Christopher's Ghosts (8 page)

The sun strengthened. Workmen watered the bridle path to keep down the dust. Miniature rainbows formed in the spray. When horses came by, the men turned off the hoses and the big lathered animals cantered or trotted by. Rima had never ridden, but she liked the sight, the sound, the scent of sweated horses. She walked along the bridle path, Blümchen barking all the while. The dog was tremendously
excited. Rima wondered if it was the smell of the horses. What a treat for Blümchen’s Pomeranian senses, Rima thought. It must be the equivalent of a person, born like herself in the twentieth century, being dragged across a savannah and suddenly smelling a herd of mastodons.

“Suppose dinosaurs were covered with feathers, like birds,” she said to Paul later on, when they were together. “Suppose they sang like birds when they woke in the morning. Imagine the sight of that, the sound.”

In the moment itself, however, something broke this chain of thought. Standing at the curb was a woman whom she knew, though she had never met her. She knew at once that she was Paul’s mother. The woman, wearing jodhpurs and boots and a tweed hacking jacket, looked like him—the same face that Rima had thought was unlike anyone else’s, the same bottomless eyes, the same musician’s hands.

The woman stood beside the open door of a black Daimler. An SS trooper in uniform held the door. Another sat at the wheel. A large beautiful Alsatian dog lay on the floor of the backseat at the feet of a man wearing burnished black riding boots. Blümchen barked frantically at the Alsatian. The woman, lovely but profoundly sad, looked for a brief moment into Rima’s eyes, as if she recognized her, too, and then got into the car.

Rima was farther away from the Daimler than Paul had been when he had witnessed a similar scene a few days earlier, so she was able to see inside and recognize Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the entire secret police apparatus, as the man who lifted Lori’s hand, peeled off its glove, and kissed the palm.

 6 

After dropping off Blümchen at Miss Wetzel’s back door and declining a cup of chocolate and a bun, Rima ran up the back stairs, pushed open the Christophers’ unlocked kitchen door, and slipped inside. Paul awaited her. They kissed. For long moments, all was silence. Then, in the middle of the kiss, Hubbard uttered a loud guffaw. Rima leaped in her skin.

“I warned you,” Paul said. “He does that when he’s writing. But if we walked into his room he wouldn’t know we were there.”

They were whispering as always. Paul led her through the reception rooms—strange misshapen sculptures, a grand piano with music open on the rack, bright upholstery, Persian carpets that looked very old. Expressionist paintings and drawings that looked like cartoons hung on every wall. A large studio drawing depicted a young nude, a girl not much older than Rima, who looked boldly at the artist and seemed to be in the very early stages of pregnancy. She was the woman who had gotten into Heydrich’s Daimler.

“My mother when she was nineteen,” Paul said. “And me before I was born, I’m told. Does it shock you?”

“No. It’s beautiful.” She went closer and read the artist’s signature. “Who is Zaentz?”

“He was well-known in Berlin not so long ago. Most of these pictures were made by friends.”

“But these friends no longer come here?”

“No, they’ve all left Germany.”

“So the Christophers are alone.”

“Not quite,” Paul said, touching her.

They walked down the hallway to Paul’s room. He had turned off the electric light and closed the curtains, so it was dark.

“Can we have a lamp?” Rima asked. “I must be able to see you.”

He switched on his reading lamp. The room, half in shadow, took form—shelves of books, stacks of magazines, record albums, photographs taken in America, in France, in the Alps, in Rügen, all showing Paul in the company of his parents and what Rima took to be other relations. The stuffed head of a wild boar hung over his desk.

“What in the name of God is that?” she asked.

Paul explained. Schloss Berwick, the house on the island of Rügen in which his mother’s Uncle Paulus and Aunt Hilde lived, stood in a grove of beech trees. When Paul was twelve, his great-uncle had taken him on his first boar hunt. They rode out before dawn, hoping to catch the animals unawares as they fed on the beechnuts that had fallen to the ground. They found half a dozen pigs feasting on the nuts and, on
Paulus’s command, charged them at the gallop through the morning mist, smooth gray tree trunks whizzing by. A boar charged Paul’s horse as he charged it. He killed it with a lucky thrust between the shoulder blades. Paulus dismounted, bled the trophy, and smeared Paul’s cheek with the blood of his first kill.

