All rights and characters belong to Elizabeth Wein.

Fallen Angel

Berlin
4. January 1944

Liebe Julie,

I've really lost it, haven't I.

It's funny, I thought that I had really lost it when I did everything that I did at the end of last year, but somehow committing treason for the sake of a bunch of French Résistance fighters doesn't seem nearly as insane to me as writing to someone who's dead. I guess I can justify the espionage with principle; this, meanwhile, is just me not knowing how to write down everything I'm thinking without pretending that you'll read it, like I read all of the pages upon pages that you wrote. As you know, I'm not a student of literature and I sure as hell am not a writer. Letters and lab reports are about all that I can do.

I'm back in Berlin, which is both the right move and a complete nightmare. I'm positive that, if I were still in Ormaie, I'd be haunted even more often by the memories that still sneak up on me at the most unexpected moments throughout the day. At the same time, though, your RAF and the Americans have done an impressive job of decimating our capital with frequent air raids. I've almost gotten used to stepping over lifeless bodies and bloodied, stiff limbs protruding from rubble, as I walk to work in the mornings. As the local secretary for a top military commander, they will move me to new accommodations every time my apartment is destroyed by another raid, but I lie awake at night thinking about the bewildered, dirty children that wander the streets with dead eyes, numb to the corpses around them. (I'm sure London is the same. This war is killing all of us in equal measure.) Everything is about a thousand times worse for those kids than it is for me, but I don't have a clue how to help any of them, and it makes me hate myself and just about everything else in this world.

I can't really reconcile this city around me with the Berlin that I knew before the war, the Berlin in which I spent my childhood. But, then, I can't really reconcile the country around me with the Germany that I knew before the Nazis. You once referred to my homeland as das Land der Dichter und Denker. Goethe and Kant wouldn't even recognize the place nowadays, we've fucked it up so badly.

I'm sorry, I'm just scribbling nonsense now. Returning to Berlin has proven more of a shock than I had expected, but it's still better than it would have been to stay in Ormaie. Unlike you, Julie, I truly am a coward.

You see, the deaths of those who died in Ormaie weigh heavily on me – yours, Marie's, and, hypocrite that I am, SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden's. I knew that Maddie would tell your story, once she made it back home. I also knew that I would never again have the bravery to contact the Résistance and tell them about their lost ones – how could I, when I was so complicit, a bystander who did nothing more than turn away in revulsion until after too many were dead? But there was one person who deserved to know the truth, and I knew how to contact her, so I did.

The expensive Swiss school had sent Isolde von Linden home for Christmas by the time my telegram arrived. Or, perhaps I should say, had sent Isolde von Linden to her relatives, not back to Berlin, where she had grown up. Her mother was dead, I learned, and with her father dead as well now, she had been returned to her only living aunt in Düsseldorf. It took some convincing before the headmistress gave me the address, and then even more convincing for the military's logistics coordinator to agree to route my travel to Berlin through Düsseldorf – three whole packets of cigarettes, and Düsseldorf isn't even that out of the way! Especially since, with all of the trains to and from Ormaie out of service

God.

I'm sorry, Julie. I'm so sorry about everything. I don't know what more I could have done, but it doesn't keep me from feeling guilty as hell about it all. (And now I've gone and smudged up half of what I've written. Stupid tears. I can't even write a proper letter, apparently.)

The point being, it's completely my fault that the bridge over the Poitou between Poitiers and Tours was blown up. So I can't complain about that the fact that it took me three buses to get from France back to Germany – Ormaie to Paris, Paris to Brussels, and Brussels to Düsseldorf the next day.

I reached Düsseldorf in the early afternoon, as all of the remaining church bells along the Rhine were clanging the hour. Even though they were all ringing in different keys, the racket somehow sounded better than you would expect – sort of beautiful, even though it shouldn't have. It was a biting but clear winter day, so I wrapped my scarf around my neck a little tighter and walked along the promenade towards the bridge that would take me across the river to Oberkassel. When I got tired of carrying my suitcase, I sat down on a bench facing the water and ate the margarine sandwich I'd brought with me, watching the citizens of the city. A mother pushed her baby in a buggy while shouting at another young child not to run too close to the edge of the water. An old man sat on a bench to my right, reading a book with fierce determination. Two girls around your age walked hand in hand, whispering secrets to each other. (Is this what you and Maddie would be doing, if the war were over and you were back in Britain, carefree and alive?) I couldn't help but admire how each worked so hard to maintain the façade that there was no war, that this was just a typical Saturday in Düsseldorf.

