Cesare Page 26

  And what would they find? The baroness sitting in a cattle car with a child, volunteering herself as a nurse. The young SS officers grew hysterical. They couldn’t strike Lisa with a pistol butt, or drag her from the transport. And they couldn’t allow her to go with the child. They were the ones who understood what Madagascar meant—it was the land of no return.

  So they had to wake the commandant, who was always in a foul mood in the middle of the night. The commandant himself had checked off this child, who was a bit slow in the head. He arrived in his pajamas and boots, his military tunic slung over his shoulders. He’d rant and cuff an elder on the ear until he recognized Lisa. Then he’d turn pale; his blond mustache would twitch, while the child was crossed off the transport list.

  And now the elders sat with their seltzer siphons at the tribunal and worried what to do about the baroness; these siphons were a mark of their prestige. Not a single tailor had his own supply of seltzer. And the siphons infuriated Lisa, because they should have gone to patients at one of the ghetto hospitals. But what infuriated her more was the sight of Ännchen in the dock; she was a retarded girl of twelve, the very child Lisa had saved from the cattle car. She lived in the “lepers’ ward” of the children’s barracks, with orphans and illegitimate boys and girls—mamzers in ghetto argot. The children had their own sense of hierarchy; they protected one another, never stole from old men or women lost in the street, kept their own mothers and fathers alive, sang in the children’s choir if they had a good voice, acted in children’s plays, had their own soccer league at the camp, and often found other ways to thrive, but they wouldn’t allow orphans and mamzers in their rooms no matter what the elders preached to them.

  It was Lisa who protected such unfortunates, took them on little pilgrimages inside the ghetto, let them ride with her on her own palomino, Nicodemus, whom she kept in the commandant’s stalls. She couldn’t canter on the dusty trails of the ghetto. Her body hurt too much; every movement in the saddle was a little shock that traveled up and down her spine, until she feared she would break like some unsprung jack-in-the-box. And she might knock down some poor grandmother in that infernal dust. Yet the children loved to ride with her, especially Ännchen.

  Lisa kept her out of the camp’s insane asylum, looked after her, screamed at any boy or girl who ventured near the “lepers’ ward” with mischief in mind. And when Lisa saw her in the dock, frightened, her head whipping back and forth as if it belonged to some rag doll, she shoved past a camp policeman in his silly hat, grabbed Ännchen’s hand, and pulled her right out of the dock, even if her own body was trembling.

  She whispered to one of the clerks, a Munich millionaire who was now a scrivener. “Junge, Ännchen belongs to me. I want her name wiped out of the docket. And if the elders aren’t careful, I’ll create my own storm and blow their little court down. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, Frau Kommandant.”

  The elders planned to cleanse the town of troublemakers, dwarfs, and little thieves while the Red Cross was in Theresienstadt. Constables in top hats would keep the old, the unsightly, and the insane in their barracks so that the ghetto could become a vacation ground for one morning and afternoon. Theresienbad. But Lisa wouldn’t participate in such trickery. The elders didn’t know what to do with the Frau Kommandant.

  They whispered among themselves, and the judge leapt out of his chair. “All charges dropped. We will have a one-day amnesty in honor of the baroness.”

  But Lisa didn’t listen to all their clatter. She led Ännchen out of Magdeburg Barracks. The girl was as tall as Lisa; her hair looked like prettified straw, but she had the bluest eyes Lisa had ever seen. That’s why the SS plotted to get rid of her, to put her on a transport. She looked even more Aryan than they did, and they didn’t like this maddening mirror of themselves.

  Ännchen’s head continued to whip back and forth, and suddenly the whipping stopped. She started to neigh, and her nostrils flared. Ännchen had her own magisterial motions and sounds. And Lisa could read her language. Ännchen wanted to go to the stables.

  She bit at the wind like a horse biting fleas, and she swept Lisa along—for a moment Lisa’s limp was gone. The dust flew around them, and Lisa could recognize companies of women waiting in line in a courtyard kitchen for their meager, miserable noon meal. They fared much better than the men at the camp, sometimes carrying their husbands on their backs while they stood in line. Some men retreated into poetry and arranged readings, but these camp poets were mainly poseurs. The genuine poets kept their lines inside their heads. At least that’s what Lisa suspected.

