Joseph Kanon - A Good German

Jake had expected to stay two minutes, a simple question, but now sat back at the table, giving way to the inevitable visit. It was a Berlin conversation, comparing survivor lists. Greta from downstairs. The block leader who chose the wrong shelter. Frau Dzuris’ son, safe from the army, then trapped at the Siemens plant and hauled off by the Russians.

“And Emil?” Frau Dzuris said with a sidelong glance at Jake.

“I don’t know. My parents are dead,” Lena said, changing the subject.

“A raid?”

“Yes, I just heard.”

“So many, so many,” Frau Dzuris said, shaking her head, then brightened. “But to see you together again-it’s lucky.”

“Yes, for me,” Lena said with a weak smile, looking at Jake. “He saved my life. He got me medicine.”

“You see? The Americans-I always said they were good. But it’s a special case with Lena, eh?” she said to Jake, almost waggish.

“Yes, special.”

“You know, he may not come back,” she said to Lena. “You can’t blame the women. The men made the war and then it’s the women who wait. But for how long? Eva’s waiting. Well, he’s my son, but I don’t know. How many come back from Russia? And we have to eat. How will she feed the children without a man?”

Lena looked over at them still eating the chocolate, her face softening. “They’ve grown. I wouldn’t recognize them.” She seemed for a moment someone else, back in a part of her life Jake had never known, that had happened without him.

“Yes, and what’s to become of them? Living like this, potatoes only. It’s worse than during the war. And now we’ll have the Russians.”

Jake took this as an opening. “Frau Dzuris, the soldier who was looking for Lena and Emil-he was a Russian?”

“No, an Ami.”

“This man?” He handed her the picture.

“No, no, I told you before, tall. Blond, like a German. A German name even.”

“He gave you his name?”

“No, here,” she said, putting her finger above her breast, where a nameplate would have been.

“What name?”

“I don’t remember. But German. I thought, it’s true what they say. No wonder the Amis won-all German officers. Look at Eisenhower,” she said, floating it as a light joke.

Jake took the picture back, disappointed, the lead suddenly gone.

“So he wasn’t looking for Emil,” Lena said to the picture, sounding relieved.

“Something’s wrong?” Frau Dzuris said.

“No,” Jake said. “I just thought it might be this man. The American who was here-did he say why he came to you?”

“Like you-the notice in Pariserstrasse. I thought he must be a friend of yours,” she said to Lena, “from before, when you worked for the Americans. Oh, not like you,” she said, smiling at Jake. She turned to Lena. “You know, I always knew. A woman can tell. And now, to find each other again. Can I say something to you? Don’t wait, not like Eva. So many don’t come back. You have to live. And this one.” To Jake’s embarrassment, she patted his hand. “To remember the chocolate.”

It took them another five minutes to get out of the flat, Frau Dzuris talking, Lena lingering with the children, promising to come again.

“Frau Dzuris,” Jake said to her at the door, “if anyone should come—”

“Don’t worry,” she said, conspiratorial, misunderstanding. “I won’t give you away.” She nodded toward Lena, starting down the stairs. “You take her to America. There’s nothing here now.”

In the street, he stopped and looked back at the building, still puzzled.

“Now what’s the matter?” Lena said. “You see, it wasn’t him. It’s good, yes? No connection.”

“But it should have been. It makes sense. Now I’m back where I started. Anyway, who did come?”

“Your friend said the Americans would look for Emil. Someone from Kransberg, maybe.”

“But not Tully,” he said stubbornly, still preoccupied.

“You think everyone’s looking for Emil,” she said, getting into the jeep to leave.

He started around to his side, then stopped, looking at the ground. “Except the Russian. He was looking for you.”

She glanced over at him. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Trying to add two and two.” He got in the jeep. “But I need Emil to do that. Where the hell is he, anyway?”

“You were never so anxious to see him before.”

Jake turned the key. “Nobody was murdered before.”

Emil didn’t come. The next few days fell into a kind of listless waiting, looking out the window, listening for footsteps on the quiet landing. When they made love now, it seemed hurried, as if they expected someone to come through the door at any minute, their time run out. Hannelore was back, her Russian having moved on, and her presence, chattering, oblivious to the waiting, made the tension worse, so that Jake felt he was pacing even when he was sitting still, watching her lay out cards on the table hour after hour until her future came out right.

“You see, there he is again. The spades mean strength, that’s what Frau Hinkel says. Lena, you have to see her-you won’t believe it, how she sees things. I thought, you know, well, it’s just fun. But she knows. She knew about my mother-how could she know that? I never said a word. And not some gypsy either-a German woman. Right behind KaDeWe, imagine, all this time. It’s a gift to be like that. Here’s the jack again-you see, two men, just as she said.”

“Only two?” Lena said, smiling.

“Two marriages. I said one is enough, but no, she says it always comes up two.”

“What’s the good of knowing that? All during the first, you’ll be wondering about the second.”

Hannelore sighed. “I suppose. Still, you should go.”

“You go,” Lena said. “I don’t want to know.”

It was true. While Jake waited and worked the crossword puzzle in his head-Tully down, Emil across, trying to fit them together-Lena seemed oddly content, as if she had decided to let things take care of themselves. The news of her parents had depressed her and then seemed to be put aside, a kind of fatalism Jake assumed had come with the war, when it was enough to wake up alive. In the mornings she went to a DP nursery to help with the children; afternoons, when Hannelore was out, they made love; evenings she turned the canned rations into meals, busy with ordinary life, not looking beyond the day. It was Jake who waited, at loose ends.

They went out. There was music in a roofless church, a humid evening with tired German civilians nodding their heads to a scratchy Beethoven trio and Jake taking notes for a piece because Collier’s would like the idea of music rising from the ruins, the city coming back. He took her to Ronny’s, to check in with Danny, but when they got there, drunken shouts pouring out to the street, she balked, and he went in alone, but neither Danny nor Gunther was there, so they walked a little farther down the Ku’damm to a cinema the British had opened. The theater, hot and crowded, was showing Blithe Spirit, and to his surprise the audience, all soldiers, enjoyed it, roaring at Madame Arcati, whistling at Kay Hammond’s floating nightgown. Dressing for dinner, coffee and brandy in the sitting room afterward-it all seemed to be happening on another planet.

It was only when the lush color changed to the grainy black-and-white of the newsreel that they were back in Berlin-literally so, Attlee arriving to take Churchill’s place, another photo session at the Cecilienhof, the new Three arranged on the terrace just as the old Three had been that first time, before the money started blowing across the lawn. Then the Allied football game, with Breimer at the microphone winning the peace and fists raised in the end zone as the British made their unlikely score. Jake smiled to himself. In the jumble of spliced film, at least, they had won the game. The clip switched to a collapsing house. “Another kind of touchdown, as an American newsman makes a daring rescue—”