For Such a Time (22 page)

Did she truly have his ear? “I’m very pleased,” she said, moving into the circle of his arms. He lowered his head and kissed her deeply, and once more Stella sensed the sadness and desperation beneath his passion. She slid her hands around his neck and kissed him back. She wanted him to understand how much he’d come to mean to her: dangerous, irrevocable feelings that touched her heart with the purity and wonder of a first snow.

Afterward she held him tightly, as though they could meld together as one. Her heart lay pressed over his old wound—that place most vulnerable in each of them. She imagined for a blissful moment their pulses beating as one.

Aric finally raised his head. “I believe you,” he said with an expression of genuine wonder.

Stella wanted to laugh. It seemed her prayers had been answered. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He kissed her again quickly, then set her away from him. “I’m certain the general grows tired of waiting in the car. I told him I had to get this . . .” He moved to grab the brass-topped cane from beside his place at the table. “I also wanted to warn you to keep your bedroom door locked while that pompous rooster stays upstairs.” He grimaced. “The general seems to run a steady course toward overindulgence . . . in all areas.”

He brushed a finger along her cheek. “You could always stay in my room.”

“No, Aric, I won’t be your mistress.”

He flashed her a wounded look.

“I won’t have the general thinking so, either,” she added.

“Nor will I,” he agreed in a chastened tone. “See you later.”

“Wait.” She wanted to ask about the dress rehearsal. “When you return, would you please tell me . . . ?” A prickle of caution made her pause.

“Tell you what?” He donned his cap.

Trust him, Hadassah
. “Tell me . . . how nice Joseph looks in his new suit?”

Aric visibly tensed, and Stella longed to call back the words. Had she put her kaddishel in danger?
Trust him
, her inner voice insisted. “He told me about the inspection.”

“Ah, yes. The inspection.” He offered a tight smile. “Of course.”

Hefting his cane, he turned and strode through the archway. Stella felt suddenly anxious. Why did he seem to dread this dress rehearsal?

A soft noise behind her made her spin around.

Helen leaned against the table, her normally hard expression yielding concern. How long had she been standing there? “What’s wrong?” Stella asked, watching for a sign that would explain the woman’s obvious distress.

The housekeeper worked her jaw as if in thought, then shoved
away from the table and propelled herself toward Stella. Pointing a finger at the area over Stella’s heart, she nodded toward the opening where Aric had departed.

“Yes,” Stella breathed, stunned at the woman’s silent question. “He matters to me.”

Helen shook her head vehemently. She reached to press a fist against Stella’s breast and then thrust her chin again toward the archway.

Stella felt unable to tear her gaze from the housekeeper’s. She wasn’t ready to confess aloud what her heart already knew, yet Helen understood. The woman’s hard mouth softened, and she clasped both of Stella’s hands, giving them a hearty squeeze.

Then, in what seemed Helen’s natural motion, she wheeled around and left the room.

Stella headed toward the library and her office. She wondered at the relationship between Aric and the gruff-mannered housekeeper. Joseph had told her that Helen accompanied Aric to Theresienstadt. But how did they meet? And how did Sergeant Rand Grossman fit into the picture of their shared past?

Impulsively she veered off course and went to Joseph’s room at the back of the house. As she stood on the threshold, Stella noted the sheet had been removed from the window, allowing dull, gray light to illuminate the tiny room.

Grossman’s sizable lump lay buried beneath a heap of blankets. Beside his narrow cot, a mahogany end table abducted from the living room sat cluttered with pill bottles, one empty drinking glass, and an untouched slice of Helen’s Apfelstrudel
.
On the floor next to where he slept lay a stack of books bound in ochre-red leather.

“Helen?”

The sergeant’s voice rose groggily from somewhere beneath the blankets. A steel hook prowled from beneath the bedding to tap the side of the empty glass. “Thirsty.”

Stella retrieved the glass and took it to the kitchen. Helen was up to raw elbows in soapy dishwater and hardly gave her a glance.

Stella poured water from the tap and then returned to find that the patient had shucked off his blankets. The pajama-clad Grossman was as solidly built as Aric, though not as tall, and closer to Stella in age. Without his
Stahlhelm
, he looked more like a man and less like an armed machine. He wore his sable hair shaved close at the neck and above the ears, while a sweep of dark locks hung limply against his forehead. Beard stubble shadowed his lean, flushed face.

