The two detectives had collected us at the house and walked us to the lamp-lit hall. Some women saw us, detached themselves from the edge of the crowd, and came to look. They, like so many others, carried lanterns into which candles had been irretrievably fixed. And these swinging lights, all through the gathering, shone on their faces from beneath.
A man shouted something, and one of the women who came to welcome us translated for Kate, who murmured to me, “She said we’ve to be careful. He’s telling everyone that we’re spies.”
I wanted to say, Well, we certainly have been.
The friendly woman led us here and there. Someone put in my hand a mug bearing a carved face. Hot to the touch, it smelled of apple drink, and it tasted heavenly. I hadn’t tasted decent food in days. The stab of comfort and delight told me how generally frightened I’d been and how responsible I felt for the safety of my headstrong friend.
Long wooden trestles stretched down the middle of the hall. Our ladies escorted us to seats at the end of one table, and they sat by us, smiling and warm. In the distance, watching from a place by the door, stood the two detectives—and four armed men.
The women began to interrogate Kate—who told me later what she’d been asked: questions about marriage, questions about matchmaking in Ireland, questions about her grandmother, questions about the couples she’d introduced, questions about whether Irishmen made good husbands.
After perhaps fifteen minutes of this, one of the women rose from the table. Sensing a purpose to her, I watched her as best I could. She walked to the door, and I saw her talk to two of the detectives. They nodded a great deal, looked in our direction—and they left. The armed, uniformed men stayed.
Food now came to our section of the table, mountains of dumplings with potatoes, gallons of dense local beer. I drank some and my tongue felt looser.
Kate began to shine like a star. Women and girls and a few playful men came to where she sat and engaged with her. And when the beer began to kick in, the war faded from my view. But the war arrived, at first quietly and then with dreadful force.
I’ve long since verified everything, gone back to that village, met the survivors, asked the careful questions, and satisfied myself that what transpired at that lantern-lit feast was a true bill.
Throughout dinner, people rambled about the hall, talking to neighbors, laughing, embracing, snacking from one another’s plates. A band played. Great brass sounds oompahed; light bounced on the bell of the tuba; and the band members came and went on the little stage as each took his turn to eat and drink.
When the heavy chocolate cakes began to arrive, new musicians took over, and soon we had waltzes and quicksteps. All sorts of people took to the floor, heavy with age, light on their feet. Happy with beer, I asked Kate to dance.
She whispered, “I can’t. I promised Charles that I wouldn’t dance with anybody until he and I had danced. And we haven’t danced yet. Anyway, I have to work.”
The thorough Germans: They brought her six people, three men and three women. My notebook became more than a theatrical prop, my note-taking went beyond acting; and in the interruption that you’re about to see, it became a war reporter; here are the entries from that Sunday night:
I’m in a small German village not far from Bonn, not far from the Belgian border. Land not very unlike Ireland, richer, perhaps; late on a Sunday afternoon, a few weeks before Christmas 1944. Miss B. is matchmaking; but not as she does at home—here she’s advising people who are looking for partners.
First Woman: Ilse—nervous, heavy; late thirties—not shy; Miss Begley and she talk; only the interpreter (whose name is Trudi) and I are permitted to listen. This exercise is, I think, to prove that we are who we claim to be.
Miss B. as ever is both expert and compassionate with Ilse. She asks Ilse, “Have you ever been in love?” and Ilse blushes; “With the schoolmaster, but that was when I was little.” And Miss B. asks if Ilse has ever been in love with a man who knew she was in love with him.
Ilse says no. Nein. Very definite about it. I look up. The detectives have come back. From a distance, they look at us—and they’ve brought with them a man who is obviously superior.
Miss Begley: What kind of man do you want?
Ilse: A kind man. Who will be nice to me. Who will not speak harshly.
The police stood their distance, peering with suspicion into the little ragged pavilion. I wrote with more industry than I knew I possessed. And as I wrote, I began to observe something. I had seen traces—or so I thought—that Miss Begley had begun to grow a little wild.
Now, as I watched, she pushed her hair back with more power. The shoulders tautened. Her feet kept shifting; one moment she would tap her toes to the music of the distant band; another time, she would dig both her toe caps into the floor. Or rock her feet back and forth, heel to toe.
Most of all the hand gestures caught me; I had first seen them two nights ago—a movement from wrist to fingertip, a washing of one hand by the other—over every square inch of her skin. She did this with no great drama—quiet and slow movements, repeated and repeated. In the night I had heard her groaning, and I knew that she was doing so in her sleep. I wanted to go into her drab little room (mine was worse) and hold her as tight to me as I’d ever held Venetia.
Here’s my note of what happened next.
Where there had been two chairs, now we had four. I sat a little distance away.
Miss Begley: Now, Ilse, do you know anything about two people being married to each other?
Ilse shakes her heads; Ilse giggles.
Miss Begley: It is the gold standard of life—do you know that?
Ilse looks solemn; Trudi translates, and is now melting. Miss Begley, who now has her two longest fingertips pressed like the points of spears to the temples of her forehead.
