Christopher's Ghosts (6 page)

Rima waited by the fountain as arranged. To Paul’s surprise, she led a dog of her own, another kind of small terrier. She wore a head scarf, ends tied under her chin. She walked slowly away down one of the wider gravel walks. He waited until she was far ahead and then, keeping his distance, he followed. She turned onto a narrow path, then into the trees. Here there was no artificial light at all apart from the distant glow of street lamps beyond the park’s spiked iron fence. They were alone. The earth beneath their feet was spongy, damp. He smelled ferns, rotting vegetation.

“Whose dog is that?” Paul asked in a whisper.

“It belongs to a neighbor, an old lady,” Rima replied, also in a whisper. “I’m doing a good deed.”

With a few deft movements, Rima leashed the dogs to trees. Then she took Paul’s hand and walked him a few steps away from the dogs. She took his face in her hands. She whispered, “Can you see me?”

“No.”

“Nor I you. It’s all right. We have four other senses. Wait. I’m going to take off my scarf.”

After a moment, she shook her head. Her hair, no longer braided, fell free. It was perfumed. He smelled her skin. He did not move.

Rima said, “I look different now.”

“I wish I could see you.”

Rima said, “There are other ways to see.”

Paul could barely talk. He said, “What?”

“Do something,” Rima whispered.

Paul groped in the darkness and put his hand on her hair. He stroked it, put his nose into it, put both hands under it, touched her cheeks, lifted the hair, which was thick and silky but less heavy than he had expected, and much longer. It fell to her waist and below. His arms were around her now. Her body moved inside her clothes. They were very close. She put her arms around his neck and moved even closer. Their bodies brushed. She kissed him on the lips, her own lips fluttering. He imitated this. She took his lower lip between her lips. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Rima touched his tongue with her tongue. He had had no idea that such techniques existed.

Rima pulled him closer, pasting herself to him. She was a strong girl, slender and muscular. She made no noise. She was in a state of total concentration, he could feel it. Suddenly she stopped kissing and turned her face away. She was crying. He touched the tears and whispered her name.

She said, “Ssshhh.”

She clung to him, arms around his neck, the length of her body still against his body, but now she seemed relaxed. Many moments later she stepped back. He let her go. By now he could see much better in the dark. Her face was almost visible. He saw her pale hands twisting her long dark hair and realized that she was braiding it. She wound the plait around her head, pinned it, and re-tied her head scarf. She took his face in her hands. She kissed him, a chaste affectionate kiss.

He felt her put a note in his hand. “Tomorrow afternoon,” she whispered. “This will tell you where.”

Paul kissed her again, this time making the first move. He was a little ashamed that he had not acted first when they entered the trees, that Rima had been obliged to do it. He was still too young to know that a man can almost never be quick enough to make the first move when a woman has made up her mind to make love to him.

In a normal tone of voice, Rima said, “Go first.”

When he walked back into the light he realized that he was leading the wrong dog. He turned around and walked back. He and Rima met in the path, switched leashes and dogs as smoothly as veteran secret agents, and walked on in opposite directions. In the instant that this maneuver took, Paul saw that Rima’s face was different—softer, with a different light in the eyes.

Balzac had been right about pretty girls. When they were happy, they were beautiful.

 2 

The next morning at five o’clock, even before Hubbard had started to write, two of Stutzer’s men came for him and Paul. They were young fellows, fresh-faced and correct. They were dressed alike in versions of Stutzer’s civilian wardrobe—brown fedoras, black leather trench coats, highly polished shoes. Hubbard called them the apprentices.

Standing calmly in the doorway in his dressing gown, Hubbard said, “What is it you gentlemen want?”

“Papers.”

Hubbard handed American passports and German identity documents to the apprentice who was doing the talking. He put them into his coat pocket without looking at them.

Hubbard said, “I ask you again. What is this all about?”

“Get dressed, you and your son,” the other apprentice said. “You have five minutes.”

“We are under arrest?”

