“Yes,” Peter answered immediately. “I am absolutely positive it would be worse.”
Both men laughed and went back to cutting. Peter understood what Maus was saying, but for him, the sweat that poured from his brow was cathartic. When he was young, his mother used to tell him that sweat was your body’s way of getting the bad out. A fever sweat, for example, was the illness seeping from your pores. The bad things escape, his mother used to say, and then you can start over, good as new.
Peter wondered now if the sweat that seeped from his brow each day was serving the same purpose: getting the bad things out. All those terrible things he’d seen on the battlefield, the guilt he carried for living while Otto had died, the shame he felt for firing into faceless masses of oncoming enemy soldiers, the disgrace of fighting for something he didn’t believe in—they were all black stains on his soul. Maybe the grueling work was his atonement. Maybe he’d get to start over one day.
That’s what he was thinking when he looked up, his eye caught by something red flashing in the next field over. It was her, he realized with a start, the beautiful girl he’d seen three weeks before. She was wearing the same red dress she’d worn in his dreams each night, and this time, she had her arm around the shoulders of a young Negro boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, who was cradling his right hand and crying.
Without considering the consequences, Peter hurried, cane knife in hand, toward the edge of the canal separating his field from hers. The girl and the boy were walking quickly through the stalks, and they weren’t looking in his direction.
“We just need to clean the wound out,” Peter could hear her explaining to the boy as he drew closer. “Then I’ll bandage it for you, and you’ll be good as new.”
Peter was struck by both the musical lilt to her voice and her gentleness with the injured boy. “I can help!” Peter heard himself call in English. He clapped a hand over his mouth and spun around, afraid one of the guards or the foreman had heard, but they were nowhere to be seen. Maus, however, was staring at Peter. When Peter turned back, he saw that the girl and boy had stopped and were looking right at him. The boy looked scared, but the girl wore a different kind of expression. Her pink cheeks had paled, and her eyes were wide.
“It’s you,” she said, taking a step closer to the canal. Now, they were just three meters from each other, separated only by a shallow strip of water that Peter knew he could jump over easily. But he wouldn’t. Not now. He might scare her. And that was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead, he held her gaze, simply because he couldn’t force himself to look away. As her eyes seared into him in the charged silence, he felt a strange fluttering in his chest.
“Hello,” Peter finally said, and he was disappointed when his single word seemed to snap the girl out of her trance.
She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. I must have thought you were someone else.”
As her gaze returned to his, Peter could feel his own cheeks growing warm, warmer than the sun had already made them. “No, I’m only me,” he said, but he immediately wanted to kick himself. What kind of fool would say such a thing? I’m only me?
But then the girl surprised him by laughing. “I suppose we all are,” she said. “Only ourselves, that is.”
Peter nodded, still flustered. “ ‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment,’ ” he blurted out, instantly convinced that reciting an obscure quote was even more foolish.
“You know Ralph Waldo Emerson?” she asked.
Peter could feel his eyes widen. “You know him too?”
“He’s one of my favorites.” She studied him more closely across the ribbon of murky water. “But you are German, aren’t you? How do you know an American writer? How do you know English so well?”
“I’ve always admired your language. I love the way Emerson wrote, and as I learned English, I made it a point to study him.” He didn’t mention the fact that he’d kept a book of Emerson’s poems hidden under his bed in Holzkirchen, refusing to take it to the town’s book burning when Hitler had ordered all foreign books destroyed. At night, when he’d read it by candlelight, he’d felt a bit like he was standing up to the rat pirate.
“You learned English in school?” the girl asked.
“Yes,” Peter replied. “But I also studied it at home. My best friend and I talked of coming to America one day.” He thought of Otto and looked down at his work clothes, stamped with the unmistakable letters POW. He felt a wave of shame as he added, “Although I didn’t imagine coming like this.”
“He’s a prisoner,” the young boy spoke up. “You ain’t supposed to talk to prisoners.”
“Why don’t you run along to my house?” the girl said to the injured boy. Peter followed her gaze to a wooden house in the near distance, just over the edge of a sugarcane field. He could spot vegetables of some sort growing in neat rows and a small barn toward the back of the property. It was, he realized, a family farm. “I’ll be along in just a minute, Jeremiah. I’ll fix up your hand then.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone with this German,” the boy said, glaring at Peter. “He might try to hurt you.”
“He won’t hurt me,” the girl said. “Please, Jeremiah. Go, and I’ll be there in a moment.”
The boy nodded reluctantly, and giving Peter one last pointed scowl, he turned away and headed to the house the girl had pointed to.
“What happened to him?” Peter asked after a moment.
“He cut his hand on a cane knife. He works on my family’s farm from time to time when sugarcane isn’t in season.”
Peter nodded. “You should put some alcohol on that wound too. To disinfect it.”
The girl smiled. “I know.”
“Peter!” Maus called out from somewhere behind him. Peter jerked around, surprised. He’d nearly forgotten that he wasn’t alone in the world with the girl in the red dress. “Peter, what are you doing? The guard will see you!”
Peter waved him off, and Maus shook his head, stared for a moment at the girl, and turned back around, hoisting his cane knife high.
