Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “And what of your father? What if he comes to visit?”

  “I have thought of that, too. It is all arranged.”

  We arrive in Berlin at midnight. I can hear sweet piano music coming from somewhere. We walk along the streets, and my body trembles beneath the Nazi banners that Willem does not appear to notice. I feel as if I am shrinking into something small and insignificant here. I do not belong, and yet I want that: to feel part of a community that is free. And I wonder if Papa could see me, if he would feel ashamed that I want this, that I am living with Germans.

  We walk up a flight of stairs to an apartment. It has a kitchen and dining area and two bedrooms and windows overlooking the street, blacked out with heavy curtains. There are two sitting rooms, also, and a small room where a housekeeper might stay, behind the kitchen. The apartment is not large, but extravagant in design and well furnished.

  “Is this your apartment?” I ask.

  “One of them,” he says. “Though it will only be temporary. There are other places we will move to. The Center I will be working at is too far to travel to every day. I will find a place not far from there . . . for you, also, of course.”

  Inside the kitchen there is a refrigerator filled with meat, and fresh bread waits for us on the dining table. He has organized for food to be here ahead of us.

  I don’t know what to say. I do not know how to thank him anymore.

  He makes some tea and cuts some bread while I unpack my case. We sit together, and he raises his teacup.

  “To our new life!”

  I raise mine.

  “Willem, I don’t know what to say. I still don’t know why—”

  “This is about righting some things,” he says, interrupting me. He does not like sentimentality or gratitude.

  But in a rare moment of affection, he reaches across the table and touches my fingers. I look at the taut skin on the back of his hands, my heart racing.

  “It is something I can do. Lena would have wanted this for you.”

  Of course. His wife. She had seen the wrongs. This is all for her. I feel a little disappointed, though I can’t yet find the heart of this, perhaps because I don’t want to admit anything.

  “What is wrong?” He has read the disappointment in my face.

  “Does it make you feel powerful?”

  He frowns.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s nothing,” I say, and regret the shift in tone. I am thinking too hard, and weary from travel. Willem drove his own car. We were stopped several times along the way to show identification and were warned of resistance fighters who may show no mercy to German women. I was not afraid of the resistance fighters but of the German soldiers who told us about them.

  “Elsi, you are still so young and have suffered much. This is hard on you—I know it is. And you have lost so much. You should be with your family, but if Lena were here, she would tell you to stay with me, to give you every possible chance.”

  You are still so young. He thinks of me as a lost child. Perhaps because I know too little of the world, whereas his wife was scholarly, interesting, and well traveled.

  “Go to bed and rest, and tomorrow we will talk again. We will talk about a future for you. Eventually I may get you some work, if that’s what you prefer.”

  I nod, but I’m feeling angry. Why am I so angry? Why can’t I just accept things as they are?

  We have talked about many subjects, though it is more from his side. He knows much of the world. He has taught me many things about other countries. We have shared meals together, listened to music.

  During the day I watch couples walk arm in arm beneath my window. I have caught glimpses of parkland from our small balcony in Tiergarten. I see children with their parents. I wonder if they know of the suffering elsewhere.

  I have named this my weeping window because when I sit here I think of Mama. In another time she would have loved it here.

  It is still light by the time Willem arrives home. I have cooked him some sausages and sauerkraut.

  “Why don’t we go out?” he says.

  “But I have cooked all this food.”

  “It will not go to waste. We can eat it tomorrow.”

  I am feeling excitement. I have watched the streets from the window. It looks as if there is no war here at all. I long to walk where no one will recognize me.

  “Yes,” I say.

  I unpack one of Lena’s dresses, which is striped mauve and white with a black-velvet collar and belt. Her shoes are slightly too big, so I put paper in the toes to make them fit. There is no makeup or lipstick. I pull my hair up with pins.

  When I come out of my room, Willem is watching me. His eyes do not roam like the eyes of other men. I wonder what he is thinking, and I am feeling suddenly self-conscious that I wear the dress of his dead wife. It is then I see the uniform and feel a stab of terror. He is one of the men who run the camps. He is one of the men who fire a pistol at the heads of innocent people. I feel slightly dizzy, and he catches me around the waist.

  “What is wrong?”

  “It’s the uniform. Just a thought . . . ,” I stammer. “Please forgive me.”

  He looks down at the clothes he wears. He is too intuitive to not see what it is that bothers me.

  “I’m sorry, Elsi. This is who I am. Or rather, who they think I am. This uniform will keep you safer than anything. I promise you that.”

  We walk along the streets as the late sun sinks behind the city. People look at us, but their eyes linger more on Willem. He has station. He is someone to respect.

  “Remember! You are my wife. You have nothing to fear.”

  Fearlessness is easier said than done, and as we walk along the beautiful tree-lined streets, I find myself looking down. I am afraid to meet anyone’s eyes.

