Page 65 of Hell to Pay
“Right,” I said. “Never mind.” I’d swear Sebastian looked disappointed, and I regretted saying it. After all these decades, I still can’t always control my tongue! I picked up the menu and said, “Now, about this meal. Ben, I think—I really think—you must try the lamb.”
Over dinner, Ashleigh asked, as always, “So what happened next? With the story? You were going to tell about going to Bayreuth.” She had her phone out again, neglecting her dinner. “Sorry,” she said, “but this place is, like, gorgeous, with the river and the lights and everything. Perfect backdrop for more storytelling, and our count keeps going up. You won’t believe this, but we’re at almost seven hundred thousand views now! We do need to keep feeding the beast.”
I told the story—how glad I was to have read the diary already and prepared myself! When I finished detailing our first two days in the village, Ashleigh said, “So is that the happy ending? Were you able to stay there until the war was over? Whenwasthe war over?”
“In early May,” I said, “more than a month after our arrival. No, I’m afraid we weren’t.”
“Why not?” Ashleigh asked. “It sounded like they were excited to have you. Except for that one lady. Seriously? Those two guys were guards at Auschwitz? It sounds like one of them was more than just a guard, though I never understand all those long titles.”
“Yes,” I said, “although I didn’t yet know what Auschwitz was. Dr. Becker did, though. The Red Army had liberated thecamp a month earlier, and had told the world what they’d seen there, but the German people didn’t know that. The Jews had their own ways of getting news—passed from person to person—that was more accurate than what the rest of us heard on the wireless and in the newspapers. The press was very rigidly controlled, you see. I can’t remember, in fact, when the government ever told us the truth. Before my time, certainly. I have no idea what happened to those two men, either. Dozens of the SS guards and officials were hanged and some sentenced to prison, but most escaped consequences. They merely shed their uniforms and blended into the population. Who was to know, afterward, who’d done what, so far from home?”
“That’s terrible,” Alix said. “What a witch, though.”
“She was resentful,” I said. “Unhappy. This wasn’t the world the German people had been promised. They couldn’t blame Hitler?—”
“Why not?” Ben asked. “I’d have blamed him.”
“Not if you’d believed in him utterly,” I said. “It’s much harder to convince somebody they’ve been fooled than it is to fool them in the first place. Nobody wants to admit they’ve been taken in, and to accept that you’ve been part of something terrible is the hardest of all.”
“Confirmation bias,” Alix said.
“Exactly,” I said. “For Frau Biersack to believe that Germany’s actions were evil would have meant believing that her husband was engaged in evil, so naturally, she resisted believing any of it.”
“OK,” Alix said, “but you still haven’t explained why you couldn’t stay.”
So I did.
It was the eighth day of our stay in the village—I’d had that week I’d dreamed of, being able to put our few clothes into drawers, knowing that we could have a bath, that we’d be eating today. I’d begun driving the cows to pasture and back every day, riding an old blue bicycle and beating on the handlebars with a stick to urge the gentle brown Jerseys along. I’d learned to milk, though I was still hopelessly inept at it, and had helped Frau Langbein start the seeds of tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers in cold frames in the barnyard—that is to say, in simple wooden boxes with clear lids to concentrate the sun. We’d sowed more seeds directly in the ground, and as I sprinkled the earth with seeds of lettuce, radishes, peas, carrots, and onions, I’d been able to hope that I’d be here to thin them out—and to help eat the tiny carrots, the tender lettuce shoots. How my body longed for fresh vegetables, now that I had some hope of getting them! I’d never gardened before—the palace in Dresden had a courtyard, but it was tended by a gardener; German royalty, unlike the indefatigable and garden-mad British, didn’t dirty their hands with such things—and the act of tending something, of nurturing it into life, delighted me in a way I wouldn’t have imagined.
