The Knife-Edge Path Read online

  “Oh no, of course, if that’s the way you want it.”

  “You’ll inherit him,” she said with a broken little giggle. “One thing about him, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I sometimes wonder if he’s really a man. I should know. I guess he is, but just be careful. That type, they’ll kill you if you ever dare to call them out.”

  “What type?”

  Hanne smiled sympathetically.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. I didn’t have the - you know, what it takes to handle him. Anyway, I never wanted to. I just did it. Maybe I’ll miss the work, but not him. I should be grateful there’s a reason to get out, now. I hate to say this, ma’am, but you can have him.”

  Geli made herself laugh. “If he was never man enough for you, Hanne, what chance d’you think I’d have if I wanted it?”

  “You’d be better at it, ma’am. My temper’s quick. I get scared easy, too. Bare knuckles, you know, the way us folks are with so little breeding.”

  “Breeding couldn’t improve you one bit, Hanne.”

  “No, not where I’m going.” Hanne held up a defiant smile. “You be careful, ma’am. Be very careful, won’t you?”

  “I will,” Geli said. “Would you like some more coffee?”

  Hanne looked into her empty cup. “Yes, ma’am, I think I would, if I’m not keeping you.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Well then, thank you very much. You make the nicest tea I’ve had in ages.”

  “You mean coffee,” Geli said.

  “Oh, goodness! What’s the matter with me?”

  “Nothing. I wish I were you, so don’t change a hair. Not one.”

  Hanne reared back, laughing, as Geli reached for her cup with a smile on her face she couldn’t contain.

  5

  Days passed, and Stumpff had not come back. She’d never gone up to his door, and was not about to start. He’d come for her when he was ready. Night began to fall and Geli went to the window and stood there, looking down until the last car passed, the last of the lights across the street went out, and she drew the curtain like everybody else, and the city fell into blackness.

  She made up her mind. She’d go back out on her own. If that meant breaking ranks, well, why shouldn’t he reward her for initiative? She set out the next day at 4 o’clock, guessing she’d arrive near 6. There were the usual delays and it was getting dark when she began to climb the musty stairway, seeing in her mind his handsome face there in the doorway: what did she want, now? What’s this woman up to? She’d have a big smile ready, cut off his suspicions with being glad to find him home.

  She stopped a moment in the corridor, got out her lipstick, put some on. At the door she took a breath and braced herself to face the man whose eyes she hoped and prayed would light up at the sight of that woman who, way back in 1936, had got a girlish crush on him at a theatre in Hagen.

  The door swung open.

  A stocky old woman with a leathery face stood there in a thick woolen coat, unsmiling. Her skin down to her neck had the texture of an eroded hillside that ran into a ravine. “Yes?”

  Geli stared at her, a nervous spasm almost made her look back down the empty corridor when she said, “Kurt?”

  “No, dear, he’s away. I’m the housekeeper, Leokadia Hintz. What do you want?”

  “That’s all right. I’ll come back another time.”

  “Just a minute, dear. Who are you?”

  Geli let out a breathy, nervous laugh. “Really, I’ll come back some other time.”

  “What is your name, dear?”

  “Simone.”

  “A friend of Kurt’s?”

  “Well, not exactly. We just met the other day when I came to the wrong door.”

  “This door?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. But now you’re back because -”

  “We had a chat,” Geli said. “I thought I’d just come back to say hello.”

  The old woman frisked her with shrewd eyes. A not unkindly squint, tinged with a smile. “I’d say you could use a little warming up. Come in a moment.”

  “Oh, I really -”

  “Do as I say before you turn into an icicle, dear.” The old woman stepped back pulling the door with her.

  Geli hesitated, eyes taking in Frau Hintz’s heavy coat buttoned at the collar. “I see you’re going. I don’t want to keep you.”

  “Keep me from my flat with no hot water and no radio to listen to? Goodness, you’ll be doing me a favor.”

  “Well, thank you. I can only stay a moment.” Geli stepped into the warm room, keeping her own coat on.