“Charming,” Rima said. “And this is the lucky boar?”

She inspected everything, then wound up the gramophone, chose a record, put it on the turntable, and lifted the needle onto the spinning wax record. This time the band was not Benny Goodman’s but Tommy Dorsey’s, playing “Getting Sentimental Over You.” They danced in stocking feet so as not to make Blümchen, whose play room was directly below, start barking.

When the song ended, Rima took the pins from her hair and shook it out, then took Paul firmly by the hand and led him to the bed. Sex was not a mystery to him. His parents had always been frank with him and he had read descriptions of the act in novels and looked at the cartoons and photographs that were passed around at school. Rima, however, had technical knowledge. She had read her father’s medical books, and of course she knew her own body as no one else, not even Paul, ever could. She was the initiator, the guide. She was nimble in bed as in everything else. She had no shyness. She asked for what she wanted. She made rapturous noises that astonished Paul as much as the pleasure of the act itself, but not as much as the way in which the passionate love he already felt for this girl expanded within him until he felt nothing else, thought of nothing else, wanted nothing else, and finally was aware of nothing else. Rima trembled, she wept, she cried out. She amazed him.

All morning they lay in bed, whispering. They completed Rima’s daydream by dancing, but in this perfect real world with no sheet wrapped around her body. She drew Paul back to the bed. They made love. They fell asleep, awoke, they made love again. They were enclosed in an atmosphere of their own mingled scent, each other’s skin, each other’s senses.

“Nothing like this will ever happen to us again,” Rima said.

Had anyone but Rima uttered these words they would have
sounded to Paul like a line from the movies, but he knew that what she said was true, that he would never make love again, no matter how far in the future, without remembering Rima. Whatever happened, this hour would haunt him for the rest of his life. He wept. Rima, dry-eyed now, smiled down at him. She said softly, “Oh, my love.”

At noon precisely, Rima knocked on Miss Wetzel’s kitchen door and heard a volley of soprano barks on the other side. Miss Wetzel threw open the door. “See her little tail wag?” she said. “Blümchen is waiting for you. Already she likes you.”

Rima followed the same route to the Tiergarten as before, and as before, Blümchen scolded every living thing she encountered. Rima did not try to stop her. She was wrapped in contentment. Her heart was peaceful, she had never been so happy, she saw no end to this overwhelming bliss as long as she and Paul could be together. To feel like this every day—imagine! She had been warned by women and by books that the first experience for a girl was painful, ugly, bloody and brutal. They had lied.

 7 

Just as she reached the park, at eleven minutes after noon, Rima was arrested. She was standing on the sidewalk near the bridle path, more or less on the spot where she had observed Lori getting into the gleaming Daimler earlier in the day. Blümchen attacked the Berlin policeman who took Rima into custody, yapping and nipping at his boots and wrapping her leash around his ankles. The portly cop lifted his feet as if stepping out of somebody else’s underwear and cursed loudly.

“Under arrest?” Rima said. “For what?” It was a pointless question. Everyone knew that no one in the Reich had a right to know why he or she was being arrested. But for a moment, snatched so rudely from her reverie, Rima thought that the policeman might be taking her into custody because he had been attacked by Blümchen.

“Control your dog!” the policeman said.

She gave the cop an astonished grin. Ear-tips to toes, Blümchen was
no more than seven inches tall. The policeman took Rima by the arm and set off down the sidewalk. Blümchen continued to dance around the two of them, barking incessantly and lunging at the policeman. The policeman kicked at the dog. Blümchen counterattacked, sinking its needle teeth into the burnished leather of his boot. Despite the desperation she felt, or maybe because of it, Rima was overcome by giggling. She was only sixteen, after all, and whatever she had said to Paul in the American church, she did not really think, especially on this particular morning, that she was going to die. Not at her age, not when she had just learned that human happiness was so deep, so sweet, such a surprise.

At the police station Rima was booked and made to hand over the contents of her bag and pockets, and also Blümchen. “That dog belongs to Miss Wetzel of number eleven Gutenbergstrasse,” she said. “I am only the dog walker. If the dog is not back on time, the owner will be frantic.” No one in the police station seemed to hear anything she said.