I wouldn’t care nearly as much that the war wasn’t over yet, I told myself, if I could spend the time here, where Dr. Becker had resumed daily lessons with the children and begun treating an ever-growing trickle of villagers, and even townspeople from Bayreuth now, who’d mysteriously found their way to our door with their eye and skin complaints, their infected splinters, their worrisome coughs and their babies’ troublesome ears. He’d struck up a friendship with the pharmacist in Bayreuth and was able to prescribe again, and I’d never seen him so relaxed. His face looked younger, less drawn, and as for the children? Last night, Gerhardt had told his father, “I don’t want to hear that baby story. Read theexciting one instead, please, about Aladdin and the forty thieves.” Gerhardt, making a request! Someday soon, he might even venture into the little park, where boys could be seen kicking a ball back and forth. Boys who hadn’t forgotten how to play.
That night, I was fast asleep on my couch, in the middle of a confused dream about cowboys and Indians, after staying up too late reading a novel about the Old West—it was rather silly, but very exciting—when Frau Langbein came into the living room, and a minute later, Herr Langbein joined her. I sat up and said, “Has something happened?” My first thought, of course, was for their son in the East. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why they’d come and tell me about it, of all people.
Herr Langbein said, “Please excuse us, Princess, for disturbing you.” He was in his trousers and shirt, but his hair was rumpled as if he’d been in bed. No wonder. It had to be the middle of the night. Frau Langbein was in her dressing-gown, her hair in a braid down her back.
“Of course,” I said automatically. They had that expression on their face that tells you it’s bad news. “How can I help?”
Herr Langbein sat with a sigh. Frau Langbein stood and twisted her hands together. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I think you must leave.”
I blinked. “Do you—do you need the room, then? Your son?—”
She made a dismissive gesture. “No. I wish that were the reason. No, Elsa—Frau Biersack—has found out something, or thinks she has. When she went to market yesterday—” She stopped, then went on. “She was talking loosely, I suspect, complaining about you and the doctor, and she met a woman from Dresden—there are many, many refugees in Bayreuth, as it’s one of the few places that hasn’t been bombed—and—” She stopped.
“And she’d heard of me,” I said. “Well, that’s no surprise, is it?”
“No,” Frau Langbein said. “Well, yes, she had, but she’d also heard of Dr. Becker. ‘Isn’t that the old Jew,’ she asked her companion, ‘who used to mope about the place in his shabby coat and star? Why he wasn’t shipped off long ago, I never understood.’ Her companion said, ‘He had an Aryan wife, I heard. These mixed marriages ought never to have been allowed. Are your family Jew-lovers, then?’ she asked Elsa. And Elsa said, ‘No, of course not. My husband is with the SS in Poland. Do you imagine we’d have a dirty Jew in our house?’”
Frau Langbein stopped, and after a minute, Herr Langbein said, “I’m afraid she went to theGauleiterand asked him to look into it. She told us, ‘What will it do to Fritz’s position if it comes out? What will it do to ours? They’re as like as not to send us all to a concentration camp! They should never have come here, endangering us all!’” He paused and seemed to think, then said gently, “I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is—I don’t think you’re safe here. I’m sorry.”
Frau Langbein was crying into a handkerchief now. As for me, I was on my feet, a panic I hadn’t felt since that terrible night in the cellars trying to overtake me. I forced myself to breathe more slowly, to be calm, and said, “I’m very sorry to have put you in danger. I’m afraid that I myself am not the safest person, either. My father was wanted for questioning by the Gestapo when he died.”
Frau Langbein lifted her head and said, “What?”
I’ve never felt so wretched, or so small. “My mother told me that night—that night before the bombing—that to come here would be to endanger both of you. All of you. And I came anyway. I couldn’t think of where else to go, but that’s no—” I realized I was twisting my nightdress in my hands—I was wearing an old one of Karin’s, who was larger than me—andforced myself to hold still and finish. “That’s no excuse. I’m sorry. I’ll go wake Herr Becker, and we’ll leave.” How urgent it felt! I wanted nothing more than to run out into the night. To run and hide.
Frau Langbein said, “Nonsense,” but I wasn’t sure she believed it. “Of course we would have been proud to shelter the King and Queen.”
“But not so much a Jew,” I said.
