Silence

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2011 Pendragon Bielefeld

Translation copyright © 2015 Aubrey Botsford

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Previously published as
Wer das Schweigen bricht
by Pendragon Bielefeld in Germany in 2011. Translated from German by Aubrey Botsford. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.

Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781477829097
ISBN-10: 1477829091

Cover design by M.S. Corley

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014920037

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

DEDICATION

History: easy to . . .

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

CHARACTERS

THEN:

The childhood friends:

Therese Pohl . . . . . 
born 1922

Leonard Kramer . . . . . 
born 1921

Hanna Höver . . . . . 
born 1921

Jacob Kalder . . . . . 
born 1920

Alwine Kalder . . . . . 
born 1922

Wilhelm Peters . . . . . 
born 1920

Siegmund Pohl . . . . . 
Doctor, Therese Pohl’s father

Margarete Pohl . . . . . 
Therese Pohl’s mother

Gustav Höver . . . . . 
Farmer, Hanna and Paul Höver’s father

August Hollmann . . . . . 
Captain in the SS

For Peter Gogolin

History: easy to think about, difficult to see for those who experience it in their own flesh.

Albert Camus (1913–1960)

Chapter 1

November 12, 1997

How quiet. Had it always been so quiet here? Robert Lubisch stood at the window and looked out over the garden.

At the far end of the extensive grounds, the tall Douglas firs glowed, almost blue, against a milky sky. Strands of early-morning mist lay on the lawn like cotton wool, shrouding the rhododendron bushes and the plinth of the life-sized marble Diana, frozen with her bow held up in a defensive pose. She had always been thus frozen; only occasionally, when the midday summer sun fell vertically on the garden, had the stone ever glowed warm and golden.

He still remembered the day she was placed there. Part of the fence had needed to be torn down so that the truck could come into the garden. He had been eleven or twelve years old. Her robe left her right breast uncovered, and in those first few weeks, anytime he felt unobserved, he used to climb up on the plinth and run his fingers over the perfectly sculpted nipple. The slight irregularities and the smooth, cool mound beneath his fingertips had aroused his first sexual fantasies.

He imagined Diana in his small garden in Hamburg, crammed into the space between the terrace and his neighbor’s hedge. He smiled.

Too big. It was like that with everything he associated with his father. To him, Robert, everything had always seemed too big. The gestures, the house, the parties, the speeches, the demands, and the expectations.

Taking care of Diana would fall to the art and antiques dealer who had already begun to sell off the pictures, sculptures, books, and furniture. Perhaps the buyers of the house would like to keep her.

Robert Lubisch carried into the hall a box containing documents, his mother’s jewelry box, and some books he did not want to part with. A few bubble-wrapped pictures and sculptures stood against the wall. These were the things he would be taking back to Hamburg.

The decision to sell the house had been a sober and logical one, but now it hurt. He had been close to his mother, who had died six years ago, but he had never lived up to his father’s standards. And now, here in this gradually emptying house, he realized he no longer had to try; it was over. But he also realized—and here lay the pain—that he would now remain inadequate forever.

His gaze fell on the broad, mahogany-hued staircase that led from the hall up to the first floor. When he was a boy, the polished handrail had made a perfect slide.

This villa on the edge of Essen, between the Schellenberger Forest and Lake Baldeney, had been important to his father—a status symbol such as only a few could afford. Over the years, his parents had no doubt come to feel at home here, and his father had stayed on after his mother’s death. Eight bedrooms and more than three thousand square feet.

He went back into the study.

Frau Winter, the housekeeper, who had run the house for thirty years, had found his father here ten days earlier. He had been sitting in his armchair, with his reading glasses on his nose and the newspaper in his lap. “He gave the impression of being busy,” she had said on the telephone, in answer to his question as to whether he had died peacefully. “Quite busy, to the end.”

The death announcement Robert had issued in the name of the family was lost among half- and full-page notices from the city council, the Association of Displaced Persons, and the Lubisch Corporation.

More than two hundred mourners came to pay their respects. The church choir sang “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed,” and three buglers played the “Last Post” at the graveside. The wreaths were piled so high, it was almost impossible to read the inscriptions. They came from the mayor, the planning department, the city council, various companies his father had worked with, the Association of Displaced Persons, to which he had given over part of his fortune while he was still alive, and, of course, the Lubisch Corporation, which he had sold five years earlier as Lubisch Inc. The Lubisch name had remained; the old man had insisted on it.

He ran his fingers over the highly polished walnut desktop. He had not come here much since his mother’s death. Birthdays and the obligatory Easter and Christmas. His father had seen him as his successor in the construction business. When Robert decided to study medicine, he and his father had fallen out, and although they both avoided the subject in the years that followed, it had always stood between them; he heard the reproach in the old man’s voice whenever the conversation turned to the company.

His father ran the firm until his seventy-fourth year, stubbornly clinging to the belief that his son would change his mind, that he might yet “see sense.”

Robert Lubisch looked at his watch. The real estate agent was coming at nine o’clock with the first prospective buyers. If they wanted the house to be spick-and-span when they moved in, he would have to engage one of those house-clearance companies.

The term stung him; he felt coarse. What would remain of the great Friedhelm Lubisch? A company name and the symbols standing here in the hall, which he would pick up and hold in his hand in Hamburg from time to time.

He emptied out the desk drawers. At the bottom he found letters from his mother, carefully bundled together. He smiled. So his father had been like that too, the old mule. If he were still alive, he would vehemently deny this small show of sentimentality and probably claim he had kept them for his mother’s sake.

Beside the letters, he found a cigar box made of dark, fine-grained wood. Incised into an oval of mother-of-pearl set in the center of the lid, a broad-hoofed horse dragged a covered wagon. The carved words, “Brazil 100 Percent Tobacco,” had worn away. Inside, he found an SS identity card, a safe-conduct pass, and discharge papers for a prisoner of war. At the very bottom lay a sepia-tinted photograph with a serrated, yellowed border. It showed a young woman. The picture on the identity card was unrecognizable, but the signature read “Wilhelm Peters.” The safe-conduct pass bore no name. Only the discharge papers showed his father’s name.

Robert looked at the papers. The black spots on the identity card were caused by blood. His father had been from Silesia. An ordinary soldier, he had been taken prisoner just before the end of the war. But why did he have a stranger’s papers?

He heard the real estate agent’s car coming up the drive. He returned the documents to the cigar box, closed the lid, and tossed it into the cardboard box along with the photograph albums and files that he would sort out when he got home.

In Hamburg again that night, he put the box in the back corner of his study. It would be three months before he paid any further attention to it.