In another room, Rima was stripped and searched by a gaunt unsmiling female with a man’s gruff voice who smelled of decaying teeth and strong antiseptic. This woman put a finger between Rima’s legs, shook it disgustedly and washed her hands. Then she pointed to the sink and shouted, “Wash yourself!”

After Rima was dressed, the woman marched her back to the booking room. To the elderly policeman in charge she said in a loud voice, “No contraband discovered! Evidence of very recent fornication noted!”

Every sentence this woman uttered ended in an exclamation point. The elderly policeman, silent and expressionless, dipped his steel pen in an ink well and entered her words in his log.

Rima expected to be locked in a cell, but she was told instead to sit at a table in classroom posture—feet flat on the floor, knees together, hands folded, spine vertical but not touching the back of the chair, head erect, eyes straight ahead. Holding this position required strength, alertness, stamina. It made the mind as well as the body ache. It made the urethra burn. It had kept generations of children in order. It had been invented by an evil genius.

After a long time, much more than an hour, the gaunt female, now wearing a wide leather belt from which a truncheon dangled, told Rima in ringing tones to stand up. She then placed her in handcuffs, took her by the arm and marched her to a back door. Outside, an Opel sedan waited. It was black like the Daimler and gleaming with wax, but smaller. A man in civilian clothes sat at the wheel. Rima got into the backseat as ordered. The woman got in beside her. The windows were curtained. There were no inside door handles. Rima’s hands were cuffed together behind her back. The thick cloth upholstery was dappled where it had had been spot-cleaned over and over again. Like the woman beside Rima, it smelled of strong disinfectant.

They drove through city streets to another back door. Her handcuffs were removed. Another woman, this one broad and muscular, took custody of Rima. She walked her down a corridor, unlocked a door, and pointed a finger. Rima walked into a small windowless room. It was no larger than a closet and devoid of furniture apart from a bulb inside a wire cage screwed to the ceiling. The woman said, “After the door is closed, remain standing.” Rima said, as if to a teacher, “May I please go to the lavatory?” The woman did not answer. She closed the door behind Rima and locked it. The light went out. The darkness was complete.

Rima walked around the room, feeling the walls with her palms, counting her steps. She had no idea why she did this, but when she was done she knew that the room was three and a half steps long and a little more than two steps wide. This knowledge seemed important; at least she knew something about her situation. She wondered what time it was. The police had taken her lavalier watch along with her other belongings and she would not have been able to see the watch even if she still had it, but she missed it. She tried to remember how many times she had looked at her watch that day. The answer was many more than usual. She had checked the time at least once a minute while waiting for the hour of her rendezvous with Paul. After that she forgot about the invention of watches. She put a hand over her mouth, afraid that she might sob with the giddy joy of the memory of that morning. She was sure that this little black room was equipped with hidden
microphones, almost certainly with a judas hole through which prisoners could be observed.

Rima was bone-tired. She lay down on the floor. A loud knock at the door awakened her. A voice shouted, “Remain standing at all times!” She stood up, expecting the door to open, the light to go on, for whatever that was going to happen to start happening. But nothing happened. She leaned against the wall, hoping for sleep. Again, just as she was drifting off, came another knock on the door. It was earsplitting. Obviously her keepers wanted Rima to know that they could see her in the dark.

 8 

By the time the light came on again, hours later, Rima was barely able to stand. Her entire body trembled, she was sweating. Her bones, her entire skeleton, ached. Her head throbbed. She had a stomachache. She was desperately thirsty and at the same time frantic to urinate. The combination of remaining upright, remaining awake, trying to make saliva, and preventing herself from emptying her bladder had numbed her mind. She was having great difficulty thinking about anything except urination. The hours in the dark literally had unbalanced her. She staggered, and now that she could see her own body again she had to remember how to stand upright. She could not tell which way was up, which down, which sideways. She was nauseated.

A woman in uniform whom Rima had not seen before opened the door. Like the others before her she was unsmiling, but she was younger. She was slim, nice-looking, sisterly, with large blue eyes with a light in them that might have been kindness.