A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  As our correspondence continued, I compartmentalized Rosemarie from my life in Bamberg. It was dishonest and irrational, but I’ve always been good at sealing up the various contradictions in my life.

  Later letters, sent back and forth about once a week or once every ten days, were less passionate than the initial exchanges. We mostly talked about literature and life. As I read over them today, I realize that I sound pompous and she sounds intelligent.

  Despite the frenzied passion with Trudi that glorious spring, whenever a letter from Rosemarie arrived, I left Trudi behind for a brief interlude and entered my Rosemarie compartment. It was a warm and wonderful cocoon from the West Side of Chicago.

  Dear Chuck,

  I’ve been reading James T. Farrell lately, mostly because the nuns said it was dirty and condemned by the Church. I called Father Raven and he said it was not condemned and that I’d learn a lot about the Irish if I read it. As you remember, the good April knew both the real Studs Lonigan and the real Lucy Scanlan, so I’ve had a couple of long talks with her about them.

  Father Raven was right. I did learn a lot about the Irish. Poor Studs, Lucy was the one chance at grace in his life and he blew it. I cried at the end.

  But wasn’t the story of their eighth-grade love beautiful? I cried then too.

  NOW, you’re not another Studs as you said a couple of times. Not at all. If anything you’re just the opposite. You’re magic, Chuck, pure magic. Peg and I have been trying to tell you that for years and you won’t listen to us.

  I know what you mean when you say you’re cold all the time: you’re homesick for your family and neighborhood. You’re in a strange place with strange people, both the Germans and the other Americans. You want to be home where you know more or less what people are going to do. Don’t ever talk about your life being almost over. I forbid it. You’re not in the winter of your life. Now is your springtime.

  It may not be my springtime. I don’t know about me, but I know about you.

  I wish I could visit you in Bamberg. Wouldn’t that surprise all your friends there if a shanty-Irish kid from the West Side sauntered in? You make the city sound so fascinating I’d love to see it myself. Well, maybe someday.

  By the way, I’m not Lucy either and we definitely are not Studs and Lucy.

  Write soon.

  Love,

  Rosie

  I read the letter three times. For a moment I was no longer in my cubbyhole with the tiny skylight on the third floor of the Vinehaus Messerschmitt (a servant’s room I was convinced). I was home.

  Then I became a little uneasy. She wouldn’t really come over, would she? It would complicate my life immensely. Rosemarie was the girl at home I got letters from, not a physically present love. Besides, she was too young and too vulnerable to take care of herself in this city.

  I thought about that. Perhaps not. Perhaps she could take care of herself better than I could. I’d ignore that part of the letter in my reply. I’m sure with the slightest hint from me, she’d be on her way to Midway Airport, bound for Rhine-Main and the three-hour train ride from Frankfurt to Bamberg. Rosemarie would indeed create quite a stir if she sauntered into Bamberg. I thought about that with a pleased smile on my face. But it could not happen. Everything would go wrong if she showed up.

  Just the same, I did not do my homework. Instead I fell asleep and dreamed pleasant dreams. I don’t remember them now, but I presume they were about my very own Lucy Scanlan.

  I was playing a double game. As spring came, I was exploring the outer reaches of passion with one woman and writing love letters to another. The letters to Rosemarie were technically not love letters, but in one part of my tightly compartmentalized mind I knew that she would take them to be love letters. Rosemarie was home. Trudi was the present. I could not face the deceit in that pretense. I am still ashamed of it today.

  I had every intention of bringing Trudi home to America with me as my wife. No other behavior was honorable. She and Rosemarie would become great friends, right?

  There was not a chance in hell of that, someone whispered in my ear. You ought to know better.

  I pretended that I didn’t.

  Naturally, I told neither of them about the other.

  Nor did I tell anyone that I had kind of become Captain Polly’s Friar Lawrence (or maybe Friar Tuck), a confidant to whom she confided her worries about how her husband’s family would react to her and about her inability to become pregnant.

  The few people who know about that bizarre interlude in my life essay on occasion a defense. I don’t give either woman, they argue, credit for any intelligence. Trudi, with her relentless self-critical realism, did not agree that she would go to America with me. Unlike many other German young women who wanted a GI to get them out of Germany, Trudi never mentioned that possibility to me and was silent when I talked enthusiastically about her life in America and how much my family would love her. Her dreams did not exceed traveling with her family to Stuttgart. Did she know that our extravagant love affair would be short-lived? Had she seen too much of life to expect any more? Did she understand that I was a callow young man, quite incapable of any long-term promises?

  I don’t know.

  And Rosemarie? Was she not smart enough to see through me as though I were plate glass? Did she not realize that I was not much more than a little boy who did not yet know who he was or what he was going to do with his life?

  At eighteen, going on nineteen, in Bamberg, did I not attribute to each relationship more than was in either?

  I remember one warm day in high spring when Trudi and I made love on a blanket in a patch of grass under an old wooden bridge across a small stream that would shortly join the Regens. After we had finished, we snuggled together and giggled about our spectacular efforts at abandonment.

  “Trudi,” I said sleepily, “I want to be with you for the rest of your life.”

