Shades Within Us, page 17
Grete straightened. What was the girl up to?
Like thunder, it struck her that Liesl thought her mad, or wanted to convince the official of that.
“You should have sought official assistance,” the man said. His voice broke slightly. He was very young.
Liesl leaned into a deep sigh, gazing at him as if he’d said the most brilliant thing in the world. “Yes! That’s exactly right. I was not thinking clearly. We were neither of us . . .” She slipped a sideways glance at Grete and closed her lips on whatever she’d begun to say.
Grete’s head spun. Impossible to think anyone would be fool enough to swallow such guff. Yet the silly man was leaning forward, half-way across his desk, and Liesl, on the other side, had her arms stretched toward him. Their fingertips nearly touched.
Liesl sighed, “We are utterly in your hands, sir.”
“And what do I do with you?” He leaned even further forward and smiled.
Grete didn’t like the smile. There was something in it she had seen before, a trap about to be sprung. She leapt to her feet. “It doesn’t matter what you do!” she hissed. “The attractive forces are irresistible and unbreakable. Critical mass eludes all efforts. The calculations cannot crack this problem in time.”
The young official stared at her, open-mouthed.
Liesl cried out, “Please, Aunt, be calm.” She turned to the young officer. “The strain is too much. She needs rest. Please.”
The official was on his feet, frowning. He seemed bigger, less young and more suspicious. Liesl sank back into her chair, making him seem all the larger as she tilted her face up to his.
As he looked down at her, his expression softened. “You are very young and pretty.” He remained caught by her gaze a moment, then turned a frown on Grete. “And you carry a great burden.” He opened the door to his tiny office and spoke softly to a clerk crouched in an even smaller adjoining cupboard.
Liesl turned to Grete, eyebrows raised. Grete folded her hands and smirked into her lap.
The official returned and there began a conversational dance where he interrogated Liesl, checking her story, and she turned his words back into queries about his life, himself. As the official asked fewer questions and answered more, Grete detached into a swirl of symbols, theory and conversation fragments. She was very tired.
Through it she heard Liesl say, “She’s been so . . . unwell, since the bomb killed Papa,” she gulped, “and Mama, and destroyed our house, half the street really. The bombers were really aiming for the docks and we were just unlucky, that’s what they told us.” Grete recognized the story as true, but actually about her sister-in-law’s gentile friends, the Werners. “You know Berlin?”
“Not Berlin. I’m from Nuremburg.”
“Oh!” Liesl clapped her hands. “The beating heart of the Reich.”
And that was it. The last piece. Grete began to weep.
Autumn progressed into winter, milder in the tiny Normandy village than in Berlin. ‘Hansi’ obtained two rooms with a shared bathroom in a narrow cottage where he himself was billeted. The luxury of the top official in an outpost the Reich appeared to have forgotten. He gave various excuses for why their papers had not yet come through and, after awhile, they ceased asking. The daily miracle of survival didn’t bear examination.
At first, Grete kept close to her room, hiding, fearful of going outside. As the locals grew used to the sight of them, frequently in company with Liesl’s officer, she felt more accepted, almost safe.
News of the war trickled through the propaganda walls. The imminent assault on Britain was delayed as the British air force continued to repel German bombers, hanging on by the skin of their Spitfires. Russia, supposed to have been a rapid blitzkrieg like every other, dragged on through winter. More and more men disappeared toward its borders, and the soldiers who remained seemed as boys or grandfathers. Even with Hansi’s protection, decent food became expensive and more difficult to come by as Germany sucked up the produce and meat of the surrounding farmlands.
Grete held on to her temper, as if she were holding her breath against all the time she was wasting that could have been spent progressing her work. She even wrote another letter to the Montreal Institute containing her thought that, since Uranium 238 isotopes absorbed neutrons needed for continued fission, they should be removed. Isolate the 235 isotopes so they could do their job. She slipped the letter to the kind woman in the fish shop whose sea-captain husband might be able to put it into the right hands. She said nothing of it to Liesl. The girl had grown increasingly snappish of late.
