“Oh.” He nearly dropped the cots he was carrying, one under each arm.
“Guten Tag,” she addressed him in German. “I am looking for the sergeant?” He had heard it before, the lilt that seemed to make a question out of every utterance, but never before had it struck him as charming.
“He is . . . somewhere. I’ll find him for you,” he offered, but made no move to leave.
“Wait—you are German, nicht wahr? Isn’t that so?”
“No, Russian.” He stopped, flustered, forgetting he was passing for Yugoslav these days, but still wore the German clothes. “The uniform. I can explain. But it’s a long story.”
“Everybody has a story. Everybody who is still alive.” She looked grave for a moment, then lit up with a brilliant smile. “This will be a hospital, yes? With sheets?”
“Yes, with sheets. I mean, I think so.” Americans have everything, he thought. Why not sheets?
“So. I live in the town. I can wash the sheets, and other things. Shirts, other things. My sister helps me.”
“Stay right there.” Filip put down the cots and ran out into the compound. “I’ll get Sergeant Evans.”
He had only seen a woman in trousers in the movies, or on the patriotic posters showing farm and factory workers toiling cheerfully for the good of the people. Anneliese didn’t look like them; she had neither the self-conscious smugness of the workers nor the slick risqué elegance of the movie stars. She simply looked comfortable.
She came twice a week, exchanged clean linens for soiled ones, and picked up shirts and underwear from her growing list of laundry clients. Everybody liked her—the easy manner that stopped just short of flirting, the careful way she delivered each man’s bundle, tied with string and marked with his initials.
Her clients were all Americans. None of the refugees could afford the luxury, nor did they have much to wash. When she came, breezing past the sentry at the gate with a friendly greeting, they would stop to watch her lean her bicycle against the fence, hoist the basket onto her shoulder, and make her way to the building where the officers were housed.
Filip was sweeping out one of the empty barracks that the American wounded had occupied while the infirmary was being prepared. Someone was whistling. He stopped and listened; it was definitely a Mozart tune. Don Giovanni ? He couldn’t be sure of the opera, but in his head, he could almost hear the words. His mother would know the lyrics, fill in the story, nodding her head in time to the music, the crochet hook moving swiftly through the work in her hands.
He started sweeping again. The whistling came closer, and Anneliese stepped in, setting her empty basket down on the nearest bunk. “I come for the sheets. Where are the sick ones?”
“We moved them to the infirmary yesterday.”
“Ach, ja.” She picked up her basket and turned to go.
“That song you were whistling—Mozart, yes? What is it called?”
“The song? Oh, I wouldn’t know. My father played the violin. Some of the tunes stay in my head. So.”
“My mother has many opera records,” he said, suddenly desperate to keep Anneliese from leaving. “She plays them all the time. Not here. Home, in Russia. Yalta.” He forced himself to stop babbling, overcome with sadness and yearning, but for what, exactly, he could not say.
“You are a sweet boy.” Anneliese laid a hand on his cheek. He covered it with his own, then embraced her. The broom clattered to the ground. He closed his eyes, his senses filled with the bittersweet aroma of her hair.
She pulled away, looking wistful. With the slightest possible touch of one finger, she stroked the thin brass band on his right hand. “And married?”
“Yes.” His voice caught in his throat. “Yes. Married.”
* * *
Sergeant Evans gave Grisha permission to use one of the empty barracks as a common room, where the men could gather to talk and eat their meals, smoke, and play cards. They were sometimes joined by off-duty soldiers whose naive friendliness enlivened the gatherings with their poor command of European languages and their infectious laughter.
Someone had etched a rough checkerboard into the tabletop, using a pocket knife to scratch in the lines and charcoal to color the dark squares; acorn caps and pebbles made good playing pieces. Soon a tournament was under way, Grisha keeping track as man after man sat down at the board to vie for the championship. For the winner, Ilya fashioned a wire pin to wear until defeated by a cleverer, or luckier, opponent.