“You now have three minutes,” said the first apprentice. Apparently it was part of their technique to take turns as spokesman of the arrest. Paul saw that his father loved this detail. Hubbard said, “Paul, get dressed. Bring a sweater. Use the bathroom.” As the Christophers knew from earlier arrests, the refusal of toilet privileges for hours on end was one of the features of secret police interrogation. It was an effective technique. Who knew what the punishment might be for wetting on Major Stutzer’s floor?

Lori, who somehow had managed to appear with her hair combed and fully dressed in a gray frock, stockings, and low-heeled black shoes, said, “Why are you doing this?”

One of the apprentices said, “That is not your concern.”

“My husband and son are not my concern?”

“Today they are our concern. You are expected to go riding in the Tiergarten this morning at seven-thirty exactly. No later.”

The apprentice was perfectly proper, his face expressionless. So was his companion. But Lori saw in their eyes that they wanted her to understand that they knew what they knew. They seemed to be suppressing lascivious smiles. Paul emerged from his bedroom, fully clothed. He overheard the conversation. As he listened, he looked into his mother’s frozen face. There was nothing there for the apprentices, or for him.

In rapid English Lori said to him, “Be polite, Liebchen. Keep your head. Be calm, always calm. Answer only the questions they ask, not the ones they don’t ask.”

“German only!” an apprentice said.

“
Jawohl
, Mama,” Paul said. He took a step toward his mother, as if to kiss her.

“No touching allowed!” said the other apprentice.

At No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Hubbard and Paul, standing up in a locked room with no chairs, waited until noon, when two men in uniform, not the same ones who had arrested them, came for Paul. Hubbard cried, “Just a moment!” They took Paul, slammed the door in Hubbard’s face, and locked it.

The guards marched Paul to another room where Stutzer was seated at a desk. There were no chairs for visitors in this room, either. Stutzer was reading a file, his pink lips pursed. He went on reading it for many minutes more, ignoring Paul. All German bureaucrats did this. They had done it under the Weimar Republic. No doubt they had done it under the Holy Roman Emperor and Barbarossa and Bismarck. The purpose was to show that the bureaucrat could ignore you, but you could not ignore him.

At last Stutzer made a note on the file he was reading, blotted the
ink, then closed the file and placed it in a drawer. He took a key from his pocket and locked the drawer. He put the key back into his pocket. In one corner of the room stood a small sink. Stutzer got up, turned on the faucet and washed his hands. He left the water running when he sat down again at his desk. Paul had never in his short life had to urinate so badly.

Stutzer retrieved his key, unlocked the drawer, withdrew another file, and studied it for several minutes. Without looking up from the file he said, “Section leader Schulz of the Thirty-eighth Hitler Youth whom you viciously attacked in the Tiergarten on 16 June, 1939, suffered a broken nose, a cracked jawbone, two broken teeth, cuts on his face, and injuries to his testicles, which were driven out of the scrotum and into his body by a vicious and treacherous kick. At the time of the attack, he was on official duty. Therefore the assault is considered an assault on an official of the Reich. The penalty for assaulting an officer of the Reich while on official duty is death.”

Paul did not speak. He did not need his mother to remind him that it was a mistake to say more to these people than was absolutely necessary.

Stutzer said, “Do you agree that you inflicted the injuries I have just described?”

“No, Major.”

“‘No?’”

“I hit him only once, on the nose. The injuries you describe could only have been inflicted by several blows.”

“So you admit that you struck this boy who was wearing the uniform of the Reich and was on official duty.”

“I didn’t strike him because he was wearing a uniform and I had no way of knowing he was on official duty. I struck him because he cut the string on my kite for no reason.”

“How did you know that he had no reason?”

“What reason could anyone possibly have for walking up to a total stranger, drawing a knife, and cutting the string of his kite?”

Stutzer tapped the file. “You provoked him.”

“I was minding my own business, flying a kite.”

“Then why did you punch him without warning?”

“As I said, he cut my kite string. He still had the knife in his hand. I didn’t know what he might do next.”

“Why should he do anything else, supposing that what you say about the kite string is true?”

Paul had had conversations like this with his headmaster, who did not like to see French boys lose a fight to an American any better than this man liked seeing a member of the Youth have his nose broken by one.

