The German Heiress Read online

  She had read the article below the picture, picked out words—incitement to war, support of a criminal regime, crimes against humanity—and they seemed to slap her awake after a long sleep. She couldn’t grasp the vast scale of the charges against him. They painted him as inhumane. Cruel. Brutal. She would be the first to admit she didn’t always understand her father, his motives, the face he showed the world. But just as she was not the machine-woman the Allies had thought her to be, he was not a monster who had rushed to war, eager to serve the Nazis, crushing thousands of lives in his fist. The war was never that simple for either of them. In his study at home, he would often talk with her about the decisions it had been necessary to make as head of the family and the family businesses. The leather arms of his favorite chair had worn down over the years from his rubbing them as he talked. She had been honored to be his confidante, privileged to see his anxiety and dilemmas, his conscience. These were deep, private aspects of him, to which the Allies had no access. To her knowledge, he had kept no journals, had left no record of his motivations for others to present in a courtroom. Only his public face and actions mattered, and those were clearly as damaging to him as Clara’s were to her.

  What the world knew wasn’t the whole truth about either of them. Odd memories from her childhood had flooded her all night, like the time Papa had let her sit on his desk as he worked. He had sketched a bird for her, and laughed as she chirped beside him and flew the bird around his head.

  Dr. Blum took her hands. “Margarete . . . ?”

  “I’m sorry, you asked about my father. I’m afraid it’s not possible to speak to him. At the moment.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s . . . he used to run a . . . small factory.”

  “Margarete, in the spirit of honesty, I must confess I know who you really are.”

  She brushed past him and cupped her hands under the tap. The water tasted like rust but it stopped the room from spinning. She had known this would happen eventually, but assumed it wouldn’t be until much later, a year from now, two, five, when she was sure of him.

  “Who do you think I am?”

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but it’s clear you’re a Jew.”

  She thought she must have heard incorrectly, but there he was, Dr. Blum looking anxious, as if worried he had offended her. Curious, she asked, “How did you come to that conclusion?”

  “There’s something about you. Something different. I sensed it the moment we met. Once I hit on the truth, it was obvious. You’re attractive in a dark, smutty way. You’re intelligent and hardworking, positive aspects of the more educated Jew, as we all know. You also seem to have a wonderful gift for secrecy and deception.” He smiled with gentle encouragement. “My dear, I know how hard it is to admit the truth. Don’t be ashamed.”

  He was looking at her with such warmth, and she didn’t understand why. Why would he want to marry her if he thought such things, and mistook her as Jewish? Was his conscience eating away at him? Had photographs from the concentration camps driven him to this decision, a desire to make things right in his small way? She could accept that. Barely. As his wife, she would help him change his ugly views further. She had never held anything against anyone based on the happenstance of their birth, and she had never understood such prejudice against groups of people as a whole. The Allied newsmen didn’t believe this, of course, but they didn’t know her as well as they thought.

  For now, she didn’t correct Dr. Blum’s false assumption. It was safer than the truth.

  “Did you tell anyone about this?” she asked.

  “Not yet. It’s no one’s business but ours. But you must tell me your real name.”

  At the cart, she picked up the hammer he used to test reflexes. She wanted to bang it against her temple, clear her mind of the fog. “Please, don’t ask me that.”

  “You’ll have to tell me one day. It’s only fair. We’ve got to keep faith with each other. We’ve got to. Don’t you see? I don’t care who you are. It’s the world. The terrible people out there who judge us all.”

  She thought of the men who would sit in judgment of her father at Nuremberg, and the feelings from last night flooded her again—fear, dismay, even anger. They didn’t know him, they couldn’t possibly judge him fairly, accounting for all the things he truly was. They had made up their minds about him—and her. The article she’d read last night had mentioned Clara too. The missing daughter, wanted for questioning, which she knew to be a polite way of saying they would prosecute her as soon as they found her. That would mean internment, conviction, prison. For years.

  She went back to Dr. Blum, her dear, misguided fiancé. She shouldn’t judge him when he’d been honest with her. He was absurdly wrong, but she didn’t have to enlighten him yet. The truth might scare him away exactly when she needed him. They could make a fresh start together. Live a new life. Be different people.

  “I want to marry you,” she said. “Nothing else matters.”

  “I’m so relieved.” Dr. Blum stroked her cheek with his knuckles. “If the Allies give me any trouble, you—my loving wife—will testify to my generosity in this matter.”

  His hand felt like ice on her skin. She didn’t like his smile, the smugness underneath, the sense of triumph. There was something in him she hadn’t seen before. “Trouble?”

  “Don’t worry, my dear. It’s nothing.”

  “It doesn’t sound like nothing. Adi, what trouble?”

  “One day people might come asking questions, that’s all. I’ve been unfairly handled in the papers—”

  She touched the cold table behind her. She read every newspaper she could get her hands on and had never seen his name.

  “Your name isn’t Blum?”

  “All you need to know is that I did what was right no matter what some malicious people might say.”

  “What might they say?”

  “The details don’t—”

  “The details matter. Tell me what you’ve done. Now.”

