by Amanda Dykes
“It was Mr. Max,” he says, face burning. He looks longingly toward the town square, which is blessedly empty. If he could just vanish away over there. “It’s for Mr. Max,” he says, dropping his gaze.
“Mi-ster Max! Mi-ster Max!” It’s the same trio from before, the youngsters bent on stirring up a scene. They hoist Robert onto their shoulders to carry him through the crowd. “For Mister Max!”
And then they stop.
The crowd falls silent.
Robert strains to see what’s happened, but the sun is in his eyes. He raises a hand to shield them and sees a woman in a simple black dress moving toward him—pointing at him.
He’s never seen her in his life. And yet the very sight of her jolts some electric shock through him—the unshakable sense that he does know her.
The boys beneath him are slack-jawed, uncomfortable in the face of this sudden otherworldly figure.
“It is you,” she says. She is singular—ice blue eyes, looking right at him, or right through him. Her face holds unknowable age. Circles beneath her eyes show she’s lived more than he, worlds more, though she can’t be much older than thirty. Dark hair drapes over her shoulder in a long braid.
He leaps from his unwanted perch, lands on the ground and senses a line. Like if he crosses it, he’s crossing a divide there will be no coming back from.
She crosses the divide. Never breaking her gaze.
“You . . . you are good man.” Her speech is measured. It’s as if she’s reaching far across to her homeland—somewhere in Europe, by her accent—and pulling those words here to speak, her conviction fierce with the strength they gather over the miles.
He should protest. She does not know. He is not a good man. But there is fierceness in her voice. Eva is beside him now. She’s slipped her hand into his, and they both stand transfixed in a sense that something momentous is happening—though nobody knows what.
Ansel, for once, is silent.
The woman lifts a hand to his face, and it trembles as she cups his jaw. “Good man,” she says again. Her eyes seem to see universes where he only sees a moment, and they hold heartache beyond measure. With her other hand she does the same to Eva, her touch one of conviction. “Good people.”
He drops his gaze. The only gift he can give such a one is the truth. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. I don’t think I am who you think I am.”
But she is not listening. Her face, marble-still until now, moves into a sad smile as she retracts her touch.
She is murmuring, words indecipherable. At first he thinks it is the way she runs her words together, the mournfulness of her voice. But then—word by word—he realizes she has slipped into another language. German, if he is not mistaken. A language few dare to speak in America, so wary are folks after the war, and after the escape of three German prisoners of war right here in Maine. None would soon forget the panic of that manhunt through the North Woods.
He catches a few words he knows: Danke—thank you. Leben—life. And two words that have the whole town holding their breath—Auschwitz. Stutthoff. They have heard the stories of these camps. Grieved the atrocities. But they never expected someone to arrive on the town’s doorstep speaking of such things.
Eva tilts her head to the side as she leans in. She doesn’t have much occasion to bring out her linguistic skills in Ansel, and she is alive with purpose.
“Ocean.” she says. “She was in the—ocean—and—”
The woman discerns that Eva is translating, and her words speed up. “She had been in Auschwitz. Was freed but had no home. She was fleeing for America, a new life . . . but the boat . . . it was sinking. She was on a life raft—”
Robert’s breath goes out of him. He knows this story. It was told to him in the gray belly of a warship. Could this be . . . ? He searches the crowd looking for Arthur but doesn’t spot him. He does, however, see his mother standing in the surrounding crowd, her eyes wide.
Eva continues. “She was cold and nearly drowned and her . . . her children?” She flattens her hand and pushes it toward the ground, indicating the height of a child.
The woman nods. “Ja! Ja! Drei!” She holds up three fingers.
But that is wrong. There had been two children with the woman Roy saved, not three.
Still, the woman speaks on, her voice cracking with passion as she points at Robert. She pauses, pulls in a breath raked with tremors, shakes her head, purses her lips. Her eyes fill, and she nods at Robert. “Gut. Good man.”