I confess, I stood outside of Isolde von Linden's new home for quite some time after I arrived. It was one of those beautiful old houses with oriel windows that are so common in this part of Düsseldorf, painted a peeling dark red between two equally-battered white façades. The inhabitants of the neighborhood clearly had been impacted by the war as much as anyone in Europe has, but Oberkassel felt so much calmer than the chaos in Berlin, or the terror of Ormaie. Would my presence cause as much damage as a bomb, I wondered, if I knocked on the door and tell v.L.'s daughter what I knew?

In the end, I didn't really get to choose what to do. As I stood staring indecisively at the house, I noticed a girl in one of the windows, staring solemnly down at me. I froze, unsure of myself, then breathed a sigh of relief when she moved away from the window. A moment later, though, she was at the door of the house, frowning at me.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

It was clear to me from the moment she opened her mouth that she was her father's daughter. She has v.L.'s soft, reed-like voice, like a quiet solo played on an oboe. But beneath the softness is something unbreakable, something that assumes it has authority and will be obeyed. The similarity was jarring, as was the familiar way she narrowed her eyes ever so slightly in suspicion.

"Isolde?" I heard myself say. "My name is Anna Engel. I worked for your father in France."

Something almost imperceptible shifted behind Isolde's eyes, which widened and grew unfocused. In a moment, she went from being the disdainful offspring of an SS-Hauptsturmführer to a young girl still deeply mourning the loss of a parent.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly, "I didn't mean to upset you..."

"You knew Papa?" she breathed shakily.

"Yes," I answered, "and I have a few things of his that I wanted to return to you."

She studied me for a moment, then nodded and pushed the door open a little wider.

"Please, come in."

The inside of the house was as seemingly untouched by the war as its exterior – tasteful and expensive, but old-fashioned. Isolde, slight and pale and so young, looked out of place amongst its ornately-carved furniture, upholstered in jewel-toned silks, which belonged to some extravagant era from before the Great War. A small grand piano with yellowing ivory keys stood in one corner of the room, near the window, where sunlight fell across the sheet music on its stand. All of the lights in the room were turned off. Isolde led me to the two chairs nearest the piano and invited me to sit down in one of them. While she rushed off to fetch water for both of us, I noticed a book of poems lying on the seat of her chair, where I can only assume she had been reading in another patch of sunlight before she noticed me outside.

It made me suddenly very sad, that this poor young girl was trapped in a dark old house like this, like a flower struggling to find enough warmth and light to survive. Isolde noch im Reich der Sonne! I thought to myself. Her father would be so disappointed.

"Here you are," said Isolde, bursting back into the room and thrusting a glass of water into my hands.

"Heine?" I asked, gesturing towards her book of poetry.

Isolde flushed.

"I know I shouldn't," she mumbled, "but how can one resist? Even Papa, who is the most law-abiding person I know, turned pale with horror at the thought of having to burn his record of Dichterliebe! You won't tell anyone, will you?" she added suddenly, cradling her own glass of water protectively in her hands and looking horribly vulnerable.

I could have laughed. This girl, no doubt raised in the most rigid of households, thought her little act of subterfuge amounted to something worthy of serious punishment. I constructed an imaginary scale, placed her little book of forbidden poems and her father's record of a banned Schumann song cycle on one side, and then began to laden the other with my own crimes against the Reich: a flurry of disorganized cards scrambled at the bottom of a bag of laundry, the impression of a key in the bottom of a perfectly-milled bar of American soap, a curl of cigarette smoke twisting from between the lips of a fearless Scottish spy, a vial of stolen morphine jabbed into the arm of a shaking Polish girl who, nearly delirious with fever and groaning with pain, still cursed my name from between gritted teeth. The scale flung Heine to the heavens as it measured the weight of my treachery, and the thought made me smile bitterly.