They spent the better part of an hour, one evening, deciding what the pin should look like. A lily—too French; a star—too provocative; a rose—too complicated. “Make it a daisy,” someone suggested. “Simple, and not political.” And so it was; everyone in the camp could recognize the reigning checkers champion by the innocent wire flower pinned to his collar.
Some afternoons, Anneliese would join them. She would stand, the basket of soiled laundry balanced on her hip, and watch the men play, her expression attentive and amused. Eventually, they convinced her to try her hand. “We need a new challenger! By now, we all know each other’s tricks.”
“I have not played since I was a girl,” she protested. “When my brothers were still at home.”
She proceeded to beat Grisha, the current champion, in a game that started slowly, then picked up speed, rushing to its merciless conclusion in record time. “When I play against my brothers,” Anneliese confessed with a wicked smile, “I always win.”
Watching Grisha pin the daisy to Anneliese’s shirt, then stoop to kiss her ceremonially on both cheeks, Filip felt distinctly uneasy. Why did it bother him to see Grisha’s big hands on her shoulders, holding her while his lips grazed her face? A German woman who does the laundry. She is nothing to me. Nothing more than a passing friendship.
Filip did not join in the games. Like the others, he did his assigned work. He amused himself by sketching in a notebook Anneliese had bought for him at his request—buildings, mostly. He strained to remember details he had seen, roofs and cornices, the contours of windows, arches, and doorways. He drew imaginary interiors, drafting elaborate floor plans with staircases, adding balconies, terraces, gardens landscaped with trees and shrubs. He knew they were crude, these dream-house drawings of his untutored hand, and showed them to no one.
The decision to have Anneliese keep the daisy pin was unanimous. “A memento of our time together here. May our nations always be friends,” Grisha, carried away into flights of rhetoric, intoned.
She pressed her lips together as if considering her reply, then raised her chin and spoke clearly. “How can our nations be friends when your Red Army comrades are behaving like animals? They hurt our women, humiliate our men. This cage you made”—she pointed in the direction of the empty barbed-wire enclosure—“is it not for German prisoners? We have lost the war, but we still have our pride.” She unpinned the daisy and laid it on the table, next to the checkerboard. “I, Anneliese, can be a friend to you. But not on behalf of my country.”
After this, the men continued to play, but much of the joy, the childish enthusiasm, went out of their games.
Assigned to clean out the shelves of the farmhouse cellar, Filip discovered a box of chess pieces the Germans had left behind. He was tempted to hide them away, keep them for himself, but thought better of it and showed Evans his find.
“Keep it.” The American waved him away. “I’m pretty sure our boys won’t know what to do with it.”
Using a discarded cupboard door and some scrap wood, Filip hammered together a table small enough to carry easily into the yard, away from the noisy checker players. He drew another board, replaced three missing pawns with white stones and the black queen with a spent shell casing. He found a few willing partners among the detainees, but playing chess required concentration and more time than any of them were willing to spare. Often, he sat at the table alone, trying to remember the classic openings and strategies outlined in the chess books he had left behind in Dresden.
Anneliese ca
me up behind him one such early evening. “My father played this game with his friends,” she said, setting her basket on the ground. “I did not know you could do it by yourself.”
Filip looked up, surprised but not displeased at the interruption. “You can’t, unless you can think like two people.” The sun, low in the sky, outlined her form so that he could not see her face. “I wish Borya was here.”
Anneliese sat down, placed her elbows on the table. “So. Show me how to play.”
* * *
The ache in his ear came on gradually, like a woodwind note in a Beethoven symphony, picked up and repeated by the other sections, building to an insistent crescendo that thrummed and crashed, filling his head with pain. Filip stumbled into the infirmary, where the medic was finishing the paperwork for the most recent batch of wounded Americans patched up well enough to be sent home.
“Help me,” Filip said through gritted teeth. “My ear . . .”
The medic examined him. “I have no glycerin for the ear, but I can give you some aspirin to knock this fever down. You may as well lie down.” He waved at the empty room. “Plenty of beds.”
