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Page 35.

Chapter 6. Berlin, 1991: Countess over Torten

“You have a Russian name also,” Berna said looking through the photographs that Madame Didier had taken from her purse. Outside, on the high black slate rooftops, snow created stipples and filigrees in intricate patterns under a lovely ink-blue night sky. The quarter moon looked like a gold sword out of the Arabian Nights.

“Yes, several. My mother and Auntie Dora always called me Umnitsa, which means Good Girl, or Clever Girl,” Madame Didier said self-consciously. “Auntie Dora took care of me after my mother died. But Auntie Dora ran a tavern, and didn’t have time for me. Then the French came. They were wealthy old-school aristos who had lost their only child in a car crash. They came to adopt a little boy, but he proved to be feeble—so instead, in this cruel world, Auntie Dora gave me to them, and I became their only child. They loved me as well as any man and woman could. They spoiled me, I’d say.”

“And they are gone?” Seidlitz asked gently.

Marianne nodded. A tear ran down each cheek and she sniffled a bit. Her parents had died more than ten years earlier, and were buried in the 17th Century family mausoleum near Avignon. She idly fingered a little cellophane book of color photos. The ever-tactful Berna took the photos and showed them to her grandfather. “Look, Opa, these are Madame Didier’s three boys.” He put on his reading glasses, and admired three fine young men looking out in the world with happiness and self-confidence. “Handsome young men,” he said, nodding, and Berna appreciatively handed the photos back. “You should be proud, Madame.”

“Thank you.” She put the photos back in her purse. She changed topics as she did so. “Did you have any idea that there was a survivor?”

He shook his head. The thought upset him very much. “I had no idea until many years after the war. I feel I have lost a great opportunity in not meeting him. And you think he is your father?”

She looked pained. “Yes, I am sure of it now, at last, after many years of searching. His name was kept secret for many years, but I believe is a man named Tim Nordhall. I need to find him now, if he is still alive somewhere.”

“You are traveling all over the world in search of one clue or another,” Seidlitz said sympathetically and thoughtfully. “I wish I knew more. I only heard about Nordhall from Fehler, who went with me to a meeting of Sturmer next of kin in Canterbury. That would have been, oh, probably 1955 or 57, I forget—and Fehler had been talking with a man named Heyday or Highway, one of those English names, whom he met over a beer at that reunion, and who also may have been a double agent. Yes, it is all quite confusing, and still swallowed up in official secrecy even now, half a century after the war. Even now that East Germany has ceased to exist, and now even the Soviet Union is history, you would think that they would all give up their ghosts and secrets.” The old captain looked around, lost in his memories, and suddenly finding himself in this place now. “Very gemütlich here,” he said, looking around at the dark restaurant, its silent tables, its windows bright with a sea of city lights and neon dusted with faint traces of white that outlined the edges of black slate roof tiles. As always, a sea of traffic flowed underneath with an apparent total lack of concern—for every life was in crisis, and no stranger had time to wonder about someone else’s puzzle from another time.

Berna had a silver and turquoise barrette between her lips, and used both hands to fold her long blonde hair back into a ponytail.

Madame Didier pushed a crumb around on the linen. “I have been to San Francisco, London, Berlin, Brussels, anywhere I can think of. Every time I think I am closing in on my real father, he slips away again, like a ghost.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” Seidlitz said.

Berna said: “You are so wealthy and beautiful, and yet unhappy. How sad.”

“I have a lot to be thankful for; you are right.”

Berna had finished tying her hair back and sat drumming rock rhythms on her jeans. “We can be happy sitting here, warm and dry, having coffee.”

“At least we are alive, those of us who made it,” Seidlitz said. He rubbed his granddaughter’s back affectionately.

“Recently,” Madame Didier said, “I came into possession of some papers including some diaries kept by my father. The papers were recovered from my Auntie’s family in Siberia, and originally belonged to my mother. It seems she was in love with Tim Nordhall to her dying day, and wrote a stack of love letters to him that she never sent.” She felt flustered. “It seems Nordhall fell in love with not one but two women, or is that just more myth like so much about him?”

“Nothing was unusual in wartime,” the captain said, shrugging lightly. “Not even a man with two women.”