The Officer and the Spy, page 4
‘I finally have a student worthy of my attention,’ Brigit had used to say, shooing them out of the drawing room, ‘unlike you philistines.’ They’d laugh, not knowing of what the word meant. ‘Go, into the garden.’ She’d tickle them. ‘Marianne will come soon.’
Otto felt her touch again, as he ran up Nikos’s dark steps. For a moment – dripping wet, breathless with cold and exertion – he stopped, smiled. But then he let his smile fall, because those lessons, his mother’s tickles, were trapped in a vanished world.
Fixing his sights on the glow of lamplight above, he climbed the final steps, through the olive trees, towards where Krista and Marianne sat alone on the terrace: Marianne in her nightgown, the cello wedged between her legs, her plait slung over her shoulder; Krista, on the paved floor beside her, elbows resting on her knees, one of the cigarettes Hitler hated smoking in her hand.
When Marianne finished playing, she held her bow against the strings, not moving. Krista offered her the cigarette, and Marianne stared at it, then bowed her head.
Her shoulders shuddered. She made a quiet, choking sound.
It took Otto a moment to realize that she was crying.
It shook him, deeply. Marianne was one of the sweetest people he knew, perpetually smiling, game for anything, always the first up and out on her bicycle, plaits flying, since the day she’d learnt to ride one. Krista, Krista, come on. It was hideous, seeing her upset. She never cried.
I can’t let myself, she’d said, the year before, when the Nuremberg Laws had stripped her, and anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents, of their citizenship. They want me to give up, to feel worthless. The only power I have is not allowing them.
Something must have happened whilst Otto had been swimming. He wanted to ask Marianne what, but held back, instinctively leaving her the privacy she believed she had.
She continued to cry, vicious tears that she seemingly couldn’t contain now she’d set them free. She clung to her cello and bow like they were all she had to cling to, but then Krista stood, wrapping her arms around her, giving her something else. Letting her bow go, Marianne reached up, placed her hand over Krista’s, and Krista rested her cheek on her head, holding her closer.
Quietly, heavily, Otto slipped through the terrace doors, into the villa, leaving them both alone.
Lotte was waiting for him upstairs, hovering with a candle at her bedroom door. Not asleep, after all. He sighed inwardly. She was always appearing when he was least expecting it. Here, now. Last night, down at the rocks. Otto. Otto Linder. It had taken every ounce of his self-control not to betray his irritation that she’d come.
‘Who was that?’ she’d asked, after he’d swum to her, looking out at where he’d left her, Eleni Adams, in the water.
‘A mermaid,’ he’d said.
It wasn’t funny, but she’d laughed like it was.
She was in white again tonight: a silk nightrobe. Her hair was loose, reaching in a sheet to her waist. The candle’s flame rippled gold on her scalded skin, bare where her robe had slipped from her shoulder.
Had she dropped it like that on purpose?
She’d used to be so scruffy. Her family had once rented rooms on the outskirts of the same leafy suburb of Grunewald that Otto’s own, and Marianne’s, lived. Brigit, and Marianne’s mother, had used to invite Lotte around for dinners, to stay on weekends, saying it was safer for her out of the way of her parents. Otto, three years older, with his own friends, had had little do to with Lotte himself. She’d been too timid to interest him; always so afraid of muddying her pinafore, the possible pain of falling.
Sometimes, though, he’d seen her staring up from the bottom of one of the trees they’d all scampered into, or standing alone on the edge of the frozen lake, and felt a tug of pity.
Is the ice strong enough? she’d ask, whenever he went back to help her find her footing, clinging to his arm through threadbare mittens. Her father had been a poor man, before he hadn’t. I don’t want to fall in.
You won’t fall in, he’d say.
If I did, would you help me?
‘Otto?’ she whispered now, porcelain voice bringing him back to the moment. ‘Is Marianne all right?’
He met her gaze. Her doll’s eyes reflected the candle. Probably, if he looked further into them, he’d still find a trace of that childish vulnerability. Some reason to pity her again.
He probably wouldn’t even need to search that hard.
But he was tired. He didn’t have the energy to search.
