The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  Meike waited for the officers to return. Surely she and David couldn’t be this lucky. But the minutes passed, and no one entered their compartment. Doors were slamming. Officers were swinging down to the platform from other cars. The train lurched, then began to inch forward. The motherly looking woman stood, put the candy box on her seat, and began picking up the jeweler’s clothes, folding them, and putting them back in the portmanteau. She was just brushing off the soiled camel hair coat when Meike saw a sign glide past the compartment window. YOU ARE ENTERING THE NETHERLANDS.

  Ten

  The day after Millie’s violent reaction to the realization of why Anna had refused the soap, she stepped into Harry Sutton’s office on a minor matter and noticed something. He was leaning back in the swivel chair with his feet on the desk in his usual document-reading position, but there was one difference. His shoes had been newly shined. Their gleaming cordovan surface took her by surprise. Then she realized that the fallout from her regurgitated lunch had driven him to do what Army regulations had never managed to. Perhaps he saw the color rise in her cheeks, because he swung his feet off the desk, as if to hide the evidence.

  On her way out she asked if there had been any progress on the search for Frau Kneff. They both knew it was the real reason she’d come to his office.

  “No leads yet,” he said, “but I had another thought last night. Wehrmacht records. She probably applied for her widow’s pension. Even if there are no payments now, she won’t want to lose her eligibility.”

  “Can I tell Anna that? I’m planning to take her some things from the PX tomorrow.”

  “You don’t seriously think I’d tell you something I didn’t want you to pass on? I saw you two together.”

  * * *

  The joke among the American military in Berlin, and for all Millie knew everywhere in Germany where there was a PX, was that you stood a good chance of getting the bends going from the ravaged world outside to the smug abundance inside. On one side of the armed guards and barbed wire were hunger, misery, and danger; on the other, aisle after aisle of shelves filled with breakfast cereals and peanut butter, ketchup and mayonnaise, Kraft and Kellogg, Campbell and Heinz. Refrigerated cases overflowed with porterhouse steaks and rib roasts, salamis and cheeses, gallons of milk and pounds of butter. Stacks of Lucky Strikes and Camels and Chesterfields stood like fortresses.

  Shoppers pushed carts filled with American bounty. German staff in long white cotton coats bowed and scraped and whispered of the men they’d once been. Millie found the experience disorienting in more personal terms as well. On the streets of the city, in her U.S. Army uniform with the special chevron indicating that she was not regular Army but still cloaked in its power, she felt more American than she ever had in the States. In the PX, she felt strangely German. Or to put it another way, on both sides of the barbed wire she was an impostor. She usually felt guilty as well, but this afternoon, shopping for Anna, the plenty induced no self-reproach.

  She pushed her basket up and down the aisles, tossing in tins of fish and packages of sausages, fresh fruit and vegetables, coffee, a Lister bag of water purified by the Army for brushing teeth, and half a dozen cakes of Ivory soap. Harry had assured her Anna wouldn’t mind Ivory. “Ninety-nine and 44/100% pure; it floats,” the ads said. More to the point, it was made in America.

  At the end of the toiletries aisle, an elderly man in a regulation white PX coat had stopped stocking shelves and was talking intently to a girl in an Army uniform with a nurse’s insignia whom he’d boxed in between two displays. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a regulation bun beneath her cap, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose made her look very young, and when she glanced over the man’s shoulder at Millie, her large hazel eyes had a desperate cast to them.

  “You don’t happen to know German, do you?” she asked Millie. “He’s been going on like this for a while, but the only word I can make out is Brooklyn.”

  The man turned his attention from the girl to Millie. She listened for a moment, said something in German, and maneuvered him aside to let the girl out.

  “What did you say to him?” the girl asked as the man made his way up the aisle.

  “I told him you couldn’t help him.”

  “What did he want me to help him with?”

  “Getting to Brooklyn where he has a cousin.”

  “Is he serious?”

  “Dead serious. You know you can’t get him to Brooklyn, and I know, but hope springs eternal in the German heart. I take it you haven’t been here for long.”

  “Two weeks. I guess it shows.”

