“Then I will pick you up at half eight,” he said. “At—?”
“Seven Krensig,” she said, cringing at the thought of him seeing the Gruber cottage. “But eight o’clock would be better,” she added, beginning her new strategy as obstacle maker.
“Aha!” He looked satisfyingly surprised.
Benita stood a little straighter and held the bag with less of an apologetic tilt to her shoulders.
“Eight o’clock then,” he said with a bow.
That evening, in preparation for dinner, Benita luxuriated in a hot bath. The Grubers still relied on the old-fashioned assemblage of water heated on the stove and schlepped across the kitchen to a tub that sat behind a makeshift screen. Frau Gruber, as excited as Benita herself, had suggested the bath and put aside her own work to prepare it. Her mother was, in fact, gripped by such nervous energy that it calmed Benita.
She ran a comb through her hair and shook off Frau Gruber’s offers to plait and wrap it around her head in her usual Sunday style and instead pinned it into a more modern, American fashion with three rolls at the base of her skull. Benita’s younger brother made a racket knocking on the bedroom door and singing old love ballads in a falsetto.
When eight o’clock finally arrived, Benita wore her finest dress—a blue-and-red-flowered dirndl that had originally belonged to her sister—and her too-small Sunday shoes. She sat pretending to be engrossed in her needlepointing as her mother arranged a plate of cookies and uncorked the plum schnapps in an embarrassing display of ingratiation. By a quarter past the hour, when Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann finally knocked, Benita had already experienced and overcome her nervousness, and she greeted him coolly.
“Staff Officer Fledermann,” she said, glancing at the clock. “I wondered if you’d been caught by one of Herr Schulte’s dogs.” Frau Gruber’s mouth dropped open at her impertinence.
“They tried,” he replied with a smile, “but I was too quick. Call me Connie, please.”
With no further back-and-forth, and certainly without partaking in pleasantries, cookies, or schnapps, Benita and Connie took their leave.
Outside the cottage the moon was bright and Connie’s Horch sport car gleamed like an object from another world. She detected the strong smell of winter thaw—the hay that had covered the vegetable garden all season was thick with mildew and hoarfrost, a trace of dead animal. But over this the fresh, clean spring fragrance of the early blooming bloodroot and snow roses. And stepping through the door that Connie held open for her, Benita could barely believe her good fortune.
“To the Golden Onion?” he asked in a way that mocked the place and all its provincial pretensions even as he suggested it.
“Of course.” She smiled, in keeping with his tone, as if they were not two strangers pursuing some staid courtship ritual in a small town in an obscure corner of the Reich, but rather sophisticated, worldly lovers, known intimately to each other already and playing a game of pretend: Pretend we are two rubes in the backwaters of the empire, meeting for the first time. Pretend we know nothing of who we are or where we are headed. Pretend the conclusion of this chance encounter has not already been foretold.
Why had this faux familiarity been the starting point for them? It confused and flustered Benita, but at the same time seemed essential—vital to the excitement. She would wonder about it later, when the time to wonder about such things returned. By then Connie and old Frau Gruber were dead, and her brothers had been killed on the front. And there was no one left with any insight.
At the Golden Onion, Benita and Connie sat beside a pleasantly flickering fire, and Connie ordered them each a glass of the local cider and a schnitzel. It struck Benita as comical—a fancy staff officer from Berlin, ordering this. “So tell me,” he asked when their cider was before them and the J?gerschnitzel steamed greasily on its plate. “What do you really think of all this marching and saluting and repatriating the German peoples of Europe?”
Benita was shocked at his question—the implication and glib tone. It was, maybe, a trick, she thought. After all, had he not said he was here on some official business?
“I think it is a kindness by our Führer to bring them back into their motherland. And also the German people need more room and space,” she parroted Fr?ulein Brebel in a confused rush.
“Who told you that?” Connie asked, laughing.
“No one—it’s what I think,” Benita said, drawing herself up straight.
“And what of all the opponents and Communists and Jews who’ve been arrested?”
Benita stared at him in disbelief. It was a traitorous line of questioning. And the basis for the question was fuzzy in her mind—certainly in Frühlinghausen no great number of people had been arrested. She stared down at her hands and could feel the blood racing to her cheeks.
“Oh no! I have upset you! My dear maiden,” Connie said, again using his cheerful playacting voice. “Don’t let my talk confuse you. Here—we will talk about Frühlinghausen’s famous cider. Is it really as good as your arrogant distillers boast?” He took a swig and made a comically evaluative face. “Do they put socks in every barrel?”
“Only in the barrels they save for visitors like you!” Benita recovered and was delighted to hear him laugh.
“Well, it’s delicious,” he pronounced, setting his glass on the table. “In Berlin we have only beer.” He made a face.
“And champagne,” she said. “Isn’t it so? There are bars in Berlin where they serve nothing but champagne?”
“Absolutely.” Connie leaned forward and took her hand. A thrill raced through her at the touch. “Will you come to one with me, Mademoiselle Gruber?”
“You are an odd one!” Benita could not help exclaiming, and for a moment she worried that she had ruined their game. Connie threw back his head and laughed.
“I am sure you are right, fr?ulein. And you must promise to remind me of that whenever I am being a boor.”