The German Woman Read online

  “My God,” Horst had said. “Not the Jews.”

  “Who else?” Kate said.

  “But that makes no sense. Half the Reds are Jews.”

  True, but nothing now made sense. What were they doing in a slaughterhouse basement, and why had Jews had their hands cut off? Perhaps they’d simply been unlucky, guessing that the Whites were coming and hastily whitewashing crosses on their doors, only to be confronted with furious Reds, who viewed them as traitors. And everyone knew the Red army had one rule for turncoats and captured prisoners: extermination.

  Kate had heard of a train near the frontlines at Kiev, in the Ukraine, that had held wounded Whites and their nurses. Four cars had become detached, and as they rolled downhill toward the Bolshevik camp, steadily picking up speed, nurses and prisoners alike had committed suicide, knowing what would befall them. And yet she understood the Reds. If they were captured by Whites, part of their torture before death was to have crosses carved into their chests; the Florence Nightingale was the Whites’ joking term for it. But she and Horst weren’t even Russian, let alone Whites; surely that would count for something. She stopped and listened, heard nothing, and, to keep her mind from turning inward, her mood from darkening further, she began to pace again, boots shuffling across the uneven dirt, frozen fingers trailing over the rough cold stone.

  “Oh, Horst,” she said. Even in the dim light his face looked horribly swollen, and his coat was covered with blood.

  “What?” He looked down. “Oh, this. The hospital, remember? The wounded Russian. The blood’s not mine.”

  “But your face,” she said. Though she knew it must hurt, she found herself running her hands over his skin to be sure it wasn’t charred.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s not that bad, I think. Nothing broken.”

  “Forgive me,” she said, trying to explain her sudden tears. “This only just started. It’s relief, you see? I thought you wouldn’t come back.”

  He comforted her until they heard footsteps approaching, then he pulled back and told her they had to hurry.

  “We’re to be shot as spies,” he said. “I’ve asked for a priest to confess to.”

  “But we’re not Catholic.”

  “They don’t know that. It might give us a little time. I’m certain they haven’t any handy, and they only considered it because I’m a doctor. Do your best to act the part.”

  The footsteps stopped at the door, the handle turned; someone waited on the other side. For what? At last the door was thrown open and a man stood looking down at them, a backlit, cutout figure in black. She couldn’t see his face, but posture and uniform identified him as an officer. Her heart beat so hard it seemed about to escape the narrow confining cage of her ribs; her throat was dry; she wanted to scream.

  “Yes,” he said in German, and nodded. “I thought so. You two. Come.” He summoned her with his hand, and as she started reluctantly up the stairs, she felt her final hope extinguished.

  “Quickly,” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Or you’ll die here.”

  Horst hung back for a moment, looking at him, while Kate, perceiving a threat, hurried. She felt herself shrinking, floating free from her quivering body, watched herself mount the stairs as if from a vast height, no longer intimately connected with what was about to occur. Would they be shot against the wall or somewhere else in town? Her mind turned over the possibilities as calmly as if she were choosing a picnic spot. Nearer the cemetery, perhaps, so no one would have to transport their bodies, or would they not even be buried, left above ground, food for dogs and ravens? Every day for three months the previous summer, she’d eaten sitting on a stone wall, ignoring the nearby skeletal remains of a horse. How easily one came to accept the death of others, yet it seemed unfair not to know where she would spend eternity. Should she run, scream? Horst’s calm presence prevented her from doing so.

  She stood blinking in the slanting sunlight, trying not to fall. Early afternoon; Horst had been gone much longer than she’d thought. She couldn’t make out what Horst was saying; her ears seemed muffled in gauze. She turned toward their accompanying officer and was stunned to recognize him, his red round cheeks and redder nose. Months before, he’d been a patient, though then as a Polish officer. Pymzyl, Porst, something. She was about to say so when he leaned toward her face and yelled, “Silence!”

  Horst, who must have recognized him sooner, nodded at the other soldiers nearby.