  He takes me to a restaurant with high arched windows that overlook a wide footpath with large trees planted among the pavers. Inside are chandeliers, high-backed upholstered chairs, and white tablecloths. A man plays the piano in one corner of the room. They are tunes I don’t recognize, soft and melodic. I have never sat anywhere so fancy, and I remember a painting in Willem’s office at the ghetto that had a similar setting. It is as if I have walked into someone else’s dream by mistake.

  Willem orders us roast chicken and wine. He talks to me again of places he has been. He tells me of a time that he and Lena went walking across the Alps, how they nearly got lost. How Lena led the charge to find their way back to their hotel. How they were soaking wet and cold, and several nights later they were back in Berlin and ate here at this restaurant. They ordered so much from the menu; the walking had given them large appetites. Lena appreciated good food. He smiles when he tells me this. He becomes more animated with memories of her.

  The smell of food is wonderful, but I am distracted by the people in the room. Men and women, even children, are served large portions of food, while people in the ghetto are starving. Their laughter hurts my ears. It sounds foreign and harsh and spiteful. These people know nothing about life, about the horrors several hours away by train.

  Another man in a uniform similar to Willem’s stops by with his wife, and introductions are made. He has seen the rank on Willem’s collar. I raise my eyes and smile politely, though I cannot control the shaking of my hand when I put it forward in greeting. Willem has seen this and distracts us all by commenting on the state of war while my eyes remain fixed on the woman’s earrings that dazzle beneath the light of the chandelier. It seems an eternity before they leave.

  “You did well,” says Willem. “It will get easier.”

  A piece of chicken is caught in the back of my throat, and I force myself to swallow. The pain in my head is worsening, pounding for release, and I rest my head between my hands. The room is swallowing me up. These people are killers. They are no better than the officers in the ghetto.

  “Willem . . .”

  “What is it?” he says, putting down his knife and fork to reac
h forward to take my arms.

  “Please take me home.” I close my eyes so I do not have to look at these people. Willem pays the bill, and we walk back to the apartment. Once inside I rush to the bathroom to empty the contents of my stomach before heading to my room to be alone.

  “I’m sorry,” says Willem, following me in. “I should have not suggested that, with so many officers around. Tomorrow we will go someplace where we can blend in with civilians. It will get easier. I promise.

  “Your false maiden name, Winthur, also on your new identity card, belonged to a family killed in a bombing at the beginning of the war. In the months before the ghetto clinic began, I was sent to look after the SS and military, following them into the heart of war, waiting on the sidelines to patch them up. Many Volksdeutsche Poles were killed, whole families, their remains and a few personal belongings left behind in the bombing rubble—spectacles, a clock, shoes, a door plaque, so many items. The name of one family I saw on one of these items has stayed with me.

  “No one can prove you are not one of them. There is no one left to expose you. No one to say you died or lived. They cannot prove you are anyone other than who it says on the card. You are safe, but it is up to you.

  “You must be brave if you want to live.”

  Black motorcars chug past us on four short legs. Willem and I follow several other families on a wide-paved footpath toward the central gardens, alongside streets lined with square table-topped buildings that have a patchwork of arched and square windows. There is an overload of architectural shapes everywhere I look: elegant street lamps, steeples, dome-shaped roofs, columns, cross-windows, and small gabled shops with colored awnings. Red, black, and white flags hang off a wine bar, murmurings inside like the hum of bees, the tinkling of glasses, laughter spilling outside onto the pavement. Willem says the bar used to be a jazz dance hall when public dancing was allowed. Now dancing is only permitted for the private functions of those with rank.

  In the park, children run about in light woolen dresses and shorts, waving a rainbow of balloons and streamers, their coats discarded in the newly risen sun. Meandering through the gardens is a lake in shades of green, and the grassy spaces around it are filled with tanned sunbathers and soldiers on leave. There is a celebration of some kind. A band of musicians starts up nearby, their instruments glinting, their music blending with loud conversation.

  Willem is not dressed in uniform today: white shirt rolled up, golden forearms, pants pleated, baggy, and belted. My heart beats a little faster. I must not forget myself. He is a German. My rescuer, but that is all. Then why can’t I believe it? Why must I have these feelings that are getting in the way of others more practical?

  He carries a basket, and I follow him to a small patch of grass. He lays down a blanket, and we sit close. From inside the basket he pulls out bread, ham, mustard, and wine in tiny flasks. He has said it is doubtful we will see any senior officers here, not in uniform anyway.

  A cool breeze blows across my back, and I can hear my mother in some distant part of my brain, telling me to put my coat back on.

  “It is beautiful,” I say of the day, a little too loudly so that I can drown out my mother’s voice, which will only make me sad and guilty that I am here and she is not. For one moment, maybe more, I want to feel guiltless.

  I feel a little giddy from the wine and raise my face to the sun to draw it closer, to caress my skin with its warm hands. To be touched. People walk by in front of us, taking little notice of the couple they pass, each from opposite sides of the battle, who have witnessed atrocities unimaginable.

  I must blend in. I am no one of particular mention. I like that. If only it was easy to forget where I’m from and where I’m also meant to be.

  “It is pleasant here, yes?” says Willem. “I used to come here a lot.”

  I am strangely relieved there is no mention of Lena.

