Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Twenty-Seven

December 23, 1944. Lepont-sur-Salm. Saturday, 0600 Hours.

She heard the car stop, the sound of the motor mingling briefly with the sleet and wind against her windowpanes. She knew it was not from Lepont. The only vehicle left in the village was an ancient Citroen used by the pharmacist to visit the sick on snowbound farms, but even those trips had halted in the last few months when petrol supplies had run out.

A knock sounded. Denise Francoeur opened the door, wind sweeping around her in chilling blasts. She stepped back instinctively and put a hand to her throat.

“You do that nicely,” Karl Jaeger said. He came into the room and swung the door shut behind him. “It’s an attractive gesture, suggesting graceful repugnance for the Hun, a defense of virginal treasures. You’re alone here, mademoiselle?”

He spoke in French and smiled at her, but she was frightened by the tension in his bright, unfocused eyes.

“Yes, I’m alone, colonel.”

“You recognize my rank? Good.” Jaeger spoke in German now. “Can I assume from that you’ve been friendly with my comrades-in-arms, fräulein?”

“There were times when I had no choice.”

“So if you were friendly, it wasn’t a matter of choice.” He glanced about the room. “You’re the schoolteacher here?”

“Did someone tell you that?”

“What is there to be evasive about, fräulein? You speak French and German, the look of your hands hardly indicates you spend much time in the barnyard.”

“I didn’t mean to be evasive. I was surprised.”

He smiled as if accepting an apology and walked about the room, glancing at the mirror over the mantelpiece, then at a sewing basket on the floor. Stopping, he removed his gloves and studied the solid wall, the central panel decorated with a brightly painted angel’s head.

He looked at the schoolteacher, the smile leaving his face. “In my case, fräulein, I’ve never been a teacher. A student, of course, and not too bad, some of my instructors were kind enough to tell me. But perhaps they were just trying to get rid of me, give me good marks so they could pass me on to someone else.”

He removed the briar pipe from his overcoat and stared at it with a puzzled frown, wondering what he had planned to do with it. His words made no sense to him. “... but perhaps they were just trying to get rid of me...” What did that mean, they wanted to get rid of Rudi, not Karl Jaeger...?

“At the Berlin Academy I studied fortifications, fräulein,” he said. “This involved mathematics, engineering, that sort of thing.” With one hand, he made a gesture of dismissal. “Of course, I couldn’t build a cathedral or a château, I wasn’t trained as an architect, but I think I could put up a little house like this... yes, I’m quite sure of it...”

He rapped the wall above the gaily decorated angel’s head and glanced at the schoolteacher, found he was unable to bring her pale features into focus. He blinked his eyes, but failed to clear away the strange veil between them... her dark hair continued to float like a cloud about her face... He rapped again on the wall and began to pound the middle panel heavily and rhythmically with his fist. “But if I built a house, I wouldn’t make the mistake of blocking off a stairway—”

“It was done to save heat.”

“How do you get down to the cellar?”

“There’s no need to, colonel.”

“What about storage? What about vegetables and firewood?”

“There’s nothing left to store. The firewood is in a shed in the garden.”

“You sound as if you’ve memorized those answers, fräulein. Which you probably have. I know you’re lying.” Jaeger pounded his fist for emphasis against the wall. “I’ve talked to the priest here. Father Juneau. He’s been very helpful. He’s the one who told me that you’re the schoolteacher here, and that you have a Jewish child living with you.”

The alarm that drummed on her nerves sent a involuntary shudder through her body.

“No, that’s not true.”

“Why would the priest lie to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know why he’s lying, which amounts to saying that he is lying. Correct, fräulein?”

“Perhaps he thought it was the truth. Or the truth as he knows it.”

Denise was beginning to realize, and with a sense of exquisite relief, that she had nothing to fear from this German officer. Her first shock of panic had been like a racial memory of terror, a nervous spasm that had made her forget for an instant that Margret was safe with the nuns. Now there was only herself, and while this man might hurt her or even kill her, she felt that if he did, he would be damaging something renewed and valuable.

