The meeting was set for the evening. The train would be leaving at 19:15 hours. Otto paced the room of the hotel, almost attached to the station itself. It crawled with the military but von Rombach was right – the best way to hide was in plain sight and so, Otto took his lunch facing the company of the American MPs and thanked another bright-eyed Ami when he held the door of the elevator for him.
In his room, the clock was ticking on the wall. The closer the hands crept to the bottom of the circle, the hotter his cheeks grew.
At last, a knock on the door. Expecting it, yet startled by it, all the same, Otto discovered that he suddenly couldn’t budge from the chair in which he was thoroughly pretending to read the newspaper to pass the time. His throat had dried up. His legs turned to concrete.
From the other side, a quiet and painfully-familiar, “Vati?”
And all at once Otto was on his feet, rushing across the room, throwing himself at the door, struggling with the lock with his shaking fingers… There she stood, smiling and pale, a suitcase in hand, his Gerlinde.
Before he knew it, Otto was pulling her into the tightest embrace, kissing both of her cheeks with great emotion, breathing in the alien smell of the musky perfume and faint remnants of some medication, and burying his wet face in the short locks of her hair.
“Maus! My little Maus!” Misty-eyed, he laughed and regarded his daughter as he held her in his outstretched arms. He didn’t seem to believe it himself, the fact that she had come after all.
“Yes, Vati. It’s me.”
He saw that her eyes had lost their childish bluish tint and turned steely-gray instead – steady, watchful, alert with intelligence. At least, she still called him Vati. Otto Neumann realized that he was desperately trying to reassure himself of something, on which he couldn’t quite put his finger, even with the best will in the world.
“Come. Come inside, don’t just stand there. Let me take your suitcase. My, it’s heavy!”
“I have my medical kit with me. I wanted to settle it once and for all between us that I’m not giving up on that.”
“No, no, you don’t have to.”
The promise of the marriage, Alfred, and promises to von Rombach had crawled into some dark corner of his mind. He’d sort them out later.
“Vati, the beard?” She smiled at him but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He touched it self-consciously.
“One might put it that way.”
He searched her face some more, afraid to breathe in her presence for some reason.
“How much you have grown!” he said, just to say something. “I left you a young girl…” His voice trailed off under her steady gaze. It was a pitiful attempt at a casual conversation and even he sensed it with his very skin. Chills were traveling down his spine ever since she’d crossed the threshold of his room. Quite an odd reaction to one’s own daughter – only this woman in front of him suddenly seemed more like a stranger than his own flesh and blood.
“The war makes one grow fast.” Her voice sounded strangely cool, detached from her body. In her eyes, unexpected ice shone, treacherous, like a cracking crust on top of the water, melting.
Otto regarded her, strangely anxious and puzzled. “I didn’t expect you so early.”
“I can take a walk if you like—” She made a move to leave.
“No, no! What nonsense!” he cried and laughed nervously and caught the sleeve of her light jacket but released it almost at once as if the material had burned his fingers.
Gerlinde observed him with mild curiosity. Her head was tilted to one side. Otto suddenly discovered that he was uncomfortable under that scrutinizing gaze.
“A medical profession then, eh, Maus?” He tried to find his footing once again.
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good. Very brave of you. General physician?”
“A surgeon.”
Once again Otto found himself thrown off track. “How so?”
“They’re urgently needed nowadays.” She shrugged indifferently. “And I’m not afraid of blood. That, too.”
“I’m very proud of you, Maus,” Otto said slowly. “I, for one, can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Her eyes bored holes in him. He felt himself to be a frog on her dissecting table, still alive but already pinned by all four of his quivering extremities.
“Can we talk honestly with each other?”
No more familiar, affectionate Vati this time. Otto backed away slowly and lowered himself into the armchair. Gerlinde remained standing. He had to look up at her when she finally spoke.
“What was in the papers that you burned before you left?”
“Nothing.” He stumbled upon the lie and pulled himself even further into the safety of the high padded back of the armchair. “Nothing substantial. It was standard protocol. We had to destroy all documentation, so it didn’t fall into the enemy’s hands…”
“Why?”
“Because… Such was the order from above.”
“Why would they give you an order to destroy the evidence?”
He started explaining something about Himmler and Pohl and sensitive information and some other utter nonsense to that extent but then receded and moved his lips without saying anything, only staring at his only daughter with wild desperation in his eyes.
“Why does it matter now, Maus?” His tone was just short of begging. “Let’s put it all behind us. We’ll start afresh, in a new country. Blank slate—”
“Blank slate?” She chuckled softly and walked over to the window. He couldn’t see her face when she spoke again, “you know, as long as I remember myself, everyone was telling me how we were the future. How we did everything right. How we had the right to do what we did because of X, Y, and Z. And it was all very logically laid out before us. And it almost made
