The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  “Do you want me to stay or would you rather be alone?”

  She didn’t answer. That was when he realized she was already alone. He decided to stay.

  She put the photographs down on her desk but didn’t look at them immediately. She couldn’t. She didn’t know how long she sat that way, staring not at the photographs but at Harry Sutton, though she wasn’t seeing him. He knew that but went on sitting there.

  Finally she looked down. The photograph on top was of a few lines from a ledger. The picture was a little blurry, but she could make out the writing. It was in a legible record keeper’s hand.

  The Jew Max Israel Mosbach died of heart failure July 8, 1943.

  She sat staring at it. Heart failure. Wouldn’t that be swift? Perhaps even painless? She knew she was clutching at straws, but what else did she have to hang on to?

  She lifted the top picture off and sat staring at the one beneath it.

  The Jew Gerda Sarah Mosbach died of heart failure June 29, 1943.

  Heart failure. The coincidence was too much. Still, didn’t that mean her mother hadn’t suffered either?

  She slid the photograph to the side and sat staring at the last one.

  The Jew Sarah Mosbach died of heart failure May 9, 1941.

  Heart failure? She calculated the years. At eleven?

  Somehow he knew what she was thinking. “The cause doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

  She looked up. She’d forgotten he was there.

  “What?”

  “The Krauts kept meticulous records, all right. Pages and pages, ledgers and ledgers of accurate names and dates. But the causes are pure fiction. That was their idea of shielding themselves from history’s judgment. They weren’t about to admit the real causes. They’re not in the record. And who knows, maybe it’s better they’re not.”

  “What?” she said again. She was having trouble making sense of any of it.

  “Or maybe it’s worse. The human imagination can be more terrible than reality. Though I doubt that’s the case here.” He stood. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “But I thought you wanted to know.”

  She still didn’t say anything.

  He started for the door, then stopped and turned back. “Was I wrong?”

  She went on looking at him.

  “No,” she said finally. “I wanted to know.”

  * * *

  After he left, she sat staring at the photographs spread out on her desk. The names were accurate, he said, and the dates. Where had she been in the summer of 1943? Working at the magazine, living in that tiny apartment with two roommates. What had she been doing in June and July? No weekends on Long Beach Island, not with gas rationing. There had been a victory garden on 17th Street. Sometimes she and her roommates had pitched in on weekends. Every Thursday evening she’d volunteered at the hospital. And there had been other girls’ brothers and cousins and friends of friends, officers and enlisted men, coming through town. It was a patriotic duty to sit across a table from them hanging on every word, and foxtrot and rhumba and jitterbug with them, and go just far enough, as the saying went, to cheer them up, because who knew if they’d come back, but not give them the wrong idea. The days and weeks of that early summer merged into a single memory, shadowed by the constant hunger for mail. For weeks she didn’t hear a word from David, then she’d come home from work and pry open the mailbox in the vestibule of the building to have two or five or six letters spill out. But try as she might, she couldn’t attach a specific memory to June 29th or July 8th.

  She looked at the third photograph. May 9, 1941. More than two years earlier. Why had Sarah been the first to go? But maybe that was better. At least she hadn’t been left alone. She’d had her mother to the end. Or had she? There was no reason to assume they’d been together.

  She looked at the date again. 1941. She was still in school. More than a year away from graduation. The beginning of May. The campus greening. Classes moving outdoors. Groups of girls sprawled on the grass beneath the blooming cherry trees, blushing with the promise of the season and the reflected color of the blossoms, while a professor lectured on Tintoretto or the French Revolution or George Eliot. The memory stopped her. She looked at the date again. May 9, 1941. That was the night Miss Albright had taken her to dinner at the College Inn to celebrate. While Sarah had been filing naked and terrified into a gas chamber, or inhaling her last diseased breaths, or counting off in a sadistic game of shoot the tenth or fifth or second person in line, she’d been preening in her paltry little triumph. This was worse than the moment so many years ago in the Anhalter Bahnhof. No, nothing was worse than that. This compounded it.

  * * *

  She didn’t know what she was doing in the station. She had no reason to be here. She wasn’t going anywhere. She wasn’t seeing anyone off. She didn’t even know how she’d gotten here.

  This time it wasn’t raining as it had the afternoon she’d said goodbye to Theo. The sky was a scrim of fast-moving clouds racing over the bombed-out walls and exposed girders. There were more people, though it still wasn’t crowded. Not like the mob she’d imagined that day she’d tripped, or fainted. Nowhere near like that other day almost eight years earlier. The day she’d been so quick thinking.

  * * *

  She leaned forward to see past the man reading the Völkischer Beobachter. Sarah was resting against their mother’s shoulder. Their father was pretending to read a newspaper. She knew it was a pretense because he kept raising his eyes from the big broadsheet to track the people coming and going. He took his watch from his vest pocket, studied it, looked up at the station clock as if his own might be wrong, then returned it to his vest pocket and went back to pretending to read the paper.