Robert looks her full in the face. “That . . . was my brother,” he says. Eyes wide, willing her to understand as gently as he can. She does not know his brother’s fate after her departure from the destroyer. And she has borne enough pain, he can see. “My twin.” He circles his face. Pushes his hands down in an X across his front. “Not me.”
“Nein,” she says.
“My brother,” he says, and looks a question at Eva.
“Bruder,” she whispers.
“Mein Bruder,” Robert says. “He was a very good man.”
To his left he sees his mother has moved close, a tear trickling down her cheek.
The woman stares long, to the point that heat creeps up Robert’s neck.
Finally, she breaks her gaze and rummages in her purse, a tattered brown handbag with one wooden handle where once there were two. She pulls a paper out, unfolds it, and holds it out.
It’s the piece from TIME magazine.
“You,” she says, pointing first to him, then the picture. “You . . . are a good man.” She shuts her eyes as if to recall something hard practiced. “Mister Robert Bliss.”
His breath hitches. It’s as if someone’s unplugged an ocean around him and it’s swirling, draining, leaving him exposed.
Not a soul stirs. A quick glance around shows the children who have clambered up beneath the docks onto the scaffolding timbers are just as transfixed as the adults—the ones floating in boats, the ones gathered about.
Eva breaks the silence with a soft strain of spoken words, making the German language melodic, building trust with this woman word by word.
“Come,” Eva says at last, smiling and putting an arm around the woman’s shoulder. “Robert, Savannah, this is Mrs. Liesl Rosen. We have some catching up to do.”
twenty-six
Through the magic of Eva’s warmth, the comfort of Mrs. Crockett’s wild blueberry-rhubarb pie with its golden-brown crust, and the backdrop cheers and crack-of-the-bat coming from the town baseball game, Liesl Rosen picks up a cloak of hope and wraps it about herself at the foot of Josef Krause’s statue.
Her English is better than it first seemed, and with only occasional help from Eva, she tells her story.
Of how she, at twenty-five, had found herself, her husband, and their two children in a concentration camp in Poland. How they lived on floors of mud, packed into barrack beds, all four of them in a bed built for one. How their stomachs grew empty, their limbs grew so cold they could not feel them, the roof leaked water so cold they sometimes awoke to ice beneath their feet—but hardly noticed, for the cold had been the only covers they’d had all the night long. But they’d stayed together, and they knew that was a miracle.
After a time, their captors had separated the men and women into different barracks. Liesl had felt an unraveling begin within her—a shivering that would not stop. A hollow sickness within her said her children would be next, for she had heard stories of other camps where children were exterminated because they served no use in the work camps.
“Served no use.” Liesl repeats the words in a whisper. “As if they are not the keepers of life itself.”
And soon her children were taken, but they appeared safe, at least for the time being, in a new children’s block. She and Luka, her husband, hardly saw each other for long days—he in the quarry, pulling stones from earth, and she in the munitions factory, her soul rending at the work she was made to do, the lives these weapons would end.
They had one single corner of the univer
se where they could meet in the late afternoon. After the guards making their rounds would pass, there was enough time that she could brush her little finger against his thumb in passing. Or sometimes—once in a great, great while— they lingered a little longer together, hidden by a wall of sandbags.
The blessed winter rains, when they came, drove the guards away longer, sent the sandbags higher, and stretched their time deeper.
Some days she came bearing bruises and marks given her at the factory—and to explain them would only add to the pain inflicted by her overseers. So Luka would just run his fingers as gently as he could over her wounds, a silent lament, his gray eyes filling. And he would whisper to her, voice roughened by the injustice—“Eines tages, Liesl.” Someday, Liesl.
She’d known he’d meant that someday . . . they would be gone from that life. To a better life. A place to breathe. Where the sun did not hide for years upon end, and where their hands could work the soil to grow things, not destroy things.
