Liberated

by Steve Anderson

  The colonel had said I was more American than most he knew. Is that all being American meant? Knowing how to cut a deal in your favor? To beat the other guy out of a good gig? The Baron von Maulendorff had sold out Major Membre to Colonel Spanner, apparently. So wasn’t I doing the same thing?

  I strolled on and turned onto a street of bustling shops and pubs, the Schellingstrasse. Number 35 wasn’t like the rest of the neighborhood. The building was scorched from fire. The windows had been boarded up a long time and a main door was nailed shut, the nail heads leaving rusty trails. I was sorry to see it. This was the address Katarina had sent me.

  Around the corner I found the building’s inner courtyard. Across the yard stood red double doors, on which a black stencil read: “Off Limits: Schwabinger Volkstheater und Kabarett.” It was some kind of community theater. Above the red doors I saw fading letters, barely legible: “Wiesenberg u. Söhne: Fleischerhandwerk.” A butcher’s. This cabaret was once a slaughterhouse.

  I went to the red doors and listened. Nothing. I knocked with a knuckle and waited. No answer. I went in. A haze of musty diluted tobacco stung my eyes and I had to squint. The room was dark, with dingy windows up high and candles on small cafe tables here and there.

  “Whom do you search?” asked a male voice in an English pulsing with Munich accent. I saw the reflection of eyeglasses, over in a corner.

  “You mean, who am I looking for?”

  “Yes, that’s it. The American-style English is quite odd, is it not?”

  This fouled-up city had me edgy and I didn’t like the smug tone, the defiance in this man’s voice. “Says who?” I grunted.

  The man only shrugged at me.

  “Looking for a woman,” I said in German. “Name of Buchholz.”

  “Ah. Of course. She is here, Captain,” the man said, sticking to English. “There, behind the curtain.”

  The curtain was US Army blankets dyed black. I felt my way through more curtains and reached a larger room that I spied on through a tear in the blankets. They’d made a theater out of beer hall benches and church pews, a stage cobbled together from plywood and sandstone blocks. A line of dim light bulbs hung along the edge of the stage.

  A sliver of fear cut at me. Munich was the big city. Katarina had left Heimgau behind. Sure, she’d sent me her address, but what if she didn’t really want me here anymore?

  I felt a draft. I pushed on through the blankets. A door was cracked open over in the corner, letting in dusty cool air. The door opened to the street. I peered out, but the street was empty. Was it her? She’d made a quick exit? I sprinted back through to the front room. Herr Eyeglasses was gone. “Jemand da?” I yelled, “Anyone there?” but only got echoes.

  Moron. Goof. Why had I hesitated? I ended up back out in the courtyard, kicking at pebbles and planning my next move.

  A straight arm stopped me.

  “That was you there?” Katarina said. Her hand had recoiled as if to slap me.

  I grabbed at her shoulders. “You in trouble?”

  “Me? Of course not. But you never know, you know?” She wiggled loose. “What if I had a pistol, or I hit you on the head?”

  “Probably do me some good.” I grabbed her, pulling her close. She fought it a second, and then let out a full laugh. I kissed the laugh.

  “So, welcome to Munich!” she said, sounding like a bubbly tour guide.

  I stayed with Katarina in her dressing room-bedroom above the theater, reached through another courtyard door, up squeaking stairs and past wardrobe and storage. A lumpy daybed sofa clogged half the room. Armoires, mirrors and racks of costumes surrounded us. The only window was painted over. She wouldn’t let me get intimate until I’d proved I could be kind, she said.

  A guy never had it so good.

  Billeting with a Fräulein was still illegal under MG law, so I wore civvies to avoid any run-ins. A pack of Chesterfields bought me the nappy wool trousers, shirt patched on elbows, corduroy jacket and leather cap I wore on the street while Katarina did her trading. We hit the black markets on the squares and in the beer hall near the train station. We met contacts on shaded corners, knocked on doors in code, argued out deals in cellars—coffee for cigarettes there, the cigarettes for an iffy slab of pork here, the pork for a bag of gray potatoes there. Katarina scored a loaf of rare farmer’s bread, fresh and moist. She gave it to an old woman who was huddled under a tree crying.