  Frau Hintz started on her way back toward the stove. She lit a fire under the teakettle, got two cups down from the cupboard and came back and set them on the wooden table, bare except for an empty vase and a folded newspaper. She pulled out one chair and then another for herself. “What did you say your name was, dear?”

  “Simone Miroux.”

  “What a pretty name. French.”

  “I was born in Italy,” Geli said.

  “Italy! My goodness! Take a load off, dear.” Frau Hintz pointed. “Sit there in the master’s chair. He’ll never know.”

  Geli pulled out the worn wooden chair at the head of the small table.

  Frau Hintz stood where she was and said, “He’s kept you secret, dear.”

  “Oh, there’s no secret to keep about me, ma’am. I mean, we had a little chat but that was all.”

  “Enough to bring you back, though.” Frau Hintz pulled up the chair to Geli’s left and sat on her bulky coattails.

  “Yes, I couldn’t help but think he looked like a man I’d known before the war. Except I found it hard to believe it could be him.”

  “Why not?” Frau Hintz smiled benignantly.

  “Well, this might sound simple, but his uniform.”

  Frau Hintz reached for the empty vase and pulled it toward her, tipped it slightly, turning it, then righted it. “You mean SS.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Frau Hintz rocked the vase some more, let go of it. “I’ve grown used to that. It isn’t him. A uniform’s a uniform.”

  “Of course. Who’s not wearing one these days?”

  “But I can tell you one thing. He gave me a start once, too. Bowled me over. Sometime, perhaps, I’ll tell you the story of how he saved my bacon.”

  “Why don’t you tell me now?” Geli said.

  “You’ll have to promise not to repeat it to a soul, especially him. I’d never hear the end of it if he found out I bragged on him behind his back.”

  “I promise,” Geli said.

  Frau Hintz traced a circle with her nail on the table. Her eyes followed the movement wistfully. At last she said, “I’d been very happy working for a Jewish family in Steglitz for some time. They paid me quite handsomely, and I loved them all. One day the SS came for them and took them all away. The children, every one of them. I tried to find them afterwards, but the authorities told me I’d better go find work elsewhere. I landed a job, of all places, mopping floors and taking out the trash for the SS Hygiene Office, right here in Berlin. It was convenient, and they treated me all right until, one evening, these three young officers in the day room, loitering after hours - they wouldn’t leave when I came in to mop. One of them, by the name of Baab, he’d needled me before, but this time with these others there to show off to, he took a notion to have some fun with the old lady, you know. ‘Come right on in, Hintz! Let’s see how good you got at cleaning up after those messy kikes.’ Well, I got scared, but I went about my business, hoping they’d get up and go before I had to mop under the table. They didn’t. So I went ahead and gently shoved my mop around their boots. The only one that didn’t move was Baab. He shoved his boots right out and made me slosh them, then sprang up so fast his chair fell over, calling me a clumsy cow. He ordered me to get down on my hands and knees and spit on his boot. ‘Use your nice clean apron there to shine it up,’ he said. Well, I was sha
king with such fright, but I said ‘No, sir, I won’t spit on anybody’s boot.’ He flew into a rage. ‘Not ladylike, is it!’ That was when Kurt happened to walk in. He asked what the trouble was. Baab wasted no time bawling how this clumsy Jew lover had spoiled his shine, then refused to obey orders. I thought I was done for. I didn’t know that Kurt was senior to these other three. My Lord, did he light into Baab! Told him he was going on report for disrespecting his elders, plus breaking the laws of the Teutonia! Baab turned so red you’d think flames would come out next, then he stormed out. Kurt helped me up. He apologized for Baab’s behavior, then told me if I ever wanted to quit this place, he was in need of a housekeeper. I’ve been here with him now for two years. The happiest two years of my life.”

  Something in Geli stirred, and it was rough and dangerous like a squall at sea. She took a chance and said, “But it does make you wonder, doesn’t it, Frau Hintz, what a man like him is doing in the SS.”

  Frau Hintz gave her a look before she shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s a war on, dear. You go where you’re needed, and he’s quite good at what he does.” Frau Hintz looked up at the clock. “Goodness, I’d better be off or I’ll miss my tram.”

