by Craig Nova
The driver of the cart rose from the damp slag of the accident, one broken arm hanging straight down. Vapor rose from the horse and folded into the steam of the car as the radiator went on hissing. The driver squatted in the country man’s way, just sitting on his heels, and rocked back and forth, saying to the dead animal, “Oh, my darling. Oh, my little one.”
Bystanders picked up his produce, and the uniformed police, who had now arrived, tried to keep the other cars away. The cart driver reached out with his good arm and touched the horse’s head. Then he went back to rocking, the tears streaming down his face. The driver of the car sat in the gutter, one hand to his bleeding nose, and watched the driver of the cart.
“We need an ambulance,” said Armina.
“All right, all right,” said a member of the Schutzpolice.
On the curb, on solid ground, or on ground that at least wasn’t covered with blood and oil, Rainer gave her the pistol. Then the two of them stood there. The driver of the cart said, over and over, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, my darling. My little one.”
Every now and then someone tried to pick up an onion or tomato that had rolled away.
“Just look,” said Armina. “Look.”
In the gutter the water, oil, and blood ran up to a drain, the petroleum making a rainbow on the surface that bent and disappeared into the depths of the sewer. She brushed at the slime, the blood and oil on her coat, but it only rubbed it in.
“I can’t get it off,” she said. “Look.” She put her head against Rainer and said, “If I could only stop crying. Why can’t I stop?”
Steam rose from the horse and from the hot water in the gutter.
“So,” she said. “Which one of us is going to leave this city first? What do we have here?”
He looked at the mass of car and horse, machine and blood.
“More of this,” he said.
“Let’s go by the avenue on the way home,” she said. “Let’s stay in the lights.”
“Sure,” he said. “Away from the shadows.”
“I just want a bath,” she said. “Then we’ll pack. Tonight.”
“Yes,” he said. “Tonight.”
“Come on,” she said. “Before the stores turn their lights out.”
In New York City, in the spring of 1945, Armina looked through the window at the detectives from the War Department who came down West Twelfth Street in their dark coats, heavy shoes, and with that blank expression she recognized from Berlin: suspicion hiding behind a slack, numb face. Their hats bobbed along as they approached her building. She had been reading a letter when she had pulled back the curtains, which she did often these days, and after guessing that the men were detectives, she let the curtains fall and swing back and forth. Armina went back to the letter from Rainer, who wrote from an island in the Pacific.
Armina had come to the States, after a year in England that she remembered even now as an exercise in being so cold that even the summer wasn’t enough to get rid of the chill. She had found a place to live in New York, but a job had been difficult, especially when people were still out of work. She had worked as a secretary for a German company that went out of business, and then she had worked as a waitress in a German restaurant, bringing her tips home and keeping them in a jar, which she shook from time to time, as though the sound were evidence of how precarious her position was.
It had been easier for her to come to the States, because she had been a police officer, or that is what she guessed. For Rainer, it was another matter, and he applied for admission and waited and then went around to the greenhouses and botanical gardens in England, but no one wanted him. It didn’t matter that he was a refugee, that he was violently opposed to what was happening in Berlin. He was suspect, a liability, someone who could be a spy for all anyone knew. He thought he might get a job on the river, and tried the docks, approached tugboat captains, but they were uneasy, too. Why did he want to be around the docks, where so much shipping came and went? He waited, wrote letters to Armina. She thought of going back to England to be with him, but that made no sense as far as he was concerned. He would wait. She would have to wait, too.
Rainer arrived a couple of years later, and they lived together on West Twelfth Street, although he had trouble, too, in finding work. He taught botany at a high school in the Bronx, and then got a job on Saturdays at the Botanical Gardens on the grounds crew. He had done translation of scientific papers, tried to publish his own work on new varieties of orchids, and finally in the late 1930s when the war began, he lied about his age and joined the army. He wasn’t allowed to fight in Europe, since he was German. His letters from the Pacific were becoming rarer. It had been three months since she had last heard from him.
My dearest Armina.
Of course, I miss you, as I’m sure you know, and this is one of those times when I want to get across to you in the old style, as when we first met, that is, I am trying to suggest to you what can’t be said. First, I should say that I am on an island in the Eastern Carolines, which I am sure the censor will let through, since it is no secret that we are here. The Eastern Carolines are south of Japan. It is a pretty large island, about fifty miles long and twenty wide. The jungle here starts at the coast, where there are mangrove swamps, which seen from the ocean have a dark green color, like jade, and behind them the trees begin, gray as elephants and so tall as to make it hard to see the top, that is, you have to put your head so far back to look straight up that it hurts. Creepers, as thick as a man’s forearm, hang from the trees and here and there you can see ferns that are twelve feet tall, the fronds spread out like a fan.