“Colonel, Father Juneau’s truth has a way of changing, depending on whether he’s talking to members of the Resistance or German soldiers.”

“Why would he lie when the truth is so easily proven?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Why would a priest lie when a lie is a sin against God and everything he professes to believe? Didn’t you ever discuss such things at your school in Berlin?”

“Those matters have nothing to do with warfare... I was taught to use guns and tanks, and to obey orders. But I learned what lies sound like, and I know Father Juneau was telling the truth.” He studied the briar pipe, then put it away in a pocket of his greatcoat. “Do you deny there’s a Jewish child here?”

“Yes, I do.”

“She’s your brother’s daughter. Was Father Juneau lying when he told me that?”

“As you said, the truth can be easily proven. Why not smash this house down and see for yourself?” She savored the reckless anger in her voice. “And if you find a Jewish child here, will it save your world and your soul to stand her up in front of a firing squad and kill her?”

“You can’t say things like that to me.” A tightness in the muscles of his throat made it difficult for him to speak. He began to pound his fist against the wall. “You can’t pretend you’re all saints and angels. Too late for that—”

The panel shattered under his blows. He hammered at the carved angel’s head and when the bolts broke free the tiny figure fell to the floor and rolled onto the hearthstone, where it rocked back and forth, its blank eyes glittering in the firelight.

Jaeger was so agitated he felt beads of sweat gathering on his forehead, prickling the backs of his hands... “Who betrayed you, fräulein? And the Americans and the Jewish child? It was the priest who wants to be safe and comfortable, with a warm fire on winter nights. Those are his eternal verities, a good meal and a bottle of wine, not the truth of God he pretends to live with. Yet you accuse me of being a monster, of lusting to execute a helpless child. I have children of my own, did you know that? Two little daughters in Dresden...” The constriction in his throat worsened; his voice was high and straining, as if the words were being squeezed past his corded neck muscles. “I’ve disobeyed my orders, fräulein. Do you think that’s easy for a soldier? I was told to destroy every member of the American gun crew on your Mont Reynard. Instead I’ve offered them honorable terms of surrender. But will they accept? Will they trust me? No, because their sergeant is a madman, too stubborn and stupid to distinguish between reality and appearance.”... Jaeger raised a booted foot and slammed it against the wall, and the boards broke and fell with a crash into the stairwell leading to the cellar. Taking a flashlight from his overcoat pocket, he snapped it on and went quickly down the narrow flight of stairs.

As he did so Denise ran to the wooden bureau on the opposite side of the room, jerked open the top drawer and lifted out the bolstered automatic. She tried to open the holster flap, but her fingers were too cold and stiff as they tugged clumsily against the leather strap locked in a metal clasp. She could hear the German in the cellar shouting something she couldn’t understand, but the wildness in his voice intensified her fear. Somehow, the strap did come free and she pulled the gun from the holster, trying to remember what the American sergeant had told her... “Move the safety lever toward the red metal dot.” She tried to do that now but the lever was jammed or broken and would not budge. When she heard him clattering up the wooden stairs, she put the gun behind her back and turned quickly to face him.

“Where is she?”

“I told you, I’m alone here.”

“That’s not what I asked you. She was here, the child was here.” He thrust a sheaf of papers in front of her and pointed at them with an accusing finger. “Look! Pictures of birds, a child’s drawings. Where is she?”

There was such bewilderment, despair, in his expression that she suddenly realized she had the power to hurt him.

“We knew you were coming back, we knew the child wasn’t safe. The American soldiers have taken her to a place she’ll be cared for.”

His reaction was not what she’d expected; she had been braced for blows or an angry, defensive outburst but instead he dropped the drawings to the floor and turned slowly from her, almost as if he had forgot her presence, and walked to the fireplace and picked up the splintered angel’s head.