  “You’ll get used to it. They tend to approach us more than the men. They think we have softer hearts.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “Not this cookie.”

  The girl looked surprised. “Anyway, thanks for saving me. I was beginning to think I’d never get away. I wish I could speak German. You’re really good. I guess you’ve been here for a while.”

  “A few months.”

  “You got that good in a few months? Do you mind if I ask how? I mean did you take lessons or learn it in school back in the States or what?”

  Millie hesitated. “I was born in Germany.”

  The girl’s hazel eyes widened. “But you’re wearing an American uniform. And you don’t have a German accent when you speak English.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The girl blushed, and the freckles on her nose deepened. The effect was vivid, and very pretty. “My mother is always telling me I’m nosy.”

  “Let’s say curious.”

  “It’s just that I don’t know many people here except the other nurses in the hospital. They’re nice. They’re swell, really, but…” She let her voice trail off.

  “But what?”

  “You’ll think I’m silly. Or at least naïve.”

  “No more so than the rest of us mixed up in whatever we’re trying to do here.”

  “I was so excited when I heard I was being sent to Berlin. I was in a veterans’ hospital in Alabama for the past year and a half. I might as well have been back in Friendship. That’s in Indiana, in case you didn’t know, and I bet you didn’t. So when I heard I was being assigned to the 279th Station Hospital on the Unter den Eichen, I thought, finally, I’m going to see the world. I only have six more months, but I was ready to re-up. That’s how great I thought it was going to be.” She shook her head. “Rubble and other Americans, that’s all the world I’ve seen so far. You’re the first person I’ve met who even speaks German. If you don’t count the man who wanted me to get him to Brooklyn and the staff who mop the floors and stuff in the hospital.”

  “That’s me. An exotic bird.”

  “I didn’t mean … I keep putting my foot in it.”

  “It’s okay. I was joking. And I’ll take it as a compliment.”

  “You wouldn’t have time for a cup of coffee, would you?” the girl asked.

  Millie glanced at her watch. Her shopping had taken less time than she’d expected. Anna wouldn’t be in her room for another hour at least. She’d told Millie she was going to make the rounds of some churches. They’d agreed that Major Sutton had a point about Frau Kneff not being able to stay away from confession.

  “It just so happens I do have time for a coffee,” Millie said.

  “See what I mean? You say a coffee. People in Friendship, the nurses, everyone I know says a cup of coffee. Or coffee.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Only it sounds more glamorous the way you say it. Let’s have a coffee.” She held out her hand. “I’m Mary Jo Johnson.”

  As it turned out, Mary Jo Johnson wasn’t as naïve as she claimed or as Millie assumed, at least in one area. On the streets of the city and in her office, Millie managed to keep the suffering at arm’s length. In the hospital, Mary Jo met it up close. More than that, she had her nose rubbed in it. Nursing the GIs was hard enough. Men learning to walk with a prosthesis, to breathe with one l
ung, to shave a strange face in the mirror thanks to the advances of plastic surgery. Then there were the wounds that didn’t show. At night, Mary Jo said, the ward sounded like a battlefield with GIs shouting warnings to absent buddies and cursing and pleading for their mothers. The GIs broke your heart. The German children proved the world didn’t have one.

  “They just keep dying,” Mary Jo said. “Newborns from dysentery. Infants from starvation. Kids of every age from all sorts of disease. And the mothers have to take them away. Last week one mother came with a cardboard suitcase. Can you imagine carrying your dead child in a cardboard suitcase?”

  Millie couldn’t. And she didn’t want to.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary Jo said. “I didn’t mean to go on like this. I thought I’d get away from it here. But all I did was let down my guard.” Two tears ran down her freckled cheeks, but she managed a smile. “That’s your fault. You’ve been so swell. Kind of like a big sister.”

  * * *

  In front of Anna’s building, two children were climbing a small mountain of rubble and sliding down it. They couldn’t have been more than four or five, but again it was hard to tell with so much malnutrition. She thought of Mary Jo’s stories about the children’s ward, then reminded herself if she was going to worry about children, she had more immediate candidates. She wished she had some news for Anna.

