengthening silence, her dread about what was coming next grew. She died. Just before I was meant to meet you in Paris. It had been no peaceful passing, she felt sure of it now.
‘When I arrived back in Berlin,’ he said, ‘the house was so silent. Papa was just sitting on the stairs, staring at the door, like he’d been waiting for me for hours.’
She swallowed, seeing it, all too easily. Henri, exhausted, full of anguish…
‘Friedrich had been… upset, that nothing had happened to Papa, and decided to go after Mama.’
‘He knew she had multiple sclerosis?’
‘He knew she’d been ill. And there’d been dinners that he and his wife had been at with my parents. His wife, Andrea, had noticed Mama’s hands. Papa said she’d called around, a couple of days before, told Mama she wanted to apologise for Friedrich going to the Gestapo the way he had, said that she was mortified. Really, she’d just been having another look at her.’
‘That’s evil… ’
‘Mama was very weak by then. Much worse than when you saw her here. Her tremors were… bad. Andrea told Friedrich, and he reported Mama for investigation that same afternoon. Lotte’s father came home with the news… ’
‘He couldn’t do anything?’
‘He promised Lotte he’d try. I don’t know if he did. She didn’t trust him anyway. She got a message to Krista, told her that the house was being watched, and that none of them should try to contact Mama’s doctor… ’
‘Nikos’s friend.’
‘Yes. Lotte went to him herself, that night, warned him what was happening. He destroyed Mama and Krista’s records. There were others he was helping too. He got rid of everything, saved their lives, then left Berlin.’
‘I can’t believe Lotte did that.’ She tried to picture her, running furtively around a dark city, putting herself in danger…
‘No,’ said Otto, ‘I never would have believed she had it in her either. She was shaken up, after. Really shaken up. And it didn’t help Mama. A letter came the next morning, instructing her to report to a government clinic for tests. Papa said she wasn’t scared for herself, only for me and Krista, and what it would mean for us if they found out what she had. Krista had been fine, she still is. No one’s ever suspected there’s anything wrong with her. Mama thought they’d insist on testing us both, though, as soon as they got her results.’
‘Would they?’
‘Probably. Papa wanted to try and get her away, to France, or Switzerland, but she thought the Gestapo would arrest her if she moved… I don’t know.’ He expelled a sigh. ‘Maybe they would have.’
Eleni tightened her fingers around his. She saw now what had happened. She saw…
‘She took an overdose,’ he said, confirming it, and she felt her stinging eyes fill, because it was so incredibly, unutterably sad. ‘She didn’t tell Papa she’d decided to. They went to bed, and when he woke, she was gone.’
‘I am so sorry.’ Words had never felt more useless. ‘I can’t tell you… ’
‘Yes,’ he said, face tense with pain, ‘I’m pretty sorry too.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ she asked him, just as she had in the ruins.
‘I didn’t know how to. Lotte’s father had me brought into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse… ’
‘What?’ It sent her cold. ‘You were taken into the Gestapo?’
He smiled, not happily, not at all happily.
She felt sick. ‘You must have been… ’
‘I wasn’t anything,’ he said, before she could say terrified. ‘I couldn’t feel anything. I’d only just got home. Lotte’s father must have had someone waiting for me outside. I thought maybe he wanted to talk to me about my mother. But he wanted to talk about you.’
‘Me?’ She felt even sicker. ‘How did he know about me?’
‘The Gestapo are pretty efficient at that kind of thing. He knew about our letters, that we’d been to Paris, and were planning on meeting there again… He really enjoyed telling me all about it.’ Anger hardened his voice. ‘He knew plenty about Krista too. Her pamphlets. Her swing friends. He said it was only because of him that she was still safe, that our father was. It seemed really important to him that I understood how much he’d done for our family.’
‘Because of all your parents did for Lotte?’
‘Probably. I’m pretty sure he’s always hated them for it. Hated that they were so much better than him. I think he’s felt… ashamed of how hard he’s made Lotte’s life, knows what a bastard he’s been to her, and wanted to… I don’t know, punish me, for not fixing that for him.’ He gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘He asked me what was wrong with me, that I’d chosen an English girl over his daughter. He told me I’d humiliated her, and him by extension, but that no one would ask any more questions about Mama’s death, or Krista, or Papa, so long as I stayed in Germany like the loyal Nazi he knew I was, and toed the damn line.’
Eleni struggled to absorb it; that it had all been going on, whilst she’d been in London, excited, happy.
‘Did he tell Lotte he’d done it?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Like he was giving her a gift, she said. She came to my house to apologise. She was upset. Embarrassed… ’
‘So, she knew about us?’
‘She did then,’ he said, the anger in him softening. ‘We could have told her that summer, you know. We all trod on eggshells with her, but it wasn’t fair. She’d never have let something like that get in the way of trying to help Mama. She loved her. Really loved her. She was heartbroken at what she’d done. She cried, cried and cried… ’
Eleni found she could picture that.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, again.
‘She wanted me to get the train to Paris anyway. She said she’d take care of her father, make sure he didn’t do anything to hurt Krista, or Papa… ’
