He paused. “Are you…?”
“No,” Gudrun said, firmly. She groaned inwardly, resisting the urge to rub his nose in how she knew she wasn’t expecting a baby. “I’m not pregnant.”
“That’s good,” Volker Schulze said. “Gudrun, I understand how you feel, but Konrad isn’t choosing not to write to you. I believe he will contact you as soon as he can. He does love you and we, his parents, approve of you.”
Gudrun felt another stab of bitter guilt. Hilde wasn’t atypical; parents, particularly those who had lived through the deprivation of the war, wanted their sons to marry good housewives, women who could cook, clean and bear their grandchildren. They didn’t want academics, career women or even the handful of girls who’d made a career in the military; they assumed, perhaps correctly, that such women would never let their husbands boss them around in public. Konrad’s parents could easily have told him that they would never approve his relationship with Gudrun and the hell of it was that they might have had a point. Instead, they’d welcomed her into their house.
“I thank you,” she said, lowering her gaze. “Have you heard anything else from the front?”
Volker Schulze gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”
“The news is always bland,” Gudrun said, carefully. “I was wondering if you’d heard something a little more detailed.”
“There are endless skirmishes with the insurgents,” Volker Schulze said. It wasn’t much more than she could have deduced from the news broadcasts, reading between the lines. “It may take longer than we had thought to defeat the niggers.”
Gudrun blinked. “The news said it would only be a short commitment.”
Volker Schulze gave her a long considering look. “There are people in my office,” he said, “who don’t really understand how the factory actually works. Therefore, they make promises they cannot keep to people who are equally in the dark about what’s actually happening and rely on the managers on the ground to cover for their failings.”
It took Gudrun a moment to realise what he was trying to tell her. If someone could be so out of touch in a small factory, and she had no trouble in believing it, how much more out of touch were the people in the Reichstag, the men who ran the country? Had they started the war in South Africa because they believed, honestly believed, that victory would be no harder than baking a cake?
“I believe my daughter misses you,” Volker Schulze said, after a moment. “You are, of course, quite welcome to visit any time you like.”
“Thank you, sir,” Gudrun said. It wasn’t entirely proper, but there would be a chaperone in the house if necessary. “And I’m sorry…”
“For not being pregnant?” Volker Schulze asked, dryly. “I respect the Reichsführer’s feelings regarding the need to raise the next generation of German men, but I am enough of a traditionalist to believe that the happy couple should be married before they start producing children. A child should know his father.”
Gudrun blushed, furiously. No one would really care if she was a virgin or not on her wedding night, not when everyone would understand her giving herself to her boyfriend before he went off to the war. The only real question would be if she’d had a child – and, if she had, what benefits the child could claim. Konrad’s baby could draw an SS pension as well as state child support; hell, if she claimed he’d been planning to marry her – and his family would likely back her up – she could claim his SS pension as well. But it was immaterial. She’d never let him take off her panties, let alone go inside her…
“I agree,” she said, torn between an insane urge to giggle and a growing urge to just turn and run. Talking to her mother about men had been quite bad enough. “Please will you let me know the moment you hear anything?”
“I’ll call your house directly,” Volker Schulze promised.
He escorted her to the door – there was no sign of his wife or daughter – and waved her through. Gudrun gave him an impulsive hug, then hurried down the steps and back onto the road that led home. She had several other people she wanted to talk to before night fell, before she was expected home to assist her mother with the cooking. And then…
His family doesn’t know, she thought, as she walked past a handful of soldiers making their way to the barracks on the outskirts of the city. She’d been sure of it, but it never hurt to make sure. They would have told me something if they’d heard anything.
She glanced at her watch, then turned the corner. A couple of boys she’d known from her first house lived there; she’d played with them as a little girl, before they’d gone to school and emerged too stuck-up to play with girls. They too had gone to the wars. No one would mind if she asked after them, surely? And one of them had been in the same unit as Hilde’s boyfriend. It would be interesting to hear what they had to say.
Horst Albrecht knew, without false modesty, that he was a very smart young man. Everyone had told him so, right from the day he’d entered upper schooling in Germanica and impressed his tutors with his intelligence. Indeed, his family had been so proud of him that they’d entered him into the SS Academy two years before the normal application date; the SS, somewhat to Horst’s surprise, had accepted him without question. It had taken him a while to see why his superiors might be interested in a spy who was barely old enough to shave. But, by the time he’d graduated from one of the covert programs, he’d come to see the value of an agent who was literally eighteen years old.
“The university is a breeding ground for ideas,” his trainers had told him, when he’d finally passed the course. Being a spy was far more than charging around like Otto Skorzeny, riding hot motorcycles and winning the hearts of beautiful women. “Some of those ideas will be very bad. Your task is to watch for those who spread bad ideas and report them.”
It hadn’t been hard, at first. Horst had entered the university with the 1984 class; he’d made friends, chatted happily to everyone and was generally well-liked by his peers. The students didn’t want to look beyond the surface, not when they were escaping a regimented existence for the first time in their lives. Horst had no trouble making friends and generally being popular; hell, he’d even had a couple of girlfriends.
He hadn’t expected Gudrun to be a troublemaker. Even now, hours after he’d made his slow way to the SS safehouse – it doubled as a boarding house for students from Germany East, supervised by a grim-faced matron who provided all the explanation other students needed for why they weren’t invited to the safehouse – he still couldn’t quite believe it. Gudrun was intelligent, true, and strikingly pretty; he might have dated her himself if she hadn’t been involved with an SS trooper. Her father was a policeman, her brother a soldier in the Berlin Guard… she hardly fitted the profile of a potential troublemaker. There were few petty little resentments in her life, save for being born female…
And she could overcome most of those problems by being a good student, Horst thought, as he opened the door into his apartment. A computer expert or rocket scientist would be worth her weight in gold, if she truly hated the thought of becoming a housewife.
And yet, she’d said, quite clearly, that her boyfriend had been quietly shipped home, his wounds covered up. Her concern – and her anger – was quite justified.