"I won't tell a soul, of course not," I reassured her, and clinked my glass against hers. "Prost."

Isolde smiled a flickering little ghost of a smile and sat down, perching on the edge of her chair like a bird about to take flight. I thought about telling her about her father and Le Silence de la Mer,but decided against it for the moment.

"Do you play?" I asked, gesturing to the piano. (The music open on the stand was a Brahms intermezzo – good Germanic music by a patriotic Christian composer, nothing controversial in the slightest.)

"Oh, only a little," she confessed. "And not as well as I should. It's really Papa who plays. Played," she corrected herself, her bottom lip trembling.

"He was a musician, then? I knew he sang."

"Oh, he sang for you, then?" Isolde sounded so delighted that I didn't have the heart to tell her that I personally had not heard v.L.'s impromptu interpretation of Tristan. "He had such a lovely voice. He wanted to be a singer when he was younger, you know."

"Did he?" I thought about coldhearted v.L. – who, according to a gleeful Étienne Thibaut, had barely flinched upon witnessing Jacques's fingers being snapped one after the other, slowly, for maximum effect – and tried to imagine him singing tender arias to corseted ingénues on stages across Europe. You won't be surprised to know that I simply couldn't manage such a mental image. "What happened?"

"Oh, the war." Isolde sighed. "Not this war – the last war. Papa was conscripted to fight on the Russian front, and Mama always said he wasn't the same afterwards. He tried to go to music conservatory in Vienna, but he couldn't cope, so he came back home to Berlin, and, when he was well enough, began teaching literature at a boys' school. He eventually became the headmaster, and was apparently very good at it. His colleagues and students all said he prided himself on having absolute control over everything that happened at the school."

That last bit sounded familiar, at least, even if none of the rest of it did.

"So he never went back to singing," I finished.

Isolde shook her head.

"Except for us, in the evenings," she said, a wistful smile spreading over her face. "For friends, occasionally. He could sing bits and pieces of almost any opera you could name. And he made up parodies of famous arias, for people's birthdays and such. Papa had such a wonderful sense of humor."

It's a good thing Isolde was lost in her memories at that moment, Julie, because I was gobsmacked, as you Brits say. Of all of the things she had said so far about v.L. and his improbable operatic aspirations, this mention of his sense of humor was the hardest to believe.

"I had no idea he was so talented," I said finally.

"Oh, he was very clever!" cried Isolde. "Mama always said he had the soul of a poet. I know he wrote her love poems, which she never showed me, and which probably went up in flames when the house was bombed. And he made up little rhyming songs for me when I was small, to tunes from Mozart operas, to help me remember the street where we lived and what his school's telephone number was, in case I got lost somewhere in the city."

She hummed a line or two from a duet from Don Giovanni, clearly remembering to herself nonsense lyrics from her childhood that were too private a memory to share completely. (I may not have the same knowledge of literature that you and v.L. shared, Julie, but my grandmother almost never turned off her gramophone when I was growing up, so I have a much more extensive overview of music.)

I raised an eyebrow, bemused.

"Not tunes from Wagner operas?"

Isolde granted me a quivering little smile.

"Papa loved Wagner, obviously, but he would be the first to admit that Mozart is much more melodically memorable. Besides, Mozart was his favorite composer."

"Really. Because of his name?"

Isolde actually laughed aloud at this.

"Do you know, that actually wasn't Papa's name? I mean, it wasn't Mozart's either, to be fair. Papa's given name was Gottlieb, but he hated it, and when he was seventeen, he marched down to the city hall and demanded that his name be legally changed to Amadeus, which, he argued, was the same thing but in a more poetic language. He always says – said – that he only named me Isolde because Mama wouldn't let him name me Pamina or Konstanze."

Pamina or Konstanze: Both beautiful girls who were defiant captives, threatened with torture, but insistent that they would rather die than submit to the will of their wardens. Isolde has hair the same flaxen-gold as yours, Julie. I suddenly desperately wanted a cigarette.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" I asked Isolde, who shook her head, and then shook her head again when I offered one of my few cigarettes that had avoided being bartered off. I lit up with practiced ease and exhaled a long, calming plume of smoke very slowly, glad that my hands were not shaking.