  All the women, even the few collaborators among them, worshipped the Frau Kommandant. They would have joined her in any revolt. And when they saw Lisa come out of a dust storm with the half-witted child, they curtsied like women at some royal court and kissed her hand. But Lisa had to fly with the wind. Ännchen had grown impatient.

  The old riding school and its stables had been built right into the fortress’s inner wall near Seestrasse. The Jewish stable boys seemed excited when they saw the Frau Kommandant. But the SS had taught them to be superstitious, and they’d convinced themselves that Ännchen had the evil eye and could turn them into a pile of salt. And so they covered their own eyes with the skirts of their leather aprons.

  Lisa heard a roar from inside the stables. It was Joachim. He walked out of a dark swirl of dust and into the sunlight. He was wearing jodhpurs with his plum-colored boots and a silk riding blouse, with a white scarf around his neck.

  Ännchen hid behind Lisa’s legs. She liked this commandant and also hated him. He smelled funny, with that mingling of sweat and bittersweet perfume, like a bar of black chocolate. But Lisa knew how to deal with this madman of a colonel who loved her so much that he had to burn her alive.

  “Joachim,” she said, “if you aren’t nice, I’ll never visit again. And I should warn you. I go wherever Ännchen goes.”

  He bowed to this little girl, who wasn’t so little, and offered her some sponge cake from Prague. “Princess Ann,” he said, “it’s my pleasure.”

  Ännchen devoured the cake in one bite. Her head began to whip again. She wanted to see the palomino with his spotted legs and white mane. And so the commandant led Nicodemus out of his stall. And Ännchen uttered the single word she had ever cared to master.

  “Nico,” she said. Nicodemus was fond of the girl. He began to rub against her with his nose and nibble on her sleeve. He was a curious creature. He had the words U.S. CAVALRY stamped on his hindquarters. What was an American cavalry horse doing in Bohemia? Nicodemus must have belonged to the old garrison. Perhaps a Czech soldier had branded him as some kind of a joke. He wasn’t much of a charger and might have been blind in one eye. The commandant wanted to have Nico shot, but Lisa appropriated him a week after she arrived in Theresienstadt.

  He’d saddled Nicodemus half an hour ago. He could sense that Lisa would come with the half-wit—no, it was the palomino who sensed it, who could catch the “flavor” of his mistress from the ghetto’s far wall. Nicodemus had beat against the earthen floor of the stable with one hoof until Joachim listened. The commandant would bide his time. He still planned to turn the palomino into glue.

  He helped Lisa onto the horse, stood her cane against a stall, then hoisted Ännchen onto the saddle, cinching her to Lisa with a leather belt.

  “Joachim,” she said, “are you going to stuff us after we die and put us in your museum?”

  “What museum?” he asked.

  “The memorial that Himmler is planning for the Jews. But we’ll all have to vanish before he starts.”

  It was another one of the Nazis’ macabre schemes. They were collecting while they killed—Jewish pianos, Jewish clothing, Jewish books. The center of the whole project would be Prague, but every town in the Greater Reich would have its own Jewish museum. Abandoned synagogues would be selected, or some cultural center that had been caught in a pogrom. Joachim himself was in charge of the Theresienstadt museum. It wo
uld be housed in the Magdeburg Barracks, where future German tourists could wander through halls that had once accommodated the council of elders.

  “Joachim,” she said from her perch in the saddle, “would you like me to run away with you?”

  She was forever teasing him, mocking him.

  “And what would I have to do, Baroness? Free every Yid in Theresienstadt?”

  She smiled at him with a morsel of tenderness, and he was almost grateful. He would have done anything for this blond bitch whose scalp had gone all white. He would have broken her kneecaps again, torn out the roots of her hair, and cradled her in his arms for the rest of his life.

  “Well,” he said, “should I free the Yids?”

  “No, darling. That would only give the Czech Gestapo an excuse to murder every single one. But you could lock up all the elders so they can’t steal seltzer from the clinics or punish children who have committed no real crime. And you could stop creating a false Paradise for the Red Cross—let the commissioners see our wonderful camp with their own eyes.”

