Silent Night
In this short story by Kathy Bergen, an American female journalist grapples with the horrors of Nazism at the Nuremberg Trials.
Editor’s Note: At the end of this story is an audio recording of the author discussing how, among other things, her father helped inspire this story as he’d served as a sound technician at the Nuremberg Trials.
Trussed with twine, the Christmas fir hadn’t looked so massive on the slopes of the Bavarian Alps. But as it’s hoisted upright on the parquet dance floor of Schloss Stein, it’s a slippery green whale, upended and wobbly. “Hold it up, damn it.” “Heads up, you stooges!” Laughter splutters forth from the gathered members of the international press corps, who are bunking in this confiscated manor outside of Nuremberg for the duration of the Nazi war crimes trials. A few of the lollygaggers crush out their cigarettes and join the efforts to prop up the beast. Once it’s secure, they drape its limbs not only with the usual adornments but also with empty booze bottles, used-up notepads, and pens and pencils manufactured by the German family that built this compound. An Underwood typewriter droops from a lower branch. A Bloody Mary in her hand and Tolya’s arm around her shoulders, Ursula can’t stand it another minute. So much gaiety and hearty assurance. She’s itching to flee into the winter storm, skitter on the crusts of ice, and feel the sting of windswept snow pellets on her chapped face as she did when she chased stories during the final months of the war in Europe. She wants to feel tossed about again, windblown, out of reach.
Even the thought of tonight’s Christmas Eve soirée at the Grand Hotel in central Nuremberg annoys the hell out of her. All the dolling up. Rolling her hair, applying rouge and lipstick, pulling on a girdle and stockings, slipping into her burgundy tea dress. She never missed this sort of fussy preparation, not once when she was racing from skirmish to skirmish in a press jeep, her curls whipping from the back of her helmet. In those fleeting moments, she soared like a winged messenger, her lungs full to bursting, blood rising in her cheeks, heart pounding. Tonight, she’ll need to rein it in, be ladylike, listen for tidbits, oblique hints, anything vaguely newsy. She’ll tilt her head, train her gaze, and maintain a knowing smile as a prosecutor, lieutenant, or public affairs officer jostles her across the crowded dance floor of the hotel’s faux-marble ballroom, his breath warm with whiskey, roasted onions, and peppermint chewing gum. Occasionally her lithe grace will pay off with an exclusive story, like the one she’s lined up for later tonight. A scoop, she’s told her editors. Christmas Eve in Nuremberg Prison, where the one-time successor to Hitler, Hermann Goering, will be kneeling before a crucifix, praying for forgiveness or, more likely, for his own life. That would be rich. But even that satisfying story won’t be enough to secure her position covering the trials. Nothing will be enough, not for her balding, deskbound editor in Milwaukee. She’ll always be the gal reporter, going for the “human interest stories,” just filling in until the men return.
For now, she aches to lie down, sleep off the three drinks she’s knocked back since noon, maybe write a letter home. It’s been an age. As her rowdy peers set up ladders to hang strands of tinsel from the crystal chandeliers, she leans closer to Tolya and toys with a button on his Soviet press corps tunic.
“Darling, I’m bushed. Walk me back?”
“Feeling sick?” He raises a palm to her forehead, and she flicks it away.
“No, not at all. Why would you ask?”
Tolya shrugs, his hands held up in surrender. He sets her empty tumbler atop the carved mantelpiece and guides her down the winding marble staircase, to the first-floor hunter’s lounge with its diamantine carpets, tapered hearths, and leaded glass lampshades hanging from wrought-iron stands like so many stray helmets.
“Come,” he says. “Over here.” They settle into the cushions of a sofa facing the empty hearth, the two of them alone in the drafty hall. The upholstery smells of dog hair, stale cologne, and cherry pipe smoke.
“I’m leaving, Tolya,” she says, her voice flat. “They’re calling me home.”
He picks at his cuticle, bites off a hangnail. “Just like that? You go along?” A dot of blood rises up, and he wipes it on the serge of his pressed trousers.
“The boys deserve their jobs back. Right?” She smooths her woolen skirt over her knees, crosses her legs. “And besides, sometimes I’ve had it, you know? The whole scripted nature of this assignment, as if we’re watching a stage play. We just sit there, calmly taking in the prosecution films.” She pictures the oily crust of the Buchenwald ovens, the human skin handbags, the stacks of broken corpses bulldozed into open pits. A few visitors weep in the gallery; a stenographer passes out; and a robed justice dashes to the toilet. And in the defendants’ dock, lit up for the cameras, there’s Goering, leaning back, stretching his neck, and yawning. The doped-up blimp who launched the camps and the tortures, safely ensconced.
“It’s all so packaged, sanitized,” she tells Tolya, then checks her coat pocket for her Old Golds and matches but finds only a crushed pack, with one broken cigarette.
“So, what’s your point, exactly? That the wheels of justice turn slowly?” Tolya rises, wraps his wine-colored muffler around his neck. “Goering’s a dead man. Let him perform, clown for the cameras. That’s what he does. Just stand up to your bosses. They’ll back down. You know they will.”
“And you, Tolya? When have you ever said ‘no’ to Moscow?” As if he could. As if that were an option.
She hustles across the lounge, trying to catch up to him as he exits this rustic castle. She wants the Tolya of their early days, the courtly scholar, not this huffy giant with a rigid jerk to his step. She wants the Tolya she met last spring near the banks of the Elbe River where American and Soviet troops converged, slicing Germany in half. All the celebrations that bubbled up near Torgau—tables spread with creamed sardines, charred veal, and raw eggs, which Tolya and the other Russians sucked from their shells, as if they were oysters on the half-shell. The raised glasses of cognac and vodka and schnapps, toast after toast; the Russian soldier, just a kid, who hoisted his accordion and belted out Katyusha, his yearning echoing in her chest though she couldn’t understand a word. She was in a reverie when Tolya strolled over for the first time, stooping to retrieve the pencil that had slipped through her fingers. Feeling caught-out, she’d offered a curt smile, but he wasn’t deterred. Later they’d danced, her pad and pencil in one hand atop his shoulder, his hand at her waist, narrowed by months in the field. Her cheek to his, she rose and fell in the scent of mushrooms, wet wool, and woodsmoke.
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