Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“What about Christoph? The fellow who died at Stalingrad.”

“We were lovers. But we weren’t in love. There’s a difference. Besides, he was just a boy.”

“Nothing wrong with that if you’re just a girl.”

“I know you think that. And maybe that’s what I was before. But I’m a woman now. You made that happen. Without you I’d still be giggling in cinemas. You treat me like something precious. Like I matter to you. You listen to what I have to say like you genuinely care. I can’t tell you what that means to a woman. That’s all I ever wanted. To be heard by the man I love.”

I was silent for a few moments after that. There’s nothing quite like a few loving words from a woman to make a man quiet.

“Look,” I said, “if anyone ever threatens me as a way of trying to get to you, then please tell them to go to hell. I’ll take my chances. In this life and the next.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m just saying. I’m not the one who’s important here. You are.”

“Yes, but why are you saying it?”

“There’s a war on. People say all kinds of strange things when there’s a war on.”

“All right. I understand all that. Look, has this got anything to do with Captain Hennig?”

“No,” I lied. “Nothing to do with him at all. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve seen him since that night in Spatenbrau, on the day we were married.”

“I couldn’t let anything happen to you, Bernie,” she said. “Not now. You’re such a sweet man, do you know that? You’ve given me my life.”

“Nonsense. It was yours from the beginning.”

“It’s true. No one was ever as kind to me as you’ve been. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You have to think of the baby now. Not me. Do you understand? I’m not in the least bit important beside you and the child.”

“I don’t understand. Why are you talking like this?”

“All I’m saying is that I want you to be careful, Irmela.”

“We’re surrounded by the Red Army, by Russian fighters, there’s no fuel and not much food, there are no secret weapons to rescue us, our homes are defended by the Father and Son Brigade, and you want me to be careful? You’re ridiculous, do you know that? If I didn’t love you so much I’d say you were going crazy.”

“Maybe I’m just crazy about you? Did you consider that possibility? That’s right. I’m mad about you.”

“Well, that makes two of us who are mad. It’s infectious, obviously. Give me another cigarette.”

“In my tunic.”

I hadn’t intended to give her the amber necklace but she found it when she was going through my pockets looking for cigarettes and I hadn’t the heart to tell her that it had been given to me by Erich Koch.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “For me?”

“No, I was rather thinking I might wear it myself.”

“I absolutely love it,” she said, putting on the amber necklace immediately and bounding across her bedroom to look at herself in the cheval mirror. “What do you think?” she asked, turning to face me.

I had to admit it suited her very well, a conclusion that was made easier for me by the fact that she was entirely naked at the time.

“Yes, it looks good on you.”

“You really think so?”

I smiled. “Yesterday’s newspaper would look good on you, Irmela.”

“It must have been very expensive,” she said.

Once again I felt a little awkward when I failed to admit that it had been a gift from Erich Koch and very soon afterward I started to regret I hadn’t told her the truth about the necklace, fearing Harold Hennig would do it for me and spoil things. There was no doubt about it. I had started to care for Irmela very deeply, much more than I could have imagined was even possible for a man of my age. I had no right to the love of a nice girl of twenty-three. I was almost fifty, after all; fifty years of fuckups and disappointments, which means that when you think you only have a few months of life ahead of you every minute seems to count, and every feeling becomes magnified, massively. I’d have done anything to protect her and the baby she was carrying, but it’s odd how inadequate anything like that can begin to feel. The best part of me was probably gone forever, but I could still hope to look after her.

The next day, when I walked down to Paradeplatz as usual, I found myself tailed by a black Audi. With so few cars on the snow-covered, cratered roads it was easily noticed, like a large and shiny spot of ink on a white sheet of paper. It stayed about ten meters behind me, which was another reason to notice it. I’m a fast walker. There were three men in it I didn’t recognize, but I knew that wouldn’t last. An introduction was coming whether I wanted one or not. I just hoped the freemason’s handshake wouldn’t be too painful. I kept walking in the hope that the longer I kept walking the farther away I was taking them from Irmela’s building but after another hundred meters I saw the futility of it, turned, slipped on the ice, almost falling over, and walked back to the car with as much dignity as I could muster. When I leaned down to the driver’s window I almost fell again. One of the men in the car sniggered. I knew they were Gestapo even before he flashed his brass identity disk in the palm of his hand. Only the friends of Koch and the Gestapo could get that kind of joke or, for that matter, the petrol.

“You Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“Get in,” said the man with the disk.

I didn’t argue. His wooden face had been argued with many times before, to no avail, and at least it was just me they were arresting. So I sat in the back of the Audi, lit a cigarette, listened patiently as their leather coats creaked against the car seats, and tried to think of all the other times I’d been picked up by the Gestapo and managed to talk my way out of it. Of course, things were very different now the war was almost lost. The Gestapo had always been good listeners but since July ’44 and Count Stauffenberg, they’d stopped listening to anything very much except the sound of tightly strung piano wire.

To my surprise we didn’t go to the Police Praesidium on Stresemannstrasse, behind the North Railway station. Instead we drove a little farther east and stopped in front of the Erich Koch Institute on the corner of Tragheimer and Gartenstrasse, which was one of the last buildings in Konigsberg still displaying Nazi flags. It added a nice touch of color to a city that had gone prematurely gray with fear and worry. Absurdly, some bandbox guards came to attention as the car drew up; they must have figured the only cars with petrol contained people who were important. The Gestapo even opened the car door for me and two of them escorted me through the cliff-high doors and up the marble double stairway, where a man was carefully fitting long, brass stair rods. At the top stood a tall plinth with a bronze of Erich Koch staring over the balustrade, like a satrap surveying his empire. Or maybe he was just checking that the stair-rods were being fitted correctly. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling as if in imitation of the freezing weather outside, which made the blasts of warm air blowing from the vents in shiny new ceramic stoves all the more surprising. The institute was noisy with hundreds of foreign workers hammering and painting and redecorating, which seemed a little premature as the Red Army hadn’t yet said which color they’d have preferred for 1945.

I was ushered along a corridor as big as a bowling alley where thick, new blue carpet was being laid and, for a moment, I wondered if I was actually in the East Prussian School for the Blind in Luisenallee. It was the only possible explanation for so little foresight and so much obvious reluctance to face the truth. Amid the ignorant confusion of it all Harold Hennig was standing with his hands in his breeches pockets, his gray tunic open, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and quite probably he didn’t. Every time I saw him I knew he wasn’t ever going to be one of the unlucky ones without a comfortable chair when Ivan stopped the balalaika music. Seeing me he beckoned me forward and led the way into an office already carpeted but without much furniture, just a lot of fluff on the floor, a couple of chairs and a half-size desk on which lay his greatcoat and cap. A large portrait of a very pink-faced Adolf Hitler was hanging on the wall. Wearing a gray greatcoat with the collar turned fashionably up and a peaked hat, the leader was looking off into the middle distance as if trying to decide if the blue of the carpet matched the blue of his eyes. He needn’t have been concerned. It was a cold blue with an affinity for black and a degree of darkness that Goethe understood only too well, and an excellent color match.