“I should go,” said the girl, and suddenly, Peter felt a sense of panic.
“Wait!” he cried as she began to walk away.
She stopped and turned expectantly.
“I—” he began, suddenly at a loss. He had no idea what to say or how to make her stay.
But the girl seemed to read his mind. “I’m Margaret,” she said.
Margaret, he thought. It was the loveliest name he’d ever heard. “Peter,” he managed. “I’m Peter.”
“Peter,” she repeated in her musical voice. No one had ever said Peter’s name as beautifully, as perfectly, as that. But before he could say another word, she was already walking away. He stared after her until he could no longer hear her footfalls in the muck, and then slowly, he sank to his knees, the wind knocked out of him.
“Peter?” Maus was saying his name with concern somewhere in the distance, but Peter couldn’t move. Something had just changed within him, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but he had the strange feeling it had altered the course of everything.
“Peter!” Maus said again, this time much closer to Peter’s ear. Peter turned around and was surprised to see Maus right behind him, his face tense with concern. “Come on! I can hear the guards coming back. What is wrong with you? You’ve never seen a pretty girl before?”
Peter didn’t reply, but he let Maus drag him back to the field, where once again, he began to slice through the stalks of sugarcane. And even though he was surrounded by dozens of his countrymen, even though someone had begun singing the familiar “Memelwacht” in the next row of stalks, Peter suddenly felt more alone than ever, lost in a forest of cloying sweetness, a million miles from home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
Back at home that evening, I heated up yet another Lean Cuisine, sat down with my laptop on the back porch, and googled Peter A. Dahler. Pages of s
earch results appeared instantly, but they all seemed connected to a Danish professor who was obviously too young to be the Peter Dahler I was looking for. There were a few stray results for other Peter Dahlers, but they all led to unused Twitter accounts or family tree projects in which the Peter in question was the wrong age.
I checked the envelope Jeremiah had given me and entered in the barely legible Holzkirchen return address, but that didn’t bring up anything other than a Google map indicating that it was located on a side street near the town center. I tried searching for the address with the last name Dahler, but that didn’t bring up anything meaningful either.
Other than discovering that Holzkirchen was just thirty minutes from Munich, where the painting had been shipped from, I came up empty. Tomorrow morning, I would call my ex-boyfriend Scott at the Orlando Sentinel to ask if he could run a search for Peter A. Dahler using the newspaper’s research system; their software would scroll through driver’s license databases across the country and a few registries in Europe too. In the meantime, though, I had hit a wall.
I gave up on looking for Peter for the time being and instead entered German POWs in U.S. during WWII. I still couldn’t quite believe what Jeremiah had told me—that during the Second World War, German soldiers had been employed in civilian jobs all over our country. But as soon as I began scanning search results, I realized that the prison camp system across the United States was even more extensive than he had described. For the next hour, I read quickly, my surprise growing as I scanned page after page of information.
I was floored to learn that nearly four hundred thousand Germans had been imprisoned in the United States during the 1940s, but that newspaper coverage of the POW camps was limited, so many Americans didn’t even know about them. Most of the prisoners had been captured in battle or on German U-boats and had been brought to the States to work. According to the Geneva Conventions, enlisted prisoners could be used for labor, but only if they were paid and worked reasonable hours, so most were on a roughly nine-to-five schedule and received eighty cents a day, equivalent to an American private’s pay in the army at the time.
Apparently some seven hundred prison camps were dotted all across the country—in almost every state, although the majority of the prisoners were housed in the South. Many of the larger camps provided university-level courses, English instruction, libraries, church services, soccer fields, and great medical care. For soldiers who had come from an economically depressed Germany, this was, in some cases, the most comfortably they’d ever lived.
There were a handful of escape attempts and complaints from locals angry about having the enemy in their backyards, but most of the experiences I read about seemed positive. As many as five thousand Germans had enjoyed their lives in America so much that they decided to immigrate to the United States after the war. Yet two generations on, none of this was common knowledge. How could I have never known there were German prisoners here, when they’d clearly been such a vital part of the wartime economy?
My phone rang, and I sighed and snapped my laptop shut. My father’s name came up on the caller ID, and I hesitated before answering.
“Hi, Emily. I’m calling to see if you managed to get in touch with Jeremiah Beltrain.” His tone was all business, which made me feel surprisingly sad. There was a part of me—a foolish part, admittedly—that was hoping for more. Hadn’t my father been trying to make amends for years? Hadn’t I finally let him in the door a little bit? Perhaps his brusqueness should have been a relief—after all, I was the one determined to put up walls. Instead, I felt let down.
“Actually, I made a trip down to Belle Creek, where Grandma Margaret grew up, earlier today.”
“Belle Creek? But that’s hours away, isn’t it?”
“Jeremiah said he wanted to meet in person, and I didn’t see any reason not to. Anyhow, he had some answers for us.” I took a deep breath. “From what he told me, it appears that your father might have been a German prisoner of war.”
“You’re saying my father was a Nazi?” He sounded horrified.
“No,” I said quickly. “Or—I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think that’s a conclusion we can draw. According to what I’ve read so far, and what Jeremiah said, the majority of the enlisted men who were captured and brought to the States didn’t identify with the Nazi Party. Most were just young men who had no choice but to fight for their country.”
