The Good German (40 page)

“Yes, yes, I know. It’s the selection. How do I select?”

He moved away, not expecting an answer, before Jake could say anything. Names in a hat. Outside, the light was fading. People were still milling aimlessly. The train was now an hour late.

“I’m sorry,” Lena said. “I didn’t know. Do you want to leave?”

“No, I’m fine. Here, sit. Get some rest.” He sank to the bottom of the pillar, pulling her down with him, her head against his shoulder.

“It’s boring for you.”

“No, gives me time to think.”

But what he thought about, his mind drifting in the half wakeful-ness of waiting, was the cards, eyes facing in two directions. Deception. Nonsense. He wished he had a crossword puzzle, where one clue led to another, rational. A man gets on a plane, one across. With no baggage but a piece of information, the one thing you didn’t have to carry. Worth money. Russian. So information to a Russian. In Potsdam. Where he’s dead by nightfall. How did he spend the rest of the day? Not looking for Emil. But neither was the Russian at Professor Brandt’s. A possibility, Gunther had said, they already know where he is. But then who wanted Tully dead? Not the paymaster, presumably, or why pay in the first place? Maybe he just got in the way. Whose?

His head dropped onto his chest, nudging his eyes open. For a second he wondered if he was really awake. The station had grown black, dotted with harsh little pools of light from a row of bare bulbs strung between the pillars, a dream landscape where things crept in the dark. Lena was still leaning against him, breathing softly, safe. He closed his eyes. You couldn’t solve a crossword without the key. No matter which way he worked it, the central piece was always Emil, who knew where the columns met. Without him, it was just tea leaves, the chance arrangement of cards. Sometimes they surprise even me. But people heard what they wanted to hear.

The shriek of the train whistle woke everybody. People scrambled to their feet, the dim rails growing brighter as the engine headlight inched its way toward the platform, as if the weight were too much for the engine to pull. People covered the roofs of the cars and hung along the sides, perched on running boards or just holding on to whatever piece of metal was available, like the trains he’d seen in Egypt, bursting with
fellaheen
. A few boxcars with feet dangling from the open sliding doors. Everyone worn and stiff, so that when they dropped onto the platform they moved slowly, awkward with cramps. A hiss, finally, of exhausted steam, and a clang of brakes. Now the platform crowd moved forward with their bundles, shoving to get on even before the train had emptied. In the confusion, Pastor Fleischman was running back and forth, trying to locate his charges. He waved Lena over. Frau Schaller, the other helper, was already lifting children off the train.

Their heads had been shaved for delousing, skeletal. Short pants, legs like sticks, slips of paper hanging on strings around their necks as makeshift IDs, faces dazed. As people pushed around them, they stood fixed, blinking. A few had dark blotches on their skin.

“Look at that. Have they been beaten?” Jake said.

“No, it’s the edema. From no food. Any sore will bruise.”

Pastor Fleischman began loading the smaller ones into the handcart while the others looked on blankly, huddled together. No luggage. A

little girl with mucus crusted under her nose. Another story
Collier’s
would never run—who had really lost the war.

Jake leaned over to help with the loading, reaching for one of the younger boys, but the child reared back, screaming, “
Nein! Nein
!” Some of the platform crowd turned in alarm. Lena stepped between them, bent down, and spoke softly to the boy. She looked back over her shoulder at Jake.

“It’s the uniform. He’s afraid of soldiers. Say something in German.”

“I only want to help,” Jake said to him. “But you can go with the lady if you like.”

The boy stared at him, then hid behind Lena.

“It’s like this sometimes,” she said, apologetic. “Any uniform.”

Jake turned to another child. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No. Kurt’s afraid. He’s young. See how he wet himself?” Then he pointed to Jake’s pocket. “Do you have chocolate?”

“Not today. I’m sorry. I’ll bring you some tomorrow.”

The boy looked down—too long away to imagine.

Frau Schaller had opened a bag and was handing out chunks of bread, which the children held to their chests as they ate. They began moving down the platform, Pastor Fleischman pulling the cart, the others straggling behind, Lena and Frau Schaller herding from the rear. The older children were looking around, eyes wide. Not the Berlin they’d heard about all their lives, Ku’damm lights and leafy boulevards. Instead, swarms of refugees and fire-blackened walls and, through the arches, dark mounds of brick. But the grown-ups were reacting in the same way, literally staggering through the doors. Now that they were here, where did they go? Jake thought of the weary DPs in the Tiergarten that first day, just moving.