  “Me, too,” Geli said. “I don’t like getting home in the dark.”

  “How far did you say you have to go?”

  “Lichterfelde.”

  “I hope we don’t get caught up in the rioting out there.”

  “Rioting?”

  “Right under our noses. All because the government won’t release the names of our prisoners taken at Tunis. If all you listen to is Herr Goebbels’ soap box, it’s not even happening.”

  The teakettle began to whistle.

  Frau Hintz got up, walked over to the stove and turned the flame off. “I’m afraid we’ve missed our tea,” she said. “Perhaps some other time. Shall I tell Kurt you were here?”

  Geli pushed her chair back and got up. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “But you’ve come all this way. He’ll want to know.”

  “It might be better if you didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “He might get the wrong idea.”

  “What’s so wrong about it, dear?”

  Geli shrugged. “The chances are he’s married, n’est-ce pas?”

  Frau Hintz placed a finger on her lower lip, spoke with a tinge of distaste, “Yes, he is, but you’d never know it. She’s a pastor’s daughter. I’ve never met her and he rarely speaks of her. She’s being kept in Tübingen, for safety’s sake.”

  “Oh.” Geli started for the door, feeling a gush of hot blood in her face. “It was so nice of you to have me in, Frau Hintz. Thank you.”

  Frau Hintz was right behind her.

  They met at the door.

  Frau Hintz tucked in her chin a little to say, “No need to be a stranger, dear. A man needs all the friends he can get. I’m old enough to know I don’t quite fill the bill.”

  Ten minutes later Geli was thinking about that, hearing it again as she climbed up onto the tram, and dropped her coin into the slot, and found her way back past people seated snugly, none of them with a smile as they glanced up, and she saw that she was going to have to stand.

  6

  The sunrise cast a thin gray light through the slowly lifting fog in Pilsudski Square. Corporal Obermeyer pulled the car around onto the wet, deserted boulevard. From the back seat, sunken in his overcoat, Captain Stumpff stared out at the passing remnants of the broken city: the charred façade of the Roen Hotel, its windows blasted and the lobby stuffed with shards of glass and splintered timbers, barely changed in three years, like a man found grotesquely frozen to the long-past moment of his death, or a chalk diagram where the body of a murder victim had fallen.

  He looked out at the darkened lamp-posts, still dripping soot, the iron brackets curled under empty sockets like once dainty fingers from which teacups had dropped during the terrors of the Stuka bombing. It seemed to him so long ago, a dream whose startling final scenes had jolted him awake and he would never be able to go back to that September day when Warsaw cracked, and its radio replaced their polonaise with, most appropriately, a funeral dirge, and the German infantry, led by mounted officers, held their victory parade here in this very square.

  Obermeyer wrenched the wheel leftward and squealed around the corner, tossing Stumpff against the armrest.

  Sitting up, Stumpff gripped the top of the front seat with one plump, gloved hand. “Take it slower, Obermeyer. We’re in no rush.”

  “Sorry, sir. I didn’t want us to be late.”

  “No chance of that. They’re not expecting us today.”

  “What I meant was for the train, sir.”

  “Pay attention to the road, Obermeyer. That’s all you need to do right now.”

  Obermeyer went silent.

  Stumpff looked at the back of his pink, raw-shaven neck, the stalks of his tendons moving as he pulled back on the gearshift. He’d known from the beginning that Obermeyer was going to be a problem. Rejected by the Wehrmacht as a bleeder, they had no place to put him. He wanted to serve, they’d said, insisting he was smart enough to drive. He could be company on these long trips, but he wasn’t smart enough to know his place. Loyal as a bird dog, but then what did that make Captain Willy Stumpff? Did they ever pass out idiots to majors? Colonels? To the back of Obermeyer’s neck he said in his mind, ‘Just do the driving. Keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you.’

  Rivulets broke from the mist collecting on the windshield, and Obermeyer reached forward to turn on the wipers.

  Stumpff slumped down in the seat. “I’m going to have a nap, now, Obermeyer. Wake me in about an hour.”

  “By then we should be there, sir.”

