Like a middle-aged Jewish woman. “You look perfect,” Emilia said. “Very Marlene Dietrich.”
The hat was meant to provide a kind of shadow, obscuring her friend’s face, but if the Gruens, traveling as the Hartmanns, ran into difficulties, it would be because of the way Frau Gruen looked. Their papers, passports and exit visas, were excellent forgeries, because resistance friends of Emilia’s had managed to link up with a Communist cell-they left anti-Nazi leaflets in public buildings-and with this very dangerous connection had come one of the most desirable people to know these days in Berlin: a commercial printer.
Emilia and the Gruens drank their mugs of coffee in silence, there was nothing more to say. When they were done, Emilia said, “Would you care for company on the way to the tram?”
“Thank you, Emmi,” Herr Gruen said, “but we’ll go by ourselves, and say farewell to you now.”
And so they did.
They left early, seeking the most crowded trains, and they were not disappointed. During the run to Dresden, two and a half hours, they stood in the corridor, packed in with people of all sorts, many with bulky parcels and suitcases. Their own luggage was a simple leather valise, packed for the eyes of customs officers. On this leg of the journey they were ignored, and the passport control on the German side of the Czech border was perfunctory. They were on their way to Vienna, part of the Reich, and so were most of the other passengers. Not quite so smooth was the entry control on the other side of the border-by then it was two-thirty. The officers here were Sudeten Germans, newly empowered, and so conscientious. One of them had a good long look at Frau Gruen, but was not quite so discourteous as to mention that he thought she looked like a Jew. He stared, but that was it, and so failed to notice the thin line of perspiration at her husband’s hairline-on a frigid afternoon. But their papers were in order and the officer stamped their visas.
Vienna was a long way from Prague, some eight hours on the express train. Here the Hartmanns were in a first-class compartment, where passengers were rarely subject to unscheduled security checks by Gestapo detectives. One didn’t want to annoy powerful people. The Gruens, in preparatory conversation with Emilia and her friends, had determined that friendly chitchat was dangerous, better to remain silent and aloof. But certain travelers, especially the newly prosperous, felt that first-class status was an opportunity to converse with interesting people and were not so easily turned aside. Thus a woman in the seat across from Frau Gruen, who said, “What takes you to Vienna?”
“Unfortunately, my wife’s mother has passed away,” Herr Gruen said. “We’re going for the funeral.” After that they were left alone.
A useful lie, they thought. How were they to know that this woman and her mouse of a husband would be on the Leverkusen, the excursion steamer to Budapest?
In the war of 1914, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires had fought as allies. After surrender in 1918, Hungary became a separate state but Germany, with a new war on the horizon in the late 1930s, sought to rekindle the alliance, courting the Hungarians in the hope they would join up with Hitler in the planned conquest of Europe. We must be friends, said German diplomacy, accent on the must, so commercial links of all sorts became important. For example, the round-trip excursion steamer that sailed up and down the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. True, it crossed the border of the Reich, but not the border of national amity. It was fun. A band played on the dock in Vienna, another on the dock in Budapest. The food aboard the Leverkusen, even in time of rationing, was plentiful-as much potato as you liked. Not that there wasn’t a passport control, there was, beneath great swastika banners, but the Austrian SS men kept their Alsatian shepherds muzzled and at a distance, and the officers, on the border with a new ally, were under orders to be genial. “The ice on the river is not too bad, not yet,” one of them said to Herr Gruen, who for the occasion wore a Nazi party pin in his lapel.
“One can be glad of that,” Herr Gruen said, with his best smile.
“You’ll have a jolly time in Budapest, Herr Hartmann.”
“We expect to. Then, back to work.”
“In Berlin, I see.”
“Yes, we love it there, but, always good to get away for a bit.”
The officer agreed, stamped the exit visa, raised his right arm, and said, amiably, “Heil Hitler.”
“Sieg Heil,” said the Gruens, a duet. Then, relieved, they climbed the gangway.
Standing at the rail of the steamer, watching the passengers as they filed past the border control, was the woman from the train and her husband. “Isn’t that …?” she said. She had to raise her voice, because the oompah of the tuba in the dockside ensemble was particularly emphatic.
“It is, my dear.”
“Very curious, Hansi. He said they were going to a funeral. In Vienna.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear properly.”
“No, no. I’m sure I did.” Now she began to suspect that the pleasure of her company had been contemptuously brushed aside, and she started to get mad.
Poor Hansi. This could go on for days. “Oh, who knows,” he said.
“No, Hansi,” she said sharply. “They must explain themselves.”
But, where were they?
The Gruens had taken a first-class cabin for the overnight trip to Budapest and planned to hide there. Hunger, however, finally drove Herr Gruen to the dining room, where he ate quickly and ordered a cheese sandwich to take back to the cabin. As he left the dining room, here was the woman from the train. Her husband was nowhere to be seen, but she was sitting on a lounge chair just outside the door and rose when she saw him. “Sir,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Excuse me, but did you not say on the train that you were attending the funeral of your wife’s mother, in Vienna?”
Herr Gruen flinched. Why had this terrifying woman, cheeks flushed, arms folded across her chest, suddenly attacked him? He did not answer, looking like a schoolboy caught out by a teacher, said, “Well,” to gain time, then “I did, meine Frau, say that. I’m afraid I did not tell the truth.”
“Oh?” This was a threat.
“I did not mean to trouble you, meine Frau, but I felt I could not honorably respond to your question.”
“And why not?” The admission had not appeased her; the prospect of a really nasty confrontation apparently provoking her to a sort of sexual excitement.
“Because we are married, but not to each other.”
The woman’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
“We are in love, meine Frau, so much in love, we are.” He paused, then said, “Tragically.”
Now she went scarlet, and stuttered an apology.
For her, he thought, just as good as a fight. Humiliation. Possibly better. It wasn’t until he was back inside the cabin that he realized his shirt was soaked with sweat.
27 December. In the sunless light of a winter morning, the Gypsy musicians on the Danube dock seemed oddly out of place, as though they’d become lost on their way to a nightclub. Still, they sawed away on their violins and strummed their guitars as the passengers disembarked from the Leverkusen. Holding hands as they walked down the gangplank, the Gruens were as close to peace of mind as they’d been for a long, long time. True, their train to Belgrade didn’t leave until the morning of the twenty-ninth, so they would have to spend two nights in a hotel. This didn’t bother them at all-they were no longer on German soil, and the hotel would be luxurious. A Hungarian officer stamped their passports in the ship’s dining room, and they’d begun to feel like normal travelers as they headed for the line of taxis waiting at the pier.