Garden of Beasts

here?” he asked. “Do you want to leave?”
    Still, she said nothing. They came to an intersection of sidewalks, one of which would take them to the left, south, out of the park and back to the boardinghouse. She stopped. After a moment she said, “Come. This way.”Turning, Käthe led him farther into the park, north, along winding paths. They finally came to a small boathouse on a pond. Dozens of for-hire boats rested upside down, nestled against one another. Now, in the hot night, the area was deserted.
    “I haven’t been inside the Tiergarten for three years,” she whispered.
    Paul said nothing.
    At last she continued. “That man who has my heart?”
    “Yes. Your journalist friend.”
    “Michael Klein. He was a reporter for the Munich Post. Hitler got his start in Munich. Michael covered his rise and wrote much about him, about his tactics—the intimidation, the beatings, the murders. Michael kept a running count of the unsolved murders of people who were opposed to the Party. He even believed that Hitler had his own niece killed in thirty-two because he was obsessed with her and she loved someone else.
    “The Party and the Stormtroopers threatened him and everybody at the Post. They called the paper the ‘Poison Kitchen.’ But before the National Socialists came to power they never hurt him. Then there was the Reichstag fire. . . . Oh, look, you can just see it. There.” She pointed to the northeast. Paul caught a glimpse of a tall domed building. “Our parliament. Just weeks after Hitler was named chancellor, someone lit a fire inside. Hitler and Göring blamed the Communists and they rounded up thousands of them, Social Democrats too. They were arrested under the emergency decree. Michael was among them. He went to one of the temporary prisons set up around the city. They kept him there for weeks. I was frantic. No one told me what happened, no one told me where he was. It was terrible. He told me later that theybeat him, fed him once a day at the most, made him sleep naked on a concrete floor. Finally a judge let him go since he hadn’t committed any crime.
    “After he was released I met him at his apartment, not far from here. It was a spring day in May, a beautiful day. Two in the afternoon. We were going to hire a boat. Right here, at this lake. I’d brought some stale bread to feed the birds. We were standing there and four Stormtroopers came up to us and pushed me to the ground. They’d followed us. They said they’d been watching him since he’d been released. They told him that the judge had acted illegally in releasing him and they were now going to carry out the sentence.” She choked for a moment. “They beat him to death right in front of me. Right there. I could hear his bones break. You see that—”
    “Oh, Käthe. No . . .”
    “—you see that square of concrete? That was where he fell. That one. The fourth square from the grass. That was where Michael’s head lay as he died.”
    He put his arm around her. She didn’t resist. But neither did she find any comfort in the contact; she was frozen.
    “May is now the worst month,” she whispered. Then she looked around, at the textured canopy of summer trees. “This park is called the Tiergarten.”
    “I know.”
    In English she said, “‘ Tier ’ means ‘animal’ or ‘beast.’ And ‘ Garten, ’ of course, is ‘garden.’ So, this is the garden of beasts, where the royal families of imperial Germany would hunt game. But in our slang ‘ Tier ’ also means thug, like a criminal. And that’s who killed my lover, criminals.” Her voice grew cold. “Here, right here in the garden of beasts.”
    His grip tightened around her.
    She glanced once more at the pond then at the square of concrete, the fourth from the grass. Käthe said, “Please take me home, Paul.”
    •   •   •
    In the hallway outside his door they paused.
    Paul slipped his hand into his pocket and found the key. He looked down at her. Käthe in turn was staring at the floor.
    “Good night,” he whispered.
    “I’ve forgotten so much,” she said, looking up. “Walking through the city, seeing lovers in cafés, telling ribald jokes, sitting where famous writers and thinkers have sat . . . the pleasure in things like those. I’ve forgotten what that’s like. Forgotten so much . . .”
    His hand went to the tiny scallop of cloth covering her shoulder, and then he touched her neck, felt her skin move against her