The Foreign Correspondent

resistance. Under the rule of the Nazis and their secret police, Germany had become a counterintelligence state, eager informers, and agents provocateurs, everywhere, did she know what could happen to her? Yes, she knew, damn her aristocratic eyes, but these people were not going to tell Christa Zameny von Schirren what she could and couldn’t do. Blood told, he thought, and told hard. But was it so different from what he was doing? It is, he thought. But it wasn’t, and he knew it.

The office door was open, but one of the secretaries stood at the threshold and knocked politely on the frame. “Herr Weisz?”

“Yes, uh…”

“I’m Gerda, Herr Weisz. You are to have a meeting, at the Propaganda Ministry press club, at eleven this morning, with Herr Doktor Martz.”

“Thank you, Gerda.”

Leaving time for a leisurely walk, Weisz headed down the Leipzigerstrasse toward the new press club. Passing Wertheim’s, the vast block-long department store, he stopped for a moment to watch a window dresser taking down a display of anti-Soviet books and posters-book titles outlined in flames, posters showing garish Bolshevik thugs with big hooked noses-and stacking them neatly on a handcart. When the window dresser stared back at him, Weisz went on his way.

Three years since he’d been in Berlin-was it different? The people on the street seemed prosperous, well fed, well dressed, but there was something in the air, not exactly fear, that reached him. It was as though they all had a secret, the same secret, but it was somehow unwise to let others know you had it. Berlin had always looked official-various kinds of police, tram conductors, zookeepers-but now it was a city dressed for war. Uniforms everywhere: the SS in black with lightning-flash insignia, Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, others he didn’t recognize. When a pair of SA storm troopers, in brown tunics and trousers, and caps with chin straps, came toward him, nobody seemed to change direction, but a path opened for them, almost magically, on the crowded sidewalk.

He stopped at a newspaper stand, where rows of magazines displayed on the kiosk caught his attention. Faith and Beauty, The Dance, Modern Photography, all their covers showing nude women engaged in wholesome activities of one sort or another. The Nazi administration, on assuming power in 1933, had immediately banned pornography, but here was their version of it, meant to stimulate the male population, as Christa had suggested, to hop on the nearest Fraulein and produce a soldier.

At the press club-the former Foreigners’ Club on Leipzigerplatz-Dr. Martz was the merriest man alive, fat and sparkling, dark, with a toothbrush mustache and active, chubby hands. “Come, let me show you around!” he sang. Here was a journalist’s heaven, with a sumptuous restaurant, loudspeakers to page reporters, reading rooms with newspapers from every major city, workrooms with long rows of desks bearing typewriters and telephones. “For you, we have everything!”

They settled in red leather easy chairs in a lounge by the restaurant, and were immediately served coffee and a huge platter of Viennese coffee buns, babka, moist, buttery cake rolled around crushed walnuts flavored with cinnamon and sugar, or a ribbon of thick almond paste. Surprising, Weisz, that you became a Nazi. Oh, it’s a long story. “Have another, oh go ahead, who’s to know.” Well, maybe one more.

And that was just for starters. Martz gave him his own red identification card. “If you have a problem with a policeman, God forbid, just show him this.” Did he want tickets to the opera, or a film, or anything? “You need only ask.” Also, filing dispatches here was gloriously easy, there was a counter at the Propaganda Ministry, leave your story there and it would be cabled, uncensored, back to your office. “Of course,” Martz said, “we will read what you write in the newspapers, and we expect you to be fair. Two sides to every story, right?”

Right.

Clearly, Martz was a man happy in his work. He’d been, he told Weisz, an actor, had spent five years in Hollywood, playing Germans, Frenchmen, any role requiring a Continental accent. Then, on returning to Germany, his idiomatic English had landed him his present employment. “Mostly for the Americans, Herr Weisz, I must admit it, we want to make life pleasant for them.” Eventually, he got down to business, producing from his briefcase a thick dossier of stapled reports. “I’ve taken the liberty of having this compiled for you,” he said. “Facts and figures on Poland. Maybe you’ll take a look at it, when you have a moment.”

After wiping his fingers on a white linen napkin, Weisz paged through the dossier.

“It’s about the corridor we require, through Poland, from Germany to East Prussia. Also the situation in Danzig, getting worse every day, the treatment of the German population there, which is appalling. The Poles are being stubborn, they refuse to compromise, and our side of the story isn’t being told. Our concerns are legitimate, nobody can say they aren’t, we must be allowed to protect our national interest, no?”

Yes, of course.

“That’s all we ask, Herr Weisz, fair play. And we want to help you-any story you want to write, just say the word and we’ll supply the data, the appropriate periodicals, a list of sources, and we’ll arrange the interviews, excursions, anything you like. Go out into Germany, go see for yourself what we’ve accomplished here, with hard work and ingenuity.”

The waiter appeared, offering more coffee, a silver pitcher of thick cream, sugar from a silver bowl. From his briefcase, Martz produced one last sheet of paper: a schedule of press conferences, two every day, one at the Propaganda Ministry, the other at the Foreign Ministry. “Now,” he said, “let me tell you about the cocktail parties.”

Weisz trudged through the daytime hours, hungry for twilight.

Christa managed to come to the hotel almost every afternoon, sometimes at four, when she could, or at least by six. Very long days for Weisz, waiting, daydreaming, thinking of this, or maybe that, some neglected appetizer on the Great Menu, then making plans, detailed plans, for later.

She did the same thing. She didn’t say it, but he could tell. Two taps at the door, then Christa, cool and polite, no melodrama at all, only a brief kiss. She would settle in a chair, as though she just happened to be in the neighborhood and had stopped by, and, perhaps, this time, they would merely converse. Then, later, he would find himself led by her imagination to something new, a variation. The gentility of her bearing never changed, but doing what she liked excited her, charged her voice, quickened her hands, and this made his heart pound. Then it was his turn. Nothing new under the sun, of course, but for them it was a very broad sun. One night, von Schirren went away, to a family property up on the Baltic, and Christa spent the night. With leisure, they sat together in the bathtub, her breasts shining wet in the light, and talked about nothing in particular. Then he reached below the water until she closed her eyes, held her lower lip, delicately, between her teeth, and lay back against the porcelain curve.

Work grew harder every day. Weisz was infinitely dutiful, filing away, as Delahanty had suggested, asking press-conference questions of colonels or civil servants. How they hammered away at it: Germany wished only economic progress-just see what’s happened at our Pomeranian dairies! — and simple justice, and security, in Europe. Please take note, ladies and gentlemen-it’s in our communique-of the case of one Hermann Zimmer, a bookkeeper in the city of Danzig, beaten up by Polish thugs in the street before his house while his wife, looking out the window, cried for help. And then they killed his little dog.

Meanwhile, at small restaurants in Berlin neighborhoods, open the menu and find a slip of red paper with black printing: Juden Unerwunscht. Jews not welcome here. Weisz saw it in shop windows, taped to barbers’ mirrors, tacked to doors. He never got used to it. Great numbers of Jews had joined the Italian Fascist party in the 1920s. Then, in 1938, German pressure on Mussolini had finally prevailed, articles appeared in the papers suggesting that Italians were in reality a Nordic race, and Jews were anathematized. This was new, for Italy, and generally disliked-they weren’t like that. Weisz stopped going to the restaurants.

12 March.

On Tuesday morning, at eleven-twenty, a telephone call at the Reuters office. “Herr Weisz?” Gerda called from the reception area. “It is for you, a Fraulein Schmidt.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, it’s me. I need to see you, my love.”