And he didn’t want to pity Lotte.
‘How do you know there’s something wrong with Marianne?’ he asked.
‘I went down. You… I wondered where you’d gone.’
‘A swim,’ he said.
Stop following me.
‘I overheard Marianne tell Krista her parents have to give up the house.’ She didn’t blink. ‘Did you know?’
‘No,’ he said, flatly – saddened, but unsurprised. Marianne’s parents had been struggling for money for years. Her father, Ernst, once a music professor with Otto’s mother at the University of Berlin, had been dismissed with the rest of the Jewish staff back when the Nazis seized power in 1933. He now scraped by teaching piano to the children of parents who’d still send them to him. Marianne’s mother, Nicola, cleaned, but didn’t have much work either. Friends feel uncomfortable, she said. Strangers don’t want me. Thank God for your mama. ‘Why didn’t they say anything?’ Otto asked, more of himself than Lotte, realizing as he spoke that they probably had, and that that was why Henri had invited Marianne along on this trip: to save her the pain of moving. Henri wasn’t a bad man, just desperate.
‘Marianne only found out herself yesterday,’ said Lotte, ‘before we flew. When we go back, they’ll be living in her aunt’s flat. I told Marianne they shouldn’t… ’
‘Why?’
‘Because they need to leave Germany.’ She took a breath. ‘It can’t be their home anymore.’
Otto stared. ‘You actually said that to her?’
‘Yes. She needs to face facts.’
‘She’s beside herself, Lotte.’
‘She was upset already. She’s been bottling it up.’
‘So you decided to make it worse?’
‘No… ’
‘She’s your friend.’
‘I know… ’
‘Her mother used to look after you. She made your birthday cakes… ’
‘That’s the past. This is now. No one wants them in Germany.’
‘No Nazi wants them.’
‘That’s all that counts anymore.’
‘Is it?’
‘Otto, you know it is.’
Don’t tell me what I know, he almost snapped, but clenched his fist, stopping himself.
Be nice to Lotte.
‘I’m tired,’ he said, and carried on to his room. ‘I need to sleep.’
‘I was trying to help her, Otto. Help all of them… ’
‘All right,’ he said, and didn’t add how much he despised the cowardice of such help. That she, who, out of any person he knew, might actually attempt to do something more for Marianne – something that counted too – did nothing but sit, night after night at her father’s dinner parties, taking the place of her mother, who’d long since run off, smiling prettily, at Nazis. She’d been afraid of her father her entire life. Nothing he said was going to change that.
Would she really help his own family, as Henri was counting on her doing, if – when – it came to it?
Otto held little hope of it.
But, whilst there was even a shred of a chance that she might, he accepted that he couldn’t alienate her.
So, with as much civility as he could muster, he bid her goodnight, and closed his door.
Crete hadn’t been in Otto’s plan for the summer. He was heading into the final year of his architecture degree, up in Munich, and keen to make the most of his freedom before he graduated and went into uniform. Conscription was a new development in Germany, introduced the March before, breaking the Treaty of Versailles, and – less significantly for international law, but certainly significant for Otto – forcing him to give up the post he’d been offered in a Berlin design studio and resign himself instead to military service. There was no way out of it. He and several of his classmates had looked for one.
‘Are you mad?’ one of their tutors had demanded, when he’d found out about their investigations. ‘Want someone to open a file on you? Get flagged as non-patriots?’
Obviously not.
But neither had they been inclined to stick around through the vacation and wave swastikas at the Olympic Games. They’d decided to escape, on their bikes, cycling through Austria, down into Italy, back to Switzerland.
Henri, however, had been plotting an escape too.
‘I have to get your sister out of Berlin, before she gets herself killed,’ he’d said, arriving without warning at Otto’s digs in Munich, just three weeks before. ‘And your mother… Ah, Otto. Your mother is getting worse. She needs rest and peace. And you. We need you.’