  Lunch was cheese smelling of mold on a bread dry like sawdust. That was the clincher. I was going to the Munich PX, get us some rations. Katarina refused. In the afternoon she helped Munich’s women clear debris. Trümmerfrauen, people called them—the rubble women. “Who else is going to do it but us gals?” Kat said.

  The next morning, hunger woke us early and we lay on our sides facing each other. My two-day stubble chafed. My head ached. I had to yawn again, and my stomach wanted to cry uncle. “Boot camp was easier than this. At least you got hot chow.”

  “I assure you, this is nothing,” Katarina said. “You were not here for the bombings.”

  “Why don’t I just hit the PX? Could go this morning. Just a tin of coffee, how’s that? Can’t you enjoy just one luxury?”

  She moved closer, smiling. “I have it.” She nuzzled me, her forehead onto my pillow. Then she pulled away, and sat up. “But do you know what? You were right to say what you said, about me.”

  “What? No.” I sat up. “I wasn’t right to treat you like that either.”

  “Such things happen. You were upset somehow. Perhaps I deserve some of it.”

  “Look, so you had some good times during the war and bad times. You don’t have to go nailing yourself to the cross, sister.”

  It was too late for that. Katarina turned to the edge of the bed, speaking away from me. “I danced, you see, and I sang, and I drank champagne—”

  “And you helped the resistance. So I don’t know what you’re beating yourself up for. Your parents are dead. Your brother. Okay. That’s not your fault. You’re not responsible.”

  “I never said I was, Harry.”

  “I wonder what you think. You’ve never asked me how the investigation is going. Not once.”

  “I know how it’s going. And I don’t hold a grudge.”

  “No? Well, maybe I do.”

  What if I told her, only her, about Colonel Spanner coming to the rescue? A breakthrough in the case was even possible. Still, I had promised. No one must know. I pushed out of bed and made for the painted window. “This room’s too somber, sure, needs some light. I could scrape this paint off in no time.”

  I scratched out a line in the window paint, enough to squint out at the courtyard. All I saw were craggy, mud-caked cobblestones. Katarina was staring at me, her head to one side. She got out of bed, pulled her hair back and left the room. She returned lugging a silver washbasin and splashed her face with ice-cold water.

  “Today? I begin to show you things,” she said.

  “Most of the theater troupe are Jewish,” Katarina told me as we headed out onto the Schellingstrasse. Bike bells jingled and shop doors squeaked, open and shut. “German-Jewish, actually.”

  “You founded this troupe? You’ve been here less than three weeks.”

  “Oh, no. You know the troupe’s founder. You met him.”

  “Guy with the glasses.” I slowed, my fists rammed in my pockets. “You’re seeing him. I shoulda known.”

  “Oh, please. You mean like you and your farm girl? What was her name, Brigitta?”

  I had only walked Brigitta home that night when the baron and major pushed her on me, but I could let Kat think the worst if she was looking for a fight. “I wouldn’t know,” I muttered.

  A US Army paddy wagon lumbered by. A huge speaker was attached to its roof releasing commands in earnest, American-accented German.

  Katarina yanked me by the lapels. “His name is Emil Wiesenberg. He’s a Munich-born Jew. Emil was the youngest son of one Ignatz Wiesenberg, a butcher. So don’t get all daft and
rattled on me, Harry. It’s not flattering.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can see that.”

  We walked on, crossed a square. Okay, so maybe I got a little rattled.

  “That building where you’re living was burned,” I said.

  “Yes, but your Army Air Corps did not bomb it. Emil’s so-called friends and neighbors gutted it long ago, on the night of November ninth, nineteen thirty-eight.”

  “The Night of Broken Glass. I read about that, back home.”

  “I met Emil later, when he was in hiding. This was during the war. He and his family had joined a group of Jews we were trying to smuggle out. They were caught before we could. They never fingered us, said they were hiding out on their own. They ended up in various camps. His family was shipped to Dachau and, as far as he can find out, Buchenwald and an underground armaments factory called Dora. His greater family, I mean.”

