The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  Their father was urging their mother to hurry. “The train, Gerda. All this time you’ve been begging me to leave. Now the time comes, and you can’t tear yourself away.”

  “I’m coming,” her mother said, but she wasn’t. She was standing with her hand on the breakfront, looking around and memorizing the room. The paintings on the walls, which she hadn’t liked at first, but now that the government had pronounced them decadent, she’d become a fan of modern art. The glass-fronted cases crowded with volumes, many of them editions of books that were being burned in the streets. The silver frames, standing empty on the tables. She had taken out the photographs and packed them in the suitcases the night before, distributing them among all five as she had the few pieces of jewelry she hadn’t sold, the little cash they had left, and two Leica lenses her father had bought for their flight, all secreted in jars of cold cream, tubs of Vaseline, and tins of talcum powder. The frames were empty, but the photographs were so familiar they could still see them. A young couple in bathing costumes on the beach at Wannsee; the same man and woman, only a little older, pushing a child in a stroller in the Tiergarten; the child, taller now, holding the hand of a small boy in the botanical garden; the two children, older still, with a third squinting blindly into the sunshine, again on the beach at Wannsee; the man alone, younger again, in the uniform of the Imperial German Army of the Great War with an Iron Cross Second Class pinned to his tunic. Her mother hadn’t wanted to take that, but her father had insisted.

  She wasn’t going to be able to do this. She really wasn’t. She stepped out of the circle of moonlight and made her way into the hall. She wouldn’t disturb him. He was a sound sleeper. At least he used to be. He wouldn’t even know she’d looked in. But she had to see him with her own eyes. She had to hear his breathing and sense the heat he gave off. He was her connection, the one being who could keep her from floating off into the darkness, untethered as a helium balloon. Especially now that she was back in Berlin.

  Her slippers made no sound on the floorboards as she went down the hall. Her hand moved to the doorknob again. This time she turned it. She started to push the door open, but she hadn’t bargained on the unoiled hinge. She stopped and waited for some sound or movement in the room. There was none. Slowly, carefully, she pushed the door open.

  The room was dark. No moonlight filtered through this window. She stepped inside, then stopped and waited. Again she sensed no movement. She took another step. The room wasn’t large but her journey across it seemed endless. Finally she reached the bed and stood beside it looking down. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but there didn’t seem to be a body beneath the eiderdown. Certainly no David sprawled across it, arms and legs hanging over the side. She fumbled for the lamp, hit it at the wrong angle, grabbed it before it went over, righted it, and pulled the cord. The bulb didn’t give off much light, but it gave off enough to see that the bed was empty. It hadn’t even been mussed.

  She went through the flat, turning on all the lights. She even looked in the closets. Then she went through again and looked under the beds. The idea wasn’t as farfetched as it seemed. Before she’d left the States, the magazine where she’d worked had published an article warning the women of America what to expect when their fighting men came home. They might be moody or angry or jumpy. A sudden noise could startle. A backfiring car could make them take cover. But David wasn’t under any of the beds. He wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. She couldn’t imagine how he’d left without her hearing him go, but he’d managed to.

  She went back to the parlor and sat on the ugly red plush love seat across from the Biedermeier breakfront. It was still bathed in moonlight, but now she barely noticed it. There was no reason to panic, she told herself. He could be anywhere, doing anything. The city was full of GIs out drinking and gambling and sleeping in the wrong beds. Still, he could have told her he was going out. But that was ridiculous. He was a grown man, she reminded herself as she’d been doing ever since he’d come home in uniform. He didn’t have to ask her permission to go out. He didn’t have to confide in her. She’d never told him about the weekend with the medical officer who was shipping out. Family ties didn’t necessitate full disclosure. Full disclosure could fray family ties.

  She just hoped he wasn’t out with a Fraulein. Only a few hours ago, the idea would have seemed impossible. Not her own brother. Not after what they’d been through. But she’d seen the way his eyes had followed the girls on the street. He was a grown man, she warned herself again. He’d been trained for battle and groomed for intelligence work. She hadn’t known about the latter back in the States. Camp Ritchie, set up to instruct foreign-speaking men, many of them still boys, most of them Jewish, had been top secret. But now the war was over, and she didn’t think he was as well prepared for peace, at least this particular peace. What was an Army manual about prisoner interrogation or instruction in photo interpretation against the hundreds of Frauleins in the city, hungry for chocolates and nylons and cigarettes? He’d fought a war and experienced a thousand horrors and terrors she’d never know. He must have lost countless buddies. He didn’t talk about that. He didn’t talk about anything he’d gone through in the war, though when he’d unpacked his things this afternoon, he’d taken out a snapshot and tucked it in the frame of the mirror over his dresser. In it, he and two other GIs were perched on a jeep, smiling into the camera. “The Ritchie Musketeers take Aachen” was written across the bottom. She’d asked who the other two were.

  “Buddies,” was all he said.

  She didn’t press it.

