I stood alone in a large, dark room, in front of a microphone, and read my letters.
Because of the darkness and the silence, but mostly because of the late hour, I thought that this was direct broadcasting. I imagined my voice traveling through the vast darkness and reaching my father and my mother in the old house where I had lived the happiest days of my childhood with my beloved grandparents.
To make sure I would reach them, I would have to repeat the reading, I thought. But no, the polite gentleman said, this should do for the moment.
Of course, what I had done were recordings that would be played day and night, I soon discovered. We had no radio, but all the people we knew did. Sometimes, walking on the street, I would hear my voice.
One day I received an invitation for tea from a lady who wanted French lessons. I welcomed the diversion.
She was about my age, slim and elegant, and she spoke French quite well. We agreed to meet for tea once a week. I did not think she needed any lessons, I said.
We sat at a small table in her airy, pleasant apartment and had tea and excellent homemade pastries. She said she had heard me on the radio.
Suddenly she bent toward me, across the table. “You are being used, do you know that?” she whispered.
Christine was less polite. She appeared on our threshold one night, turned her back on me, and addressed Abel angrily. I could not understand her. I don’t think Abel ever told me what Christine truly said.
Less than a week later, a letter came from one of Abel’s brothers-in-law who lived in a town about three hundred kilometers away. He was coming to visit us, he wrote.
He was a career officer who, because of a heart defect, worked in an office for the army. I had met him once. I remembered an ugly man with a kind smile.
He arrived on the following Sunday in late afternoon. It was odd and a bit perturbing for me to see a German army officer taking off his verdigris military greatcoat in our home. He too felt awkward, he smiled a lot.
He sat at our small table for dinner, talked briefly about his wife, Abel’s favored sister, and their son, a boy of nine. Then, bending over as if he were addressing the noodles and greens on his plate, he said, or rather grumbled, “Don’t do a thing for those . . . people. You don’t know them. We, in the army, we know them. Don’t ever get into any kind of deal with them. Abel, do you understand?”
Yes, Abel said, he understood.
I said nothing, but I had understood.
A few days later, a telegram came assigning me a late-evening appointment at the radio station. Abel accompanied me.
The polite gentleman at the radio station, that evening, wore the black SS uniform that made Abel cringe. Smiling confidently, he handed me a prepared text, an appeal to French women, he announced.
“Oh no, no, I cannot read a text I have not written,” I exclaimed.
The polite gentleman looked surprised and rather annoyed.
“Well, in the future, you will have to deal with someone else anyway,” he finally said. “I am proud to inform you that I’ll depart for the front shortly.”
“The front, which front?” I asked.
I got no answer.
Another telegram summoned me sometime later. I went with Abel, who had to explain that I had a bad episode of a recurring laryngitis. I, of course, could not say a word.
Next I received a check. No explanation, just a check for what seemed, at the time, a substantial amount.
I returned the check, in person, to a very surprised employee.
A week or so later another check came. Again, I returned it.
No more telegrams or checks arrived after that.
“You take one step on your own and it is right onto treacherous sands,” Christine told me. “Ask me for advice before you take another.”
XIV
I liked the cold, dry, sunny winter days in Stuttgart and the snow that softened the ponderous architecture of the town. The suburban houses too were more friendly when icicles dribbled in front of the scrubbed windows and the white fluff messed up the bushes in the front yards.
After my first misdirected efforts, I refused myself even the modest pleasure that a stroll could offer. I ventured out without Abel only for short errands to the grocery store or the vegetable market. And there, invariably having to make a choice between kohlrabi, cabbage, and rutabaga, I would get sick with longing for the cornucopia of a Parisian street market.
I did not go to Dr. Müller any longer. He was treating tuberculosis and kidney stones with herb tea and bicarbonate of soda, I had heard. I had lost faith in his doctoring.
Christine still believed in him. She also believed that if the Germans attacked France, they would be taught a lesson worse than the one they had been taught in 1918.
I did not.
I lived through the first month of 1940 hoping, dreaming that the war would never start, or trembling with fear that it would. If it did, I knew in my heart that France would be crushed. I could not explain how I knew, but I knew.
Christine said I was a defeatist.
On April 8, Germany invaded Norway.
“An ancient rite,” Christine said. “Our noble ancestors always went on a rampage in the spring! That one will end up badly, I am afraid.”
A few scattered bombs fell around the city. No mention was made in the newspaper.
Nobody seemed to worry. Strange. As if Norway had been a faraway country.
Abel read an ad in the newspaper: a grand piano was for sale in our neighborhood. We easily found the tall Gothic house with its high stained-glass windows. We rang the bell hanging by a heavy carved door of dark wood. A pale, unsmiling young woman opened it for us, and we saw the piano. It stood in a vast, bare room under the magic blue, red, and purple light from a stained-glass window. The high, vaulted ceiling above was lost in the shadows.
Abel sat at the piano and played. Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven.
Abel’s mother and sisters had often told me how beautifully he could play. I had known him as a painter and had never heard him play anything besides dance music on an upright piano. Indeed, he could make great music.
Abel stopped playing. We exchanged only one look. He bought the piano.
The piano filled half of the largest room in our apartment. We had a small bench made to order. Once more, I wondered about the man I had married. He had refused to buy one chair, and now he was acquiring the most cumbersome piece of furniture.
Less than two weeks later, bombs fell on our area, and there was a crater-like hole in place of the only tall Gothic house in the vicinity.
XV
On May 10, Germany invaded neutral, small, helpless Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
Sonder Meldungs (special reports), preceded by a phrase of glorious music, followed one another, every one tightening the clamp around our hearts. We all knew that France’s turn was next.
Abel could only share my anguish.
Christine, bitterly triumphant, had begun to pack up.
“They want it, they will get it,” she said. “This city will be destroyed.”
One month later, on June 14, the German army was