  Lisa listened to his raucous laugh. He was a moment away from strangling her.

  “Baroness, the Red Cross would still believe in the fable of Theresienstadt. It’s useless for you to intervene. Come, admit your defeat and spend one night with me here, among the horses. We’ll have our own little manger, far from the Red Cross.”

  Lisa’s own laugh was now as raucous as his. “It would be a catastrophe, darling. If you touched me once, I might break.… Joachim, you shouldn’t have brought Erik to Theresienstadt.”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” he pleaded. “It was U.S. naval intelligence. They want to kidnap Bernhard Beck for their own reasons. It will boost American morale. I’m just the conduit.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “It was your idea. And the Americans were insane enough to buy into your scheme. Do you intend to stamp ‘U.S. Cavalry’ on Bernhard’s buttocks?”

  “Yes. I would love to brand his hide.”

  “You think that holding Erik in your hands will give you some power over me, that you can bargain with his life—Joachim, take another look. I’m already one of your museum pieces. So is Erik.”

  And she rode off into the dust with her palomino. Ännchen let out a whooping cry that had its own raw melody. And the commandant had nothing but his prize Arabian mare in the stalls, Lisalein, a strong-blooded horse who tolerated his love and might even have loved him back. But he would get nothing from the baroness. He’d risked his whole career. He’d come to this fortress, far from Berlin, because it was the one place where he might protect a Jewish half-breed. He still meant to vanish with her, woo her right out of the war. He’d even tolerate the idiot girl with the straw hair. He’d adopt Ännchen. They might live near Basel, where his family had a farm. And when he saw her rocking on Nicodemus, in and out of that constant curtain of dust, he realized that Hitler’s Endziel, his quest to destroy all the Jews and turn their bones and dust into the relics of a ridiculous museum, was only another mirage, another curtain of dust.

  THE Frau Kommandant CAME OUT OF THAT CURTAIN as she rode along her “bridle path” near the battlements. She didn’t have the same aura as the commandant. Whenever he rode his Arabian, an SS bugler would give three long bleats on his horn: It was the signal that all streets and lanes had to be cleared of settlers and their traffic of hearses and other carts. The commandant and his white mare could make time stand still; settlers either rushed into the barracks or stood like stone until that bugle sounded again.

  But there was no bugler for Nicodemus. The palomino hobbled along, foam in his mouth. He never responded to Lisa’s reins. But it didn’t really matter to Ännchen, who was high above the ground, as if she had her own moving ladder. She stared at the Catholic church, with its steeple, at the red roofs of the barracks, at the lone circus tent, which swayed in the wind; it had once been filled with benches and bottles of ink dust, but it was now a great hollow, like a tunnel with soft billowing walls. But there was still ink dust all over the place, and Nicodemus started to whinny and sneeze. She held on to his ears. Nico didn’t mind. Ännchen was tied to the beautiful baroness with scars on her cheek. Everyone shivered around the baroness. But the baroness never barked at Ännchen. She smelled like tapioca and wet leaves. She smelled like the river and whitewash on a wall. Ännchen could hear her heart beat. Nico went round and round the ramparts. And then all her joy was gone as Nico stopped in front of her barrack. It didn’t matter how much she wailed. Nico wouldn’t move. The beautiful baroness untied the belt that bound them, and Ännchen slid down from the saddle.

  “Darling, you mustn’t cry,” the baroness said. “I’ll take you riding again. But I have to lie down.”

  Then the baroness allowed her head to drop on Nico’s whitey-white mane, and the two of them left the girl standing there and went back into the dust.

  On the Battlements

  33

  THE FIRST TIME ERIK SAW THE COMMANDANT’S ARABIAN, he dreamt of Motte, Admiral Canaris’ white mare. He wondered if the admiral and his mare might be safer at Theresienstadt. This Paradise Ghetto had battlements and walls. It even had a strange new sheriff, who wore the Ritterkreuz until he lent it to Lisa.

  She kept it discretely under her commandant’s cloak, but the ribbons stuck out of her collar whenever she taught school. What subjects could she teach in a concentration camp that posed as a settlement town? She’d heard stories of how Rosa Luxemburg had gone into the ghetto schools of Scheunenviertel with her very own song. It was about teaching Berlin’s poor to read. Lisa had memorized this song, and she sang it to the children.