"Do you mind if I put on a record?" she asked me, in return. "I know it sounds silly, but my aunt never lets me. I don't even know why she owns a gramophone. She feels it's morally frivolous to listen to music with so many people dying every day, but she's out for the afternoon, and what she doesn't know can't hurt her."

"Please."

I watched Isolde as she searched through the records on the shelf with a slight frown on her face, until she finally pulled one from the stack, gave it a solemn nod of approval, and set it on the turntable. As she dropped the needle into one of the grooves and the music crackled into life, I expected to hear the opening chords to "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," but I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that Isolde's strict aunt had obligingly disposed of any recordings of Dichterliebe that she had once possessed.

"Don Giovanni?" I hazarded. (It was something Mozart and fluttering and Italian, but didn't sound like what I remembered of Così fan tutte.)

She shook her head.

"Figaro," she replied. "This bit coming up was what Papa always put on when he was having a stressful time at work. He said it cheered him up enough to keep him from growling at me all through dinner. Papa always hated being cross in front of me, and he almost never was."

There was a sputtering pause in the music, and then a long soulful line sung by a deep bass voice. Contessa, perdono, perdono, perdono... The unfaithful Count begging his wife for forgiveness at the end of the story, when he has just refused to absolve the wrongdoing of everyone else.

And then Isolde began to sing along with the Countess, in a soft, clear, crystalline voice that pierced straight to my heart. Più docile io sono, e dico di sì, e dico di sì. I am more docile, and I say yes.

Should it have surprised me, Julie, to find my eyes filling with tears at such a moment? There seems to be so little beauty left in the world these days, and yet here was a quiet, simple example of everything our lives in Ormaie lacked – music, hope, and forgiveness. It's all so easy in Mozart's farce; the wicked who repent are forgiven and accepted with open arms by those they have offended, and life goes on. Ah, tutti contenti saremo così.

The end of the war will not be that easy. I keep asking myself if v.L. was brave to put a bullet in his brain, or a coward to do so. The more I think about it, the more I think he was even more of a coward than I am. Isolde, still in the realm of the sun, shielded from reality behind the mountains of neutral Switzerland, had been told that her father had died as the result of an explosion at the Gestapo headquarters in Ormaie. (I know, because I sent the telegram.) This was technically true. But I know that Amadeus von Linden had given up all hope of forgiveness and was fleeing from some justice that he knew he could not avoid. I sensed that most of his men assumed that his suicide resulted from shame over the destruction of his headquarters, and from fear that he would be demoted or fired or even executed for his failure in Ormaie, and I can only guess that that must be partially true. But as one of the few who knew about how you had operated him, had charmed him, had laden him with doubt and guilt for his actions, I think he was also fleeing from himself.

I know how that feels. God, Julie, I know what it means to want to flee from yourself. A friend took me to see a production of Richard III when I was in Chicago, and I now understand completely what Richard meant when he said that. I've done things that I can't forgive myself for doing, and Ormaie actually isn't one of them, even if it's left me with v.L.'s blood on my hands. Ironically, if the Allies win, Ormaie may be the only thing that saves me from all of the shit that I've done in the service of the Reich. But even then, I can't expect to be forgiven easily by the victors. The Allies are not led by Countesses who can forgive in five brief measures of music. If Countesses governed the world, perhaps we wouldn't even be in this war, in the first place.

As I grappled with this odd combination of catharsis and despair, I slowly realized that Isolde, too, was weeping. I brusquely wiped my tears away with the back of my hand as the opera finished with an exuberant flourish that seemed wholly out of place with how melancholy I suddenly felt. Isolde timidly sat back down in her own chair, again on the very edge, as if afraid she would be swallowed alive by the cushions if she leaned back.

"I'm so glad that you came to visit, Fräulein Engel," she said quietly. "I can't talk to my aunt about music, or about Papa, really, and it's made things awfully lonely here in Düsseldorf."

"Well, at least you'll be going back to school soon," I reminded her, but she shook her head.

"We can't afford it," she explained.