Paul said, “He was behaving in an unpredictable way. I thought it prudent to protect myself.”

“From what?”

“I thought he was going to attack me.”

“Why would you think such a thing?”

“Because he was not the first bully I had ever encountered, and the others were his friends. In fact they did attack me a moment later, six against one. They beat me until I was unconscious.”

“I remind you that after you attacked their leader, who was wearing the uniform of the Youth, a young man who had sworn an oath to protect the Leader with his life. In your mind you were actually attacking the Leader, is that not so?”

“No.”

“What do you have against the Leader?”

“Nothing whatsoever, Major.”

Stutzer knew perfectly well that this was a lie. “Then why are you not a member of the Youth? You have repeatedly refused to join.”

“That has been explained to you, sir. It is impossible for me to join. Only Germans of pure Aryan blood can belong. I am an American citizen.”

“You are the son of a German mother. You were born in Germany. Under American law, the child of an American father born abroad takes the nationality of the mother. Therefore you are a citizen of the Reich.”

Paul was silent. He knew he had already said too much. This was how the secret police were going to proceed against him and his family; this would be their argument. Whether or not it was true was irrelevant.
This was the pretence on which they proposed to act. There was no escape from their pretences. Nearly everything men like Stutzer held dear was a pretence, a substitute for a known fact—that they were Aryans, that the Jews were their secret enemies, that Germany had deserved to win the World War, that they were the party of peace, that Adolf Hitler was their savior. Even at sixteen, Paul knew that there was no exit from this wilderness of pretence, that Stutzer could draw his pistol and shoot him dead right now and then go on with his day and his life as if he had crushed a fly. They would tell the Christophers that their son had been shot while trying to escape. Or that they had let him go with a stern warning (he was only a boy, after all) and he had vanished—sailed away to Denmark, perhaps, or gone to France—and not even the secret police could find him.

 3 

O. G. knew quite a lot about Stutzer.

“Franz Stutzer, son of a Munich policeman, an early member of the party,” he said. “Recently promoted to major and awarded the Iron Cross first class for work he did in the Sudetenland, where he commanded a special SS unit of some sort. As you know, he was formerly the head of the secret police office in Rügen. He works in secret police Department A, which deals with enemies of the Reich.”

“Then he’s not small fry,” Hubbard said.

“Not at all. Stutzer is a high muckamuck, no question about that. He’s good at the work. Trusted by his superiors, admired by his men. One of Heydrich’s boys.”

They were seated in O. G.’s large office in the American Embassy in Parisierplatz. Tall windows filled two walls of the room. In June in another country, or even a more southerly part of this one, it would have been a sunny office, but it was raining in Berlin and the light was feeble. Tea was served by O. G.’s secretary—sugar cookies, cucumber sandwiches, Uneeda saltines spread with deviled ham, a delicacy to Hubbard and O. G., inedible for anyone who did not grow up on it
and even for some who did. At his father’s request, Paul had just told O. G. about his conversation with Stutzer. He and Hubbard had been released at three in the afternoon. They had stopped at the apartment to collect Lori, then came straight to the embassy.

O. G. said, “Let me ask you something. Does this man Stutzer have some personal reason for pursuing you?”

Hubbard and Lori exchanged a look. She said, “You tell him, Hubbard.”

“Well,” Hubbard said, “Lori did slap him in the face in front of twenty witnesses in the Kursaal Café in Putbus, on Rügen.”

All expression drained from O. G.’s face. “He was a member of the Gestapo at the time?”

“Oh, yes. This was in the summer of 1936, shortly after he arrived on Rügen as chief of the local secret police.”

“May I ask why you did this, Lori?”

“A drunk was crawling from table to table, stealing cream from the little pitchers in which it was served. This was a habit with him. He meant to amuse. He was shell-shocked from the war, everybody knew that. When he stole Stutzer’s cream, Stutzer kicked him in the face and broke his jaw.”

O. G. nodded. “So you slapped him.”

“Socked him, actually,” Hubbard said. “Backhand. Hit him hard enough to knock his hat off and give him a shiner.”