Grete began to hope, something she’d never wasted time on in the past. Perhaps Germany would lose the war. Perhaps she would return and pick up where she left off. How were the Canadians doing with the fission project? Had they got her notes and calculations? If only she could be there. At times like this, frustration blinded her in a sheet of red outrage. She was frightened all the time, and she was bored.
Six months, they’d been here. Six months. Grete waited for Liesl’s return from her nightly ‘visit’ with Hansi. She’d washed their stockings, read the trash that passed for a newspaper and dimmed the lamp to conserve precious oil. She sat up in bed, for warmth, playing with a problem she’d once found intriguing but that now seemed absurd and pointless. At last, later than usual, Liesl entered, locked the door, and slumped on the edge of Grete’s bed. She looked tired.
Grete knew she should be kind, but she’d had enough. “I am sick of this waiting.” She punched the coverlet beside Liesl. “I’m sick of everyone thinking I’m meshugge. I’m—”
Liesl lunged at her and grabbed her by her hair and hissed, “Shut up!”
Grete’s breath left her as Liesl pinned her against the mattress, her knee digging painfully into Grete’s thigh. Liesl pressed her nose to Grete’s so that her lips almost brushed hers.
“Have you ever heard from someone who’s gone to a camp in the east?” Her voice was near inaudible.
Grete’s scalp burned from Liesl’s grip on her hair but she was afraid to move or speak.
Liesl murmured against Grete’s mouth, “From them, I mean. Not about them. We hear about them.”
Grete had to suck in a breath, chest heaving against Liesl’s weight.
Liesl drew back a little, a black silhouette rearing against lamp-glow. “You knew the Cohens, Aunt Grete. You know they went east.” She turned her head aside, gold light etching shadows on her thin face. “Lennie died of heart failure. He was my age. Athletic. Healthy. And he loved me. What did they do, that his heart failed?”
Grete pressed her palms against Liesl’s chest and then flattened them against her own breastbone. She could not speak.
“I don’t want to go to a camp, Aunt Grete.”
Grete closed her eyes. “I will be quiet,” she whispered.
Liesl released her and sank back onto the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But you must never, never speak Yiddish again. Someone might hear, and then it’s all over.”
Grete collapsed against the pillows, drained. “You would do better without me. I am like a heavy isotope, sucking up the neutrons needed for a chain reaction.”
Liesl laughed, a short huff devoid of humour. “No wonder people think you are mad, the way you talk.” She turned, and the sharp lines of her face softened in the golden light. “But don’t worry. Your craziness is good cover.”
Grete had to laugh.
Liesl lifted a hand to cradle Grete’s cheek. “In fact, perhaps you are the moderator that helps me survive.”
Grete’s eyes smarted and she leaned her cheek into Liesl’s cupping palm. “Ah, Liesl, how are we here?” The lamp flickered, about to die. “What has happened to decency or even to law?”
“Law.” Liesl lay back over Grete’s legs, savouring the word. Then the corner of her mouth turned up and she raised her slanted eyes to Grete’s. “The Nazis smashed the nucleus of the law apart, using for a moderator fear and hate. The energy released now burns across Europe so hot it consumes every good thing. There is no law, only survival, until it burns itself out. If it ever does.”
Grete sat up straight. “Liesl! That is the second elegant analogy you have made tonight.”
“You see, Aunt? I listen.”
Hansi was called to the Russian front.
He had only one day to bid Liesl a sobbing, passionate farewell. He told them to pack and go to the station first thing in the morning. He left them with a package. “This will keep you safe.” His voice broke, like a bullied boy’s. He hugged Liesl again and again and even gave Grete an awkward hug. She did her best to conceal her contempt.
The next day, in an early summer bright with blossom, Liesl and Grete sat glumly across from each other in a second class train carriage. The package had contained destination-specified transit papers, dated suspiciously long ago, and a letter placing them under the care of his Mother. In Nuremburg.