Filip understood the gesture, if not the words. He unlaced his boots and collapsed on the nearest cot. “Thank you,” he said, enunciating the English syllables with care. “Thank. You.”
The fever came down a bit, then shot back up within the hour when the aspirin wore off. “Buck up, man,” the medic said. “I’ve got no more morphine until supplies come in. You’ll be all right.”
Filip understood only no morphine and moaned, surrendering to the fresh waves of agony inside his head. Through the hot red haze of fever and pain, he thought he saw Anneliese talking to the medic. Then she was gone.
He didn’t know how long he tossed on the narrow cot; shaking his head was worse, so he tried to lie still, the room spinning behind his burning eyes. Someone was turning him onto his side; something cool dripped into his inflamed ear, and suddenly the pain receded. Not gone, no, but reduced to a dull, throbbing pattern, like timpani winding down for the concert finale, the kettle drums still reverberating but softer now, ever softer.
Anneliese sat next to the bed, arms folded in her lap. When she saw his eyes open, she smiled. “Better? Good. I put a little cooking oil in; it helps with the pain until the infection passes. My grandmother taught me.”
He tried to raise himself on his elbows, but fell back, weak with the fever still wracking his body. “Anneliese,” he said, “you are an angel.”
“Pfft. Angels are for babies.” She leaned forward, wiped his face with a damp cloth. “Who is Borya? Your brother? A friend for chess?”
“Borya? How do you know Borya?”
“You say his name, when you are sick. And before, you mention. When we play chess.”
He told her everything. The wedding registry, the lucky green tie, the firewood, the mushrooms. The white shirt dripping with red paint. Matted blond hair falling over Borya’s lifeless face. The bare feet. The drone of SS threats like distant thunder, a storm from which there is no escape. Everything. Even the things he could not put into words.
Anneliese was silent, her head lowered, one hand over her eyes.
“Was it me?” Filip whispered. “Did I do it?”
She rose, pushed another cot up to his and lay down. She held him while he wept, her body pressed against his back, her arms wrapped around his chest, her head nestled into his neck.
He woke alone. On the desk near the door, a single lamp sent feeble rays of light into the dark room. The fever was gone.
5
THE PRISONERS WERE SINGING. In the May twilight, the day’s heat abating with the setting sun, the compound empty of all but the sentry at the gate, their voices floated over the camp. More than a few men, whether Russian refugees or American troops, raised their heads to listen. Energetic martial tunes gave way to slower, sadder songs that echoed each man’s own longing for home, peace, and loved ones, no matter what the language or the words.
They had been brought in a few at a time, arriving in trucks, hands tied, sometimes at night. They were searched, stripped of all belongings but their uniforms, and registered in the POW logbook: name, rank, serial number. Hometown, date, and place of capture.
It was odd, wearing the same uniforms as the captured enemy. Filip thought it wise to sew the now meaningless ROA patch back on his sleeve, so there would be no mistaking his allegiance. There was no question now of mounting any kind of resistance movement; General Vlasov was himself in captivity in the Soviet Union and likely to be shot or hanged as a traitor. But until Filip could find other clothes, it seemed a necessary precaution.
The enclosure had filled up quickly. Within a few days, there was no room for anyone to lie down. The men stood, or squatted back-to-back to avoid leaning against the barbed wire. Food was dispensed through a chest-high opening in the fence. Each man received his bowl and spoon, moving in a line around the inside perimeter, a soldier counting off the empty vessels and utensils as they were returned.
“It’s not right,” Ilya observed, watching the line snake around in a spiral, unwinding like a grim dance, those in the center working their way to the periphery to receive their portion. “They are not animals.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Sergeant Evans, standing nearby to oversee the meal, shot back. “I’ve seen the German prison camps.”
“The men can’t even lie down. These barracks”—Ilya gestured to the buildings—“are standing empty.” His voice was hard, steely, as if uncoiling from a spring of anger in his chest. Filip had never seen his father-in-law so angry.