He’d arranged everything, no expense spared: air tickets, so Brigit wouldn’t have a long journey by sea, then a two-month lease on the villa. Brigit’s doctor knew Nikos from way back; it had been he who’d suggested renting his house to Henri. ‘Mr Kalantis prefers to work the summer in Thessaloniki,’ Henri had told Otto, without so much as a pause to ask whether Otto minded giving up his plans for the break. ‘He’ll leave once we’re settled, and there’ll be plenty of room for all of us, Marianne as well. Lotte, too.’
‘Lotte?’ Otto had said, interrupting. ‘Seriously, Papa. Lotte?’
‘Yes, Otto. Lotte.’
‘Does her father know Marianne is coming?’
‘No… ’
‘You don’t think Lotte will tell him?’
‘No, because you’re going to ask her not to.’
That had done it. Otto had exploded, refusing to go along with any of it, flaming at Henri’s high-handedness, the stranglehold of obligation he could feel closing around him. Henri, in turn, had accused him of being selfish, unfeeling, and slammed from the room, instructing him to come by his hotel when he’d seen sense.
‘Has it ever occurred to you?’ Otto had yelled after him, from the top of the stone stairwell, ‘that our versions of sense don’t align?’
‘Never once,’ Henri had yelled back.
‘Beer?’ one of Otto’s housemates had enquired, sloping from his room.
They’d cracked several, climbing on to Otto’s window ledge to drink them, convincing each other, in Munich’s early summer sunshine, that Otto wouldn’t be going to Crete to babysit or cajole anyone – least of all the daughter of a man who might fairly expect to spend his eternity in hell. No, he’d be cycling with the rest of them.
Otto had believed it.
Until his mother had telephoned.
‘I want you to go on your adventure, my darling,’ she’d said. ‘I’ve told Papa that there will be other summers.’ He’d pictured her gentle smile. Imagined her, alone in their hallway, fingers touched to the wall to still their tremor. ‘I’ll think of you having fun with your friends, and it will make me so happy. It’s all the medicine I need.’
How could he have enjoyed a second of anything, after that?
‘Good man,’ his father had said, at the door of his hotel room. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘Yes.’
‘It never helps… ’
‘It’s helped a bit.’
The others had gone off to Austria, and Otto had returned to Grunewald, hugging Krista when she’d charged down the driveway to greet him, hugging his mother too, at the front door, hiding his grief that she hadn’t been able to run anywhere. Your mother is getting worse. It had only been then, seeing the oil-spills of exhaustion beneath her eyes, feeling her bony fragility, that he’d accepted the truth of Henri’s words. Realized that, whatever his disappointment, it was right that he’d come home to her.
He’d still dreaded the weeks ahead, though.
He’d dreaded them all through that evening, as Henri, taut with forced jollity, had talked over dinner about the many excursions he was excited to make: to Knossos, various beaches; a plan to rent a boat.
‘Perhaps you can teach Lotte to sail, Otto. I’m sure she’d enjoy that.’
He’d dreaded them as he’d failed to fall asleep in his childhood bedroom, listening to the pipes’ familiar creaks, the rustle of the garden’s trees.
He’d dreaded them more when, the next morning, through the kitchen window, he’d caught sight of Lotte’s father, SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Becker, turning into the driveway in his motor with its swastika flags, delivering Lotte to the porch.
‘Stay here with me, darling,’ Brigit had said to Marianne, who Henri had been careful to collect much earlier. ‘His ignorance is our bliss, yes? We’ll enjoy our breakfast, not give him the satisfaction of ruining it. Otto will see him off.’
‘Thank you,’ Marianne had said to Otto, as, leadenly, he’d gone to do just that.
At the porch, Becker had clamped his hand in his own, watery eyes willing him to flinch. ‘Look after my little girl,’ he’d said, and then he’d smiled. ‘I know you will.’
Otto hadn’t returned the smile. Not even for Marianne.
The vice of Becker’s fist had tightened, and he hadn’t flinched either.
But he had sat with Lotte for the taxicab to the airstrip, then again in the aeroplane. She’d fumbled over her belt, asked for his help, and he’d clicked the metal into place for her.
‘I don’t know what Papa is going to do when he finds out about Marianne,’ she’d whispered.
