The German Wife(58)

“Maybe not,” Jürgen said hesitantly. He glanced at me. “There was talk at Kummersdorf about a weapons designer who went rogue. They say he was caught because of a passive listening device in his office. The Gestapo were supposedly sitting in the next building listening to every word he said. I never took the rumors seriously until last night. Secret listening devices? So small that a person wouldn’t even notice them, so small that they can’t even be found? The very idea seems so fanciful. I figured the rumor was just more propaganda. It would suit the Gestapo for people to think they could hear us even in the privacy of our offices or our homes too.”

“But...there is no sign of a device in that room. Could they really have invented invisible microphones that don’t even need electricity? There must be another explanation.”

“If you told an electronics engineer that I have reasonably reliable rockets firing on a regular basis, he’d probably say that’s absurd. For all we know, someone else working for Army Ordnance has designed passive microphones that really could be hidden in plain sight. We have to act as if it’s true.”

“We have to assume they can hear everything we say? Everywhere we go?”

“It’s probably safe out here,” he whispered. “Maybe there are ways we can cover the sound of our whispers inside, but we’ll have to be careful. We’ll never know which rooms they are listening in on...” He motioned toward Adele’s building next door. “Or even which homes.”

“Dietger was there when you were taken last night,” I said, my throat tight. The existence of such a technology might explain his mystical ability to stick his nose in everyone’s business. I felt physically ill. “I tried to call Lydia after the Gestapo took you. I didn’t know what else to do. She didn’t answer, and this morning their housekeeper told me they unplugged their phones last night.”

Jürgen and I stared at one another, connecting the dots in the only way that made any sense.

“They knew you’d be calling,” Jürgen said finally.

“You were friends with Karl and I was friends with Lydia long before you and I even started dating,” I said. “If we can’t trust them, who can we trust?”

The answer was in my husband’s eyes. Moving forward, we would have to trust no one outside of our family.

“What do we do about Mayim?” he asked.

I could never bring myself to send Mayim away, but she couldn’t stay. We couldn’t allow our children to be brainwashed, but we had no choice other than to allow our children to be brainwashed.

I couldn’t join my thoughts together in a way that made sense.

“My love,” Jürgen said suddenly. I turned to him, and he gave me a gentle smile. The skin around his swollen eye crinkled. “Leave it with me, will you? Let me think on it.”

He went inside to take a nap after that. Mayim retreated to Adele’s house with Laura, and I went next door to join them. Adele made me sickly sweet, milky tea, and every time I finished a cup, she refilled it. In the end, we sat in near silence, but for the sound of Laura’s chatter as she pottered around. I nursed that final cup of tea in my hands, too full to drink it but drawing comfort from the warmth.

When Jürgen woke he joined us, and he insisted I go home for a nap too. And when I roused again, I slipped out of the bedroom and into the living room, where I found Jürgen and Mayim sitting across from one another on the sofas. Mayim was crying, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

“I had already decided to leave, Sofie,” she said.

“But how will you survive?” I asked, stricken.

“I’m strong. My family is strong,” she said, her voice breaking. “Besides, we don’t have a choice. You know that’s true, even if you wish it wasn’t.”

In the foyer less than an hour later, I stood opposite my best friend, staring into her eyes.

“I’m going to be okay,” Mayim insisted. But she was pale, and I knew that she did not believe that any more than I did. I had been increasingly aware that she and her family were in danger. Until that moment in the foyer, I fooled myself that as long as she was in our house, she was safe.

But I had become someone who would sit at a dinner party and crack jokes about pork knuckle when a man spoke of Mayim and her family as vermin. I was someone who would let my child read anti-Semitic books.

I was someone who would let my best friend be sent away, even as our country turned its back on her.

She was in danger, and I was a part of the problem, not the solution. I just didn’t know how to fix any part of that without risking Jürgen’s life.

It was an impossible, unbearable position.

“I don’t know how to get through the day without you,” I blurted.

“Me either,” she whispered unevenly. “That is something we are both going to have to figure out.”

“I want my children to be like you,” I said, hot tears rolling onto my cheeks. “I wanted you to help me shape them to be better people. I don’t know how to be a good mother without your help.”

“Nonsense.” She pressed a hand to my chest, flattening it over my heart. “It’s all here, Sofie. You’re already a better mother than you know.”

We were both sobbing now, each of us increasingly distressed. We’d been children together, and then we’d navigated adolescence, and those first brave steps into adulthood at finishing school, and then she’d been by my side when I married Jürgen and had my children.