  Stumpff shut his eyes. The wipers swished and clunked. The tires hummed and Stumpff drew up his knees, snuggling against the armrest. Soon he was fast asleep.

  Forty minutes later he opened his eyes to the sight of the bleak arms of ash trees reaching for the car. The crippled black and rusting hulk of a Polish tank bristled with frost in the ditch.

  “Where are we, Obermeyer?”

  “Just clear of Lublin, sir.”

  “Lublin? How much farther on to Lvov?”

  “No, sir, remember? Lvov would be too far.”

  “Yes, of course.” Stumpff settled back, taking Obermeyer’s impertinent word for it. His puffy eyes began to water as he looked out the window to his left.

  There, far across the fallow field, a long string of boxcars crawled behind a locomotive belching smoke.

  “Look there, Obermeyer. That’s got to be our train from Lemberg.”

  Obermeyer looked, then suddenly tromped on the accelerator and the car surged forward.

  “What are you doing, Obermeyer?”

  “Don’t worry, sir! I’ll get us to the crossing first! They’ll stall us for God knows how long if I don’t!”

  Stumpff felt vaguely annoyed by Obermeyer’s taking matters into his own hands. All the more because he was probably right. A blast of steam shrieked from the locomotive and Stumpff looked harder for faces in the small, wired apertures. He thought those looked like children, peering out. That wonderful etching of Daumier’s came to mind, The Third-Class Carriage, which he had once sold to a woman in his shop, giving her the discount he’d known she was holding out for.

  Obermeyer gripped the wheel, bending forward. The needle on the speedometer crept past 60 as the train closed from the left toward where the tracks made a V with the road at the crossing.

  Suddenly the car rose as if it would take off, bounced over the embedded tracks as Obermeyer kept his foot to the floorboard and the car jumped onto a rise and Stumpff saw in the distance the stark, tall chimney, the barbed-wire corridors enclosing simple, raw-planked shacks and the railroad siding that ran along the outer gate. Atop the farthest building back the Star of David perched like a tuning fork to catch the pitch of the wind that swept across the Great Mazovian Plain.
/>   Obermeyer eased back on the accelerator, the car slowed to a comfortably cruising 45. A putrid smell began to seep in through Obermeyer’s partly open window, and Stumpff reached for his handkerchief as the car slowed and the stench grew stronger with a sharp turn leftward onto the rutted road that ran parallel with the railroad siding.

  In the middle of the yard behind a high fence strung tight with barbed wire, a rawboned, disheveled-looking officer gripped a riding crop as he stood reeling like a dour sea-captain trying to steady himself on a rolling quarter-deck.

  He’s been drinking again, Stumpff thought.

  One of the two guards at the gate held up his palm as Obermeyer stopped to roll his window down.

  The guard leaned in, glanced at Stumpff and then stood back saluting as the other guard pulled back the gate.

  Obermeyer drove through. He swung the car around to a stop beside the officer, and Stumpff looked out at the pinched yellow face of the man he despised. He grasped the door handle as if his glove was a protective rag, pressed and got out.

  The officer came toward him with a few more swats against his jodhpurs with the riding crop. “Well, well! To what do we owe the pleasure? We missed you yesterday, Stumpff.”

  “Sorry, Wirth. I was unavoidably detained.” Stumpff tugged on the cuffs of his gloves, making fists as if to wring them out.

  Voices across the yard caught his attention. He looked and there were a group of soldiers milling about three canvas-covered trucks parked in a semi-circle. One man threw down a cigarette and stepped on it.

  “Just as well,” Wirth said. “Yesterday’s delivery didn’t make it.”

  “What? Not again. You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh, yes. Deadly.”

  “You notified the railheads, of course.”

  Wirth shook his head. “Too late. We went ahead as usual, the old way. What’s the difference, as long as the job gets done?”

  Stumpff tried to shake off Wirth’s insufferable aplomb.

  They both held the same rank, but Wirth always had to be the big man. The hunter, he once bragged, doing all the dirty work while others picked up their meat at the market. Big man, who wasn’t too proud to order all his vodka from the commissary.