She moved toward the cot, and his eyes opened. Glazed with fever and blue as ice, they watched her steady approach. “Not Helen . . .” he growled hoarsely.

Stella clutched the glass of water. She shouldn’t have come—they had never been formally introduced. The only dealings she’d had with him since her arrival was to give him mail to post. They had never actually conversed.

His mouth widened in sudden recognition. “Fräulein, welcome. Wel . . . come,” he sang.

“Your water.”

She thrust the glass at him. Droplets splashed onto his beige flannel pajama top. He didn’t seem to notice as he struggled to sit up. “My throat feels like I swallowed sand.”

Stella glanced at the shiny prosthesis. “If you’d like help . . .”

“I’m no cripple.” He snatched up the glass with his good hand and took several long gulps before placing it on the table. The exertion seemed to exhaust him. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he said, “Sit awhile, Fräulein. Keep me company.”

“Just for a few minutes.” She dragged over a ladder-backed chair from beside the door and sat down. “How do you feel today, Herr Sergeant?”

“Like the Fourth Panzer Army ran practice maneuvers across my chest.”

Stella smiled. His stoic humor was much like Aric’s. “Can I get you anything else?”

His steel hook tapped at the brown bottle of pills on the end table. “Would you mind . . . ?”

Stella picked up the nearly full bottle, identical to the one on Aric’s nightstand. She unscrewed the cap and shook out a single morphine tablet and handed it to him.

“I am grateful to Herr Kommandant for these. That idiot surgeon gave me nothing.” He popped the pill into his mouth and retrieved the half-empty glass to wash it down. Afterward he settled back against the pillows. “Do you play chess, Fräulein Muller?”

“I never learned.” She looked down at the stack of books on the floor. “What are you reading?”

“See for yourself.”

Stella reached for the top book and hid her surprise.
Poems of Alfred Lord
Tennyson.
She hadn’t imagined Grossman to have an appreciation for poetry . . . or a disregard for the law. The Third Reich forbade possession of such literature.

Flipping open to a ribbon-marked page, she couldn’t contain her astonishment. “‘Ulysses’?” she said, glancing up at him.

“I
can
read, Fräulein.”

She blushed. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“It is my favorite. Would you read a few lines aloud?”

Stella scanned down toward the middle of the poem and read:

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains. . . .”

“Ah, how that speaks to me, Fräulein. Danke,” he said when she paused.

“It’s a lovely piece, Herr Sergeant.”

“Herr Kommandant has excellent taste in poetry.”

Stella glanced up. The book belonged to Aric? “But I thought . . . it’s forbidden by the Nazis!”

“How do you think literature survives war, Fräulein?” He grinned. “And call me Rand, if you like. Under the circumstances”—he glanced down at his bedclothes—“we don’t need to be so formal.”

Stella allowed herself another smile. “Call me Stella.”

Rand shook his head. “Herr Kommandant would not like it.”

“Why should he care?”

Her cheeks ignited at his sudden burst of laughter—followed by several moments of phlegmatic coughing. “Come now, Fräulein,” he wheezed. “I am his man. He is quite taken with you.” His eyes took on a faraway look as he added, “And don’t I know he deserves happiness.”

Her curiosity overrode embarrassment. “He’s had a difficult life, hasn’t he?”

“More than you can imagine. We shared a hospital room at Sevastopal, on the Crimean Peninsula. We played a lot of chess.” His fevered face softened. “He usually won.”

“How long were you in hospital together?”

“I was released after four months. I was on patrol outside Sevastopal last August when a few of us got showered with partisan grenades.” He raised the ominous hook for her inspection. “When I was admitted to the hospital, Herr Kommandant—a major at the time—had arrived a month earlier from the city of Lemberg, in the Ukraine.” He gave her a weighty stare. “He’d been in hospital there since December of forty-two.”

“When did he get out?”

“We took a train to Berlin together in January of this year.”

Stella fell back against her seat. Aric had been hospitalized for over a year? Her heart ached for him. “I imagine you became good friends, at Sevastopal?”

Rand loosed another grin. The morphine made his eyelids heavy. “We fought together with Army Group South, under Field Marshall von Reichenau back in forty-one. At the Battle of Kiev.”