  “The extended family, we call it.”

  “Yes. There were twenty of them.”

  “None have come home?”

  Katarina stared at me a moment. She shook her head, and her eyes welled up.

  She led me through tree-lined streets and into the vast English Garden. We found Emil Wiesenberg on a bench, gazing at sunlit treetops after what I guessed had been a hard morning of trading. Out in the daylight the man looked fit for a former concentration camp inmate, though he was still too lean. His hard cheekbones matched his strong chin, and his brown eyes darted and sparkled behind those glasses. Yet at 29 years old, he looked 40. His black hair had thinned, leaving fuzzy clumpy patches.

  Emil stood as if to shake hands, but he didn’t.

  I smiled. “Morning.”

  Emil smiled. “So, you are this captain who plunders the heart of Katarina,” he said in English. The intonation was unclear. Was plunder a good or bad thing to him?

  We looked to Katarina, who stood back, grimacing like a kid who had to find a toilet.

  The three of us strolled the paths of the English Garden, Emil and I in front and Katarina trailing. We talked, but also yielded to long silences. Birds chirped. Branches crackled underfoot. Bells tolled. Germans could stay silent for hours on end, strolling, gazing, contemplating. I had lost that. I never felt more American than during the silences. I needed interruptions just to think.

  “The knees are shaky, and my joints ache in the cold weather,” Emil told me. “Blows to my head have silenced the hearing in one ear and the prolonged lack of sleep? Well, that’s where I get these purple bags under my eyes, which I don’t believe I ever will lose.”

  We left Emil so he could do more trading. “He suffers from fits of diarrhea and migraine headaches,” Katarina told me. “And nightmares. One is the same. It comes every night.”

  Back home, she showed me Emil’s nightmare. He had scribbled it on the back of a ration card book: Out on the roll call ground the Kapo named Henk kicks my mother at the back of her legs, forcing her to her knees. She faces me, with Henk behind her. She looks at me wearily, it is true, but also lovingly and proud, as if knowing I must and will survive. A single shot from behind explodes her shaven forehead, splattering warm blood on my trembling legs.

  She lies at my feet, yet I dare not touch her. Henk screams that if I whimper, I die.

  So it goes. Every time I fall asleep, the bastards murder my mother.

  On my third night in Munich, Emil and I drank whiskey in the empty cabaret, feet resting on chairs, a bottle on the table between us. Only a couple candles provided all the light. Our faces seemed to float in the darkness, like illuminated masks. We could have been anywhere—in a cave, around a campfire, down in the cellar of some bombed-out building on some godforsaken front line.

  “Coming back here, after, one gets an odd feeling,” Emil said. “Time has stood still, yet everything has changed. I keep the family property here. I don’t live here. It’s only a convenient place to perform. Me, I prefer the brotherhood of the Deutsches Museum camp, where all us Jews stay. It’s a special deal, compliments of UNRRA”—the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration. He was smiling. He drank. I drank. “Now, Katarina, she tells me you’re what they call the Public Safety officer in lovely little Heimgau. Ironic, no? Considering what you can achieve there, what you can obtain with such a status. It’s the perfect front.” He chuckled.

  “So I hear.”

  Chuckling made Emil wheeze and fight a screeching cough, bending forward until his face flushed red-hot and his temples bulged. I offered him the bottle, but he waved it off.

  “I like you, Captain,” he said when he’d recovered. “Therefore I will tell you the truth behind our cabaret troupe. It’s an excuse, you see. Sure, some are actors, and there are relative outsiders like Katarina who contribute by performing, but this is all excuse and alibi—another way to congregate at all times and for any reason.”

  “You’re a fence. That’s what we call it.”

  “A fence, yes. That’s clever. But it’s more than that. I help run a ring called The Survivors. Not such an original name, but what can you do? We’re a Jewish ring, just starting up. We had hoped to leave Germany by now, but we are forced to wait out our ‘processing.’”