  He stiffened. Her old tone of command had slipped out. She had suppressed it since the war. It wouldn’t do for people to think she was the kind of woman who was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. “Darling,” she went on, “we’re being honest with each other, remember? You can tell me anything.”

  “It’s complicated.” He sighed. “When the war started, I left my doctor’s practice in Bremen to work at Ravensbrück.”

  “The concentration camp. For women.”

  “Our work has been completely maligned in the press,” he said. “The Allies don’t understand what the medical staff were trying to do. It was an act of self-defense. A kind of immunization of the people. We worked to protect the healthy Volk from the sick and corruptive influence of the Reich’s natural enemies. For the record, I always thought the Party wasted too much energy on the Jew. The real danger through sheer numbers comes from the Slav. But duty was duty.”

  “What exactly did you do”—she was staring at the ring, the tiny reflection of herself deep in the gold—“at the camp?” Scratches crisscrossed the surface of the ring. On the inside were initials. Not hers, not his. Whose then? She wanted to believe he had gotten it on the black market, but her hand felt burned, as if dipped in acid.

  “I worked with children.”

  “Were they ill?”

  “The individual mattered less than protecting the whole, my sweet. For the general good, if a few needed to be sterilized . . .”

  She couldn’t listen to the rest. She let him talk while she maintained an understanding, attentive look on her face. A wisp of a memory curled into her mind: a thin Ukrainian girl in a checkered head scarf pouring her a cup of tea. Her eyes had met Clara’s with a warmth Clara would never have expected because of who she was, because of who the girl was. Clara closed her eyes and the memory blew away, leaving her here and now with Dr. Blum. Or whoever he really was.

  After a light kiss and a final good-bye, he accompanied her back into the waitin
g room. The women still sat with their children. They stared at her ripped stocking with hostility and envy. She had very little time to warn them about the creature that held her arm. All she could do was look at each woman as she passed, showing the depth of her disgust as it rose from her stomach and up her throat and settled, hard and clear, in her eyes. By the time she had buttoned her coat, the first of the women were fetching hats and mittens and herding their children out of the door.

  2

  On the way home, Clara stomped down the lane of half-timbered houses, a dusting of frost on the windowsills, a glow of weak light behind the panes. It was late afternoon and already dark. People were lining up at the grocer’s next to her boardinghouse. They waited in silence, holding their empty buckets and sagging bags, the women in the back straining to see to the front of the line. At any moment, the grocer might come out and declare the shelves empty. Children built stone towers nearby and leap-frogged in the lane. Clara watched them play, saw the exhaustion and anxiety of their mothers in the line, and she thought of Blum and his doctor’s tools. She’d seen no conscience in him, no remorse. And he’d expected her to understand him—out of desperation, out of love? She’d been stupid, blind, and far too close to becoming the wife of that swine. A tiny part of her wondered if she was being unfair, judging him as harshly as others would judge her and her father, but she overruled that quickly enough. She wanted to shout at herself for not seeing what Blum was capable of.

  “Excuse me, miss,” said a British soldier, “are you all right?”

  She started back from him, though he was looking at her with concern. Perhaps he’d noticed her distress, her torn stocking. He seemed very young, far younger than her, his nose red as though he’d just had a drink. His cigarette was half smoked, and several butts were scattered at his feet. His presence on the pavement confused her. Why was he standing so close to her door?

  Her head bowed, she stuttered an answer in German peppered with easy English words. She was quite all right, thank you. She was only very cold, and hungry too. The soldier searched his pocket and gave her a sweet. It upset her and she didn’t know why until she remembered Blum and his peppermints. She thanked him, pushed open the boardinghouse door and closed it quickly behind her. She hadn’t exchanged casual words with a soldier in months, but every time it happened, it left her shaking. He couldn’t possibly have any idea of who she was. Surely he was nothing more than a soldier being kind.

  She tore the wool cap from her hair and dashed up the steps, dying to change her clothes and scrub herself with a soapy brush that would leave her raw and clean. She would finish packing for the trip to Essen, head to the station, wait on the platform as long as it took for a train to come.

  The sharp singsong of her landlady came from the dining room. “Is that you, Fräulein Müller?”

  Clara halted, too late to creep the rest of the way upstairs. Frau Hermann loomed in the foyer below, a teapot in her hand. She was a widow of the old type, in fake pearls and black skirts trimmed with dreary black lace.

  “You’re pale as death, my dear. What’s happened?”

  Clara held on to the banister. Her anger at Blum and the stronger anger at herself was exhausting. She’d had a close call, like dodging a car in the street, and she wanted to tell someone about it. But that was impossible. Blum still believed she would marry him, and if she told her landlady even a part of the truth, Frau Hermann would no doubt tell him that his bride was having second thoughts.

  “I’m fine, Frau Hermann. Really.”

  “My dear, but you’re shivering. Come and warm up.”

  Clara looked at her glove. As hard as she willed it, her hand wouldn’t stop trembling. She still felt the burn of the wedding band. She’d left it with Blum until they could get it refitted. Except that she had no intention of marrying him. While she was away, she would consider how to break the engagement quietly, without drawing attention to herself.