  “I will bring you to division,” the officer said, then turned and limped away.

  Probst. Yes, that had been it.

  One of the soldiers, who was missing an eye, understood German. “We were to shoot them, Dimitry,” he said.

  “And we will.” Probst shoved Horst toward a waiting staff car, a German one, its door painted over with a white royal Polish eagle, the eagle in turn covered with a thin, amateurish Soviet hammer and sickle. “The Germans have been very clever in leaving spies behind. We’ll interrogate these two first. Who knows who else is in our midst?”

  They were in the car before the soldier could respond, though as they started out, he pulled open a rear door and swung himself in next to Kate and shut the door as they sped away.

  They headed into the white abandoned countryside, traveling in near silence, Probst up front with the driver, giving directions in Polish. Black patches of forest broke the white rolling bleakness and twice they passed through deserted towns, their houses, church steeples, and factory chimneys all coated white, as if constructed of snow and ice. The road bisected a field marked with hundreds of small wooden crosses from some forgotten battle, most with their writing obliterated, and then passed a series of telegraph poles papered over with bright yellow posters instructing scavengers to turn in what they found to military authorities and warning them that if they didn’t, they’d be shot. Beyond came the response: miles of broken guns, field kitchens, ammunition carts, sleighs, and abandoned rifles that no one had bothered to scavenge. From a shell hole filled with frozen water three hands stuck up, like fins.

  Kate studied Probst’s profile. Yes, it was really him. He’d come to their hospital with a fellow officer of the newly constituted Polish army, a nearly dissolved bag of salt tucked into one of his wounds and the wound sewed closed, which meant he’d been in a Soviet hospital; the barbaric, painful custom was their preferred method for sterilizing wounds. She’d said nothing about it at the time.

  She should have, she thought, watching his still face against the endless white fields; he wouldn’t be about to kill them now, though that was foolish, she realized; it would simply be someone else. Still. His fellow officer had been suffering from influenza, so far gone he was cyanotic, hands, lips, and eyes all indigo. His nose had spurted blood, as had his ears, the epistaxis a sure sign of approaching death, and though they’d done what they could to comfort him, he’d had subcutaneous emphysema, air pockets just beneath the skin from ruptured lungs, something she’d never seen before and that caused him unbearable pain. When they rolled him to change his sheets or to wash him, his skin crackled like breaking ice; in the end they’d not moved him at all.

  Probst’s less painful wounds had been equally peculiar. As she’d scanned his hip and leg with the fluoroscope, marking blue Xs on his skin to show Horst where to cut, she’d picked up the clear impressions of sprockets and dials and shutters, prisms, screws, and springs, from the camera he’d been carrying that had been blown into his leg and down his femur to the knee. No doubt Horst had missed a few, explaining his current limp.

  During his recovery he’d told stories to make the other soldiers laugh. The one she remembered best involved a peasant market, where he’d inquired of a fishmonger the price of a carp and then bought it. “This is mine now?” he’d said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “And I may do whatever I like with it?”

  “Certainly, Your Honor.”

  At which point he’d slapped her across the face with the fish and run off laughi
ng. The officers had all laughed, but Kate doubted his new comrades would find it so funny. That poor woman, she’d thought at the time. By now she was perhaps luckily dead.

  They drove through miles of black forest, their engine noise echoing from the dense trees, the light almost disappearing, and emerged into a valley, the bright blinding snow piled high on both sides of the car, plumes blowing into the blue sky from tufted crests. Again and again they rose up hills and dropped into valleys, and she had a sense that they weren’t really moving, that they were on a stage set, a loop of pretend hills and a fake ribbon of road that might never end. How far were they going? She tried to catch Horst’s eye without calling attention to herself, but the car was getting colder, and, shivering, Kate couldn’t help bumping against the one-eyed soldier, who glared before pushing her away and saying something in Russian to Probst.

  “Da,” Probst said, and pointed through the windshield at an upcoming crossroads.

