The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

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  In memory of

  Meredith Kay

  And for

  Stephen Reibel

  again and always

  God, I hate the Germans.

  —GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER in a letter to his wife, September 1944

  I can hate Germany and all things German with a passion, but I can’t hate individuals.

  —GERDA WEISSMANN KLEIN, survivor of a Nazi slave labor camp and a 350-mile forced march

  One

  Berlin had never been so quiet. Cars and trucks lay in useless pieces. Even bicycles were scarce. There was a rumor that a Soviet soldier had shot a woman who’d refused to yield hers. Smart-stepping boots no longer echoed on the pavements. People trudged the streets dour and mute. The city had been cowed into silence. The hush was as unsettling as the physical devastation. The rest of Germany had been bombed. Berlin had been obliterated.

  She’d been in the city for only forty-eight hours, and the shock of the destruction, wreaked first by Allied planes, then by fierce fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, and most recently by Soviet rape and pillage, was still raw. Some neighborhoods looked like moonscapes, all dirt and craters and dusty shadows that when she got closer turned out to be Trümmerfrauen, the sullen, silent women who picked up broken bricks, pieces of pipe, and other debris and passed the wreckage along from hand to hand in a weary assembly line of forced labor, forced if the women wanted ration cards to eat. But what amazed her even more than the ruin was the Russian roulette aspect. Here and there, parts of buildings still stood, though walls or roofs had been blown away, exposing to cold and rain and prying eyes old bedsteads, broken toilets, and desperate inhabitants still clinging to what was left, because where else could they go? Sometimes one side of the street was nothing more than a pile of rubble while a building across the way stood untouched, the architectural details still handsome, or garish, the glass of the windows unshattered, the Biedermeier breakfronts like this one in the parlor of the flat gleaming in the setting winter sun that spilled into the room. The breakfront had caught her attention as soon as she’d stepped through the sliding doors to the parlor. It was standing between two tall French windows that opened onto Riemeisterstrasse. She told herself Berlin was full of Biedermeier chairs and tables, secretaries and breakfronts. There was no reason to think this was a piece from her own past. But reason had nothing to do with it.

  She started across the room. The woman in the rusty black dress that hung on her scrawny frame as if on a scarecrow—Millie was willing to bet that in happier times she had liked her schnitzel and kuchen—dogged her steps. A girl, about four or five Millie guessed, though these days with all the malnutrition it was hard to tell, clung to her mother’s dragging skirt. The child’s eyes, when she stole a glance up at Millie, were saucers of fear in her thin washed-out face. Don’t be afraid, Millie wanted to say. I won’t hurt you. Then she caught herself. Who was she kidding? Of course she was about to hurt the child. She was about to devastate the entire family.

  The woman moved to step in front of the breakfront, as if to protect it from Millie, and the stench of sour body odor grew stronger. These days soap was as hard to find in Berlin as food, and what little there was crumbled into hard gray pebbles the instant it met water. Breathing through her mouth to avoid inhaling the smell, a trick a medical student back in the States had taught her, Millie ran her fingers over the birch and ebony inlays. The wood felt smooth and familiar beneath her touch. Berlin might be full of Biedermeier breakfronts, but how many had elaborate geometric inlays and ebony columns with brass capitals? The piece was too elegant for this solidly kleinbürgerlich flat. Middle-class, she corrected herself. She was here to speak German to the Germans, not to wander down her own linguistic memory lane.

  “It is, how do you say in English, a fake,” the woman said.

  Millie took a step away. Even breathing through her mouth, she couldn’t escape the smell. She reminded herself it wasn’t the woman’s fault, but that didn’t make the odor, or the woman, any less offensive. Whose fault was it that there was no soap in Berlin?

  “Fälschung.”

  “You speak German?” the woman asked as if she’d been tricked.

  “Apparently. But fälschung or authentisch, it’s part of the inventory.”

  “It is a family piece,” the woman insisted. “Of sentimental value only,” she added in an unsentimental voice.

  A family piece. Of sentimental value. Millie knew something about that. She turned from the breakfront, crossed the sitting room, and started down the hall. The woman tried to bustle ahead, but Millie blocked her way. She did not want to be shown the apartment, as if she were a prospective renter or boarder, as if she were a supplicant. We come as conquerors, not as oppressors, General Eisenhower had announced, and though Millie was officially sworn to the second part of that sentence, she wasn’t about to forget the first. More to the point, she was determined not to let any German she came in contact with forget it.

  She made her way down the hall. The dining room was crowded with a heavy carved table and too many chairs. No Biedermeier elegance here. The kitchen was primitive, but she didn’t intend to do much cooking. She wasn’t in the military, only attached to it, but she would still have access to various messes and officers’ clubs, requisitioned restaurants, and that wondrous outpost of American prosperity, the envy of the world or at least of the inhabitants of Berlin, the PX. So would the roommate she’d been told to expect.