  Suddenly tea seemed like a wonderful idea, a moment to collect herself before making her escape. Frau Hermann was a gossip and had spied for Blum, but Clara didn’t think her landlady knew what he was. She probably thought she was playing a part in the romance between her lodger and the local doctor, a welcome change from running the boardinghouse.

  “I’ll come in,” Clara said, “for a moment.”

  In the dining room, the other lodgers were arranged around the table as if they were dolls Frau Hermann had placed for a tea party. They were a shabby lot: journeymen in dusty black waistcoats; young women who earned their money in mysterious ways. They greeted Clara without much interest. She sat next to one of the girls she shared her room with, a blonde who claimed she worked in a shop but who slept until noon and only went out at night. She was still in her dressing gown.

  “Late shift again?” Clara asked.

  The girl shrugged and didn’t bother to look up from the July 1946 issue of Die Frau that the women of the boardinghouse had been passing around to each other for months. Clara had studied it like an instruction manual on how to be a normal woman who could conjure up a meal out of rationed food or alter old clothing into something new and lovely. Growing up, she’d never learned such useful things.

  “Come, child, tell us what’s upset you,” Frau Hermann said as she poured the tea. She hovered next to Clara like a hungry raven. “You can tell us everything.” She gestured at the table. “We’re family.”

  As the boarders turned to look at her, Clara warmed her hands on her cup and thought of her real family gathered around the table for a meal long before the war. At first, the children behaved as their mother wished, but with each dish the servants brought, the composure of Clara and her brothers slipped. Feet pounded each other under the table, elbows poked, peas careered across the tablecloth until the children were laughing and Papa announced with his secret smile that that was quite enough. Clara behaved for the rest of the meal even if her brothers didn’t. She would never do anything to be sent from the table.

  A wave of sadness hit her, and she focused back on the other boarders. She had worked hard to avoid being noticed, and now their attention was on her for perhaps the first time since she had moved into Frau Hermann’s house. She had thought she didn’t want them interested in her—it was safer for her if they weren’t—but now she wanted to tell them something, to coax them into caring at least a little about what she’d just gone through with Blum, even if she couldn’t tell the whole truth.

  “I’ve become engaged.” Her voice sounded strange to her. Breathless and anxious.

  Frau Hermann pressed a hand to her heart. “Oh, fräulein. I knew it. Oh, my dear. Congratulations.” Her lips felt like a cold feather on Clara’s cheek. She spun away, informing the table about Adolf Blum, a good, fine doctor. She opened the cupboard and, to Clara’s surprise, pulled out a bottle of schnapps.

  Clara’s roommate touched her arm. “A doctor. Lucky you. Congratulations.”

  “Yes. Yes, thank you.” The touch surprised her, made her want to get up and shake everyone’s hand, or hug them, as if this really was a special occasion and the lodgers her friends.

  Her mood deflated. She fidgeted with the napkin in her lap while Frau Hermann circled the table pouring the schnapps, talking all the while about how wonderful marriage was, especially in these hard times. It was a sign of renewal. A triumph of decency over the dark past.

  “To new beginnings,” Frau Hermann said, raising her glass.

  Clara forced a smile. “To new beginnings.”

  The lodgers clinked glasses and drank and began talking of other things. Clara didn’t join in. For a few minutes at the surgery, she had thought she would start her new life with Blum. Yet that was out of the question now. She had no desire to see him ever again. Even if he accepted her refusal to marry him, he might not feel safe now that she knew his secret. The last thing she needed was another potential enemy. It would be prudent to leave Hamelin for good.

  But what was she supposed to do then? How was she s
upposed to live? And where? Her father was in the internment camp. Her mother had never been there for her when she needed the support. Her brothers were gone. Max was . . . somewhere, maybe still in Essen, but she didn’t want to see him, or to indulge in the slither of anger and disappointment she felt at the mere idea of that man. She thought uneasily about the soldier outside, the hard realities of being in hiding, how reserved she’d been with everyone she knew here, the lies she’d told them, the careful construction of Margarete Müller in the eighteen months since the end of the war. Living like this drained her more than she had realized. How long could she possibly keep it up? The rest of her life?

  It seemed impossible now. Part of her must have known that. The risk of a letter to Elisa, carefully worded so that only her friend would know who wrote it, the plan to go back to Essen for a visit—they were signs of how much she yearned for home. To walk the streets, smell the familiar smoky tang in the air, talk with someone who knew and loved the real her. She would still have to be careful. But surely no one would recognize her now? She smoothed her skirt over her thighs, far thinner than they used to be, her face transformed, she thought, by hunger and the strain of living with shortages and want. She would go home, yes, and—she promised herself—she would keep the visit short. She would take shelter with Elisa, who would help her decide where to go next.

  She finished her tea, shoved a wedge of bread into her mouth, and stood up. Elisa wouldn’t turn her away after all they’d been through. Yet the unanswered letter was troubling her again. It suddenly felt imperative that she get to Essen tonight, no matter how late.