Evony
There’s a fresh breeze blowing against my cheeks. The scent of gentle sunshine on clean sheets. The casement window is propped open by a chipped and slightly rusted hook. There are no curtains and the fresh sea air is blowing away the faint mildew scent of rooms that have been closed up for too long. The space beside me in the bed is empty.
Sozopol. It’s exactly how Reinhardt said it would be. Sleepy, sunny, pretty. Ordinary. There are guards here of course and portraits Zhivkov, the Bulgarian leader, in the square and on some of the houses. But no one seems to pay them much mind and the guards don’t button their uniform jackets. From the living room window last night I watched the fishing boats coming back to the docks, the twining cats lining up in the dusky light, tails raised and expectant, waiting to be thrown the guts and fish-heads from the day’s haul.
I’m so tired after the events of the last week that I should go back to sleep, but I keep my eyes fixed on the window because if I close them I see too much blood. Heydrich’s spraying against my face. Reinhardt’s seeping unrelentingly through my fingers as I try to staunch the wound in his neck. The remembered terror of that drive to the hospital. His gray, unconscious face.
“You’re awake.”
I look over and see him standing in the doorway, one shoulder against the doorjamb, hands deep in his trouser pockets. There’s a large white plaster on the side of his neck and apart from a slightly paler cast than usual to his skin he looks as he always did. Sleek and powerful. Handsome. His eyes search mine. Perceptive eyes. Worried eyes.
We barely talked after he was discharged from hospital. He held my hand for most of the two hundred miles to Sozopol. Last night I stayed in the car while he knocked on someone’s front door and I heard loud, excited voices talking. Reinhardt brought us here and I went to bed almost straight away.
He comes and sits next to me on the bed. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
I pluck at the sheets, not meeting his eyes. “Everything’s wrong. I don’t know why we came here. Bulgaria is spoiled for us.”
Heydrich is dead by my hand but I haven’t even got time to deal with that because we’re not safe here and I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. Sozopol isn’t nearly far enough away from the havoc of that final border crossing.
“Spoiled how?”
“We were supposed to get into Bulgaria without being noticed. After what happened at the border—”
He covers my hand with his own, his voice gentle and reassuring. “It’s all taken care of, meine Liebe.”
I look at him, perplexed. Reinhardt is resourceful and clever but surely even he can’t undo the mess we made getting into Bulgaria. Not in less than a day, and not without more upheaval. “But how?”
“By a few things. Bribes for the guards. An unmarked grave for Heydrich. A Polish intelligence report that will soon arrive in East Berlin detailing the captain’s defection to the West via Danish fishing vessel.”
Bribes. How much of our starting over money has he spent? And I consider how it will look to the Stasi back in East Berlin that Heydrich followed us in pursuit and ended up defecting. “Heydrich wouldn’t turn like that. Not when he was so close to… Oh, unless he failed. Is that what you implied in your report, that he lost us and couldn’t face returning to East Berlin?”
Reinhardt smiles. “Implying. I’m working on the report now and I’ll send it to one of my contacts in Poland to deliver to HQ.” He’s silent for a moment, watching me. “It’s too soon to hope that we might get away with our dramatic entry into this country. But looking at you, my beautiful girl, whole and safe and by my side, I find that I have hope anyway.”
He draws me to him and I put my arms around him. I feel it too. Hope. We’ve battled our way here and we’re in one piece. We love each other. If it comes to it we’ll keep fighting, but the gentle sea breeze that caresses us, the soft buzz of bees in the spring garden, seems to herald the end of our flight.
“What’s next Reinhardt? What now?”
“Now? Now nothing. You’re going to rest.” He looks at me closely. “And you’re not going to feel guilty about what you had to do. If you hadn’t killed Heydrich he would have killed you.”
Do I feel guilty? Part of me wishes that I didn’t have to shoot him, but the other part is viciously glad I did. I didn’t know that this part of myself existed. “I wanted him to die. That’s probably the hardest thing to admit.”
Reinhardt wraps an arm around my shoulders and kisses my forehead. “It will never not be a difficult memory, Liebling. But it will begin to make sense for you in time, I hope.”
That’s more comforting than platitudes or telling me I did the right thing. I will always remember what I did, and why. I won’t forget any of this, but it will mean I treasure every peaceful moment in our life from now on.
“Where will we live?”
He smiles in mock astonishment. “Where? Here, of course. This is our new home.”
I gaze around the beautiful sunlit room. Though it’s careworn and musty the little stone cottage has charm, what I’ve seen of it. “But how?”
“Thanks to a very old friend of mine. That’s who I went to see last night. Our grandfathers were friends and we knew each other as boys. I’ve helped him out over the years when he’s needed it, and now he’s helping me.”
I wrinkle my nose, suspecting the sort of help Reinhardt could offer. “Shady secret police things?”