  In the first bedroom, a massive four-poster was piled high with eiderdowns. Again, the woman tried to run interference, but Millie took a step around her, put her hand on the eiderdowns, and pressed down several times, testing the mattress. She knew she was taunting the woman, and she felt a small flash of shame, but not enough to stop. The woman’s hand lifted, as if she wanted to slap Millie, then fell to her side. The child moved closer and wound her arms around her mother’s leg. Now Millie was ashamed. Goading a grown woman, a grown German woman, was fair play, or at least justified. Intimidating a child, even a German child, was unconscionable. Except that the German child was likely to grow up to be a German adult.

  She moved on to the bathroom. It was spartan but immaculate. The woman was a good housekeeper. That couldn’t be easy with all the dust the Trümmerfrauen kicked up collecting the rubble and wheeling it along the broken roads.

  She entered the next room. The woman followed with the child still clinging to her thigh. The bed here was smaller but still piled high with eiderdowns. She didn’t bother to test the mattress. She’d made her point. She moved on to the last room. The small chest of drawers and narrow bed were painted white with pink and blue flowers. A stuffed bear, the cross stitches of his mouth set in an eternally winsome smile, was propped up against the pillow. Is that your teddy? The words were almost out of her mouth before she swallowed them. The child really was testing her resolve. She did
n’t want to taunt her, but she was determined not to be seduced by her. Giving a wide berth to a dollhouse that stood in a corner, she walked to the window, looked out into the bare alley where a few weeds sprouted among the rubble, then turned, left the bedroom, and made her way back down the hall. She was not going to look at the breakfront again, not so much as a glance, but her eyes had a will of their own. As she passed the doorway, her head turned to take it in one more time. The piece was so handsome it was almost an affront to the city, and the times.

  She and the woman stood facing each other in the entrance hall. The fear she’d read in the woman’s faded blue eyes when she’d opened the door and seen Millie’s uniform had hardened into hatred. Millie could feel the rage coming off her, acrid as the smell of her unwashed flesh and greasy hair. That was all right. That made it easier. The woman’s hatred was like a stick poking her own to life.

  “Three o’clock tomorrow,” she said in German. “You, your family, and your personal effects must be out by three o’clock tomorrow.”

  “But the child…” the woman began.

  “Three o’clock tomorrow,” Millie repeated and was out the door before the woman could protest any further. If she was going to worry about a child, she had better candidates for her pity than that little girl, who, even after all these years, even after everything that had happened, still had a teddy bear to cling to.

  She made her way down the stairs slowly. She told herself she was being careful because there was no light in the stairwell, but she knew it was more than that. The shadow of the child followed her all the way.

  Pulling open the door to the street, she stepped into the falling dusk. The winter solstice was still a month away, but the shortening days made the ruined streets feel even more ominous. The rubble wasn’t as bad here as in some parts of the city. Zehlendorf, a borough of handsome villas, cobblestone streets, lakes, parks, and upstanding German citizens, had been of no strategic value, except perhaps for those upstanding citizens. It had been spared the worst of the bombing. But it still felt broken.

  She crossed the street and stood looking up at the French windows of the flat she’d just requisitioned. The woman appeared in one of them and stood staring down at her. Even at this distance, Millie could feel the rage. Again, she told herself that was all right. That was welcome. The woman’s hatred banished the shadow of the child that had stalked her down the stairs.

  She’d been in Berlin only two days, but in Germany for a week. The experience was not what she’d expected. She didn’t mean the hardship. She’d been warned of that. The unwanted sympathy, her own, not the Germans’, was the problem. It was easy to hate from a distance. She was surprised to find how much energy it took close up.

  As she went on staring up at the window, two GIs turned the corner onto Riemeisterstrasse. One of them took a last drag of a cigarette and flicked the butt to the street.

  Suddenly four small boys appeared out of nowhere. Three were wearing torn trousers that were too thin for the winter weather. The fourth was in shorts. All four of them dove for the cigarette butt. The scuffle didn’t go on for long, a few punches, some wild kicks, violent curses. The boy in shorts pulled away from them, ran halfway down the block, and turned back to look at the others. They stood watching him but made no move. Honor among thieves, or at least a code of behavior among scavengers. The winner took a small tin box from the pocket of his shorts, opened it, and placed the cigarette butt inside. The incident was something else she’d been in Germany long enough to understand. Kippensammlung, or butt collecting. Children, and sometimes able-bodied men, if any were left, and the elderly as well, collected cigarette butts, removed the remaining tobacco, rolled it into new cigarettes, and sold them on the black market. They weren’t as valuable as American cigarettes—four cents a pack at the PX, ten dollars on the black market, fifteen for Pall Malls, which were longer—but they were profitable.

  She looked from the boys back up at the windows of the flat. The woman was gone, leaving only the memory of the encounter. She hadn’t found requisitioning the flat as painful as people had told her it would be, but neither had she found it as satisfying as she’d expected.