They managed to squeeze the youngest group into the jeep, Lena holding the boy who’d wet himself. The nursery was in a church in Schöneberg, and before they were halfway there the children had begun to nod off, back in the rocking motion of the train. No sense of where they were, the streets a maze of moonlit ruins. What about the people who hadn’t been met? Jake remembered walking out of Tempelhof that day, as confused as the refugees tonight, getting lost in the streets on the way to Hallesches Tor. And he knew Berlin. But of course they had been met, Breimer bundled into his official car, Liz and Jake piling in with Ron, everyone taken care of. Except Tully. How was it possible? A hasty trip, as if he’d been summoned, Brian thought. Left to find his way through the debris, someone who didn’t know Berlin? He must have been met. Berlin sprawled. Potsdam was miles away. No taxis here, Ron had said. Certainly not to Potsdam. Someone in the crowd at Tempelhof. He thought of Liz’s picture of Ron, a fuzzy background of uniforms. Why couldn’t she have taken one of Tully, made everything easier? He must have been there somewhere, one of the blurs in the doorway. While Jake had been staring across the street at rubble, missing it. Take another look. Maybe it was there, the connection. No one just arrived in Berlin, except refugees from Silesia.

The church basement had been fitted out with a few cots and rows of mattresses scavenged from bomb sites. In one corner an old wood-stove was heating soup. The room was bare—no crayoned drawings or cutouts, no piles of toys. As he watched Lena settle the children, he saw for the first time how exhausting the work must be, keeping them busy with imaginary games. Kurt still clung to her, burying his head whenever Jake caught his eye, but the others raced for the stove. “I’d better get the rest before the soup goes,” Jake said, relieved to have an excuse to get out.

The return trip took longer. Fleischman insisted on bringing the cart and hanging it over the back with his body wedged against it for support, so that each bump in the road threatened to dislodge it with a crash. They seemed to move by inches, as slow as the train. At the church, it finally did fall, then needed a heave to turn it upright. “Thank you. It’s for the wood, you see. Otherwise, the stove—” Jake imagined him working his way through the rubble in his white collar, picking up splintered pieces of furniture.

They had to carry the sleeping children in, dead weight, even the thinnest of them heavy. When he got to the basement doorway, a boy’s head against his chest, Lena looked up and smiled, the same unguarded welcome as at Frau Hinkel’s, but softer now, as if they’d already been to bed and were holding each other.

The soup was watery cabbage thickened by a few chunks of potato, but the children finished all of it and sprawled on the mattresses, waiting for sleep. A line for the one toilet, some squabbling, refereed by an exhausted Fleischman. Lena washing faces with a damp cloth. An endless night. The girl with the mucus was crying, comforted by Frau Schaller stroking her hair.

“What will happen to them?” Jake asked Fleischman.

“The DP camp in Teltowerdamm. It’s not bad—there’s food, at least. But still, you know, a camp. We try to find places. Sometimes people are willing, for the extra rations. But of course it’s difficult. So many.”

The few children still awake were given books, the old bedtime ritual, Lena and Frau Schaller reading to them in murmurs. Jake picked one up. A children’s picture book of Bible stories, left over from Sunday school. His German could manage that. He sat down with the chocolate eater and opened the book.

“Moses,” the boy said, showing off.

“Yes.”

He read a little, but the boy seemed more interested in the picture, content just to sit next to him and gaze. Egypt, exactly the way it still was, everyone’s first imaginary landscape—the blue river, bullrushes, a boy on a donkey turning a waterwheel, date palms in a thin strip of green, then brown desert running to the top of the page. In the picture, women had come down to the water’s edge to rescue the floating wicker basket, excited, in a huddle, just the way they had pulled Tully out in Potsdam. Drifting toward shore.

But Moses was supposed to be found, set into the current toward a better future. Tully had been flung in to disappear. How? Thrown from the bridge leading to town? Dragged in until the water took him? Dead weight, a grown man, much heavier than an emaciated child, a struggle for someone. Why bother at all? Why not just leave him where he’d fallen? What was another body in Berlin, where the rubble was still full of them?

