“You think he’ll be better off in an Allied prison? That’s what this means, you know. They try people for this.” He put his hand on the folder.
“I won’t leave him there. You don’t have to do it. I will. Tell your friend Shaeffer,” she said, her voice flat.
He looked up at her. “I just want to know one thing.”
She met his gaze. “I chose you,” she said.
“Not that. Not us. Just so I know. Do you believe what’s in here? What he did?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, barely audible.
He flipped open the cover and turned the pages, then pointed to one of the tables.
“This is how long it takes-”
“Don’t.”
“Sixty days, more or less,” he said, unable to stop. “These are the death rates. Still want to get him out?”
He looked up to find that her eyes had filled, turning to him with a kind of mute pleading.
“We can’t leave him there. With them,” she said.
He went back to the page with its spiky typed numbers and pushed it away. Two lines.
They avoided each other most of the morning, afraid to start in again, while she tended to Erich and he worked up the rest of his notes about Renate for Ron. The story they all had to have, but at least his would be first, ready to send. At noon Rosen turned up and examined the boy. “It’s a question of food only,” he said. “Otherwise he’s healthy.” Jake, relieved at the interruption, gathered up his papers, eager to get away, but to his surprise Lena insisted on coming along, leaving Erich with one of Danny’s girls.
“I have to go to the press camp first,” he said. “Then we can see Fleischman.”
“No, not Fleischman,” she said, “something else,” and then didn’t say anything more, so they drove without talking, drained of speech.
The press camp, depleted after Potsdam, was quiet except for the poker game. Jake took only a minute to drop off the notes, grabbing two beers from the bar on his way out.
“Here,” he said at the jeep, handing her one.
“No, I don’t want it,” she said, not sullen but melancholy, like the overcast skies. She directed him toward Tempelhof, and as they got nearer, her mood grew even darker, nothing in her face but a grim determination.
“What’s at the airport?”
“No, beyond. The kirchhof. Keep going.”
They entered one of the cemeteries that sprawled north of Tempelhof.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to visit. Stop over there. No flowers, do you notice? No one has flowers now.”
What he saw instead were two GIs with a POW work party, digging a long row of graves.
“What gives?” he said to one of the GIs. “Expecting an epidemic?”
“Winter. Major says they’re going to drop like flies once the cold sets in. Get it done before the ground freezes.”
Jake looked beyond a cluster of tombstones to another set of fresh graves, then another, the whole cemetery pockmarked with waiting holes.
Peter’s was a small marker, no bigger than a piece of rubble, set in a scraggly patch of ground.
“They don’t keep it up,” Lena said. “I used to take care of it. And then I stopped coming.”
“But you wanted to come today,” Jake said, uneasy. “This is about Emil, isn’t it?”
“You think you know everything he did,” she said, looking at the marker. “Before you judge him, maybe you should know this too.”
“Lena, why are we doing this?” he said gently. “It doesn’t change anything. I know he had a child.”
She kept looking at the marker, quiet, then turned to him. “Yours. He had yours. It was your child.”
“Mine?” he said, an involuntary word to fill the space, taken up now by a kind of dizziness, an absurd rush of elated surprise, almost goofy, caught off guard in some cartoon of waiting rooms and cigars. In a graveyard. He looked away. “Mine,” he said, guarded again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? To make you sad? If he had lived-I don’t know. But he didn’t.”
“But how-you’re sure?”
A disappointed half-smile. “Yes. I can count. You don’t have to be a mathematician for that.”
“Emil didn’t know?”
“No. How could I tell him that? It never occurred to him.” She turned back to the marker. “To count.”
Jake ran his hand through his hair, at a loss, not sure what to say next. Their child. He thought of her face in the church basement while he read. The way it would have been.
“What did he look like?”
“You don’t believe me? You want proof? A photograph?”
“I didn’t mean that.” He took her arm. “I want it to be. I’m glad we-” He stopped, aware of the marker, and dropped his hand. “I was just curious. Did he look like me?”
“Your eyes. He had your eyes.”
“And Emil never-”
“He didn’t know your eyes so well.” She turned. “No, never. He looked like me. German. He was German, your child.”
“A son,” he said numbly, his mind flooded with it.
“You left. I thought for good. And here it was inside me, this piece of you. No one would know, just me. So. You remember at the station, when you went away? I knew then.”
“And you never said.”