Eines tages. The man said more in those two words, and in the fierce hope living behind the torment in his dark eyes, than all the storytellers in all the world could have said together.
And so when it came to pass that she realized she had life growing within her—life there in that place of death—she’d taken her husband’s hand fleetingly as they passed one afternoon and placed it on her sunken stomach, hiding such a secret in its dark. With cheeks flushing like a bride in her youth, and a magic she could feel come alive sparking the air between them, she whispered his battle cry back to him: “Eines tages, Luka.”
Her smile said the rest, and his grin in return was as if someone had given him his youth back. And life right along with it. “Ja,” he’d said, and squeezed her hand. “Ja, Liesl.” His voice so thick, so full even in its huskiness.
And then had come the march. Rumors of the Soviet forces encroaching brought hope and despair in a battle for life. The Soviets—they could free them! But the Germans—they might outwit the Soviets first. March them all off to their death before freedom had a chance. Which was exactly what they did.
“It was . . .” Liesl’s voice here in the town square, telling the story in the shadow of Josef, her countryman, is haunted. Just like her eyes. She shakes her head. “I cannot bring the words to it,” she says, her accent lacing the English she is able to piece together into tragic poetry. “They marched us through the winter, right up to the cliffs of the Baltic Sea. And then they forced us over a cliff . . . and the shooting began.” She lifts her hand to cover her mouth, stifle a cry.
Eva reaches across the table and takes Liesl’s free hand. “You need not tell us,” she says softly.
Liesl is still as she composes herself, then draws a deep breath. “I will tell you what is needful,” she says, “because there is a miracle yet.”
She goes on to speak of how, though her children were with her, she could not find Luka among the travesty. But she could hear his voice in her heart, urging her on with those two words. Eines tages. Eines tages. Someday. She knew they were already as good as dead, and as that reality drove deep, something happened.
Freedom.
“They could take nothing more from us than they already were doing,” she said. “And so my shackles . . . they broke. No fear. Not a thing except this . . . this . . .” She presses a fist to her bosom, over her heart. “Fire. To try, one last time.”
She broke away from the others before they were made to jump. Holding fast to the hands of her two children, she pressed herself against the far side of a tree. Her children shook, one of them whimpering, and she pulled them close, praying for a way out. Praying, to the God who parted the sea once before, that He might do the impossible again and save them.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a break in the trees ahead. Footsteps came from behind them. “Quickly, my loves,” she said, pulling her children toward the opening. It was a rough stairway, nearly unrecognizable as such for its rustic steps of rock and driftwood embedded in earth. At its base, a humble fisherman’s shack. The steps neared. She whispered to her children to take shelter behind the shack and not to emerge, no matter what they heard. That if she did not come for them by morning, they were to be “quick and sneaky like foxes” and follow the cliffs west until they found a home.
With one eye on them, and one toward the tree line, she saw that she must advance toward the coming guard, lest he spot the children before they reached safety.
So she did. He caught her roughly by the wrists, would not look her in the eyes, though her stare dared him to. And when he did . . . what she saw there poured heartache and cold fear through her, twisting together like a noose around her lungs. The man—boy, really—had hardly tasted life, and all he knew of it was death. She saw it in his eyes. The coldness. The flicker of despair.
“Please,” she’d said, voice low. Strong. Wrapped in a peace she could not account for. “You do not have to do this thing.”
He’d looked away. Toward the sea. Then over his shoulder, to the massacre he’d left beyond the trees.
“It is all I can do.” His voice broke. He released her grip, shoved her with the butt of his rifle. She hit the ground. Crawled backward, away from the approach of his black boots, crunch upon gravel.
She felt earth give way beneath her shin, a tiny tumble of rubble down the cliff. She would soon follow. There, on her knees, arms upon cold earth, she’d prayed for deliverance. A wordless prayer, spoken only in a wail, thinking of her children. Spare them, Lord. May they not find me, not live with that picture in their minds. Keep them, Lord. One hand struggled up to her stomach, to cradle her unborn child—desperate. And then she’d looked up.