I have found many varieties of orchids here, and some that, as nearly as I can tell, are entirely new. Let me describe one to you. It has large, broad petals that have a sheen I have never seen before, something like nylon stockings in incandescent light, and the color of them is like gray silk, and yet the center is pink and has that same sheen as the petals. They put off an odor, too, a perfume that somehow pierced me when I first came across it, something nutty, skin like, sweet and at odds with the muskiness of the floor of the jungle. Like that perfume you used to wear that smelled one way on the glass dauber and another way when you touched it to the skin behind your ear. So you will understand what I felt when I say that I walked into the woods and saw the cascades of blooms, not only the new ones with that sheen, like wet silk, but some that I had collected for the Berlin hothouse. I saw some purple varieties like a storm at its most intense. You know, that color in the sky that looks like a bruise. I have spent time looking at that color and have tried to describe, to myself, just how the color makes the malignant into such beauty. Do you know that in one of your eyes there is a small streak of purple? I am not sure you do, since you would have to be very close to a mirror to see it. It is just the color of these flowers. So, walking here is like being in my memories of you, and when I reached up to take a flower, I heard your voice saying, “You shouldn’t do that.” It is the sound of your voice that mixes with the partial silence of the jungle, which has a constant whir. I don’t know if I am cheered up or miserable when I saw that color, as though we were bound together by it while having it as a reminder of how far apart we are. The color left me drawn, like a string, which vibrated when I thought of you. Of course, I didn’t think people could actually tremble with missing someone, but then I have learned a lot out here.
I went into the jungle the other day with a man who lives on the island. He speaks some English, and it is funny when he can’t understand my German accent. Still, we went farther into the jungle than I had been before, wading streams that got us wet, and as we went he was cautious, hesitating before coming into a clearing, but then the island had been occupied and who knows if anyone is left. We came to some ruins.
They were made of black stone that had been fashioned into long octagons, as big around as a log. These stones were piled up to make walls, just as they had been arranged on the ground to make a plaza. Everything here was covered with
vines, and so it was like a green and black bower, filled with sparkles where the light hit the pyrite in the stone. The silence is difficult to describe, more complete than in the jungle, and when I stood in it, in that shower of light, the man who took me there said, “The god who lived here flew away to Truk when the missionaries came.”
I wondered what that must have been like, when the god flew away. Such a beating of wings, a blast of dark air like the worst hurricane, although dry and cool, and I tried to imagine the sound of it, too, when this creature left on enormous, transparent wings. I think of the desolation that it left behind, which, of course, is still here, in that silence. I am sure you know that this silence, this loss, this sense of departure and dark air is how I miss you. Like the loss of one’s god. I don’t have to go on about this. That you understand is such a comfort to me. And then, of course, I walked down from the ruins into the jungle, where I can find those flowers with that purple color like your eyes.
The censor will stop some of the following, but I want to try to tell you. On we had hard fighting for and afterward we couldn’t the bodies days, so you had to dig through and the smell of the island could be detected twenty miles from land
We are bathing out of a helmet, but over the reef, which goes around the island, you can see a rainbow when the sun rises in the mist from the breaking waves….
There is only one other thing. I look at the stars at night and realize that you don’t see the same ones, but I know that you can go to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx and see some of the same flowers, and so I hope that is what you will do on your day off. It will be like the time you used to look in the window and we both had a glass of brandy. The sensation of beauty will make us feel close.
Armina put the letter down and thought of her work, which was the best she could get now. No one trusted her to work where munitions were manufactured, and the only job she could find was in a factory that made portable organs for chaplains, and one day, when she was stapling the leather of the foot-cranked bellows of the instrument, she wondered if one that she had worked on would be used on an island where Rainer was stationed.
She kept to herself, mostly, although from time to time men from the War Department came to see her to ask about people she had known in Berlin. Still, she was careful these days, since one day a man had approached her in the diner where she had breakfast and asked if she would be willing to “help him out” by doing “some work,” which involved taking pictures of ships in the harbor. She had immediately called the police.
She tried to explain the lack of letters from Rainer in every conceivable way but one. A ship that was carrying the mail could have been sunk, or an airplane that was filled with sacks of letters could have been shot down. A fire could have broken out in a jungle station where the mail had been kept. The letters could have been lost on a jungle trail, soaked with rain, dropped in the Pacific when they were being loaded onto a ship. It had come to the point where this list of possibilities was a litany she went through at night, and during the day when she had a chance (such as when she was on the train coming up from the shooting range). She wished that Rainer hadn’t told her about the god who had flown away, and the rush of air, since when she went through the possibilities and still had no concrete idea of what had happened, she was left, through a process of elimination, with the one possibility she couldn’t face. Then she imagined that rush of air, that enormous presence of wings so large she could only feel diminished.
She joined a pistol club downtown, where New York City detectives took target practice. And when she went into the range and loaded that pistol, holding the bead flat in the rear sight and feeling the beating of her heart, it was as though she was trying to concentrate on one thing against the dark rush, that breeze that left her so alone as to think all she had was the throb and Bang! throb and Bang!
