The German Wife(104)

I wanted him to hold me. I wanted him to lie to me—to tell me that it was all going to be okay. Instead, he looked back to the blueprints, his gaze hollow.

“I need this for tomorrow. I’ll be in soon.”

Jürgen was already out of bed when I woke the next morning. I could hear him moving around in the living room. As I roused slowly from a fitful night’s sleep, he appeared in the doorway, fully dressed.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay to have breakfast with you,” he said. “I have an early meeting and I slept in—I’m already a little late.”

I pushed myself into a sitting position and stared at him. He was freshly shaven and wearing a suit. He looked at his watch, clearly anxious about the time.

“What...have you decided...?” I started to whisper, but I stopped, unsure how to ask him if he’d made a final decision without giving away his doubts to a potential audience.

He shook his head, then took two steps to the bedside. He bent to kiss my cheek, then whispered in my ear, “I won’t do anything drastic without talking to you. But if I call and ask you to come, find a way to get here to say goodbye?”

We’d cleared the air but resolved nothing. I caught his elbow just as he moved to straighten, and then I scrambled to my knees and threw my arms around his neck.

“I love you,” he said softly.

“I love you too,” I whispered.

I dragged myself out of bed after a while, deciding I would tidy his villa before I started the long drive back to Berlin. But as soon as I stepped into the living space, I saw the blueprints on the table—the ones he’d been working on the previous night. I hovered over them, trying to make sense of his scrawl and the diagrams, unable to even decipher what the component represented.

Then I remembered Jürgen telling me he was staying up to finish the review because he needed the blueprints that morning.

The entrance to Mittelwerk was a large opening at ground level on the side of a hill, guarded by dozens of men in Wehrmacht and SS uniforms. I found the site easily enough. Several officers approached my car the minute I neared their station.

“Are you lost, miss?” a young soldier asked. I fumbled for Jürgen’s blueprints, my heart racing as I eyed the gun in his hand and the unwelcoming expression on his face.

But just then, I saw Aldo, a few dozen feet away, supervising a crane lifting some sheets of metal onto the back of a small train carriage. He happened to glance over at me just as I noticed him, and set his clipboard down on a pile of boxes, then jogged toward me.

“Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes,” he greeted me. “What on earth are you doing here?”

I looked past him to the entrance. The mouth of the tunnel was maybe two stories high. Two sets of railway tracks disappeared into the darkness, and even from the guard station, I could see people milling about inside. Some were wearing striped uniforms.

If you saw the conditions at Mittelwerk, you would understand why I will hang.

I wanted to understand. I’d allowed Jürgen to shelter me for all of those years, and in doing so, I’d allowed him to bear the burden of a guilt we both deserved to share. I couldn’t fix a single thing—but I could face the truth.

“Jürgen forgot some important paperwork,” I said. My tongue stuck to the dry roof of my mouth.

“I’ll take it,” Aldo offered. I shook my head and picked the blueprints up.

“It’s very important that I see him myself,” I said, my voice growing stronger. “Please, take me to him.”

I parked my car off to the side according to the guard’s instructions and walked through the gates. Aldo was waiting for me beside a small khaki truck. He looked unsure, glancing between me and the entrance to the tunnel.

“He’s quite a way in...”

“That’s okay,” I said, forcing a confident smile. “I’m not in any hurry.”

I took the front passenger’s seat and Aldo started the car. As the engine ignited, he glanced at me one last time.

“It’s not pleasant in there, Sofie,” he said, his voice low. “Are you sure you want to do this? I know Helene Sch?nerer is well familiar with the camps, but even she found it to be...too much.”

“I’m just here to see Jürgen,” I said firmly. “Let’s get this over and done with.”

He sighed and nodded, then steered the car beneath the crane’s frame.

“Wind up that window, please.” I did as I was instructed, and Aldo did the same on his side, as the car moved into the mouth of the tunnel.

Inside, the light was much dimmer, and at first, it was hard for me to see. As my eyes adjusted, I saw dozens of men working at tables and on components on flatbed train trolleys. Aldo drove slowly, driving around some of these stations, crossing each of the train tracks at different times to avoid carriages left in place. As we moved farther along, the air in the car became so pungent, my stomach rolled with every breath.

“What is that smell?” I asked Aldo. I covered my nose with my hand and tried to breathe through my mouth, but even inside the sealed car, I could taste the filth.

“We had to move quickly after the Peenemünde site was bombed, and we’ve had high quotas to meet for the V-2s. There was no time to install sanitation or ventilation...”

Now a few hundred feet into the tunnel, I saw a rough-hewn cross tunnel that seemed to have been cut by hand, the texture of the walls and ceilings coarse and uneven. I was startled to see rows of wooden bunks in the tunnel, most without even a mattress on them, and beside these, drums lined up, one after the other. A man sat on the last drum. His striped trousers were down around his ankles, but he seemed unconscious, leaning back against the wall behind him, his mouth wide and his eyes vacant as he stared at the ceiling. I gasped involuntarily and squeezed my eyes shut.