The Other Side of Love (57 page)

Groener immediately threw the past into the open.

“Nothing like my swank quarters in PrinzAlbrechtstrasse, eh, Kathe?”

he asked.

“Sit down, both of you, sit down.”

Aubrey pulled out a chair for Kathe, but remained standing, his hands clasped loosely behind him, his thin legs apart, a military at-ease position.

Groener sat at the desk, showing uneven teeth in his cocky grin.

“So, Captain? You told Loock you had business?”

“Groener”

Aubrey started.

“It’s Schwagermann now. Let me guess why you’re here. You’ve heard about my game and you want a bit of what Amis call

“the action”, isn’t that it? So you’ve brought your trump card. Kathe. Well, Captain, don’t expect too large a cut. This isn’t your zone. And my connections at headquarters go all the way to the top.”

“Your blackmarket operation doesn’t interest me. A little information is all I want.”

Groener’s smile faded.

“One rule goes with me. I never deal against the Amis.”

“Nothing to do with them. My cousin wants to know about”

“Cousin, pah!”

Groener interrupted.

“You’ve got yourself a pretty blonde Schatzi. Kathe warms your bed.”

“You’re well aware that Fraulein Kingsmith’s father was English, Groener, so why should an English cousin be such a strange pill to swallow?”

Groener eyed Aubrey thoughtfully.

“Forgive me, Captain Kingsmith,”

he said after a pause.

“I’m not normally forgetful or stupid. But Kathe has that effect on a man.”

“Fraulein Kingsmith wishes to know what happened to the child born at Villa Haug in April of 1940.”

Groener’s sharp inhalation sucked at the candle-flames, and enormous shadows danced across the plywood halls.

“So you told him about our boy, Kathe,”

he reproached.

“Where is he?”

Aubrey asked.

Groener shifted the candlesticks towards them so that his face was obscured.

“One of your brave bombardiers dumped his load on a Bavarian farm. My wife, my little Otto, my Adolf were killed.”

The heavy shoulders were slumped.

“I have only this child. To be absolutely frank, I’ve been mulling in my mind whether I should find him and get him back.”

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‘It’s as you say.”

Aubrey used a conversational tone.

“There are certain Americans who have a vested interest in not seeing you exposed as a war criminal”

“I served my country, and just as honourably as you served yours, Captain Kingsmith.”

“At that party in Berlin,”

Kathe said hoarsely,

“I heard you and Hannalore’s father talking about slave labour. You’d end up in the dock at Nuremberg.”

“On what evidence? The word of a woman involved with the OKW against the word of a decent de-Nazified German?”

Aubrey had taken out a small leather memo-pad.

“They wouldn’t believe Kathe. But from where I sit I can see a great many questions about Herr Schwagermann and Hauptsturmbannfiihrer Groener. We’re talking about an investigation, a full-scale CIC investigation.”

“Is this blackmail?”

“Just give us the child’s surname, and where he is.”

“That’s all?”

Unhappiness etched Groener’s voice.

“You’re asking me to give up my son.”

“He’s Kathe’s son.”

Groener sat, his head slumped on to his thick chest. After a few seconds, he muttered:

“Reinhard and Fulda Detten.”

“Detten.”

Aubrey jotted the names.

“Where do they live?”

“After the surrender they moved to Darmstadt.”

“Are they still in Darmstadt?”

“I haven’t contacted them.”

“Has Detten changed his name?”

“My guess is he’s still there and still Reinhard Detten.”

Groener looked up at Kathe. Tve prayed for thťoy.”

Through her haze of joy, Kathe felt an irrational flicker of sympathy for her enemy.

369

i

On the road out of Hochst they were pulled over by a pair of young MPs, politely informed that it wasn’t safe to travel by night, and directed to a former Hitler Youth hostel where there was a small dormitory for women. Rathe, burning with impatience, hadn’t believed she could sleep, yet as soon as she stretched on the wooden bunk she was out. She awoke to another gloomy day. In her excitement the layers of clouds had a wild beauty.