  Nearby, a Trümmerfrau was picking up bricks and stacking them in neat rows. As Millie approached, she looked up from her work, gave Millie a filthy look, and called to the children to stop that right now. The children went on climbing and sliding.

  Millie made her way through the clouds of dust they were stirring up toward the building, or what was left of it. The windows were glassless holes in what remained of the wall. There was no door, merely an opening into a long, dark corridor that ended in a dusty cloud of light pouring in from the litter-strewn courtyard on the other side.

  She stepped through the exposed steel and cement of the opening and started down the hall. On the first door on the left, a scrap of paper printed with Anna’s name and attached by a rusty nail fluttered in the wind. “Anna Altschul” was scrawled on the wood of the door as well. She wasn’t taking any chances on not being found.

  Millie knocked.

  “Come,” Anna called.

  “Don’t you even ask who it is?” Millie said as she stepped into the room.

  “I can’t afford to be choosy. Who knows who might have word of Elke. Besides, there are no locks.”

  “You said the place was safe.”

  “As safe as anything in Berlin is these days. At night I wedge a chair against the door under the knob.”

  Millie glanced around the room. A narrow cot stood against one wall, the furnace Anna had said sometimes gave off heat, though it wasn’t giving off any at the moment, took up most of another. A light bulb hung from the ceiling by a wire. Anna followed her eyes. “See, I even have electricity. When there is any. All the comforts of home.” The single window was boarded up. Again Anna followed her eyes. “The only thing you can see from down here is the rubble and people’s feet anyway. I’m fine, Meike, really I am.”

  “Where should I put these?” She held the bags out to her.

  Anna took them, thanked her, and placed them on the cot. Millie was glad she didn’t start to go through them. Anna’s embarrassment for having so little was nothing compared to Millie’s shame at having so much.

  Anna straightened from putting down the bags and turned back to Millie. She didn’t have to say a word. Her upper body, skeletal in the thin coat, curved toward Millie as if it were a question mark.

  “We have a list of Kneffs in the various sectors. No Teresas or Frau Axels yet, but she might be with family members. We’re tracking down Klempners too. You said that was her sister’s name. Most of the information comes from applications for ration cards. She’d need one for her and one for Elke. And Major Sutton had another idea.” She told her about the Wehrmacht widow’s pension. “We’re making progress.” She heard the fatuousness of her own voice. “At least we’re trying. Really we are.”

  Anna stood staring at her, her big eyes, bigger now than ever in her emaciated face, hard with anger. “Trying? The Americans don’t try, Meike. They do. When they want to. They bomb. They win the war. They liberate the camps. But they can’t find one little girl? With time running out. Like sand in an hourglass. Every minute she’s growing older. Every minute she’s growing further away from me. She won’t even know me.”

  “She’ll know you,” Millie lied. They both knew twenty months of infancy were no match for almost five years of care and love, but Millie told herself, if not Anna, that they’d worry about that when they found Elke. If they found Elke.

  “Are you still combing the black markets?” Millie asked.

  “I go wherever there’s hope.”

  “There’s no hope there, Anna, only danger.”

  Anna didn’t answer. She knew Millie was right about the danger. But she was right about the hope.

  “They’re jungles,” Millie went on. “Filled with pickpockets and thieves and”—she remembered the MP’s warning the day she’d followed the girls on the way to school—“people who’d slit your throat for a pack of cigarettes. And if they don’t get you, the military roundups will.”

  Anna shook her head. “They don’t bother with me. I’m not buying or selling. I’m just looking.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt.”

  “You don’t understand, Millie. You walk the streets in an American uniform, and everyone notices. Some hate, some fear, a few are grateful, but all of them notice. An old woman like me—”

  “You’re five years older than I am.”

  “I’m a lifetime older than you are. And I have the camps written all over me. No one wants to be reminded of them. So I’m invisible. The operators know I have nothing to trade. The cutthroats know I have nothing to steal. Sex? Don’t make me laugh. And the upstanding German citizens selling their jewelry and furniture and whatever they have left blame me for the war. You know the saying. Another bad Jewish joke. The Germans will never forgive us for what they did to us. As for being rounded up, why would they bother with me when they have people with pockets full of jewelry and forged identity papers and penicillin and morphine to sell?”