  And away we’ll go on the wings of a word.

  We are the kind ones even at our cruelest,

  We kill the hunter so that you won’t have to weep.

  Erik worked with the older children, who begged him for tales about America. But he had no American tales. He relied on what he alone could tell, his maneuvers as an Abwehr agent. He didn’t reveal one secret, since last year’s missions belonged to the dust of ancient history. But the children—boys and girls—were enthralled by his tales of museums, hotels, and department stores, where women dressed as men, where clerks carried bombs in bottles of perfume, where mannequins had messages on their tongues, written in indelible ink.…

  “Bravo, bravo,” Erik heard from the back of this clandestine classroom. The commandant stood there, clapping his hands. He was all alone, without one Czech bodyguard. The children seemed terrified. Joachim had never bothered to infiltrate their hideouts, their secret dens.

  “Children, children,” he said. “I would like to borrow your professor.”

  Erik had to control his rage, or he would have deepened the children’s terror, thrown them into a panic. He smiled at them, tousled their hair as he walked from desk to desk, but his mouth was twitching as he exited this hut, hidden behind a pavilion.

  He marched with Joachim along a narrow path.

  “I’ll kill you if you ever come into my classroom again.”

  Joachim started to laugh. “Quite the dedicated teacher … but you shouldn’t give our secrets away. Haven’t you heard? The Abwehr is now a branch of the SS.”

  The commandant talked about Canaris’ last days at the Fuchsbau, when the SS trampled through his offices on the Kanal, frightened his dachshunds, and broke into his safe. “What wonderful material we found. You’re mentioned repeatedly, Herr Kapitän, in the most heroic terms. The Führer cried when he read your dossier.”

  The admiral was under an elaborate form of house arrest. He could still ride Motte in the Grunewald, but his Jewish tailors were gone, and his forgers now toiled for the SS. They were the ones who had dreamt up the idea of Jewish currency at Theresienstadt. They struck every coin, printed kronen in different colors and denominations, while the admiral sat in his wrinkled uniform, with old messages in his pockets, bread crumbs swimming in his trouser cuffs. He missed his Cesare “to the point of madness,” the commandant said. “He
laments that you were thrown out of America. But that’s our good fortune.”

  “Joachim, you won’t survive this little hike. I’ll set your ears on fire.”

  “What a pity, that. I’m the savior of Theresienstadt. Without me, the camp would close and all the Jews will be sent on a picnic to Auschwitz, including your lovely children.… You ought to make certain I don’t fall off a parapet. It would be fatal—to everyone.”

  “What do you and your Hunde want from me?”

  Joachim laughed and leapt up onto the battlements and balanced himself on the crumbling walkway.

  “You’ll wear your Ritterkreuz when the Red Cross comes. You’ll be our Pied Piper, the great hero who’s returned from American soil. And you’ll show the Red Cross the model town that our beloved Führer built for the Jewish people.”

  “And perpetuate your lies.… These settlers will all be gassed, sooner or later.”

  Joachim began to purr like a demented cat. “Come on up, Cesare. Join me. It’s quite a view.”

  Erik climbed onto the battlements. He could make out the Little Fortress through the mist. The river had begun to boil. The trees resembled raw red giants.

  “There’s a world of difference between sooner and later. The Third Reich might collapse. It’s an excellent gamble. One day we’ll find Patton’s tanks in our front yard. It’s only a matter of time.”

  The red giants seemed to move in the mist.

  “And if I tattle on you to the Red Cross? If I show them what a farce your resettlement camp is?”

  “Cesare,” Joachim said, doing his own little dance on the battlements, “the Danes and the Swedes can’t help you. They’re only functionaries, even with their famous white trucks. They have no machine guns. King Christian will cry to the Danish parliament, and the Führer will have a fit if we throw the Red Cross out on its ass. Perhaps he’ll punish me. But he’ll get over his lament. Will you? I’ll murder the baroness, as much as I love her. And if you don’t decide right this minute, I’ll pick fifty of your precious children and have them cremated, ten at a time.”