She chafed while they crawled along ruined stretches of the road. They didn’t reach Darmstadt until mid-afternoon. The year’s first snow was falling. The fat lazy flakes turned to slush as they hit the narrow cleared trail that meandered through the heaped rubble.

Atop the hill near what remained of the Darmstadt town hall, the few standing structures bustled with Military Government personnel. A chubby WAG bounced ahead of them along narrow corridors, jumping up creaking staircases. She left them alone in a dank attic room filled with tall American-made filing cabinets.

Kathe pulled open the De drawer, then her hand dropped nervelessly.

“Would you look, Aubrey?”

Drawing a breath, Aubrey rapidly flipped the manila folders.

“Thank God,”

he whispered, removing three.

The Dettens, Reinhard and Fulda, both holders of Card 6, the so-called Death Card that entitled the bearer to 800 calories a day, lived on Sohnerstrasse with their fiveyear-old son, Erich. Since Reinhard had responded to Question 41 on his Fragebogen in the

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affirmative, yes, he had been a member of the Nazi Party, according to Military Government Public Law 8 he could be employed only for ordinary labour. He worked on a farm a few kilometres outside the town. Fulda cleared rubble - a Trummerfrau.

Their son, born on 10 April 1940, had been recommended for additional milk ration. His name was Erich.

The typing blurred before Kathe’s eyes, and she leaned against the cabinet for support. Until this moment she had not realized how desperately she had been keeping at bay the armies of uncertainty.

Clutching the form to her tweed coat, she gave a joyous laughing whoop.

“Eureka!”

The pudgy WAC gave them the directions to Sohnerstrasse.

“I better warn you, sir, this friend of yours”

- Aubrey had given the routine excuse of looking for his old sweetheart

“isn’t living in the Ritz. In fact that side of town gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“How could anything be worse than this?”

Kathe murmured as they drove past the children - many of them wearing rags wrapped around their feet instead of shoes - who searched for American cigarette butts in the slushy cobbles of the otherwise empty market-place.

“We shouldn’t have any difficulty convincing the Dettens that Erich will be better off with us.”

“They consider themselves his parents, Kathe.”

“You have your revolver, then.”

He smiled.

“What, kidnap him at pistol point?”

“If we have to!”

Negotiating the shell of a church, Awrey asked quietly:

“Given any consideration to what you’ll do when we get him?”

“A little. I’ll have to go back to Ober Tappenburg. But Erich … Could you - would you take him to Grandpa’s?”

“And then?”

“You said you …

“

She swallowed, flushing.

“Last week in Novikov’s house, you said you’d like me with you always. My little boy’s part of me.”

“And I want both of you. What do you think?”

As far as the family’s concerned, then, we’ll have jumped the gun by adopting a war orphan before the wedding.”

Kathe, are you positive about marrying me? I’d take your little boy to England anyway.”

She turned to him with the same joyous laugh she’d given in the attic.

“You’re the best, bravest, finest man I ever knew. You’re talented, you’re clever, you’re kind. You care already about my son. Why is it so incredible that I’d promise to marry you?”

Steering one-handed, he reached for her fingers, raising her arm

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to press his lips on the blue veins between her cuff and her glove.

“Darling,”

he said, and his voice shook.

Sohnerstrasse could be reached only by climbing a footpath over the ruins. As they left the car, the snow was falling harder, veiling the worst of the devastation, but somebody had chalked GRUESOME in block capitals and this single word said it all. The dung-coloured apartments, ugly before the war, now were either pyramids of masonry or facades behind which families had hammered together flimsy shacks. Here and there thin wisps of smoke curled above grotesquely repaired chimneys. Scrawny coughing children waited to fill containers at an old-fashioned street-pump. A desperate-faced woman emerged from a bakery, raising her empty shopping-bag like a white flag of defeat, and the queue of women plodded off hopelessly. A snow-covered mound looked suspiciously like a body.