“In a way. His niece met an Italian at university and fell in love with him. I helped with the papers to she could emigrate to the West and be with him.”
My eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You know, Reinhardt, you’ve got a stupidly soft heart inside that hard Stasi exterior.”
He smiles, and kisses me gently. “It’s not Reinhardt, it’s Alexsandr and Lina Lyubomir.”
Oh, yes, our new secret identities. That will take some getting used to. All this will take a lot of getting used to. But I’m ready to start trying.
“Would you like to see the rest of the house? It’s been standing empty for some time and there’s a lot of work to be done on it.”
He helps me out of bed and I smile and take his hand. “But it’s ours?”
“It’s ours, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see that we’ll be safe here.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Reinhardt wasn’t exaggerating. There’s so much work to do on the house but in the days that follow I enjoy scrubbing floors, making curtains and scouring the meagre shops for the things we need. The activity keeps the worry from my mind. As in East Berlin there are shortages of things like cooking pots and other household items, but there’s plenty of fresh food to come by. We search the market for second-hand furniture and Reinhardt turns out to be quite good at making shelves and rehanging doors. In the evenings I learn Bulgarian from him, a German–Bulgarian dictionary and the local newspaper.
As the days pass I feel myself slowly unbending. It was hard at first to leave the house on my own. I was afraid that I’d come home to find that Reinhardt had been arrested, or that I’d be arrested in the streets. But the sleepiness of the town is soothing. So is lying beside Reinhardt in bed at night and listening to his steady breathing. All I’ve wanted from my life is to be with the people I love and to be happy with them. The West was the answer at first because it was the place my father wanted, that Ana wanted, and there’s still sadness in my heart that I can’t be with them. But I think I can be happy here, with the man I love.
Reinhardt smells of sawdust and varnish these days, and there are paint smears on his shirt and wrists. We make love in the middle of the day in the sunshine-filled bedroom, or on the new rug that he rolls out on the living room floor. I haven’t taken the pill in weeks.
As we sit in candlelight one evening I say to him across the kitchen table, “Please don’t join the secret police here.” The electrics are being repaired and tangles of old wires hang from all the light switches.
Reinhardt looks up from the newspaper in surprise. Then he smiles, and I see the ghost of the hunter in his eyes. He’s always there, lurking at the edges. “But Liebling, I have to do something and I’m so good at that.”
“I know you are. Very good. But can’t you find something else that you’re good at? Something that’s not so…cruel?”
He leans forward and kisses me softly. “For you, of course.”
But he’s agreed too readily and I’m suspicious. I scramble to add more conditions. “Something that doesn’t hurt anyone, body or mind. Something that helps people.”
Reinhardt smiles a wide, amused smile. “Would you like me to become a fairy godmother perhaps?”
I give his chest a little shove. “Ha ha. I’ll settle for you doing something that doesn’t hurt or terrorize anyone. Is that agreeable?”
He pretends to think on this for a moment as if it’s a great sacrifice. “Well, all right.”
“You could get a job from the State,” I point out. “You could teach History or Politics. You know enough about both.”
Grimacing, he says, “Mm, I don’t think so, meine Liebe. I would grow bored, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m bored.”
I can imagine. I’ve already noticed that he doesn’t seem to know how to sit still for very long. His mind is always ticking over with the next things to do. I open my mouth to make more suggestions but he kisses me into silence.
“I’ll think of something,” he assures me.
I reach for some of the newspaper and the language dictionary so I can translate it. “Good, you’re going to need a job. Because I’m pregnant.”
He freezes, and I see an old fear flicker in his eyes. I look at him over the newsprint, my heart in my mouth.
He takes a deep breath. “Are you sure?”
I nod, tears prickling my eyes. “Pretty sure. I think it must have happened almost straight away. I’m two weeks late and I’m never late.”
His hand reaches for mine and holds on as he searches for the right words. “I just want you to be safe, Liebling. I’m happy, I promise.”
But. The unspoken word hangs in the air. He’s told me that if I’d died by Heydrich’s hands he would have died as well. He would have taken his own life rather than go through all that pain again. Childbirth has risk. Children die young from disease, from accidents. I take a deep breath. “It will be hard, and we will worry, but I didn’t come with you to live half a life. I want to be in this house with you, loving you, and loving our children.”
He nods, and when I return to my translating I can feel his eyes on me, watchful.
As the weeks pass and my belly grows he’s by turns anxious and curious. He never had this the first time, I realize. He never got to see Johanna’s belly grow, or watch her demolish half a loaf of pumpernickel bread at eleven at night, or sit shiny-bellied in a bath full of warm soapy water. He puts his hands on my stomach, feeling for the baby and waiting long periods for it to kick. He’s fascinated by every change in my body. I watch his face sometimes and my happiness is bittersweet. I always assumed that I would have this so I can just get on with things, but he never did. It must seem like a strange dream to him.