I was about to protest that Isolde's despicable aunt could sell some of her outrageous furniture to pay for her niece's schooling, or at least to get her out of Rheinland where she might be bombed to death any day, but decided that it was none of my business. (Except that it was my business, because it was my fault that Amadeus von Linden had shot himself in the head and was no longer receiving a paycheck for torturing poor French boys all day long.) Isolde jetzt im Reich der Schatten! I improvised to myself. Everything that she had known had been taken from her – parents, house, school, friends, even the right to play Mozart on the gramophone when she wanted – and now she was terrifyingly alone in Düsseldorf, a city that was trying so desperately on a Saturday afternoon in January 1944 to pretend that there wasn't a war on.

"Tell me about Papa in France," she asked me suddenly, and I quickly stuffed my cigarette in my mouth to avoid having to answer.

"Your Papa in France," I repeated after a moment, sighing a silver cloud of smoke and stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray on the table between us. "What do you want to know?"

"What he was like. What he did there." She shrugged, trying to appear more casual than she obviously felt. "How he got on with everyone. How... how he died."

There's a reason I'm writing this fake letter to you, Julie. I like to believe that you, of all people, can understand the importance and necessity of telling a carefully-constructed truth. But, when I'm honest with myself, I cringe to think of what you would say if you could read this. Fräulein Anna Engel, M d M – Mädchen des Mensonges. Anna the Alchemical Angel, turning steel pins and iron shackles into gold.

I had come to Düsseldorf to tell Isolde the truth about her father's life and death. But I am a coward. I looked at the poor girl, who had lost everything except for her beautiful memories of her clever, talented Papa, who hated being cross in front of her during dinner because of work. And I realized that this was truly why Amadeus von Linden had killed himself: He did not ever want to have to tell Isolde the truth of what he had done. I had all but convinced myself that it was my duty to tell her, but sitting face-to-face with Isolde, the calculus changed. She hadn't asked for any of this, she had virtually no one left in the world, and the war had already been so unfair to so many innocent people. And what right did I have to take those small scraps of comforting memories from her, as well?

"He was in charge of everything that happened at the headquarters in Ormaie," I said finally. "He made a lot of important decisions concerning everyone there, and he was widely respected."

It's true, Julie. His men were scared to death of him, but they all wanted him to be pleased with their work, too. You more or less said yourself that while you hated and feared v.L., you did respect his intellect. I can't say the same for the French prisoners, but then, I never had the chance to ask them for their candid opinion of SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden. So I have told the truth.

Isolde nodded, as if this information did not surprise her. (It really shouldn't have – it was extremely generic.) She waited for me to go on. I racked my brain for more specific positive instances.

"We worked out of a big hotel in Ormaie. The Château de Bordeaux. It was a beautiful building. Your Papa's office was on the ground floor, in a grand old parlor with a Venetian glass chandelier. He once invited a journalist in to conduct an interview there, with a young spy who had been compiling a report for us, and I sat in as a translator."

I've learned well from you, Julie. Careless talk costs lives. I purposefully omitted any damning national adjectives, letting Isolde presume what she would. But I have told the truth.

"There was a man who worked with us, a local man whose family was Alsatian and spoke German. They hosted our staff for dinner at their farm several times while I was there, and your Papa became fast friends with the youngest daughter of the household, a little girl of probably ten or eleven. He would bring her small presents when we visited. I'm sure he was thinking of you when he did so."

There was no need to mention that the family's hospitality was not voluntary, nor that they had harbored the orchestrators of her father's final humiliation. And Isolde didn't need to know that only a few weeks ago, I had pretended to scold that same little girl on the Place des Hirondelles, so that I could march her off the square as if in search of her brother, only to then ask her to deliver this message to an English spy named Kittyhawk: Isolde's father found shot through the head, a suspected suicide. So I have told the truth.

"That sounds just like Papa," breathed Isolde. "And the explosion?"

I could have told her that I was responsible, that I had provided the Résistance with a narrative map of the headquarters and a key with which to enter, that I had scrawled treason in red ink and smudged an incriminating archival number into an innocent blur and written secret messages in invisible ink on silk scarves. I could have told her that her father was a terrifying bastard who watched calmly as brands were pressed into bare skin or pins threaded through tender flesh; that he was an idiot fascist and an exemplary servant of the Third Reich, in every detail except for his determination to save an extremely guilty and utterly beguiling Scottish spy; that he never let me touch so much as a drop of alcohol all through my time in his service because I was his driver (and God knows I could have used alcohol to erase some of the things that I saw). That I regretted having his blood on my hands, but I didn't regret in the slightest that he was good and dead.