  A woman wheels her baby carriage up a short rise toward a group of older children waiting patiently for the food package she has under her arm, and like eager birds they crowd around her, pecking impatiently. A girl in a bathing suit catches the eyes of shirtless male sunbathers—soldiers on leave, says Willem—as she brazenly walks close to them.

  Willem looks across at me several times, and I wonder what he sees. I look away, afraid that he sees only the Jewish refugee from the ghetto clinic. I want him to see more.

  “You are a good person, Elsi. You need some time to adjust, but you will. You must move on.”

  Can I?

  As if to clarify, he reaches over and takes my hand. It is friendship, I’m sure, this rare gesture of affection.

  He releases my hand just as quickly, something perhaps he would do for his patients, to give them courage, like he is giving me.

  We have been here for an hour, and I notice his restlessness. He is thinking of something else, something I presume that doesn’t include me. I want to be part of his life. He perhaps believes friendship is what I want. But it isn’t. I want him to throw his arms around me. I want to cry into his shirt. I want to feel loved.

  With Mama and Papa gone, and Leah, too, I have forgotten what it is to be loved.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  WILLEM

  She has waited up. She has cooked some beef and fried it with cabbage.

  “I thought you might be hungry. You didn’t eat much before you left yesterday.”

  Today I have been to see Father, who lectured me. I have said all the right things to him. I have told him that I see the error of my ways. That I behaved irrationally. That I cannot change things, and I will not look to the past for any answers to the future. I am not sure if I have convinced him—he is far too intelligent to be fooled—though he looks somewhat appeased. If there is any truth that he can glean from my words, it is that I will honor the commitment I made to work at the Center. He says that he has pulled many strings to stop another officer from taking the post, and has allowed for my time to grieve. But he insists I must start within days. There are several new children who will be arriving, and two more pregnant girls who require care. The woman currently in charge is not equipped with the number, nor is she suitable. Father has said again that the party needs someone with rank and expertise in health. I have agreed to everything.

  Elsi has set the dinner table. She has poured a glass of wine for me. I see there is an empty glass on her side of the table.

  “Have you been all right here alone?”

  “Yes,” she says, though there is distance in her tone. “Today I left the building and purchased new shoes with the money you gave me for emergencies. The color matches the dress beautifully, don’t you think?” She talks slowly, clumsily, perhaps from the wine. I notice another bottle lies empty in the kitchen and wonder if she has been drinking during the day. I am somewhat alarmed, not just about the wine but about whether she has made the shopkeeper suspicious.

  “Elsi, you should not go out alone.”

  “The sales lady was very polite to me, especially when I told her the rank of my husband.” She smiles, leans forward to pour some more wine. I catch the bottle first.

  She watches me with sapphire eyes that are round and shining with alcohol. The food is suddenly dry in my mouth. She is wearing one of Lena’s dresses: one of my favorites. It is red and belted tightly at the waist. She has a tiny waist, narrow hips, and small breasts. These are things I have not appreciated. Not until now. Not until the dress. Her short, light ash-blonde hair now long enough to frame her face.

  “What day do we leave?”

  “Wednesday, most likely.”

  She nods and looks away.

  “I have been thinking a lot of home and wondering if you should not have left me at the ghetto. I have no right to be here.”

  “You have every right. Stop punishing yourself. You were lucky. Some people haven’t been. It is as simple as that.”

  “That is too easy an explanation. Nothing is that simple unless you strip away all the emotion. Is that perhap
s what you are? Emotionless?”

  “Sometimes it is the only way,” I say.

  I can see she is minutes away from breaking, her words fracturing.

  I choose something that I think Lena would say.

  “You are the only person with the power to control your thoughts and attitudes. No one can touch you in here,” I say, pointing to my head. “You don’t have to change who you are because of what has happened to you.”

  “Mama changed. Some of us don’t have a choice.”

  She pauses, looks at the bottle of wine out of reach, where her eyes stay fixed.

  “I was not a good daughter. I was flighty, irrational, and argumentative.”

  “You don’t seem that way . . .”

  “I’ve had to change, too,” she says in a tone that is forceful and alien. It is a tone that does not suit her gentle nature. Her eyes lock onto mine, and I find I cannot look away.

  “I remember the day Leah was born. Mama didn’t have time to call for Papa or a doctor. I had to run next door to find a neighbor to help. She gave me instructions. Told me to find plenty of linen to clean up the blood, to talk to Mama, to squeeze her hand for comfort. Leah came quickly and quietly into the world but took some time to open her eyes. I remember the moment she did, lying in Mama’s arms, and the look in my mother’s eyes, as if something so great had happened there were no words to describe her feelings. Then Mama had noticed me there, speechless, perhaps for the first time in my short life. I was still shocked from all the blood, from this slippery, ghostly purple mass that had come from inside my mother.

  “She said, ‘Elsi, come hold your sister’s hand.’

  “I looked into Mama’s eyes. I had never seen that look before. I had never seen so much love in them. And looking at Leah, I did not understand this love that had caused my mother so much pain.