  Two

  “What the fuc—pardon my French, Captain, what the hell are the Krauts up to now?” Private Meer muttered as he turned the jeep onto Riemeisterstrasse and slowed to a stop.

  Millie hadn’t yet met Major Sutton, who would be her boss, but he’d given her his jeep and driver for the move into the flat. Private Meer had been trying to watch his language. She was an American girl, clearly off-limits because she held the equivalent of officer rank, but still a welcome sight in Berlin in late 1945, or so she had been told repeatedly. Not that the city wasn’t full of eager Frauleins. They were off-limits too, technically. The Army’s rule against fraternization—no socializing with Germans, no visiting their homes, no shaking hands with them even—had been one more article in the conquerors’ creed. It had also been a sop to wives and girlfriends back home. Unfortunately, or fortunately for those involved, the rule had turned out to be totally unenforceable. GIs wandered the streets arm in arm with German girls. Often the girls were wearing nylon stockings and munching chocolate bars or smoking cigarettes. It was as if they were acting out the worst clichés of the Occupation. The first afternoon she’d been in Germany, she’d passed an enlisted man snapping a photo of his buddy, grinning to beat the band as he stood with two Frauleins, an arm around the shoulders of each and his big hands palming a breast of each. She bet that was one photo that wasn’t going home to mother. The officers were no better, or so she’d heard. Every one of them had a “frat” stashed away somewhere. She’d been in Germany only a week, but she’d already heard the story of the young officer who’d wanted to bring his wife over. “You must be nuts,” his superior had said. “You don’t bring a sandwich to a banquet.” Millie qualified as a sandwich—barely that, she supposed, since she wasn’t anyone’s wife—but if that made her less desirable, or at least less accommodating, it also made her more respectable. Private Meer was doing his best to watch his language around her. “What the hell are the Krauts up to now,” he said again, as if repeating the bland word would wipe out the more vivid expletive.

  Halfway down the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty men and women, some of the women with children, was gathered in front of a building. They weren’t shouting or jostling or even milling. They were simply watching, almost respectfully, as if at a funeral. One of the men was even holding his cap in his hands.

  Meer put the jeep in gear, cruised to the edge of the group, and stopped again, but he left the engine idling and glanced behind them. She knew he was checking for an escape route. The crowd was calm, but situations could turn on a dime. The Soviets were more volatile than the Germans. That had to do with the vodka. Skirmishes between the Ivans and the Amis or the Tommies—there was no German slang for the French occupiers, whom they clearly saw as also-rans—were not unheard of. But the Germans were sullen and self-pitying. Under the right circumstances, those traits could be incendiary too.

  As she and Meer sat watching, a man came out of the building where she’d requisitioned the flat the day before carrying an armful of pots, pans, and kitchen utensils. A woman in the crowd crossed herself. A man muttered, more in despair than anger. You didn’t have to speak the language to understand the tone. Every man and woman in the crowd, even some of the children, knew the same fate could befall them. Tomorrow or next week or next month they could be carrying their own kitchen utensils out of their own houses. And it was likely to get worse before it got better, if it ever did get better. The rumor was that the Amis were going to bring over their families. All those women and children would need places to live, though the houses and apartments wouldn’t all be requisitioned space. In Frankfurt, the headquarters of the American sector, German POWs were already at work building an all-American suburb behind barbed wire, complete with schools, movie theaters, bowling alleys, hair dressing salons, and
other aspects of American culture. But until that was complete, a lot of Germans would be giving up their Lebensraum.

  The man carrying the kitchen utensils began making his way through the mob. Several American soldiers started to push the crowd back to make a path for him, but there was no need. The bystanders separated on their own.

  “Like the Red Sea,” Millie muttered.

  Meer turned to her and grinned. “You nailed it, Captain. That’s the Krauts for you. Like Churchill said, either at your throat or at your feet. Even with each other. Especially with each other these days.”

  The man reached the street where a wagon stood, the shafts for harnessing a horse resting on the ground, black paint peeling from the sides, a scrap of black fabric fluttering in one of the broken windows. In an earlier life the vehicle must have been a hearse. The man bent to put the utensils inside it, but he was carrying too many, and they clattered out of his hands, shattering the reverential hush. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman let out a single sob. The man collected the fallen items from the street, put them in the wagon, and started back to the house. The crowd went on watching. They were respectful and sympathetic, but they were curious too. Was the wife a good housekeeper or a slattern? Was the family better off than they pretended or living beyond their means?

  Meer shook his head. “Damn Krauts. I’m not saying it ain’t what they deserve, but they sure do know how to pull at your heartstrings.”

  Millie didn’t answer.

  A moment later the man came out of the house again. This time he was trailed by a helper. The first man was carrying a pile of folded linens and eiderdowns, the second some clothing and a pair of beat-up military boots. A subdued murmur rustled through the crowd. She couldn’t tell whether it was admiration for the quilts and linens, which even at this distance she could see were snowy, or shame for the depths to which the boots had sunk.