The Matchmaker of Kenmare (35 page)

I said, “Why are we here?”

“Somebody talked,” said the girl.

“About us?”

“Trudi and her husband were shot yesterday. He was the detective who led you from the hall. They knew when they saw the Kommandant that there had been betrayal. Trudi’s instructions were to make you safe. You were smuggled away.”

“But the policeman?” I asked. “Trudi’s husband?”

“Our greatest hero,” she said. “He had enough dirt on everybody to blackmail the entire village and he was our leader.”

On my journey of discovery years afterward, I learned the details of how the village had worked its quiet resistance to Hitler. I’m telling you now so that you can understand, while you are still relatively young, the power of ordinary people. You will, I hope, conclude that there may be no such thing as an ordinary person.

Most of those villagers did nothing dramatic, nothing showy—they paid their taxes, they lived their daily lives. If coerced into attending a Nazi Party meeting, the unbelievers sat without a word. Inside this quiet existence, they ran an undercover transport system, part of a chain bringing secrets and operatives across Europe, and inserting them behind German lines.

Until they shot Trudi and her husband in front of the white church next morning—with all the village press-ganged into witnessing the execution—they’d had no difficulty of any kind. Not even Charles Miller, who had passed through months earlier, had caused anything like the trouble we brought them.

The tongue-less man and his wife, silent as robots, came back and took us to bedrooms, and the girl said that she would see us later. I slept like a man who had died. Only when I awoke many undetermined hours later did I have the strength to observe the grandeur. From the window I could see distant mountains—but, before them, rolling lands with excellent fencing.

Nothing gave any clue as to ownership. I tried most of the books on the tall, ornate bookshelves; not only could I not read German with any useful competence, all of these had been printed in a kind of Teutonic that I’d heard of but never seen.

The room had a bathroom en suite, with a toilet, ancient shower, deep tub, and, by the basin, a pile of fresh clothing for me. I’d read of such things happening in the adventure stories of my boyhood; here I was, living them.

From the texture of the sunlight it felt like three o’clock in the afternoon. I went downstairs and found Kate sitting in the hallway; she too had been given fresh clothes.

However, she had no good mood to offer. In the car, nobody had mentioned our next step; I guessed that we’d have to wait until somebody led us. Kate had no such feeling.

“They’re arranging to get us back home,” she said. “She told me yesterday.” I thought she was about to scream.

“Do you have any idea where we are?”

My abiding thought was,
Where’s the fighting? I hope it’s not coming closer to us. Are we out of the bombing pathways?

“I’m restless,” she said. “I want to get to Charles.”

I said, “And I’m as hungry as I’ve ever been in my whole life.”

After a breakfast of omelets and coffee, it became a strange and shadowy day, with the tongue-less man and woman ghosting about the house, continuing to pay attention to our every need, and never saying a word—not a grunt, not a whisper, not a cough. They had eyes like marbles. I found a deck of cards and played solitaire until I thought I’d go blind.

That night Kate called me to her room. On the bed she’d spread the map of Europe, and she’d taken out the needle and the handkerchief.

“I’m going to start right here,” she said, “because I have a hunch, a feeling, that Charles isn’t far away.”

“Do you know where we are?”

She said, “The girl told me that we’re well south of Bonn, very near the Belgian border.”

She stood by the bed, smoothing her skirt over and over. She fiddled with her hair. She pressed her fingertips to her temples again, and her face glowed red.

“I couldn’t do this without you,” she said. She took my hand, led me around to the other side of the bed, smoothed the quilt, sat me down, and walked back to her needle and handkerchief. Sprawled across from me, on this great, sagging old bed, she rubbed the needle slowly through Charles Miller’s handkerchief.

It took no more than a few minutes. When she dragged the needle across the border in the direction of Liège, it began to quiver, and when she held it over some hills, it swung, firm and confident, from side to side.

She stopped, raised her head, and looked at me like a lamp.