  “Here,” he said in German as they came to the turn, “and here,” he said at the next one, which brought them to an abandoned house and a ruined stone barn, an armored car sitting between them.

  The soldier grew agitated. Hands gesticulating, face reddening, he stepped out and asked a series of questions in Russian. Probst ignored him, retrieving a shovel from the trunk. The soldier hectored him with a rising voice, pointing at Kate and Horst, until the engine of the armored car started up, after which the driver came around from behind it and in German asked the one-eyed soldier for a cigarette.

  “What?” the soldier said, turning to face him. “But you already have one.”

  Probst nearly decapitated him with the shovel, holding it sideways like a sword as he swung. For a few seconds the Russian’s body didn’t seem to react, then he swayed and fell to his knees before tumbling backward with his arms outstretched, his legs tucked beneath him. The driver stepped on his face, pushing his head into the bloodstained snow, flicked his cigarette on him, and moved off.

  “Hurry,” Probst said, and pulled Kate away from the doorway of the ruined barn, where she’d been staring at a pile of German officers’ brass belt buckles, wondering what it meant. They were moving toward the armored car. “We haven’t much time.”

  From inside the armored car he retrieved a fur coat. Kate ignored the dried blood gumming its hem and put it on. They got in and started off, the heavy car clanking as it jerked forward; even at low speeds, it was too loud to talk and excruciatingly hot, but Kate was afraid to take off the coat. Sweating, chilled, she covered her ears with her hands and sat back against the hot metal.

  The car stopped and Probst threw open the back door for air. They were near a town that had been shelled, its houses blasted open, tables still set for dinner. What was left of the town seemed to have been taken over by inmates from an asylum. Men in dresses and top hats were pushing walls over; dozens of others tore thatch off roofs, smashed windows and flowerpots and doors with hammers, tied ropes to the beams of houses and yanked them down, and threw chamber pots and kitchen pots and pianos from windows. Smoke and dust rose from every heap. Other men, already drunk, collars open, beltless and barefoot despite the cold, lay on the ground. The sanest-seeming men were carrying chickens under their arms or pushing perambulators filled with wine bottles on the roads out of town. Two were pulling a feather bed in different directions until it ripped and added its contents to the blizzard of feathers in the air.

  A Jew had had his stomach slit, his small intestine pulled out through a tiny opening and nailed to a post, and now the Red soldiers stood beating him, making him circle the post, the intestine a thin blue snake slithering out of his stomach as he ran. Above them, three soldiers threw pried-up roof tiles to the pavement below, not caring whether they hit their comrades, and beyond them more Jews’ bodies were laid out in a circle like numbers on a clock, faces toward the center, a man in the middle swiveling and urinating into their open mouths. Nothing from the war or from its aftermath prepared Kate for this depravity.

  Probst’s face darkened. “We’d planned to go around this town. The German lines are on the other side of it, but I’m afraid we’ll have to go through it.”

  Kate was horrified to find herself cheered by his words; he seemed intent on killing. The armored car clanked over cobbles. Smoke filtered in, and feathers from the ruined bedding, the smell of charred flesh. Probst cocked the machine gun and began shooting at the worst offenders, the terrific rattling noise of the gun and of the spent shells clattering on the corrugated metal floor joining in with the general mayhem of crashing houses and breaking bottles and artillery salvos from the German lines. Bullets ricocheted off cobbles and brick, sank into houses, ripped into bodies; Kate realized she’d been screaming only when her jaw began to hurt.

  The urinating soldier looked straight at them, seemingly unaware that they’d been shooting. Plaster dust coated his face, giving him a waxy complexion, and Probst shot him. Then others, as the driver crushed still more against the buildings. All of it was appalling, everything her glance touched, and when she closed her eyes most appalling of all was the eagerness for destruction she’d felt only minutes before.