  “Where you heading?”

  “Palestine. We hope to settle in Palestine. This is why you have to endure my English that I practice. Meanwhile, we score. We prepare using the black market and we always buy up. Provisions, clothings, medicine, informations. We work with the DP gangs, Germans, does not matter, whoever can pay or trade for the materials we receive from the Red Cross and UNRRA relief people. It’s faultless and foolproof. As so-called ‘United Nations Nationals,’ we Jews enjoy special status. We’re immune from German police authority and your officials ignore us. So we exploit that status.”

  Of course, this made me think of Abraham, and what a man like that must have seen and done once he busted out or however he had gotten free. He might have become this fellow.

  “I found one of yours just outside my town. He had the numbers on his arm.”

  “Yes? There are so many.”

  “He passed away on me, unfortunately.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I am. You probably don’t want to talk about things like that.”

  “Not now. I’m enjoying this evening too much. Here’s to it.” Emil reached for the bottle, drank, and handed the rest to me.

  “Here’s to it. No wonder Katarina like’sh you,” I said, fighting a slur from the whiskey. “I tell you, you guys sure got chutzpah.”

  “Chutzpah? I don’t know what this word means, Captain. But if you ever have some good action for my chutzpah, you please do let me know. Maybe we make a deal.”

  “Will do.”

  Emil took a last drink and went quiet. He had pulled back from the light. Grim shadows filled his sunken features. Like this, he could have been back in his concentration camp cell block. He seemed to be, inside his head. He had that thousand-yard stare. I let him stay there as long as he liked. “It’s a goddamn shame,” he said eventually.

  “What is?”

  “I can tell you. Katarina wished that I wait, but you deserve it. Because you made such a great effort.”

  “What is it?”

  “The man you found, before he died? It was Abraham—Abraham Beckstein. I’m sure of it. He was my cousin.”

  Eighteen

  EMIL HAD FLOORED ME WITH HIS NEWS. When I told Katarina about it, she was still mad at Emil the next morning, but what could she do? Emil had a right to tell. Abraham Beckstein was how Kat knew Emil. SS trucks had hauled Abraham and his family away from Heimgau years ago. She had thought him long dead. This was why, among other good reasons she had, that Kat was so wary of me when I first came asking. When she was back in Munich, her old acquaintance Emil Wiesenberg, another cheater of death, told her what he knew about his cousin. Abraham had escaped from an SS death march across Czechoslovakia in the last days. Emil had seen Abraham passing through Munich. Abraham wasn
’t looking for a family reunion. He was heading back to Heimgau, hell bent. He had his own agenda. Emil didn’t know what it was or why, and Abraham wasn’t telling, not yet. Emil could only guess that Abraham was returning to take revenge on the sicko beasts who had condemned them all. There was plenty of that going on. Emil had tried to talk his cousin out of going back, to no avail. Right as the war ended, Abraham had gotten a message to Emil in Munich saying that Heimgau was chaos, but he was helping a few trusty locals, including onetime mayor Buchholz, take over the town. The next thing Emil heard, and only recently from Kat, a US captain might have found his cousin dying along a road.

  “I can still get to the bottom of it,” I reminded Kat, but she didn’t answer me. She headed out for more trading, more humping bricks.

  That afternoon, Emil worked the sidewalk outside his theater in a burgundy smoking jacket and white ascot, shoving leaflets into the hands of passersby. I’d just gone to the Munich PX for that can of coffee. I strolled up and took a leaflet. “Cabaret! No Cover!” it read.

  “Subtle.”

  “Thanks, Mister.” At some point in our whiskey session the night before, Emil had taken to calling me Mister. “I’m glad you came back,” he said. “You must see something.”

  He pushed open the courtyard door. Inside stood a US Army motorcycle, its matte green paint as smooth as new. Emil followed me in. I handed the can of coffee to Emil and circled the machine as if it was a sleeping bear. “Wowee. Just off the boat. A Harley-Davidson. Ridden Excelsiors and Indians, but nothing this strong. Stateside, I was a courier, you see.”