  Millie admitted she had a point, but she still worried. That was why she decided to go with Anna the following Saturday. When Theo heard about the plan, he insisted on accompanying them. “Two women alone are just double the quarry, even if one of them is in uniform,” he said.

  They started in the Alexanderplatz. The vast square was a landscape out of a nightmare. The imposing shops and office buildings, the famous Manoli cigarette ad with the ring of neon tubes circling endlessly that had intrigued them as children, lay in rubble. Here and there the remains of the U-Bahn tunnels that had first served as air-raid shelters, then been flooded by the Wehrmacht in a last ditch effort to slow the advance of the Red Army were barricaded to keep people from tumbling into the holes. And everywhere crowds of people shoved and jostled, hawked and haggled. Arms shot out from coat sleeves to display half a dozen watches, everything from valuable Luftwaffe Ondas to inexpensive Mickey Mouse models, the favorites of the Ivans, for which they’d pay obscene prices. Private Meer swore he’d sold one for four hundred dollars. Fists opened to show a handful of diamonds. Young men peddled Wehrmacht ribbons, Hitler Youth badges, and knives with swastikas on the sheaths for GIs to take home to show the folks where they’d been. Old women and an occasional man hovered silent and watchful beside chairs and bedsteads and—Millie stopped—a handsome inlaid breakfront with ebony columns. She crossed the space and stood looking down at it. The geometric pattern was similar to the design on the one in the flat, but the drawers of this one had brass keyholes.

  The woman standing beside it took a step toward Millie. “Zehn cartons,” she muttered.

  Millie went on staring at it. She reached out and touched one
of the brass keyholes. She couldn’t remember. It was so long ago. Did the one her father had given her mother have brass keyholes?

  She traced the pattern of the inlays on the surface. If only she could be sure.

  The woman was still watching her. “Neun cartons.”

  Theo and Anna were suddenly beside her. She hadn’t realized they’d kept going when she’d stopped to look at the breakfront. “We thought we’d lost you,” he said.

  She turned away from the breakfront. The woman muttered something under her breath. Millie wasn’t sure if it was the word acht or a curse.

  They made their way through the crowd, Anna’s head constantly turning, searching for women in the hordes of buyers and sellers, examining faces, lingering every now and then to study one more closely. She stopped suddenly and stood staring at a man who was holding out a camera for a GI to inspect.

  “Is that someone you know?” Millie asked.

  Anna didn’t answer.

  “I thought we were looking for a woman,” Theo said.

  Anna still didn’t answer.

  “What is it, Anna?” Millie asked.

  Anna lifted her arm and pointed at the man with the camera.

  “Herr Kneff?” Millie asked. “I thought he was dead.”

  “The Butcher,” Anna said.

  “From your old neighborhood?” Millie asked.

  “From the camp. A guard. That was what they called him. The Butcher.”

  “Are you sure?” Theo asked.

  “You don’t forget someone like that,” Anna muttered.

  “We should find MPs,” Millie said.

  But Theo was already moving toward the man. He looked up from the camera, saw an American uniform bearing down on him—this was no potential buyer, this was a pursuer—grabbed the camera out of the GI’s hands, and started to run. Only when he did, did they realize that he had only one leg and a crutch. His gait was so hobbled that it seemed with each step he would topple over. Theo caught up with him in a few strides. He staggered back with Theo’s first punch to his face, doubled over and collapsed with the second thrust to his stomach. The crowd backed off in a circle around them, staring in silent fear and anger as Theo’s right boot collided with the man’s head. He took a step back. Millie thought he was finished. He was only positioning himself to exert more force. His boot swung back, then forward against the man’s head. The man’s body bounced with the blow. His blood spurted. Theo swung his boot back, then forward again. He kept at it, his mouth shouting curses while he kicked, until two MPs pulled him away, two others bent over the man on the ground, and suddenly a squad of officers and enlisted men was swarming through the market. People were grabbing their wares and running while others were being pushed into trucks. There was chaos, but there was no panic. Everyone knew they’d be released immediately and back within an hour.