  “Let us talk only about now, Karl. God will take care of our future.”

  “I want to bring you home,” I insisted.

  “What is home?”

  “Where I live.”

  “Would they like it if you brought home a Nazi?”

  “They wouldn’t have to know about what you did as a child. Even if they did, it wouldn’t make a difference, they’d love you so much.”

  She did not reply.

  “Did you ever hurt anyone?” I asked cautiously.

  “Throw stones through the windows of a Jewish family? Or turn a hiding Jew over to the Gestapo? Oh, no, Karl, I never did anything like that. I didn’t know till the last year of the war what was really happening. I couldn’t do anything about it. But I don’t think that is an excuse.”

  “You were no worse than the rest of the kids of your generation.”

  “And no better. . . . I’m sorry, Karl, to be talking about this. Eventually I will get it straightened out in my own head. Meanwhile, life must go on, must it not?”

  She pressed her naked body against mine, an invitation to yet more love in the springtime.

  Trudi was an intelligent woman as well as a fabulous lover.

  Much more intelligent than I was. And certainly a much more fabulous lover.

  16

  Besides Trudi and Captain Polly, there was Brigitta.

  Brigitta Richter was the strangest of my Don Quixote adventures in Germany. Even now I find it difficult to describe the relationship and her. I had intervened in her life with little justification, transformed it with little thought about what might happen to her, and become a mix of confidant, confessor, and guardian angel to her—for all of which roles I was supremely unqualified.

  What had she become for me? I’m not sure. Not a lover exactly, but a friend who was willing to trust more of herself intimately to me than anyone else I had ever known or would know for many years to come. In a way she gave more of herself to me than Trudi would or could. And in possessing what she gave me, I found both terror and delight. And mystery—strange, frightening, dele
ctable mystery. Brigitta was a light, delicate fruitcake, and as I say that, I can feel the taste of her on my tongue.

  It was late afternoon in early November, before we raided the werewolves, when the weather had begun to turn cold and the skies were gray every day, except this one when the sky was a glorious blue dress, hiding all signs of suffering. Bamberg was a lovely city, untouched by the war, save for a few bombs over by the railway yards. It was not yet late in the day. The sun was still high in the sky, giving the thirteenth-century city on the left bank and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city on the right bank the look of a collection of picture postcards. The hunger and the cold were the same here as in other cities, but there were no ruins from the bombing raids as there were in such devastated cities as Frankfurt and Mannheim and Munich.

  The Emperor Henry II, variously called the Holy or the Pious, had sketched out the design for Bamberg based on his conviction that it would be the new Rome, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. He had planned that the city on the left bank of the Regens would be built in the form of a cross created by the Carmelite church, the Benedictine church, the Dominican church, and the Dom. The left bank was filled with churches and statues, some of them on the fronts of ordinary homes and shops—most of them built long after Henry’s time—so the piety had lasted for a while.

  I often speculated that the world would have been a different and interesting place if St. Henry’s dream had been achieved. One of the reasons it was not is that he and his wife, St. Cunnegunda, had no children, allegedly as legend has it because they abstained from sex. I kind of doubt that. Those Germanic royals always thought of dynasty.

  The Bamberg he had planned was a fragile piece of china, beautiful and so easy to break. If the Russkies, who were only twenty-two miles north, chose to come crashing down on us, the china would be permanently shattered this time, and the lovely and corrupt summer idyll that most Americans were enjoying here would turn into a nightmare.

  I decided to make one of my periodic visits to the Bahnhof to photograph the possible return of prisoners from Leipzig. By the time I pulled up by the station, low gray clouds had raced across the sky. No one got off the train. The shabbily dressed men and women who were waiting, heads bowed against the fierce wind blowing in off the steppes, walked away disconsolately, their shoulders stooped in discouragement. Hope once again frustrated.

  A woman who had caught my eye before that seemed especially discouraged. She wore a patched and faded brown cloth coat, flat shoes stuffed with newspaper, and a babushka scarf. She was tall, thin, haggard, and yet somehow graceful. Nearly starving, I supposed, and weary, yet doggedly faithful. She was old and not particularly attractive, probably in her late forties, but once she must have been beautiful. What made me lift my camera to catch her face was the mix of sadness and unconquerable hope I saw there. If her man was still alive, he was fortunate indeed.

  For a moment I captured her face in my 100mm lens and clicked. I still have the picture in a frame on my desk, one of my two best shots from Bamberg. I can see now what the eighteen-year-old kid did not see—vivid, ethereal, and haunting beauty, loveliness not far away from the tomb. I smile at the woman and once more taste the fruit (raspberry, I think) tart.

  I have the second picture somewhere too, the one in which her face becomes knotted in fury and she is charging toward me.

  “Bastard!” she screamed, shaking her fist at me. “Why must you damn Americans always exploit our misery!”

  Even more surprising than her fury was her English—a perfect Chicago accent (the only proper accent for an American, I have always contended).

  “I was going to call the picture ‘Fidelity,’ ” I said, backing away from her fist. “If you want, I’ll take the roll out and destroy it.”