“On the night of Herr Kommandant’s party, he mentioned a place called Babi Yar. Is that where you met?”

He grimaced and shook his head. “Our division was already in Kiev two weeks.” The drug’s effects seemed to be loosening his inhibitions. “Terrible place, Babi Yar. ‘Old Wives’ Gully.’” He closed his eyes and jerked his head to one side as if avoiding a blow. “The baby . . . I’ll never forget . . .”

Stillness rose between them like an impregnable wall. “Tell me about the baby,” Stella said softly. “I want to understand.”

Rand opened his eyes. Even dulled by morphine, they held anguish. “Can’t possibly describe. Ravine was an open grave, miles of rotting flesh.” He dropped his head. “Blood and excrement . . . so strong I got sick all over myself. And the baby . . .” His deep voice broke. “He jus’ kept nursing while his mother lay dead in the ditch.” With a groan, Rand rose up off his pillow and reached for Stella’s hand on the book. “His tiny black head . . . soft hair, stuck out all over. Jus’ like my sister’s boy, like little Karl’s hair.” He fell back onto the pillows, clearly exhausted.

Dread clawed at Stella’s heart, recalling Aric’s conversation the night of the banquet. “Was Herr Kommandant a part of this?”

“Nein!” Rand sat up again, all visible signs of the morphine gone. “Our divisions went in first, killing Russian soldiers only. Then Heydrich’s SS-
Sonderkommandos
followed. They killed women and babies and old men just hours after we had taken Kiev. They boasted of how they ‘led the sheep to slaughter’ with promises of relocation—”

“Stop!” Stella covered her ears. “No more, Rand. Please!”

“Forgive me.” Haggard lines rimmed his features. “I should not have spoken of such things.”

“Lie back before you damage your stitches.” Her voice shook
as she nudged him against the pillows. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have pried.”

Yet she felt driven to know the rest of the sordid story of Aric’s past. “After what you saw . . . at Babi Yar . . . why did you and Herr Kommandant join with the SS?”

“By forty-three the Reds and the Americans had started to squeeze us in. The Wehrmacht wanted only able-fighting men.” He frowned. “They had no use for invalids. We had nowhere else to go.”

“You could have gone home,” she accused.

“I have no home left, Fräulein, except with my widowed sister and her baby. In the city, work is scarce. Food is rationed. And this”—he raised his steel hook—“does not help my chances for employment. So I stay here and send her what money I can.”

“And Herr Kommandant?”

“Worse for him, I think. I was only in service three years. He spent a decade in the German Army. He was a major when the fighting at Stalingrad almost killed him. It killed his career, anyway. Last December, when he began to walk again, Himmler sent his personal courier to Sevastopal. The SS-Reichsführer offered him the rank of colonel and commandant of this camp.”

“And you came with him.”

“He made a place for me. Promoted me to the rank of sergeant,” Rand said proudly.

Frustration tore at Stella. While she understood Rand’s limited options, she wondered why Aric had taken a position in the SS. Why hadn’t he gone home to Thaur, anywhere beyond Hitler’s reach? Or did he too feel he had nowhere else to go?

Her own entrapment seemed precarious at best. Did Aric simply try to survive, as she did? He’d spent a year of his life in hospital, unable to walk, at least until those last few weeks. Then he was abandoned by the Wehrmacht
.

Stella tried to imagine his sense of loss. “You helped him,” she said to Rand.

He shrugged. “Herr Kommandant is a great man. Have you noticed the Knight’s Cross on his uniform? Few men receive such an honor, but I have seen his courage and strength. He actually led a band of soldiers to the west of Cherkassy, right beneath Ivan’s nose. Took out their Thirty-eighth Rifle Army and freed up our Seventeenth, which had been holed up for days at Uman.” Rand smiled. “The man is afraid of nothing. I just let him win a few games of chess.”

Stella smiled back. She suspected Rand had done much more. “You’re loyal to him, aren’t you?”

“I would gladly give my life for him.” His blue gaze met hers. “And you, Fräulein? Are you as faithful?”

Such a complex question. Stella considered her sham life and the 160 Jews who did not board yesterday’s train. There was also the fact she knew Captain Hermann wanted Aric dead but said nothing. She nodded at Rand, and the answer rose from deep inside her. “I would die for him,” she said.