Miss Begley: I can vouch for marriage. Trudi has a little difficulty translating the word vouch. Miss Begley waits.
At that moment we hear a mighty roar overhead and people everywhere that I can see from the little pavilion shake their fists at the sky—the roar dies as the aircraft travel on, deep over Germany.
Miss Begley: It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if I were telling you to marry, and how wonderful marriage is if I weren’t married.
Ilse smiles. As does Trudi. Several yards away, the police scowl and the superior man looks at his watch. I feel a stab of fear and my stomach heaves.
Miss Begley: I met my husband one sunny afternoon when he came to my house to ask my grandmother find him a wife.
Ilse: Where is he now?
Miss Begley, smiling like an angel: Waiting for me. Would you like to hear how we met?
No surprise that Ilse—and Trudi—nodded.
Miss Begley: He came up the lane to our house—we live on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. The roses were in bloom beside the front door. My grandmother was sitting outside making lace.
From overhead came another roar, longer this time, nearer, and with greater shouting from inside the hall, wilder brandishing of fists. Trudi spun in her chair as her husband and his colleagues advanced to the pavilion. They too—I watch them—look upward and shake fists. Trudi holds up her hands, palms flat out to ward off the advancing policemen. They indicate that they’ve come for Miss Begley and me. Naturally they ignore—
My report ends there—because it was then that Hell arrived. A bomb fell near enough to the hall to shake the building and bring down part of the roof. Twenty feet from us, dust and debris, roof tiles, beams, wall sidings cascaded upon the people sitting and standing and eating and dancing.
How shocking it is to discover that the human body amounts to little more than a sack of soft materials that scatter apart when torn by something of great force traveling at speed. A siding plank became a spear and ripped open a grandmother in a black and white dress. She—or what she had become—fell to the ground and burst open.
And how shocking are the multiple and myriad ways in which people react to being bo
mbed. They weep; men, women, and children weep rivers, they weep tides. No surprise with the children; they haven’t yet learned the management of feelings. And the women have learned the uses of tears, the positive and healing effects of crying, and they do so in war, and seem the stronger for it. To me, though, the men’s had the greatest eloquence—a rage of high, irascible wailing, and no care whatever as to who witnessed such unmanning.
But I know why they did it—they wept at being denied the opportunity to guard and protect their loved ones. They wept because they’d been made subject to forces so great that they had no chance of coming to any terms. They wept because in that fell and disgraceful moment, they had been staring into their own graves.
We don’t know what dust we harbor in secret. It piles up in walls, around the stones with which our houses are built, in the woodwork, on the tops of closets too high too reach. When a bomb causes a building to burst open, the dust comes billowing out like some foreign, secret cloud that has been accumulating in there all along.
In the first billow that night it looked, from my distance, to be no more than a great puff that rose, and in a minute or so seemed to dissipate. But as I walked—I ran, I leapt—to find survivors or pull bodies from the wreckage, the dust was waiting for me, waiting to invade my thorax, to stick in my pores, to clog my hair, even my eyebrows. I found its residue billowing forth a second time next morning when I sneezed.
I never gave any help. Not a survivor did I find. They stopped me—three men stood in front of me and shooed me back. I ran and put my arms around Kate. The uniformed policemen raced to help the victims, as did one of the detectives. Their superior officer left and the remaining detective came for us. He beckoned us from the little pavilion, and then led us from the hall, never saying a word. I didn’t know what to expect.
He drove us to the house in which we’d lodged.
“Collect your belongings,” said the man; his glasses were speckled with dust.
Kate, her eyes flashing, said, “Can you give me until tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Do you have a map of Germany that I can borrow?” Miss Begley asked.
He said, “Europe would be better.”
I can’t tell the name of the place to which he took us, and I’ve never been able to find it. He took us from that house, and that village—where another bomb fell as we were leaving—and he loaded us into the back of a large truck, where he covered us with tarpaulins and sacking and told us not to say a word. And then somebody slammed a foot down, revved the engine like a lunatic, and drove us forever.
95
I fell asleep. When I woke, nothing had changed—it was still dark. I heard Miss Begley next to me, and put out a hand to find her. Lying on her side, her back turned to me, she took my arm and wrapped it around her waist.
Soon after that, the truck stopped. We heard voices. Something outside slammed the metal just above my head. More voices. All in German, not clear enough for me to pick up a word. We drove on.
Five minutes later, the truck changed gear and slowed down. Within moments, after hefty bumping, it stopped again.
Somebody opened the rear doors. No daylight; I had lost all track of time. No flashlight either. Legs climbed in and clambered beside us. Hands pulled back the tarpaulin.
“Raus,” said a strange voice. I didn’t know what it meant, I just followed Miss Begley’s lead. Now they put us in a car, in the backseat of a luxury sedan. From outside, somebody gave us rugs and flask tops of hot coffee.
Four people in the car, and the girl beside the driver turned to look at us. “We will soon be somewhere more comfortable.”
Dawn began to break; it would be a cloudless day. The car took us slowly past farmhouses, and farmyards, over postcard-perfect little bridges, up high country roads where frost glistened in pools like leftover glass. Under the rugs, Miss Begley reached for my hand.