“I don’t care what it takes,”

Kathe said. Tm getting him out of here. This afternoon.”

“There’s no choice,”

Aubrey agreed grimly.

They needed to ask directions three times before they reached the board painted Sohnerstrasse. They gave the Dettens”

number to a squint-eyed little girl listlessly scratching in the snow for twigs.

“Does anybody live there since the bombings?”

the child asked.

“It’s behind the fortune-teller’s.”

Next to a crude sign,

“Countess Romany, Palmist’, an alley of sorts had been cleared between a great slagheap of bricks and a building with its upper storeys gone. Aubrey held Kathe’s arm, cautiously eyeing the Danger warnings plastered over the singed stucco. In the few square feet that once possibly had been an airshaft they saw a propped ladder that seemingly led to nowhere.

“We must have copied the wrong numbers,”

Kathe sighed, her optimism plummeting.

“We’ll have to go back.”

“Somebody put the stepladder here. It’s worth a look. I’ll trot on up.”

Kathe was already scaling the rungs.

A ledge that protruded a few inches had hidden a wall and an interior door. Leaning forward on the ladder, Kathe tapped on the lower panel. There was no response. Climbing the final rungs, she used her left hand to balance herself on the jamb as she turned the yellowing china knob.

The tiny windowless slit must have been a boxroom. The draught stirred newspapers heaped atop a stained mattress. An upended US Army packing-crate held dishes, a battered tin jug and a handleless chamber-pot. There were no other furnishings or possessions. But what chilled Kathe’s blood was the odour. This was the unforgettable

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stench of the Berlin air-raid shelter that last week of the war, when the living had been wedged among the dead.

Legs shaking, she stumbled into the lair she couldn’t think of it as a room.

Aubrey followed her.

“Oh my God,”

he whispered. To numb his horror, he reminded himself of what he had seen in the camps: to the skeletal inmates this eight-by-eight hole with its ice-skinned pitcher of water would have seemed an earthly paradise.

Kathe wet her pale lips.

“They’ve moved. They don’t live here any

more.”

“Herr Detten’s working at the farm, Frau Detten’s chipping away at bricks, and Erich’s with her.”

Aubrey forced reassurance into his voice.

“They’ll be along soon.”

They waited below, stamping their feet on the freshly fallen snow as the tiny courtyard filled with winter twilight.

IV

A small clatter of falling debris sounded on the path, and an ancient woman shambled into sight.

Kathe gripped the strap of her handbag, unable to move or speak. This crone bore no resemblance to the plump thirtyish Hausfrau who had so proudly carried Erich down the steps of Villa Haug.

“Frau Detten?”

Aubrey asked.

“Yes, I’m Fulda Detten,”

the woman said defiantly. Clutching at her ragged coat, she stood more erect.

“And it’s too late. I’m alone now.”

“What do you mean?”

Aubrey asked.

“Alone?”

“The funeral was last week.”

W”

“Whose funeral?”

Aubrey rasped.

“My husband and my little boy.”

“Erich?”

Kathe coughed to loosen her throat muscles.

“Erich?”

“Of course you know the name!”

The words came spitting out on breath-clouds.

“Why wouldn’t you know? The Americans have sent you for their ration-cards, isn’t that it? But why did you bring the Tommi?”

“Tell me about Erich,”

Kathe whispered.

You sound like a German. May you rot in hell for swooping down on a poor woman in her hour of grief!”

Kathe made a high breathy sound.

it’s v 7?U lauShing because my Reinhard caught the mumps? Oh, your Z y”

A grCm

” man dyinS of mumps-Go ahead and split won? i y°U collaborating whore! Aren’t you happy your friends destrovS

” marvellous that the British and the Americans have ReinhJrH ~Ur,cmes *° we have