The soldier looked at her. Mouth pursed grimly. And she’d seen it. He was going to kill her. Feed her to the sea, then shoot her to make sure. Just like the others.
He bent down, reached a palm toward her face as if to push her. A single tear trickled down her cheek, splashing a gray rock as big as her head, speckling it black.
The young man laid a hand on the back of her head. Let it linger there a moment—a benediction . . . or a death sentence. His struggle pulsed into the air. Was she a life worth saving? Or only a parasite, as he had been taught to believe? Hand to head, human to human, he was torn.
And then, in an explosion of force, he slammed her head against the rock—and all went black.
Transfixed, entangled in her story, right there on the cliffs of the Baltic with her, Robert cannot take his eyes from Liesl. Nor can Eva. His mother’s head is bent in tearful despair.
“But you . . . you awoke?” Robert says at length. The woman is here, sitting before them, after all. “That was your miracle.”
Eva shakes her head in wonder. “It is a miracle, Mrs. Rosen, to have survived that march, the fall . . . and to have—pardon me for assuming, but—to have also escaped with your children?”
Liesl’s face lights, shadows chased away. “Ja. A miracle I thank God for every day. But that is not the miracle I came to tell you of.”
“I did wake up. It was wet and cold, and I was covered in a thin layer of sand. It was first light the next day, and I awoke to two shadows blocking the sun. My children, murmuring their own prayers, holding tight to me. My whole self was numb, and as I began to move, every bit of me began to hurt. I had fallen a great distance—and I was scraped all over, new scratches crossing over my old scars like weaving. But—and I still cannot believe it—I was not shot. That boy.” She shakes her head. “He breaks my heart still. I hope for him that the darkness does not win. Such a battle in him. Though he did toss me to the sea . . . he did not shoot. I choose to believe there was some shred of light left in him. A light I pray he fights for.”
Eva squeezes Liesl’s hand, and swipes quickly beneath her eyes with her free hand. “So much goodness in your heart.”
“I wish that might be so,” Liesl says. “But the truth is, I did not feel that way for a very long time after that. To have another person look you in the
eye and decide that you are nothing—a pestilence to be squashed—it is very dark. I walked in darkness very long after that.”
She gives her head a small shake, as if to realign her story, and continues. “My children and I made our way through the forests of Poland, surviving however we could. The land was alive with word of victory in Europe. Not the end of the war, but the end of it in our part of the world, at least. The beginning of hope for the rest of the world. We were met with kindness, enough to help us find passage to America. Luka had a sister here, and we had dreamed of someday joining her. If I was ever to find my husband again, if he by some chance survived, it would be here. I worked and saved and then had word from Luka’s sister, with money for us to board a ship to take us across the Atlantic, several months after . . . after the cliff.”
“Bound for New York,” Robert says. There’s a pricking in his memory, an echo of Arthur recounting the midnight rescue. He sits taller, leaning in.
Liesl nods. “When we went into the ocean that night, I had no hope. My children and I—all three of them, for my baby was still on the way—clung to that life raft and sang our song. They saved my children but could not return for me. But then, when all seemed lost, your brother appeared.
“When I saw his hand reaching down for me . . .” Her voice is choked by the memory, eyes red with tears. She pulls in a shuddering breath. “Suddenly I was upon that cliff again. A hand reaching toward me. But it was not the face of a killing soldier I saw, not a man who would toss me away like vermin. It was a face of kindness. A man who would come into the waves when he should not have. To risk his life for mine.”
His mother’s anguished face is laced with a haunting sense of pride that Robert, too, feels deep in his heart. He forgets to breathe. In his mind’s eye, another dark night is replaying itself. His brother hanging on for dear life—the look of torment on his face when Robert pulls him to safety. Echoes of regret—and cast against this new image of him redeeming this woman’s scars, with the one thing he had to offer: courage.