“Waiting for orders to move them out,” the sergeant growled. “Anyway, it’s not your concern.”
“I am a Wehrmacht officer.” They all turned toward the next man in line to receive his dinner. His voice, too, had a sharp edge, pitched higher than Ilya’s. It rang out like that of a man used to command. “These men need protection from the sun and rain, and boards to cover the latrine. Geneva Conventions.”
“Becker.” Filip recognized the lieutenant. He was unshaven and his coat was stained, with a long gash in one sleeve. At the sound of his name, he turned, his back perceptibly straighter, and ran a hand through his dirty hair. He and Filip locked eyes.
“Keep moving. I’ll get back to you.” Evans turned on his heel and walked off toward the house.
Geneva Conventions. Rules for the humane treatment of prisoners. Filip thought of the thousand small humiliations he had witnessed and endured at the hands of German overseers—the gleeful way one would slather rancid butter on stale bread, then scrape all but the lightest coating off with his knife before tossing it on the detainee’s plate; the endless taunts and insults—idiot, half-wit, swine; days filled with pointless degrading tasks invented for the Nazis’ amusement.
Filip shuddered at the memory of Ilya and Ksenia facing imminent execution, when no Conventions stopped the action but the reluctance to waste a bullet. And for prisoners, no doubt, it had been many times worse. What must it be like for women, he wondered, living in constant fear of being assaulted by almost anyone?
Yet he admired Becker’s courage, his commitment to the welfare of men of lower rank who were not even under his command. And he remembered the civility, the lieutenant treating him with something that bordered on respect. Hadn’t Becker shared his stamps with him, expecting nothing in return?
That evening, Filip waited for a moment when no one was paying attention. He found the officer dozing at the edge of the enclosure, his back wedged in the corner, the wires digging into the cloth of his coat. “Becker,” Filip whispered. “No, don’t move,” he advised when the man shuddered awake and tried to rise. Filip took a chunk of bread from his pocket, tore it in pieces small enough to fit through the space between barbs.
“Danke,” Becker’s voice was hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for hours, but his eyes were clear and alert. “We need more water, also. To wash.”
Filip nodded and
moved away. He had no sway with the Americans, no power to persuade the leadership to do anything for the prisoners. Evans had given them two water buckets, some planks to cover the latrine, plus a daily sprinkling of lime to control the stench. Even so, the ditch teemed with flies. No wonder they sing, he thought. That endless buzzing would drive anyone insane.
What would happen to these men? Their clothes, after several cycles of sun and rain and the inescapable rubbing against the wire enclosure, were starting to look as bedraggled as the refugees’; their unshaven faces were streaked with dirt and sweat. People were waiting for them, somewhere, like Ksenia had waited for her son, wondering when they might return. Were they hurt, or missing limbs, like Maksim, their lives shattered? Were they alive? My own mother doesn’t know where I am, he thought. What might she imagine has happened to me? He resolved to write to her as soon as they left the camp, by whatever means. It was unwise to write now and betray their Russian origins until the Americans had decided their fate.
“Sergeant Evans,” Becker addressed the noncommissioned officer with barely suppressed contempt. “My men need water, to wash.” He was still a few paces from the food dispensing window. “Water. To wash.”
“I heard you.” Evans, standing at the fence, took a last drag on his cigarette. “Damn Kraut,” he muttered, crushing the butt with his boot. “Go to hell.”
“Geneva Conventions,” Becker called out. “Your country signed—”
“Shut up! Just shut the hell up!” He turned his back on the Germans still moving in the food line behind the fence. Filip, on his way to his own breakfast, glanced up just in time to see Becker’s arm shoot out of the opening and encircle the sergeant’s neck, pulling him up against the fence in a tight clinch. Before anyone could react, he whipped a length of cord from his other hand and passed it under Evans’s chin, pulling the ends tight. The other prisoners tried to back away, but there was little free room in the cage; they stood silent.
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