  They stopped beyond the town and got out, blinking in the smoky sunlight. The German artillery had zeroed in, and as the salvos began, the houses disappeared beneath the incoming rounds as if they’d been sucked into the earth, the enormous cones of the shell bursts brown and white when they hit a garden, red when they struck the brick houses. She almost couldn’t hear it; had her eardrums been punctured? She wanted the town wiped off the Earth, hoped that no one would ever remember what had happened there.

  “That way,” Probst said, pointing toward the river. Rivulets of sweat had marked lighter channels through his smoke-blackened face. “The Germans are just beyond it.”

  “Are you going back?” Horst said. His swollen face was blackened too, as her own must have been; to others they would all look like devils freshly escaped from hell. Her teeth chattered, and she wrapped herself more tightly in the coat, then scooped up a handful of snow and began rubbing her face clean.

  “Certainly,” Probst said. “Those soldiers were drunk. They won’t remember me.”

  “You saw what they did,” Kate said, scrubbing at her skin. “You’ll remember.”

  “Believe me, the Whites have done worse. They were evil, but not all Bolsheviks are. I understand them.”

  “That they’re savages?”

  “That they have no hope left save the hope of revenge. What they’re doing here, as horrible as it seems, is nothing compared to what’s been done to their homes.” He looked at her. “By Germans, in some cases.”

  Horst said, “You’ll be killed if you go back. Shooting your own men.”

  “Perhaps. If we don’t go back, the issue is already decided.” He held his hands up. “In any case, it’s an accident of war. And you see, most of them are dead now anyway, and so will not be able to testify, while I, bravely, have advanced toward the enemy.”

  He turned to Kate. “If recaptured, you’ll be shot. Don’t stop to help anyone, no matter how badly wounded they seem.”

  Horst shook his hand but neither he nor Kate thanked him, and without another word they turned and walked toward the bridge, on the other side of which flapped a German flag.

  “Horst,” she said, stopping as they came in sight of the ice, red in the slanting light, like a river of frozen blood.

  “I know.” He pressed his hand to her back and forced her forward. “It’s a trick of light, that’s all. Hurry. We have to cross.”

  KATE JOLTED AWAKE as the train slowed near another ruined town—makeshift wooden crosses tilted inside broken rooms, names scrawled on doors, a landscape of the dead—and stopped beside a shattered barn with a row of horse skeletons still tethered to iron rings. Was all of Pomerania destroyed? When their field hospital had first come to the region, four years before, it had been bountifully bucolic; she’d thought they might eventually settle among its hills and lak
es and picturesque towns. Now it looked as if it had endured a hundred years of fighting.

  Dammvorstadt. She didn’t remember it from before the war. The compartment’s outside door opened and a blond woman was standing beside the tracks next to her even blonder crippled daughter, who was in her late teens, Kate guessed, only a few years younger than herself. Horst stepped down to help her from her wheelchair.

  “If you could just get her to a seat,” her mother said, her German inflected with the slightest Polish accent.

  Kate stood as Horst began pulling up the girl by her arm; she made noises in her throat like a wounded animal.

  “Sorry,” Horst said.

  The girl blushed as Kate gripped her under her arms and Horst lifted. Even with her useless legs she seemed almost unmarked by the war—glossy hair, smooth skin—a touch of the miraculous that pleased Kate. She wore layers of clothes, at least two dresses and two long coats.

  “Sit here,” Kate said, sliding the girl to the seat she herself had vacated. “This corner is warm.” Which was true; the steam pipes’ meager heat seemed least meager there, though it would be many long minutes before the compartment warmed up again now that they’d had the door open.

  The mother climbed in once her daughter was settled and sat down next to her. “You’re too kind. We’re fine, just happy to be going west. Is Berlin home for you?”

  “Hamburg,” Kate said. “My husband’s home.”

  “Not yours?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  The woman waited but Kate did not go on; there was no point in it. “And you?” Kate asked the girl, shifting the conversation away from herself. “You have relatives in Berlin?”

  The girl nodded and fiddled with the scarves at her throat—the top one a beautiful fawn-colored paisley—and Kate wondered if she was another whistler.