At the bottom of her fear and despair, she considered something else. At first, she had tried to pretend that she was far enough away from Berlin to have escaped her obligations there, but with each passing month, and as the months had turned into years, she had discovered that just the opposite was true: the distance only increased her feeling of having left something undone. And when she woke at two and three in the morning, unable to get back to sleep, and after reading the few letters that she had, opening them carefully and handling them only by the tips of her fingers (in which she could recall the touch of his skin, or the texture of his hair) she felt the gravitation of Berlin. She got up in the middle of the night and looked at herself in the mirror, and then she walked around her small apartment, hearing the old building creak, and all of it, the sleeplessness, the sense of living in the wake of a god that flew away, the sounds of the building, left her with the desire she couldn’t quite articulate. She wanted to do anything that would let her sleep at night, to be at peace, to stop having the impulse to scratch her face or pull her hair or be someone, or so she told herself, who probably deserved to have the man she loved end up on the floor of some jungle, in that sound of insects, and beneath the orchids that were so wet and fragrant. Then she started the entire process again, going through the possibilities of why she hadn’t heard anything from Rainer and coming back to that same feeling of being incomplete. She hadn’t finished her work in Berlin, and she could feel the ghost of what remained undone.
She closed her eyes, but she saw swirling arms of light, so much like the Milky Way, the movement of them seeming slow but yet still upsetting, and when she opened her eyes, as though she had been drinking, she saw quite clearly the pulled-down stockings, the red blisters, the faces turned toward the leaves, as though giving up, dying there against the earth with a caress, a sigh of exhaustion after what they had endured. The pad of the fingers curled so gently into the dirt, and the posture of the young women, so loose against the bottom of the gullies where they had been found seemed, from Armina’s bed, in the dark, an accusation and a plea. How could she have so utterly failed them? It hadn’t been for want of trying, and yet that didn’t do her any good at all. In fact, she thought that this might even be a larger indictment, that she had tried and failed and showed herself lacking some critical item, some aspect of personality that, if she had been able to obtain it, would have saved those women in the park. At dawn, when the first pale light came in through the windows, Armina wanted to shout, to get up and break the glasses and plates in the kitchen, anything to violate the silence of the apartment, which for her seemed to be a kind of hiss of the obligations of the dead. The marks, the posture, the sad perfume left over from the previous night, the pale skin, all of it lingered as a constant, unavoidable indictment. Armina went through each one she had found and suspected she just wasn’t good enough. Yes, she thought, the obligations of the dead. If I could just appease them, if I could somehow do the right thing, I’d be able to rest. I could sleep. Rainer would come home.
The men in the dark clothes had come up to the bottom of her steps, and then they stopped and looked in a notebook, checking the address before looking at the front door. Their expressions were now a little more blank, a little more masked, and she knew that this meant they wanted something. She held back the gauzy curtain as they climbed the steps, their leather shoes slapping on the brownstone. The super slammed a trash can lid like a shot. Her buzzer rang.
“Armina Treffen?” said one of the men. He had taken off his hat and showed his thinning hair. The other one just stood there.
“Yes,” she said.
The man showed his ID. The War Department.
“Can we come in?” said the first one.
“Of course,” she said.
Perhaps, she thought, the War Department was running short of people to notify relatives of men who had been killed in action and so people like these were left to do the job. Or maybe it was done with a telegram. That was the proper way. She put her hand to her face.
They came in. It was a Saturday afternoon. The detectives sniffed at the coffee that was on the stove, and she asked
if they wanted a cup. They agreed. Yes. They would like one. Did this mean that they had come about Rainer? She poured the coffee into two cups, brought them out, and put them on the table in her small living room. Then she brought a bowl of sugar, a small pitcher of milk, a plate with a couple of cookies on it. Finally she sat down with her own cup, the gentle rattling of it in her saucer unstoppable, and so she put it down and sat there, hands together. They sipped their coffee.
“So,” she said. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet,” the first one said. “But soon.”
“How do you know?” she said.
“We have connections there,” said the other. His voice was deeper, like the base note of an organ in a church, like a croaking frog.
“Where? How do you know anything about the Pacific?” she said.
“The Pacific?” said the first.
“No, we meant Berlin.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Hitler will be dead soon. And a lot of others …”
“Oh,” she said. “Thank God.”
She swallowed. Then she took up the coffee and drank from it.
“We don’t know much about the Pacific,” said the other.
“No,” said the other.
But soon, they said, they were going to need people to go back to Berlin, who knew the city, who spoke German fluently, who knew the police department from the days before the war, who could help with an investigation. Would she be willing? they said.
“When would you want me to go?”
“The Soviets are almost there,” one said.
“It will take a little time to stabilize,” the other said. “The end of the summer.”
When she arrived in Berlin, no one checked her at customs, although a British soldier said, “I wouldn’t go around alone, if I were you.”