The door opened and his son entered the room, put his leather field case on the floor and inclined his head to his father in a gesture of respect.
“I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said. “I think you’ll be comfortable here until it’s over. Herr Moeller assures me there’s enough coal to last until the days are milder...”
His son was so tall. Professor Jaeger thought, his strength seemed to fill the room. And with the thought, the father’s mood became suddenly wild with anger and frustration. He wanted so desperately to tell his son now that nothing could be created in hatred, that hatred consumed rather than nourished, and while it gave an angry glare to eyes, it could never help one to see.
When the words sounded, the noise was meaningless to Jaeger, and looking into his father’s naked eye was like staring into the flame of an open furnace.
The professor wheeled his chair toward the break-front. Breathing heavily with the effort, he pulled down a leather yearbook and opened it to a page of photographs, his hands fluttering on the dry pages with a sound like leaves skittering over winter fields. When he found the photograph he was searching for, he put a finger on it and raised the book with trembling hands to his son.
Jaeger looked at the solemn and unformed features of young Rudi Geldman, the black hair brushed back neatly and only the hint of a smile to suggest his amusement at the absurd solemnity surrounding the taking of class pictures. There was something so graceful and charged with potential in his expression. Karl felt a spasm of pain at the waste of it.
But his father had more to show him, smudged pictures he was removing from an envelope with trembling fingers, and Karl had a fleeting glimpse of a slim, naked body shackled to iron posts, but he looked away quickly and with a swing of his hand knocked the photographs to the floor.
His father cried out something to him and the words the son heard were, “Water is green and love! And cry it forever.”
Turning as if on parade, Jaeger strode into the kitchen and filled a glass with water at the sink. He was trembling now with an anger that matched his father’s. Where did the old man’s moral superiority come from? To dare to weaken him, take the heart from him when within hours their tanks and soldiers would be smashing into the Ardennes... and was it not his own father. Professor Albrecht Jaeger, who had expelled Rudi from school? Of course, it was the law. But had he even tried to defy it? And what about the fat geese given loyal Germans by Nazi block and cell leaders? Those plump birds decorated with mushrooms and truffles had graced the table of Professor Jaeger when heads were bowed in grateful prayer and the evils of the times forgotten in the steaming aroma of roast fowl and the fragrance of good German wines that accompanied it.
Karl returned to his father’s room and put the glass within reach of the old man. “Let me tell you something, father,” he said. “After Crystal Night I offered to drive Rudi across the border to Switzerland. But no, he believed this was his country, and he sacrificed his life — he threw it away — and to prove what? That in his deepest heart he believed in the Cornet Rilke?”
Karl slung his field case over his shoulder. He had to leave now; his car was waiting. But he couldn’t live with the memory of his father’s terrible eye glaring up at him... “I hope you’ll pray for me, father. Pray for Hedy and the children and all our people. And pray for yourself too, father. Because you are the river that flowed into my life.”
He turned and walked from the room and the heels of his boots rang hard through the apartment, an impersonal counterpoint to the incoherent words his father cried after him.
Chapter Nine
December 15, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Friday, 1700 Hours.
Snow continued to fall heavily over the Ardennes. The sky stayed dark and overcast and the clouds were weighted with moisture. Sleeting storms developed with erratic violence across the terrain held by the American VIII Corps.
Snow packed the chinks of sandbagged revetments, froze the breechblocks of cannons, numbed the faces of soldiers and caused gale warnings to fly along the Channel ports from Ostend to Zeebrugge and down the canal systems of Europe into the tributaries of the Rhine.
The bitter weather swept across lakes and woodlands of the Ardennes, driving what was left of the livestock to cover, forcing starving goats and sheep to huddle together for warmth behind foothills covered with bracken that was as hard and cold as iron. Root crops had been scarce that year. Beets and potatoes were frozen in the fields, the woods thinned by the occupying troops. Great stands of maples and oaks were gone; without these windbreaks the countryside was nakedly exposed to winter gales.
The labor force had been conscripted by the German Army, the diamond and glass and flax industries no longer functioned, and the bulk of food for human consumption came from painstakingly nurtured garden plots, chiefly sustained by human manure, a commodity also in dangerously short supply.
On the banks of the Salm near Lepont the ground had been beaten flat and hard. Across this frozen earth, once thick with silver birch and wild fruit orchards, the winds raced unchecked through the streets of the village. It shook the old panes of Denise Francoeur’s brick home, where Jocko Berthier had camouflaged the entrance to the stone cellar, a vaulted enclosure directly below the parlor.
Working by candlelight with the blackout curtains drawn tightly. Jocko had removed the locks and hinges of the cellar door, filling the screw holes with putty and whitewashing the door panels to match the color and texture of the parlor walls. He’d then wedged the door back into place, fitting it closely and snugly with strips of felt.
From a poster of his own ancient bed. Jocko had sawed a wooden angel’s head and attached it by a bolt and screw to a cross panel in the cellar door. The illusion of a smooth, unbroken white wall, relieved only by the shining angel’s head, was completed when Denise placed a table in front of the whitewashed door and decorated it with a lace cloth and pewter candlesticks. The gracefully carved angel’s head was painted blue and white with delicately ridged blond hair and a small pink mouth formed in gentle curves. The eyes of the angel were blank and round, and firelight touched them with a suggestion of sightless innocence.
Later that same afternoon a V-1 in a formation heading toward Liège developed a misfunction and tipped to earth short of its target, exploding in the woods above Lepont and missing by a few dozen yards the gatehouse of a castle that had been occupied until recently by German officers.
From her parlor Denise had watched the robot bomb flash across the skies and curve down into the woods above the village. She went quickly into the bedroom, where Margret, her dark hair fanned out against the pillow, her breathing deep and uneven, was sleeping. There was a look of pain on the child’s small, cramped features, and tears had started beneath her eyelids and glistened on her cheeks even while she slept.
Denise woke her niece gently and led her down to the cellar, where there was a cot, candles, ajar of water and some writing paper and crayons.
“If anyone knocks, you won’t come up?”
The child shook her head.
“Promise me.”
The little girl nodded and her aunt left her, collected her cloak and went into the village.
When she located Jocko Berthier he grumbled, as she’d known he would, but at last pulled on his sheepskin coat and started with her up the winding road, flanked on one side by black trees and on the other by a sheer drop into the valley. Above them, arches and turrets dark against the dull afternoon, they could see Castle Rěve standing on one of twin peaks; the second promontory, slightly higher than the castle hill, was known as Mont Reynard.