“I found him. He’s near a place called Saint-Vith. That’s where we’re going.” She began to cry. “I knew it. I knew he wouldn’t die on me. I knew it.” Her fists dug holes in the soft bed. “He wouldn’t do that to me, he wouldn’t. I knew it. God bless you, Charles, God bless you.”

At that moment, I saw what she would look like when old—a little Irish countrywoman, with a dimpled and wrinkled face, and still the dynamite smile.

“Let me get you a cup of tea from downstairs,” I said, using her own tactic of escaping from tough moments.

She cut in. “No. Hug me first.”

She did the hugging; she clung to me the way a baby monkey clings to an adult.

“Thank you, Ben. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” and her voice could scarcely make itself understood above the noise of her weeping typhoon, and I thought,
Jesus God, what is she going to do when she gets to the true end of all this?

I didn’t make the tea. We both went downstairs, and in slow German she asked the robots for tea and toast—and they made perfect, thick-ish slabs of cream-colored, bready toast, dense with melting butter.

Keeping my voice light, I said, “How does that needle work?”

“Blessed if I know,” she said, “but it’s always worked for me.”

“Never wrong?”

She said, “Sometimes you get a false start. Remember that murder case I told you about at home? Well, at first they found only a coat. And
when they took the coat away and I did the pendulum again—the body was in a completely different place.”

I dropped a piece of toast—naturally it fell on the buttered side—and said, “You mean it found the missing person’s coat before it found the actual person?”

She said, “It does that sometimes, but it always comes out right.”

Heart in mouth, I said, “Shouldn’t you go on looking?”

And she said with a laugh, “You don’t know Charles. There’s no chance he’d ever lose a coat.”

Next morning the girl arrived, and I intercepted her.

“Are you trying to get us back to Ireland?”

“That is a fact.” And she smiled.

“She”—meaning Kate—“won’t see the joke.”

“We’re hiding you here until we get a boat out of Bremerhaven. The way you came in. There’s no place else to go. Getting you to the American lines would be too difficult.”

I said, “She’s talking about a place named Saint-Vith.”

“Why does she want to go to Saint-Vith?”

I said, “Did you ever hear of a thing called a pendulum? For finding people?”

She said, “My grandmother did it.”

“But isn’t it mere witchcraft? Or old wives’ tales? I mean, there’s no rationale in it.”

“I believe in the possible,” she said. “I’m from Belgium.”

“Come on. How can you find somebody by rubbing a needle through a possession of theirs, and then holding the needle over a map? Ridiculous.”

“Why do the police use it? They don’t believe in magic, would you say?”

I said, “It makes no sense. On any level.”

The girl cut in, with a measure of sarcasm. “I can tell that you don’t want to find him alive, do you?”

I said, “She will ask me now every hour of every day—she’ll get up in the middle of the night and knock on my door to ask me—when can we go?”

And every hour of the past two days, Kate had indeed asked, referred to it, made some allusion, pleaded, begged, entreated—find all the synonyms in the English language for the word
demand
, then find all the synonyms for the word
supplication
.

Now she trotted out to the steps on which we stood.

“How far are we from Saint-Vith? Has Ben told you the good news? When can we go?”

The girl led her away from me, to the far edge of the terrace, where they stood and talked, animated like negotiators. I hoped that she was telling Kate of the plans to take us back to Bremerhaven. But it has been one of the trials of my life that I so often confuse what I hope for with what I should expect; too much of what I forecast comes from wishful thinking, and I didn’t anticipate that the Belgian girl would support Kate’s belief in the pendulum.

Looking back on it now, how could I have won? Any woman, no matter how pragmatic, would always have sympathy with another woman searching the battlefields for an adored husband.

Next morning we climbed into another van, this time heavy with police insignia, and driven by a man with recklessly thick glasses. In equally dense French he told Miss Begley that he would take us to the Belgian border not far from Saint-Vith. He lectured us all the way, sour and obscene, ridiculing us for getting into an area so near the war, and now he was going to pitch us farther in and he didn’t care what happened to us.