Jake looked at the picture again, the excited women. Because Tully wasn’t meant to be found. Jake tried to think what this meant. Not enough to get rid of him; he had to vanish. First simply AWOL, then missing, a deserter, then finally irretrievable, a file nobody would follow up. Nothing to investigate, permanently out of the way, every trace, even the dog tags, supposedly at the bottom of the Jungfernsee with him. But the riding boots had slipped off, not held by laces, and he’d floated, carried by the water and the wind until a Russian soldier had fished him out, like Pharaoh’s daughter. Where he wasn’t supposed to be found.

He looked up to find Lena watching him, her face drawn, so tired her eyes seemed weak, almost brimming. The boy had fallen asleep against his shoulder.

“We can go. Inge will stay with them.”

Jake moved the boy gently onto the mattress and covered him.

Pastor Fleischman thanked him as he walked them to the door, a formal courtesy. “About the climate? It’s hot there. So perhaps I should send the healthiest.” He sighed. “How can I select?”

Jake looked back at the sleeping children, curled up in clumps under the blankets. “I don’t know,” he said.

“He’s a good man,” Lena said in the jeep. “You know, the Nazis arrested him. He was in Oranienberg. And the parishioners got him out. It was unusual, to do that.”

What it was like, day to day. A waitress collecting a check, a thousand cruelties, then the odd act of grace.

“Did you know him before? I mean, was this your church?”

“No. Why?”

“I was wondering if anyone could trace you through him.”

“Oh,” she said quietly.

He glanced at her, her head nodding, not yet asleep but drowsy, as peaceful as one of the children. Not just bait but living with a man asking questions, vulnerable either way. There had to be another place, somewhere nobody knew. But who had flats? Generals’ girls and whores.

“You passed the street,” she mumbled as he sped up Tauentzienstrasse toward the Memorial Church.

“I have to make a stop. Just for a minute.”

He double-parked in front of Ronny’s in a row of jeeps.

“Here?” she said, puzzled.

“I won’t be long.” He turned to one of the waiting drivers. “Do me a favor, will you, and keep an eye on the lady?”

“Now I need a guard?” Lena said softly.

“Watch her yourself,” the GI said, then took in Jake’s uniform patch and stood up. “Sir,” he said with a salute.

There was the usual blare of music as he went through the door, a trumpet leading “Let Me Off Uptown,” loud even in the noisy room.

The club seemed more crowded than before, but Danny still had his own corner table, Noel Coward hair slicked back, drumming his fingers to the music, a permanent piece of the furniture. Only one girl tonight, and next to him Gunther, staring into a glass.

“Well, here’s a treat,” Danny said. “Come to cheer old Gunther up, have you?” He nudged Gunther, who barely managed an acknowledging glance before going back to his glass. “Bit down in the dumps, he is.
Not
the best advert for the girls. You remember Trude?” A hopeful smile from the blonde.

“Got a second?” Jake said. “I need a favor.”

Danny stood up. “Such as?”

“Can you fix me up with a room? A flat, if you’ve got it.”

“For yourself?”

“A lady,” Jake said, leaning closer, not wanting to be overheard.

“How long do you need?” Danny said, glancing at his watch.

“No. A place to live.”

“Oh, you don’t want to be getting mixed up in that. Get their hooks in and then what? You want to spread the wealth. Cheaper in the end.”

“Can you doit?”

Danny looked at him narrowly, ready for business. “It’ll cost you.”

“That’s all right. But nobody’s to know.” He met Danny’s eyes. “She has a husband. Can you fix it with the landlord?”

“Well, that’d be me, wouldn’t it?”

“You own it?”

“I told you, nothing like property. You see how it comes in handy. Mind, I’ll have to chuck somebody out—they won’t like that a bit. They’ll need a little something for relocation. That’d be extra.”

“Done.”

Danny glanced up, surprised not to have to bargain. “Right. Give me a day.”

“And not with the other girls. I don’t want people coming and going.”

“Respectable, like.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s your lookout. Smoke?” He opened a gold cigarette case, a prop from
Private Lives
. “Take my advice, don’t do it. You don t want to settle in, makes it worse after. Me, I like a choice.”