Unexpectedly, Reinhardt gets into the art trade. It’s the last thing I would have thought would interest him but he takes his keen eye for detail and applies it to paintings and sculpture. He invests the last of the marks and dollars we brought with us from East Berlin into his first pieces.
I suspect—no, I know—that not all the trading is legitimate. I know little about art but the signatures on a few of the more beautiful paintings catch my eye. Vermeer. Pissarro. Raphael. Such works were never on display in the East but I remember a passage in a school textbook about Nazi looted art.
One day I find Reinhardt contemplating a painting propped up on the mantelpiece. It’s about two feet across, a landscape showing some olive groves and mountains in the background, except that the colors are vivid oranges and blues instead of the expected greens and browns. The brushstrokes are thick and haphazard, merely suggesting the scene, but it’s not an ugly painting. In fact it’s very beautiful.
“Are you going to hang that there?” I ask. Occasionally Reinhardt finds a piece he likes or he thinks I’ll like and puts it in our house. Nothing that he believes was stolen, at my insistence. I don’t want to live my life surrounded by stolen objects.
He puts his arm around my waist and caresses my swollen belly. At seven months pregnant I’m becoming huge. “That, meine Liebe, is an act of aesthetic violence committed by a degenerate seeking to undermine the steadfast German spirit.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Is it? I thought it was just a painting.”
He laughs and kisses the top of my head. “Not to Hitler. This was confiscated by the Reich, probably from a museum or a Jewish collector. Hitler didn’t like Modern art.”
“And you’re selling it to the highest bidder.”
“Not this piece. This piece is going to the Louvre. An anonymous donation.”
I look at him in surprise. “Not into the hands of a collector?”
“No. It’s too good for a private collection. This is one of my conscience pieces.”
I don’t know what he means for a moment. Then I remember the other smuggling he used to do, reuniting families who’d been separated by the Berlin Wall. “Like Frau Schäfer?”
“Ja, like Frau Schäfer.”
I can’t say I’m thrilled by what my husband does and I suspect a great many of the pieces that pass through his hands should be sent to a museum, not just this one. But he did tell me he would land on his feet and I suppose I should be glad it’s paintings he’s dealing in and not something worse. There are no guns involved, no espionage. Most of his time is spent hunting through old auction catalogues and papers, trying to determine provenance and sniff out forgeries. It’s a different sort of hunting, and it suits him. “Promise me we won’t get wealthy from you doing this. It feels parasitic.”
He nods at the landscape. “We shan’t. Conscience pieces like this don’t come cheaply. Once I’m satisfied that you and the baby are taken care of I’ll send something off to Paris or New York every now and then. How does that sound?”
I think for a moment, leaning against him. It’s not honest work like farming or teaching or plumbing, but for Reinhardt it’s quite good. We regard the painting together for a while. How many more just as beautiful are being lost to rich men who hang them up where only they can see them? “It’s a shame to think of all these pieces disappearing into private collections forever.”
Reinhardt digs a little book out of his pocket and shows it to me. “Maybe not forever. These are all my sales, buyers and their addresses. If the Wall ever comes down and there’s peace in Europe the authorities may be interested in this.”
I flick through the pages and see the particulars of hundreds of pieces of artwork and dozens of buyers. There are detailed notes about the provenance of each piece and whether he suspects they were sold to him legitimately or not. “So they won’t be lost forever. I knew you had some conscience but you’re becoming positively burdened with one. When did this happen?”
He gives me a dry look and caresses my belly with a large warm hand. “Since I found out I was going to be a father.”
I’ve sensed a gradual change in Reinhardt since we left East Berlin. As he said, happy men do not snatch women from the streets. I think that in getting us out he’s laid a ghost to rest. He couldn’t save Johanna all those years ago but he was able to save me. Her specter seems to be dissipating and I hope that now her memory is at peace he can be, too.
“So you’re happy about the baby, Reinhardt?”
He regards me silently. “Some mornings I wake up and I don’t know where, or even who, I am. This place. No uniform for the first time since I was a boy. You getting so big with our child. I want to laugh because it doesn’t seem possible.”
“You don’t think you deserve it?”
He kisses me softly. “No. But I think I’ll try to. If I earn your love then that’s all that matters. Yours, and Fritzl’s or Magda’s, or whomever this little one will be. If I can make you both happy then I will have done better than I ever thought possible.”
I snort with laughter. “Fritzl or Magda? We are not having a Fritzl or Magda.”
Mock surprised, he says, “What is wrong with such good and sturdy names? But tell me, Liebling, are you happy here with me?”
I look up at my husband who was once so fearsome to me. Who desires my strength and has taken strength from me. Who gives me hope and all his love. For so long there was the gray of the Wall in his eyes but it’s been many months since I’ve seen that concrete scar reflected in their depths. They’re the blue of the sea these days.
I smile, and go up on tiptoe to kiss him. “Yes, Reinhardt. I am.”