Garden of Beasts

grow suspicious.
    “It’s nice.”
    He noticed a single suitcase on the bed. The Goethe book was on the bare table, a cup of weak coffee next to it. There were white lumps floating on the surface and he asked her if there was such a thing as Hitler milk from Hitler cows.
    She laughed and said that the National Socialists hadplenty of asses among them, but to her knowledge they’d created no ersatz cows. “Even real milk curdles when it’s old.”
    Then he said, “We’re leaving tonight.”
    She nodded, frowning. “Tonight? When you say ‘immediately,’ you mean it.”
    “I will meet you here at five.”
    “Where are you going now?” Käthe asked him.
    “Just doing one final interview.”
    “Well, good luck, Paul. I will look forward to reading your article, even if it is about, oh, perhaps the black market, and not sports.” She gave him a knowing look. Käthe was a clever woman, of course; she suspected he had business here other than writing stories—probably, like half the town, putting together some semi-legal ventures. Which made him think she’d already accepted a darker side to him—and that she wouldn’t be very upset if he eventually told her the truth about what he was doing here. After all, his enemy was her enemy.
    He kissed her once more, tasting her, smelling lilac, feeling the pressure of her skin against him. But he found that, unlike last night, he wasn’t the least stirred. This didn’t trouble him, though; it was the way things had to be. The ice had taken him completely.
    •   •   •
    “How could she have betrayed us?”
    Kurt Fischer answered his brother’s question with a despairing shake of his head.
    He too was heartsick at the thought of what their neighbor had done. Why, Mrs. Lutz! To whom they took a loaf of their mother’s warm stollen, lopsided and overfilled with candied fruit, every Christmas Eve, whom their parents had comforted as she cried on the anniversary ofGermany’s surrender—that date a surrogate for the day her husband was killed during the War, since no one knew exactly when he died.
    “How could she do it?” Hans whispered again.
    But Kurt Fischer was unable to explain.
    If she had denounced them because they had been planning to post dissident billboards or to attack some Hitler Youth, he might have understood. But all they wanted to do was leave a country whose leader had said, “Pacifism is the enemy of National Socialism.” Like so many others, he supposed, Mrs. Lutz had become intoxicated by Hitler.
    The prison cell at Columbia House was about three by three meters, made of rough-hewn stone, windowless, with metal bars for a door, opening onto the corridor. Water dripped and the young men heard the scuttle of rats nearby. There was a single bare, glaring bulb overhead in the cell, yet none in the corridor so they could see few details of the dark forms that occasionally passed. Sometimes the guards were alone, other times they escorted prisoners, who were barefoot and made no sound except their occasional gasps or pleas or sobs. Sometimes the silence of their fear was more chilling than the noises they uttered.
    The heat was unbearable; it made their skin itch. Kurt couldn’t understand why—they were underground and it should have been cool here. Then he noticed a pipe in the corner. Hot air streamed out fiercely. The jailors were pumping it in from a furnace to make sure the prisoners didn’t get even a small respite from their discomfort.
    “We shouldn’t’ve left,” Hans muttered. “I told you.”
    “Yes, we should have stayed in our apartment— that would have saved us.” He was speaking with sharp irony.“Until when? Next week? Tomorrow? Don’t you understand she’s been watching us? She’s seen the parties, she heard what we’ve said.”
    “How long will we be here?”
    And how does one answer that question? Kurt thought; they were in a place where every moment was forever. He sat on the floor—there was nowhere else to perch—as he stared absently into the dark, empty cell across the corridor from theirs.
    A door opened and boots sounded on the concrete.
    Kurt began counting the steps—one, two, three . . .
    At twenty-eight the guard would be even with their cell. Counting footsteps was something he’d already learned about being a prisoner; captives are desperate for any information, for any certainty.
    Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two . . .
    The brothers regarded each other. Hans balled up his