The ornament was painted a glossy blue and white, the ringlets of hair blond, the innocent mouth a rosy pink. A crack showed in one of the blank eyes; in the shifting light the small figurehead seemed to be winking at him... “You must understand, fräulein, that what was done to many children, to many of the innocent—” He stopped because he couldn’t find the words. And then to his relief he realized that the crippling duality no longer seemed to be cracking his mind; he could isolate his thoughts now, examine them clearly.

“What was done,” he said, speaking carefully and precisely, “was not done by soldiers. So you see, fräulein” — Jaeger smiled at the blank but strangely intimate eyes of the angel — “your alarm for the Jewish child wasn’t necessary. No one would have harmed her. I wouldn’t have permitted it. It would have been a simple matter to arrange papers, to provide her with an escort...” Yes, he thought, a simple matter indeed to save the child as he tried to save the Americans. Still, he remembered again, with an empty feeling, someone else he had forsaken. And again he found it difficult to speak... “I came here to tell you the child would be safe. I’ve assured Father Juneau of that. And I will not violate the cease-fire and terms of surrender I gave the Americans. I am a soldier, I have daughters of my own, I’ll show you their pictures if you like...”

He turned from the fireplace, saw the slim Belgian woman was pointing a gun at him, holding it inexpertly in both hands, but his reflexes took over and he hurled the angel’s head at her face an instant before she pulled the trigger. As the blast filled the room, the bullet ricocheting from the stone chimney like a furious metallic wasp — in that finger-snap of time Jaeger struck the gun from her hand and knocked her sprawling with a backhanded slap that sounded like a second pistol shot on the cold air.

The blood on her cheek was as red as the lips of the angel head lying on the floor beside her. He picked it up and was relieved to see that it had suffered no further damage. Putting it under his arm, he knelt and collected the drawings of birds and went back down into the cellar. Someone had drawn more pictures on the white walls there — a child to judge from the wavering strokes of the crayon — birds in flight soaring over sketches of woods and lakes.

Jaeger tore up the papers with the birds on them and dropped them on the floor. He took the letter and the photographs of Rudi Geldman from inside his greatcoat and, after studying them for a moment or so, ripped them into dozens of pieces which he allowed to fall slowly and deliberately from his hands, watching them with frowning attention as they fluttered in circles and drifted at last to the floor to mingle there with the tattered scraps of childish drawings.

The stir and drift of paper kindled a memory neither welcome or unwelcome, of the death of Cornet Rilke: “Eine lachende Wasserkunst”... “a laughing fountain.” It had been Rudi’s own fantasy of death. To die saving one’s country’s flag... “The sixteen curved sabres that leap upon him, flash on flash, are a festival.”

“A laughing fountain.”

Jaeger went upstairs and knelt beside the schoolteacher. He felt for her pulse; it was slow but firm. Lifting her slight body, he carried her into a bedroom and placed her on a bed covered by the same sort of hand-knitted coverlet he remembered from his grandmother’s home in Bavaria.

Next he took two small photographs from his wallet, pictures of Hannah and Rosa taken on the merry-go-round in the park at Dresden, and put them on the pillow beside the schoolteacher’s mass of tangled black hair. She would believe and understand what he said about children and soldiers when she saw the pictures of his daughters.

As he ran to his command car, he was thinking that it wasn’t so important what your country asked you to live for, but what it asked you to die for, and Colonel Karl Jaeger was determined to show the Americans on the hill, soldiers who had denied him the exercise of compassion, that he clearly understood this important distinction.

When he bent to pull open the door of his car, he realized with surprise that he still held the brilliant little angel’s head in the crook of his arm. Why hadn’t he left it in the cellar with the pictures and drawings? It didn’t matter, the angel’s head didn’t matter now. He dropped the ornament on the snowy cobblestones and swung himself behind the wheel of his command car.