“There has been no bombing there,” he had told Liesl. “It is such a fine and beautiful city, even the English do not want to harm it.” That was the safety he’d promised them. They travelled as his fiancée and her aunt. France receded, hour by hour and kilometre by kilometre.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Grete,” Liesl said. “But we are lucky to have happened across the most gullible Nazi in all of occupied France.”
It was a slow train, stopping or pulling aside often. Other trains loaded with munitions and soldiers roared by, heading for the coast, ostensibly for the final assault on Britain that the propaganda promised would come any day. But the soldiers that hung from the carriage windows looked so very young and very scared. People begging for food skulked in corners in every station, evading officials.
Grete and Liesl alighted at every stop, looking for some way to divert to a different route. But each time they casually approached a ticket wicket or drew near an exit, an official or armed guard would take an interest in them and they would pass on, too afraid to risk their slender security. In one terrible instance, a freight train of cars reeking with an animal stench pulled slowly into the station at a platform opposite the one where they strolled. Armed guards positioned themselves at intervals along its length. Liesl gripped Grete’s arm. Following her shocked gaze, Grete saw fingers protruding through the tiny air vents high in the car’s walls. As they stared, frozen, a column of people straggled toward the last car, some clutching small cases or bundles. A guard hauled the door open, pointing his rifle at those who crowded into the opening. A child was handed out, limp and still. A woman, sobbing, tried to climb after him, but the guards pushed her back into the crush. Heads bowed, clutching throats and noses, the people in the line shuffled past the dead child dumped so casually on the platform. They clambered up into the car, helped by hands within. When there was no more room, the guards pushed with their rifle butts, packing the bodies together.
Without discussion, Grete and Liesl returned to their seats and sat, silent and breathless until their train pulled away from the horror. As they passed the transport train, Liesl watched it, hands and face pressed to the window glass, until the last car was past.
Grete wanted to run to the emergency hammer and smash windows until not one particle of glass remained. Then she would start in on the smug Germans, the officers and painted ladies sharing the carriage with them.
The rhythm of the wheels chanted “We have to escape, we have to escape.” Yet the train carried them ever deeper into the land of those who wanted them dead, ever closer to the nucleus of the Fatherland. Like a neutron, she wanted to smash it apart.
She wondered yet again if the Institute had got her calculations.
Hansi’s mother was considerably more suspicious than her son. She had read his letter, and said to Grete, “You look like a Jew.” Despite the comfort of the bed and the joy of hot water and a bath, Grete barely slept their first night there. She kept waiting to hear boots, coming for them, denounced by the upright, silver-headed mother of Liesl’s knight. When she did sleep, her nightmares were all of fire consuming freight trains holding everyone she had ever known.
In the morning, she told Liesl, “We cannot stay here. She does not trust us.”
Liesl shook her head. “We are invisible in plain sight like this,” she said. “If we win her over, we could survive.”
“You can win her over,” Grete said. “You win everyone over. But she mistrusts me. As long as I am here, she will be suspicious.”
Heavy footsteps on the stairs told them they were both wrong.
Grete and Liesl climbed down from the truck with the others and waited. More terrified boredom as the Nazi officer argued with his sergeant about the method of killing them. Too many prisoners to fit into the gas van. Two or three lots would take too long. Some would have to be shot. Gas the men, shoot the women. It took on the air of a comic opera. Even the location, a lovely glade on the road between the transit camp and Nuremburg, seemed like the setting of a romantic musical. Except prisoners were even then finishing shallow trenches among the trees, barely deep enough to hold a layer of bodies.
“A year.” Liesl spilled a shovelful of fertile black earth onto the bank.
Grete smiled at her, affectionately, digging slowly, her back sore.
“We survived.” The girl tilted her face, thin from hunger and fatigue from their weeks in the camp, but her sloped eyes held a spark of humour. “So, Aunt Grete, where is our Canadian bomb?”