“But . . . I don’t understand.” His voice sounded hollow. “What were Germans doing over here during the war?”
I quickly recounted what Jeremiah had said, then I explained what I’d just learned about the prevalence of German POWs in the United States.
“You’re telling me that there were four hundred thousand POWs here?” he interrupted.
“It was news to me too.”
My father was silent for a moment. “So what on earth happened? How did my mother wind up getting involved with a German prisoner? Who was he?”
“His name was Peter Dahler. It sounds like they were in love. Jeremiah said that both he and Grandma Margaret thought that Peter was a good man.”
My father choked on a laugh. “A good man? Good men don’t wind up in prison camps, seducing local girls.”
“I don’t think it was like that.” I didn’t know why I was defending Peter Dahler; he obviously hadn’t turned out to be such a great guy in the end. But something about the painting and the note that had come with it made me believe there was more to the story.
“So Jeremiah is positive that this Peter fellow is my father?” His voice cracked on the last word, and I realized for the first time how much this was bothering him. “How could he—?” My father trailed off in midsentence, and I closed my eyes, knowing exactly what he was going to say. How could he vanish like that? He cleared his throat, obviously aware of his near-stumble, and tried again. “So now what? Mystery solved?”
“Not at all. If Peter Dahler left your mother and never looked back, what explanation is there for the painting? I have the feeling we’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg here.”
“Maybe that’s far enough,” my father said softly. “Maybe there’s a reason your grandmother didn’t want us poking into this.”
“Actually, I think she’d want us to know the truth,” I said. “I’m just not sure she knew it herself.”
* * *
Myra dropped by for a drink that night at nine thirty, after she’d put her daughter, Samantha, to bed. Her husband had been happy to stay home on their couch watching football, and Myra had practically begged me over the phone to give her an excuse to get out of the house. We lived four blocks from each other in the historic Colonialtown neighborhood just east of downtown Orlando, where the homes dated back to the 1920s and the streets were tree-lined and filled with joggers and dog walkers.
“Sometimes, the two of them just drive me crazy,” she said, settling into an Adirondack chair on my front porch as I handed her a glass of chardonnay. She took a long sip as I sat down on the chair beside her. “I mean, if I have to hear Jay say one more word about how great the New England Patriots are, I might actually have to strangle him. And Samantha is in this phase now where she refuses to go to bed at her bedtime, because she’s afraid she’s missing whatever else is going on in our household. Apparently in her four-year-old brain, the moment the lights are out in her bedroom, the living room turns into a full-on disco filled with Sesame Street characters.”
I laughed and clinked glasses with her. “Now I have a mental image of you doing the hustle with Big Bird.”
“Nah, I only dance with Elmo.” She smiled, and I felt a little stab of pain in my heart as I thought about all I’d missed out on with my own child.
I shook my head and forced a smile. “So you’ll never believe where I was today.”
“Somewhere more exciting than the Sesame Street disco?”
I laughed and recapped the arrival of the painting, my meeting with my dad, and my visit with Jeremiah. When I fi
nished, Myra was staring at me, her eyes wide.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said. “I mean, you voluntarily reached out to your dad? That’s huge. And you’re finding out that sweet little Grandma Margaret had some kind of sordid love affair with a German prisoner?”
“I don’t know that it was sordid, exactly.”
She waved me off. “Don’t rain on my parade, lady. This is splashier than a soap opera. Seriously, though, what are you going to do next? You have to find this Peter guy!”
“I know.” I avoided her gaze as I added, “I’m going to call Scott in the morning to ask for his help.”
“Scott,” she said finally, her voice flat. “Scott Caruso, who dumped you last year because, according to him, you didn’t have enough time to dedicate to him.”
“Yes.” I cringed.
“Scott, who had a new girlfriend within a week. After dating you for seven months.”
“I was never really that serious about him anyhow.” I avoided her gaze.
She sighed. “But when are you serious about anyone, Emily?”
“So now you’re on Scott’s side?”
She snorted. “Hardly. You know I never thought he was right for you. I wanted to throw a party when the two of you broke up. But you have to admit, in the whole time I’ve known you, you’ve never really thrown yourself into any relationship. You just kind of coast along, waiting for it to end.”
I shrugged and looked out at the darkness beyond my front porch. How could I tell her that the last time I’d really loved someone was eighteen years ago, when I was head over heels in love with Nick? I’d always thought I’d find someone else who I felt that way about, but half a lifetime later, I was still looking—and still thinking of the high school boyfriend I’d walked away from. Clearly there was something wrong with me. “Can we change the subject?” I muttered.
Myra gave me a look. “Why not? We always do.”
I ignored the dig. “Okay, so I’ve been thinking about this supposed grandfather of mine all day. I just can’t piece it together. My grandmother was such a cautious person, and she always seemed to know when someone wasn’t a good person. The thing is, I can’t figure out how she’d judge this Peter Dahler guy so incorrectly. If what Jeremiah said was accurate, she was completely in love with him, and then he just dropped off the face of the planet.”
When We Meet Again Page 6