"It happened while the British were bombing Ormaie," I said instead, shaking my head. "I wasn't there."

I have told the truth.

Every goddamn word was the truth.

Isolde was crying again. I would have reached out and hugged her like she deserved, but the most painfully German part of me couldn't quite manage that extravagant a display of affection for a total stranger. Instead, I fished about in a pocket of my bag until I located v.L.'s gold signet ring with its tiny sapphire, as well as a small framed picture of him and a much younger Isolde that had been found on the windowsill of his bedroom. I had asked the police officers and coroners to leave them with me when they were done with their investigation of the scene of apparent suicide, and now I pressed them both into Isolde's trembling hands.

"Here's one more thing about your father that I know was true," I said, and I didn't need to fabricate this part in the slightest. "He loved you very, very much, and he wanted you to be proud of every decision that he made for the sake of Germany."

Isolde nodded, and gulped, and nodded again. I handed her her glass of water, which she sipped gratefully. We sat in silence for what seemed like hours, the gramophone still chuffing steadily where Isolde had left the turntable spinning. Amadeus von Linden's six calfskin notebooks, filled with descriptions of his vicious interrogations of French Résistance fighters, remained in my suitcase.

An ancient grandfather clock chimed from the shadows in the corner of the room. It was later than I'd realized.

"I should be going," I said.

"Oh, must you?" cried Isolde, springing to her feet.

"I start a new job in Berlin tomorrow," I explained apologetically.

Isolde nodded, and led the way to the door of the house.

"I'm glad you came," she repeated on the doorstep.

I wish I could have said the same, but I was so torn over my cowardice that "Take care" was all that I could manage in return. We shook hands formally. And then I turned away and did not look back, although I could have sworn I heard the first dreaming piano chords of Dichterliebe trail along behind me as I walked slowly back towards the Altstadt. My suitcase was still laden with v.L.'s hideous records of torture, but even then, it somehow was infinitely lighter than the guilt that I carried with me away from Isolde's aunt's house.

The train tracks between Düsseldorf and Berlin had been bombed (predictably), so my assigned transit was a lift from a munitions maker whose factory – or what was left of it, after so many targeted air raids – was in the Ruhrgebiet. It was perhaps six or seven hours by car, and the roads were often so damaged that we had to cross through fields to pass. My driver was a kind man, but we did not speak much, which suited me fine. I could see the same deep sorrow hanging over him that I myself have felt so often in recent years. The German countryside is less damaged than the cities, but even in the undisturbed fields, you can feel the difference. The vibrancy of Germany has gone out, like looking at a colored postcard of the country, rather than the country itself. It didn't help that we were forced to stop in Paderborn for more kerosene, and so found ourselves in the shadow of Wewelsburg. I've gotten very good at masking my feelings about the Reichsregierung, but my driver must have sensed my anger, for he gave me a small, sad smile as we drove by. Even a smile can hide a code, in these times.

And so, here I am, back in Berlin, surrounded by the dead and dying and desperate every day, working for a real lech of a new boss, and wishing and wishing that the war would end. I wonder every day how many silent others there are out there, who love their country but hate their government, who want to win the war but don't want to do the dirty work that winning takes. Look at me, spewing treason here on a page, the most dangerous place in the world to put anything. Clearly, I've reached a point where I don't even know what I want to think about things anymore. I'm going to close this letter in the cover of one of von Linden's horrible journals and do something with them, something to keep them safe and hidden until the war is over and I can decide for good where they should go.

To be entirely honest, Julie, I'm tired of playing these games. I'm tired of having to live the double life of a citizen who serves her country diligently, but smiles to herself at the news of every new advance by the Allied front, however small. War is evil, in any and all cases, but the things that are happening in Hitler's Germany are beyond the pale. It would almost be a relief to be caught out for my treachery, and sent to some prison to wait out the war, patiently and harmlessly. Would that really be too much to ask?