  The point was she had no right to sit in judgment on his actions. Nonetheless, there were some things you didn’t do. Sleeping with the enemy was one of them. More than the enemy, his own personal nemesis. She was no prig. She didn’t care whom the rest of those lonely, sex-starved, far-from-home men went to bed with. She found it distasteful, in view of what these people had done, but it was none of her business. David was her business. He knew what these people had done as well as she did. He’d suffered what they’d done along with her. The more she thought about it, the more impossible she knew it was. She had no idea where he was or with whom, but she did know one thing. He could not be sleeping with the enemy.

  She heard a key scraping in the lock, jumped up, and started toward the front door. Then she stopped, turned, walked quickly down the hall to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. She’d caught herself in time.

  Since the war had ended, she’d lived with two recurrent fantasies. In one, David came home from the Army, got his degree, perhaps a medical degree—their father would like that—and married. She married too. She was no heroine out of a nineteenth-century English novel, sacrificing herself for a brother or father. In that blissful fantasy, David and his wife and she and her husband and their children—there would be lots of children—lived near one another, perhaps on different floors in the same apartment building or neighboring houses in the suburbs. One of the children would be a little girl named Sarah. Maybe they’d each have a girl named Sarah. She saw the children flying in and out of one another’s homes, entwined in one another’s lives, David’s Sarah and Millie’s Sarah, the joy of them, the beauty of them, the sheer Sarahness of them doubled. And if they found Sarah, when they found Sarah, the delight would be tripled. They were not a superstitious family. They did not believe, as did many Jews, that naming a child after a living relative was inviting trouble. This would not be tempting fate; it would be celebrating it.

  In the other fantasy, David married and pulled away from her. What man, or woman for that matter, wouldn’t strain against the possessiveness of an overbearing older sister? And as he disappeared from her life, his visits growing fewer and farther between, his phone calls clearly matters of duty, she grew more bitter, a lone woman, even if she was married, an alienated familyless woman.

  She stood behind the closed door of her bedroom, listening to his steps going down the hall. She had caught herself in time. She refused to bec
ome that unloved woman. Where he’d been, what he’d been doing, was none of her business.

  Four

  She didn’t say a word to him about his being out the night before. She made coffee for them, and toast, and they joked about the indignity of eating Wonder Bread from the PX in Berlin because the handful of bakeries that were functioning again couldn’t get ingredients for good German rye or pumpernickel. She even managed to keep it up until he left for the displaced persons center. A few minutes later, she stepped out of the building into a chill November morning. The clear moonlit sky of the previous night had disappeared behind a scrim of dirty clouds that pressed down on the city like a lid. The wind made her turn up the collar of her Balkan bunny. That was what the girls on the ship coming over had called the Army-issue trench coats lined with fake fur. The joke had been that they came in two sizes, huge and gargantuan. Some of the smaller girls had almost disappeared inside all that fabric, the hems dragging along the floor, the shoulders making them look like professional football players. She was lucky. She’d got one of the merely huge ones and was tall enough to carry it off. No one would call the coat fashionable, but it was warm, and if she cinched the belt tight enough, she didn’t look like a sack of potatoes.

  She started down the street in the direction of Kronprinzenallee. Despite the lack of familiar landmarks—many houses and shops and public edifices were no more than unidentifiable rubble—here and there a still-standing building brought the city back to her. Perhaps that was why it happened. The familiarity in the midst of all that destruction was unnerving, as if she was moving through two worlds at once.

  The girls must have been on their way to school. Classes had resumed only a few months earlier. The delay hadn’t been due entirely to the fact that buildings were in ruins. The more significant problem was a shortage of teachers. An alarming number of them had Nazi pasts. You could give a street sweeper back his broom or let a clerk return to his desk, but you couldn’t entrust the nation’s youth to the men and women who had led, or followed, it down the recent path in the first place. The lack of text books was another difficulty. All the old ones had to be pulped and new ones written. She hadn’t thought it possible to inject propaganda into a math book until she’d seen some of the examples. “A usurer charged an honest farmer 12% interest on a loan of 400 marks for 4 years. How much did the Jew swindler get?”

  The three little girls were swinging along ahead of her holding hands. Their heavily mended cotton stockings were nothing more than patchworks of darns. One of them wore a coat with the unmistakable mark of a hem that had been let down; the second’s coat had a wide band of another fabric around the bottom; the third had no coat, only a sweater. But despite the cold and their lack of protection from it, they seemed to be having a good time, impervious to the weather as children often are. The one with the strip of different fabric at the bottom was in the middle, and as she turned back and forth from one friend to the other, her dark braids swung in the cold morning air. Millie quickened her step to catch up with them.

  The closer she got, the surer she was. The girl with the braids dropped her friends’ hands, skipped forward a few steps, then without turning danced back. Millie would know that high-stepping caper anywhere. She was almost running now to catch up. The closer she got, the more certain she was. The thick dark braids, the narrow shoulders, the coltish legs. The girl shouted a few words back at her friends. The sound of her voice, like a bell in the icy morning air, shattered something inside Millie. These girls couldn’t be older than seven or eight. But that was the age she still was in Millie’s mind.