To Kate, he made appalling remarks, too crude to repeat, and largely to do with having shared the bed of an American officer. I thought, when he finally let us out of the car, that he might kick us into Belgium. To the guard on the German side of the border he described us as “a couple of Irish fools, whose country is so small and backward they don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

Of course, as I discovered, both the driver and the border guard had
been part of the Belgian girl’s strategy. When I went back after the war, I met them both—and I might as well reveal that I went back as much to apologize to the villagers, whose neighbors had been shot because of us, as to pick up the story of Charles Miller, which still had so many baffling parts.

“What did you think of us that morning?” I said to the man with the thick glasses. He had prospered after the war, owning a chain of accountancy offices and a coat with a fur collar.

He said, “I told you that day: a pair of idiots. I thought she was leading you around by the nose—or some other organ.”

We walked into Belgium, Kate Begley and I, into war-torn Belgium, a country ripped open and bleeding, and the blood was all flowing in our direction, only we didn’t know it yet. Neither did I know that I was entering the worst period of my life—although I did suspect and fear so. No matter what had gone before, nothing could compare to what lay ahead.

By now, my resolve to keep a journal had failed, and I felt disinclined to write at all. When I simply had to keep a record—and it can be a compulsion—I did my best, but it never lasted for long.

Miss Begley didn’t do so well either, probably because I had fallen back in my resolve; or perhaps on account of the severe tension she must have been feeling. Yet she made one entry, a passage of her journal that I later found so valuable. She wrote it the morning after the pendulum had danced over the village of Saint-Vith and the town of Liège.

If I had read that journal entry while still in Europe in December 1944, I think that I’d have found a doctor and had Kate Begley taken into some sort of care in order to get her back to Ireland. Those can’t have been the thoughts or reactions of a sane woman. And yet, other than some tics and twitches, I hadn’t seen any serious hints of derangement—unless that intense focus of hers amounted to some kind of instability. In fact, with the women of the village in Germany, she seemed very like the girl I’d seen at Lamb’s Head.

So what can she have been thinking? Did she know anything concrete of her husband’s style of soldiering? What had he told her? That he got behind enemy lines undercover, and hid all day? And at night, like some werewolf, he came out and slit the necks of German officers?

That’s what I assumed he did, and that’s what had been hinted to me—Killer Miller. Even if she hadn’t known, how did she assume—and she knew that we were going behind German lines—how did she assume that he could just walk away from the war, as though he were a member of some wandering troupe of performers?

My guess is that it belonged in the same kind of thinking that she developed when she was four years old. By refusing to accept that her parents had drowned, she’d built and maintained a kind of shield around herself. Otherwise courageous, she had granted herself one area of life in which she never had to face reality.

Our first challenge arrived within minutes. Once the border point disappeared behind us, not a soul did we see. We walked along a country road, and a steep hill rose ahead. Loose trees stood like soldiers across the heights. We climbed to the hilltop and saw a long farmland valley below. A small sign pointing left said,
SCHONBERG—8KM
. Since the previous day, my heart had begun to pound so loud that I could hear it.

Kate scrutinized a piece of paper and hummed a tune. She had written out, she told me, the name of every town and village that we were
likely to see, and she began to recite them: “Bütgenbach, Stavelot, Büllingen—”

A roaring sound overwhelmed her voice. Above the treetops, with the suddenness of panic, came an aircraft. It aimed itself down at us. What could the pilot see? Two small people on a country road. Each carried a not very large valise. They looked hesitant.

He banked, turned, and came back. From the side this time, and lower, he had plenty of room to get down near us. The road amounted to no more than a ribbon in this huge furrow of the forest. Trees didn’t begin for hundreds of yards on either side. A squadron of planes could have flown down this corridor, wingtip to wingtip.

We could smell the fuel he came so low. A small, fast plane, black cross on the wings. He went right over our heads. Peeled off up into the sky. How can an engine snarl and whine at the same time? I had never seen anything move that fast.