‘Does he need to know?’ he’d asked, true to the lines of his father’s script.
‘You want me to lie to him?’
‘Just not tell him about it.’ He’d held her eye, despising himself when she’d blushed. ‘Please, Lotte.’
‘All right.’
For the rest of the flight, with the propellors’ noise mercifully blocking conversation, Otto had stared through the window, thinking of he wasn’t sure what, until, at last, they’d descended towards Crete. The island from the sky had been beautiful, undeniably so, its great bulk shimmering beneath the blazing sky, yet Otto hadn’t been moved. He’d looked coldly at the beaches scalloping the perimeter – the iridescent sea so transparent he’d been able to see the shadow of the plane’s wings in its fathoms – too buried in his own bleak mood to want to surface. As they’d bumped into land, Lotte had gasped, and he’d pretended not to hear. When, minutes later, they’d all disembarked into the airstrip’s peace, he’d felt no urge to exclaim on the blissful warmth, like everyone else had. He’d simply filled his lungs with the hit of pure, earthy air – that scent he would, eventually, with a clearer mind, come to crave – and told himself, it’s not for long. Lotte would, at least, be gone before the rest of them, too, flying back to Germany to be her father’s ornament for the closing days of the Olympics.
They’d have a week free of her at the end.
‘It’s something,’ Krista had consoled, when they’d reached the villa, and he’d carried her and Marianne’s trunks to their room.
It was.
Just not very much.
At nightfall, Lotte had hummed as she’d dressed for dinner, and Otto, hearing the noise through their thin, shared wall, had gone for that first swim to escape. He’d wanted only to move, raise his heart rate, exorcise the tension trapped in his limbs.
He’d hoped for no more than that.
But he’d caught sight of Eleni Adams on the moonlit shingles. He’d watched her run at the sea like she belonged in it.
Dreaded the summer ahead, for the short time he was near her, a fraction less.
It had been her abandon that had appealed to him. A mermaid, he’d called her, and she could have been one, diving, swimming, not giving a damn. All of them, in Germany, had become so conditioned to picturing themselves through the eyes of others, second-guessing the impression they were making: a self-obsession borne of terror. But Eleni; she’d been… free. He’d felt her freedom in himself, vicariously.
Until Lotte had come, calling him to dinner.
Otto. Otto Linder.
Aside from that one dawn glimpse of Eleni, in her grandfather’s Cadillac, he’d seen nothing of her since. Not out on the road, nor down by the water, nor in it.
Hour by hour, she’d dropped from his mind. His thoughts had filled once again with his mother, how washed out she looked in her basket chair, reading; how pensive his father was, watching her; Lotte, so watchful too.
Lotte, at least, remained in bed the following morning, a Sunday.
‘Bathed in cold cream,’ said Marianne, returning to the kitchen, where Otto and Krista were having breakfast. (Marianne, with a magnanimity Otto struggled to understand, had taken Lotte up a tray.) ‘She’s staying hidden until tomorrow.’
‘How red does she look?’ Krista asked, dolloping yoghurt into a bowl.
‘Quite,’ said Marianne. ‘But, you know, still pretty.’
‘I don’t think she is,’ said Krista. ‘She’s always reminded me of a lily, which—’ she sat at the table ‘—stains everything it touches.’
Marianne said nothing. Krista had told Otto, whilst she’d been gone upstairs, that she was determined to forget the night before had happened. She says she doesn’t know when she’ll get another holiday. She’s promised her parents she’ll enjoy this one.
In part to help her do that, in part because he couldn’t face idling away another day in the villa, Otto suggested the three of them head out, explore the island.
‘A good idea,’ said Nikos, making them all turn as he too came into the kitchen. ‘You can use my motor.’
‘Are you sure?’ Krista asked.
‘Yes.’ He crossed to the sideboard, poured coffee. ‘I rarely use it. I have a man who taxis me, so I can work. He’ll take me to the port tomorrow. The motor’s yours for the summer.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Please don’t crash it.’
Was he joking?
His hooded expression gave nothing away.
They thanked him. He told them it was nothing, that he’d fetch them a map.
