Christopher Reich - The Runner

She’d visited Egon at the Villa Ludwig soon afterward to ask for more money and it seemed he’d been waiting for the request. Yes, he’d smiled cloyingly, he’d be happy to loan her some money. Say, five thousand marks should she accompany a visiting dignitary and ensure he had an enjoyable dinner. “Whatever’s necessary, Ingrid. I’m sure you and Field Marshal Scheerner will get along famously. After all,it is what you do best.” And to underscore his meaning, or being Egon, just to be rude, he’d pinched her rump and blown her a harlot’s kiss. Furious and utterly humiliated, she’d slapped him across the face and sworn never to speak with him again.

But the sight of Pauli wolfing down his meager meal made her question whether she’d been rash, if pride had taken precedent over necessity. Momentarily she was paralyzed with fear. What would happen when she could no longer barter for fresh butter and chickens and red cabbage on the black market? The wine would only take her so far. One month, perhaps two. Then how would she feed Pauli? With more sausage stuffed with sawdust? Bread levened with sand?

She stood so abruptly that her son let go a frightened cry.

Keep moving, a fevered voice inside her commanded. Don’t look behind you!

Forcing a smile to her face, she told him she must look in on Grandpapa and fled the room. She ran up the back staircase, loosening the serving apron from her neck. Reaching the first floor landing, she rested her head against the wall. Deep breaths did little to ease her anxiety. It wasn’t fair that she should be expected to support the household to do the cooking, the cleaning, the mending, and the caring for her father and her child. She was a Bach, dammit! There were others to do those jobs.

Keep moving! Responded the voice, but now it sounded as scared as she.

I can’t, she whimpered.I don’t want to. Then came the scariest rejoinder of all, the one that haunted her more as each day passed and her family’s circumstances worsened.Why? If there’s nothing to look forward to, why?

Frightened by her dark thoughts, she drew herself upright and wiped at her eyes. Somehow her tears eased her anxiety and when she reached the door to her father’s bedroom, she had regained not only her composure but her confidence. She rested for a few seconds, gathering her breath and finding her courage. Her fingers danced through her hair, guiding stray locks to their place as if by intuition. Closing her eyes, she offered a brief prayer that today would be a good one for her father. Then she knocked and opened the door.

The room was dark. The labored huff and sigh of her father’s breathing rose from the bed. Alfred Bach was still asleep. She drew the curtains, then rolled up the blinds and threw open a window. Sunlight burst into the room as a gust of wind invigorated the still air.

“Good morning, Papa,” she said, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

The old man’s eyes fluttered, then opened. “Good morning.”

Ingrid smiled. He said “good morning” no matter what time of day one greeted him. “How was your sleep? Did you see Mama in your dreams?”

“Good morning,” he said again.

Ingrid kept her smile in place, but her heart sank. Illness had shrunk him. The outline of his frame hardly showed under the duvet. “Good morning,” she whispered.

Every so often her father had moments of clarity. “ Aujhellungen ,” the doctor called them. The term denoted a clearing of the clouds. On those days, Papa would be himself again, barking orders left and right, complaining about his arthritis, cursing that nincompoop Hitler’s decision to delay the invasion of Russia so that he could take a vacation in the Balkans. She had hoped today might be one of those occasions.

Alfred Bach lurched forward and Ingrid’s hands dropped to the sturdy restraints hanging from the bedside. “Ingrid, my darling daughter,” he said. “How I love you.

She released the ties. “I love you, too, Papa.”

“How is Bobby?” Always the question about her husband. “He’s fine.”

“Is he coming to the party?”

Ingrid smiled coyly. Lately, her father had gotten it into his head that every day was his birthday. “I’m so sorry, Papa, but Bobby cannot come. His squadron is stationed in the east. He’s probably flying right—”

“No, no,” interrupted Alfred Bach. “He must be on his estate. He’s a Graf , after all. Don’t forget that. His responsibility is to his land. A man must keep his eye on things.”

Alfred Bach loved his son-in-law’s vast tracts of land in eastern Pomerania almost as much as the title that had accompanied them. Graf Robert Friedrich von und zu Wilimovsksy. And, of course, she was the Grafin , though her claim to the title was dubious now that the Red Army had seized her husband’s estates.

They were a pair, the Wilimovskys and the Bachs. Two of Germany’s fabled families, one destitute and ruined, the other soon to be.

She’d known Bobby her entire life. He was a dark, willowy boy — she’d never been able to think of him as a man — who loved sleek boats, fast cars and faster airplanes. But, he was no playboy. God, no. He’d neither drunk nor smoked. To her chagrin, he hadn’t even liked sex very much. He’d proposed at midnight, New Year’s Eve, 1939, at the Bristol in Berlin, Reichsmarschall Goering standing close by as his second. Maybe it was the champagne or his dancing brown eyes or the fact that earlier in the day she’d learned she was carrying a child. Whatever the reason, she’d said yes, then and there. She had loved Bobby very much. But she hadn’t been in love with him. At least not then, and — if she were to keep to the morning’s theme of unblinking introspection maybe not ever.

Erich had stolen that from her. Not the ability to love so much as the capacity to trust that was love’s necessary antecedent. She saw him now as he always visited her, dressed in his formal evening attire, blond hair swept sternly from his forehead, bronzed skin glowing in contrast to his blackest of black uniforms. A gold medallion hung from his neck, an award bestowed by the Fuhrer that very evening to honor the Fatherland’s finest athlete. A year after his defeat at the Olympic Games, Erich Seyss had regained his country’s adulation, winning three events at the European Championships, all by decisive — or as Adolf Hitler lauded in toasting him — “Germanic” margins.

He wasn’t the handsomest man she’d ever seen, perhaps not even in the room that night, but he possessed about him a stillness, a composure that was its own attraction. He smiled reluctantly, as if humor were a commodity in short supply. He had the gift of patience, of making others come to him and not speaking until one wasn’t sure whether he’d even heard a word you’d blathered in that first gush of hellos and congratulations and generally shameless fawning. But the most alluring of all his qualities was his confidence, unalloyed and unspoken. To everyone who saw him that night in Berlin, seated on the dais to the Fuhrer’s left, he was, of course, the new Germany. The Fatherland reborn.

And when he appeared at her side late in the evening, not only smiling but bowing as he requested the next waltz, his diamond blue eyes riveted upon her as if she were more valuable than any medal, she broke her every coquette’s precept and agreed immediately.

He was a wonderful dancer.

That had been eight years ago, Ingrid realized, almost to the day.

“Bobby won’t be coming to the party tonight,” she said to her father. “But I’ve invited all your friends. The Mellars, the Klinsmans, the Schroeders.”

A drawer in the nearest cabinet housed her father’s medication. Lidocaine to be injected twice daily. Aspirin. Morphine for the days when his pain was unbearable. She had no medicine to sharpen his mind. She administered the lidocaine and made sure her father had swallowed his aspirin, then went downstairs to prepare a light breakfast for him.