  As she came abreast of the three, she couldn’t help glancing over at them, though she had already realized her mistake. They stared back at her, taking in her government-issue trench coat, half curious because they were children, half suspicious because they were their parents’ children.

  At the same moment, two MPs caught up with her.

  “You okay, Captain?” one of them asked.

  “Fine.”

  “We saw you running after those girls. They swipe something?”

  “No, I was just…” She let her voice trail off.

  “Don’t let them put one over on you.”

  “Put one over on me? They’re children.”

  The MP shook his head. “Sure. And they’d slit your throat for a pack of cigarettes.”

  She stood staring at him for a moment, wondering how she’d slipped down this rabbit hole.

  “I’m fine,” she managed to insist again and started walking.

  Turning the corner onto Kronprinzenallee, she kept going, though suddenly she had no idea where she was. It took her several blocks to regulate her breathing and get her bearings. She never should have run after the girls. One thing she knew for sure. She wasn’t going to tell David about the incident.

  * * *

  The building that housed the press and publishing clearance office was a heavy, soulless example of fascist brutal architecture at its best, or worst. It didn’t invite. It wasn’t satisfied with impressing. It was determined to intimidate. She climbed the steps and made her way through the massive doors.

  The entrance hall was large, bare, and perfectly proportioned to make an individual feel insignificant. Long hallways extended from both sides. Men in uniform and women, some in uniform, some in civilian clothing, hurried back and forth, carrying brown manila envelopes, thick folders, and sheaves of papers. She started down the hall to the right. Even if she’d been inclined to ask for help, she doubted anyone would pause to answer her. She passed a few doors, realized the numbers were going in the wrong direction, turned, went through the entrance hall again, and started down the hall on the left. The numerals 113 were painted in black on the frosted glass window of the fourth door. She pushed it open.

  A low slatted wooden divider ran the length of the room. On one side of it, benches lined the walls. Men and a handful of women were crowded on them. Others stood. A man was squatting on his haunches. They were a motley lot, some in well-cut if worn, patched, and too-big suits, others in even shabbier outfits. On the far side of the barrier, a thin young woman with hollow cheeks and an unhealthy pallor sat behind one desk, a buxom girl with yellow braids wound tightly around her head behind another. The nameplate on the desk of the dour one said Fraulein Weber. The Mädchen with the braids was Fraulein Schmidt.

  A few of the people in the waiting area looked up as Millie entered. She tugged the belt of her Army coat tighter, as if girding for battle, and approached the secretary with the crown of braids. She didn’t seem friendly, merely less hostile than her hungry-looking colleague.

  The secretary lifted her Dresden blue eyes. They registered the Army uniform. A slight frown tugged at the side of her rosebud mouth. Millie was willing to bet the response would have been warmer if the person in the U.S. Army uniform had been a man. Nonetheless, the frown did nothing to detract from the girl’s looks. She wondered whether her new boss, Major Sutton, had hired the girl or some personnel officer had succumbed. She hoped it was the latter. She didn’t like to think the head of the denazification office would be susceptible to Fraulein charm, though from the little she’d already seen, there was no reason he should be any different.

  She gave her name to the girl, who was even better-looking when she smiled, though the expression wasn’t genuine. The girl said Major Sutton was expecting her, stood, and led Millie to another door with a frosted glass window. MAJOR HARRY SUTTON was painted in black letters on this one.

  She stepped through the door the girl held open, and Major Sutton looked up from the papers he was studying. Beneath a high forehead, which the receding light brown hair made higher, his face was long and narrow, bisected by a Roman nose that was a little off-center, as if it had been broken and not properly set. He swung his feet off the big, ornately carved desk, righted his chair, and stood. The tall, wiry body went with the long face, but when he came around the desk to meet her, he moved on the balls of his feet, like a te
nnis player, and seemed suddenly younger. She wondered how old he was. The war had been fought largely by young men. She’d been surprised when she’d found the commanding officer David had referred to as “the old man” was twenty-six, only two years older than she was now. Sutton held out his hand, though he kept the other one in his pocket, and smiled. His smile was easy, too easy she thought, but his eyes, almost green behind steel-rimmed military glasses, were watchful and, she was sure she wasn’t imagining it, speculative, if not downright suspicious. Perhaps he knew about all the good words Russ Bennett had put in to land her here.

  “Welcome to the Occupation, Captain.” His voice was a deep smoker’s baritone, and his accent was British rather than American. She wondered if he’d gone to school in England or had an English nanny as a child. She should have known the government might staff the denazification office with German-speaking Jews who’d fled the country, but they wouldn’t let one of those suspect characters run it.

  “Flat requisitioned and all squared away?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t have to sir me, Captain. You’re attached to the Army, not in it.” He flashed the too-easy smile again, then went back around the desk, sat in the swivel chair, and indicated one of the straight chairs on the other side of the desk. “And while we’re on the subject, I’m curious to know why you’re attached to the Army. I’m not suggesting I’m not delighted to have you, but not too many Bryn Mawrtyrs—”