Outside a high, red-roofed village, the car turned in to a massive gateway, where two armed men opened the tall wrought-iron gates. At the end of a dipping and swooping avenue stood a mansion with more turrets than Walt Disney ever conceived. Inside a man and woman met us without a word, took our ragged bags, and walked up the wide staircase.
The girl from the car came with us.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Hitler did his worst here some time ago.”
I said, “Eh?”
“The couple who met you. They own this house, and one of the Nazi Party commandeered it in 1938. When the owners objected, he had their tongues cut out.”
I said, “Why are we here?”
“Somebody talked,” said the girl.
“About us?”
“Trudi and her husband were shot yesterday. He was the detective who led you from the hall. They knew when they saw the Kommandant that there had been betrayal. Trudi’s instructions were to make you safe. You were smuggled away.”
“But the policeman?” I asked. “Trudi’s husband?”
“Our greatest hero,” she said. “He had enough dirt on everybody to blackmail the entire village and he was our leader.”
On my journey of discovery years afterward, I learned the details of how the village had worked its quiet resistance to Hitler. I’m telling you now so that you can understand, while you are still relatively young, the power of ordinary people. You will, I hope, conclude that there may be no such thing as an ordinary person.
Most of those villagers did nothing dramatic, nothing showy—they paid their taxes, they lived their daily lives. If coerced into attending a Nazi Party meeting, the unbelievers sat without a word. Inside this quiet existence, they ran an undercover transport system, part of a chain bringing secrets and operatives across Europe, and inserting them behind German lines.
Until they shot Trudi and her husband in front of the white church next morning—with all the village press-ganged into witnessing the execution—they’d had no difficulty of any kind. Not even Charles Miller, who had passed through months earlier, had caused anything like the trouble we brought them.
96
The tongue-less man and his wife, silent as robots, came back and took us to bedrooms, and the girl said that she would see us later. I slept like a man who had died. Only when I awoke many undetermined hours later did I have the strength to observe the grandeur. From the window I could see distant mountains—but, before them, rolling lands with excellent fencing.
Nothing gave any clue as to ownership. I tried most of the books on the tall, ornate bookshelves; not only could I not read German with any useful competence, all of these had been printed in a kind of Teutonic that I’d heard of but never seen.
The room had a bathroom en suite, with a toilet, ancient shower, deep tub, and, by the basin, a pile of fresh clothing for me. I’d read of such things happening in the adventure stories of my boyhood; here I was, living them.
From the texture of the sunlight it felt like three o’clock in the afternoon. I went downstairs and found Kate sitting in the hallway; she too had been given fresh clothes.
However, she had no good mood to offer. In the car, nobody had mentioned our next step; I guessed that we’d have to wait until somebody led us. Kate had no such feeling.
“They’re arranging to get us back home,” she said. “She told me yesterday.” I thought she was about to scream.
“Do you have any idea where we are?”
My abiding thought was, Where’s the fighting? I hope it’s not coming closer to us. Are we out of the bombing pathways?
“I’m restless,” she said. “I want to get to Charles.”
I said, “And I’m as hungry as I’ve ever been in my whole life.”
After a breakfast of omelets and coffee, it became a strange and shadowy day, with the tongue-less man and woman ghosting about the house, continuing to pay attention to our every need, and never saying a word—not a grunt, not a whisper, not a cough. They had eyes like marbles. I found a deck of cards and played solitaire until I thought
I’d go blind.
97
That night Kate called me to her room. On the bed she’d spread the map of Europe, and she’d taken out the needle and the handkerchief.
“I’m going to start right here,” she said, “because I have a hunch, a feeling, that Charles isn’t far away.”
“Do you know where we are?”
She said, “The girl told me that we’re well south of Bonn, very near the Belgian border.”
She stood by the bed, smoothing her skirt over and over. She fiddled with her hair. She pressed her fingertips to her temples again, and her face glowed red.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” she said. She took my hand, led me around to the other side of the bed, smoothed the quilt, sat me down, and walked back to her needle and handkerchief. Sprawled across from me, on this great, sagging old bed, she rubbed the needle slowly through Charles Miller’s handkerchief.
It took no more than a few minutes. When she dragged the needle across the border in the direction of Liège, it began to quiver, and when she held it over some hills, it swung, firm and confident, from side to side.
She stopped, raised her head, and looked at me like a lamp.
“I found him. He’s near a place called Saint-Vith. That’s where we’re going.” She began to cry. “I knew it. I knew he wouldn’t die on me. I knew it.” Her fists dug holes in the soft bed. “He wouldn’t do that to me, he wouldn’t. I knew it. God bless you, Charles, God bless you.”
At that moment, I saw what she would look like when old—a little Irish countrywoman, with a dimpled and wrinkled face, and still the dynamite smile.
“Let me get you a cup of tea from downstairs,” I said, using her own tactic of escaping from tough moments.
She cut in. “No. Hug me first.”
She did the hugging; she clung to me the way a baby monkey clings to an adult.