  Her shoulders sank even lower and rage ebbed from her body. She turned her head away from me, like that of a novice who has been properly reprimanded by a wise mother superior. “It is perhaps a good title,” she murmured softly. “No, don’t destroy the film. Perhaps the photograph will help someone else someday.”

  “Perhaps it is also a compliment.”

  She lifted her head and looked at me with the lightest blue eyes I have ever seen, a touch of morning after a dark winter night.

  “Perhaps.”

  “University of Chicago?”

  She was startled. “How could you know that?” she asked anxiously.

  “Pure Chicago accent. Like my own.”

  She smiled ever so slightly. “Of course. Kurt, my husband, and I were graduate students there before the war. We thought about staying in America but waited till it was too late. We were deported as enemy aliens. Kurt was drafted. He was a panzer commander. Disappeared three years ago at the battle of Kursk. I know he is still alive.”

  She clenched her fists in determination. A single tear appeared on each cheek.

  “I know it. I know it.” She began to cough fitfully.

  What do you say to that?

  What I said was stupid: “Biggest tank battle in history.”

  She nodded and reached in her dilapidated purse for a handkerchief, spotlessly clean at that. I noted two things: her clothes, however mangy they were now, were the sort that were chic and expensive five years ago, and she was much younger than I had thought, early thirties at the most.

  “Kurt”—she stopped sniffling, but continued to cling to the handkerchief—“thought the war was stupid from the beginning. He said it was arrogant of us to think we could do what Napoleon could not do when he invaded Russia. He said the best way to fight Communism was to restore the historical traditions of German democracy.”

  They were intellectuals all right. I wondered what their democratic principles were.

  “We were of the Center Party.”

  “Windthorst and that bunch.”

  She almost jumped in surprise. “How does one as young as you are know so much about German history?”

  “I figure, you’re in a country, you ought to learn something about it.”

  She giggled. “You do talk like a Chicagoan.”

  “Well, Frau . . .”

  “Richter, Brigitta Richter.”

  “Sgt. Charles Cronin O’Malley, First Constabulary Regiment, Army of the United States.”

  I did not salute but almost did.

  She bowed her head politely. Convent-school girl, I bet.

  “Let me ask you a thoroughly Chicago question: Do you need a job?”

  How the Organization would have loved that!

  “I will not accept help from Americans!” she screamed at me. “We are not your slaves!”

  I did what Chicago pols do when they hear something to which they do not want to respond. I ignored it.

  “Can you type?”

  “Of course,” she snorted.

  “We need more translators at the Constab. Your American is better than any of our bunch.”

  That was not altogether true. We didn’t need more translators, but we always needed a couple of good ones, quick, efficient, and reliable.

  “I will not take another woman’s job away from her!” she said, shoulders erect, head high, breasts temporarily thrust forward. The effect was spoiled somewhat by a fit of coughing.

  She did sound like a democrat.

  “We don’t fire people,” I replied, truthfully enough. “Come on, Brigie, I’ll give you a drive home in the jeep.”

  “No!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Do I look like a rapist?”

  She hesitated. “No, you look like a funny little Irish kid.”

  “Than which there is no one more harmless. Come on.” We walked toward the jeep. I helped her in.

  “You will really try to find me employment?” She looked at me again with those sunrise eyes, a suspicious examination.

  “I didn’t say ‘try.’ ”

  “Why would you do this for me?”

  A perfectly good question to which there was no obvious answer—then or now. Chucky as La
ncelot du Lac. Or maybe Galahad. Or the Black Knight. Or maybe Der Rieter over in the Dom. Or maybe Der Rosenkavalier. Hell, we did need a good translator.

  “We Chicagoans need to stick together.”

  She lived on the left bank, in an apartment around the corner from the Pfarrkirche (parish church), not all that far from the Domplatz. A badly run-down neighborhood. What other kind of neighborhood would she live in?

  “It is not a parish like those in Chicago,” she said, “not like Holy Cross or St. Thomas the Apostle. Kurt says that your American parishes are peasant communes set down in a large city.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Kurt says that you have solved the problem of anonymity in urban life.”

  “This Kurt I will have to meet,” I said as we crossed the RhineMain–Danube Canal, which runs parallel to the Regens and about a half a kilometer northeast of it—the Regens empties into the Main a few miles downstream from Bamberg.

  “Please God, you will.”

  I found out more about her. She lived with her two children—Heinrich and Cunnegunda (I’m not kidding!)—and her mother, Regina Klein. She worked two mornings a week in a shop on the Grünerstrasse, the down-at-the-heels market street near the Jesuit church. She and Kurt had grown up together in Bamberg and had married at the age of nineteen in 1936 (so she was only thirty). They had both earned their Ph.D.’s at Chicago. She had studied American history. Kurt was a sociologist. Jews were good people. What Hitler had done to them was diabolic. Many of their friends had died in the plot against Hitler. If Kurt had not been captured at Kursk, he might have been tortured and killed too. The Gestapo came to question her, but after a day of interrogation, they decided to leave her alone because her husband was a panzer commander missing in action. She and her mother and children had colds all the time. They were always hungry. She was not sure they could live through the winter, especially if it was as bad as the last one. She had little hope. But a little was better than none at all.