“No talking!” A guard shouted.
“My humble apologies,” Grete pushed her shovel into the trench. “I must have miscalculated.”
Liesl’s shoulders shook, and Grete felt laughter rise within herself and wash away the black cloud of dread. It would be over soon. She leaned back her head to enjoy the warm sunshine on her face. A couple of planes grumbled overhead. A third. She looked more closely: a giant bomber and two escorts. Not recognizably German.
She watched them on a heading for the city. It couldn’t be far away, two kilometres at most? For Nuremburg. The heart of the Nazi power. The final piece.
She hissed, “Liesl!”
As Liesl turned, Grete pointed at the planes and yanked her into the trench.
The soldiers laughed, and one commented, “They aren’t usually so cooperative.” The officer appeared above them, lit a cigarette and blew a cloud as he gazed down at them. Lips clamped tight on the cigarette, he unlatched his holster, removed his revolver, and undid the safety catch, each move deliberate.
As he raised the gun, Grete flung her body across Liesl’s. Twisting her head, she peered up into his face, meeting expressionless blue eyes.
Searing white light silhouetted the officer, his peaked cap, his shoulders, the half-raised weapon. He turned his head.
A boom cracked Grete’s ears, and a wave of heat like an open oven roared above her, searing her back.
The officer spun, struck by a blast of incandescence, his cap flying. He fell into the trench.
Grete shrank from the heat of him.
The back of his black uniform was scorched and smoking. The side of his head was bald and bubbling red. He raised his face to them, the cigarette stub embedded in the scarlet flesh of his lip. His remaining eye stared, shocked and horrified. Slowly, he raised his arm where the revolver smoked, welded to the flesh of his hand. The sinews flexed, and he collapsed, face down. The air around them seethed with smoke and screaming.
Liesl struggled out from under Grete.
Grete winced, her shoulders hot and tender. They crouched, face to face, examining each other.
“Are we dead?” Liesl asked.
“My back is too scorched,” Grete replied. The ditch felt warm, but safe among the smouldering remnants of blackened trees.
“A year,” Liesl said, nodding. Matter-of-factly oblivious to the dead soldier lying next to them. “Your calculations were sound.”
Grete spread her hands. “You made a significant contribution.”
Liesl smiled. “Do I get co-authorship in the publication?”
“I insist that your name go first.”
They clasped hands and leaned their foreheads together, staying that way, unable to laugh or weep. Not yet. When they had to take shelter from the black rain, they hid under the hulk of the burned truck that had been intended to ferry them to their deaths. Surrounded by an audience of the dead and dying, Grete explained radiation. Then she listened to Liesl’s plans for their future.
SCREEN IN SILVER, LOVE IN COLOUR, MIRROR IN BLACK-AND-WHITE
Julie Nováková
I saw Adele’s life.
Cigarette smoke, clatter of glasses, muffled voices, laughter. Closing my eyes, it’s as if I’m transported right there from the quiet of my Toronto home. I linger on the steps of Café Černý Kocour a little too long, soaking it all in. I relive that evening of early March 1938 again . . .
I. Waiting to dance in ruins
I came to Černý Kocour late that evening, delayed by a small row with my landlady; money again. All the stamgasts were already there: Rakhel, drinking her lost dreams away bottle after bottle and providing a cautionary tale for the rest of us. She never forgave the world for the injustice of ending her promising acting career in Berlin. At the table next to hers sat Herr Winder with his faithful disciples, failing to notice that the world they discussed so eagerly was long gone; the well-known critic from the silent movie era never quite caught up with talkies. This time, actor Eugen Unger sat with them. Unlike Rakhel, he was an optimist—but still never managed to find his own way here. A troupe of more lucky Czech-speaking actors clustered near the bar and downed one beer after another. All kinds of washed up people from theatre and film drifted there, while the successful ones frequented Lucerna Bar or Barrandov Terraces.