  The man between her and her father turned a page of the Völkischer Beobachter noisily. She averted her eyes from it. She didn’t want him to think she was reading over his shoulder. She didn’t want him to notice her at all. And she couldn’t bear to look at the paper. The hate-filled headlines in the ugly Gothic script terrified her. SWEEP OUT THE JEWISH VERMIN WITH AN IRON BROOM. JEW ASSASSIN MURDERS NAZI OFFICIAL IN PARIS. EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FUHRER.

  A voice came over the loudspeaker announcing another train departure. The man between her and her father folded his paper and tucked it under his arm. She took David’s hand in preparation for sliding over to sit beside her parents and Sarah. As she did, she noticed two SS officers approaching. Their eyes raked the waiting passengers; the older one’s cruel and dark and beady, the younger’s the color that she imagined the Aegean Sea to be. Somehow the beauty of those eyes made it worse. She held her breath waiting for them to go by. Her father was still pretending to read the newspaper, but it was trembling in his grip. The officers walked slowly up the row, then turned and started down it again, studying faces as they went. The man beside her picked up his suitcase, stood, and started off. She began to slide into his place. The SS officer with the cruel eyes stopped in front of her father. She slid into the seat she’d been about to leave and nudged David back into place.

  The officer demanded her father’s papers. Her father reached into the breast pocket of his coat and drew out his and Sarah’s passports. The officer with the Aegean Sea eyes stood behind his colleague, both of them examining the passports. The first officer pivoted to her mother and demanded her papers. She took them from her handbag and held them out to him. Again, the second officer stood reading over the first’s shoulder, then moved a few steps until he was standing in front of Meike and David. They looked up at him. His eyes weren’t the color of the Aegean Sea. They were the icy blue of snow on a frigid day.

  “Are you with the Jews?” he asked.

  David went on staring from under his shock of blond hair. Meike dug her nails into her palms.

  “Are you with the Jews?” the officer repeated.

  “The Jews?” she said as if she didn’t understand the word.

  “The Jews you’re sit
ting with.”

  She went on looking up at the officer. She didn’t turn her head to look at her parents and Sarah. Her mind was racing. Be smart, Meike. Think quick. Answer fast.

  “We’re not sitting with those people. We never saw them before in our lives.”

  Twenty-One

  This time she fought the MPs. Of course she didn’t know they were MPs. All she saw were two men in uniform. All she felt were four hands grabbing her. She tried to pull away. They held her in place. She flailed and kicked and pummeled. They pinned her arms and cuffed her hands. She screamed. A large sweaty hand covered her mouth. She tried to bite it. It clamped her jaw closed. They hustled her across the rubble of the waiting room, out of the station, and into a jeep. One kept her pinioned in the back while the other drove.

  By the time they pulled up in front of the hospital, she’d realized they were MPs. She tried to apologize. She tried to explain. They sat straight-faced and uninterested.

  She had trouble climbing out of the back seat and held her cuffed hands out to one of the MPs to be freed. He merely helped her out of the jeep.

  “I’m fine, really. It was just a momentary scare.”

  The MP who’d refused to remove her cuffs put his hand on her elbow. His grip was not rough but firm enough to hold her. She let him lead her past the bullet-pocked walls up the hospital steps.

  She recognized the doctor. He was the same one who’d seen her last time, Mary Jo’s Phil. She wondered if they’d called him specially or if he just happened to be on duty.

  “Hi, Dr. Pinsky,” she said jauntily as he led her down the hall. “Long time, no see.”

  He managed a wan smile. “Hello, Captain.”

  She’d expected an examining room again. He held open the door to an office, indicated a chair for her, walked around the desk, and sat behind it.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” he began.

  “Why don’t you tell me? One minute I was walking through the station, the next two MPs were roughing me up.”

  “Apparently you weren’t just walking through the station. You were stopping people and shouting at them.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” She hesitated. “What was I shouting?”

  “The MPs don’t speak German.” He sat staring at her. “Did you ever hear of battle fatigue, Millie? Do you mind if I call you Millie?”

  “As Mary Jo’s friend, I insist on it.”

  His blush wasn’t as flattering as Mary Jo’s. “Or shell shock?” he went on. “That’s what they called it in the last war. The names change, but not the condition.”

  “I haven’t dodged any shells or fought any battles.”

  “You haven’t fired a gun or dropped a bomb, if that’s what you mean, but according to your commanding officer—”

  “What does he have to do with it?”

  “I called Major Sutton. He was the one who signed for your release last time. It seemed the logical thing to do.”

  “Logical!” she shouted, then caught herself. It was bad enough she’d fought the MPs. She couldn’t afford to make a scene in the hospital. She managed to force a laugh. “Forget Major Sutton. Maybe what I need is General Patton to slap my face and order me back into action.”

  This time he didn’t even try to smile. “That’s up to Major Sutton, but I’m going to recommend that you give up this denazification business. If it were up to me, I’d send you back to the States. But that’s his call, not mine.”

  * * *

  Harry was waiting for her at the nurse’s desk.

  “Maybe you ought to stay out of Anhalter Bahnhof.” His tone was joking, but he didn’t look as if he found it a laughing matter.

  She didn’t answer.

  He led her down the gravel path to his jeep and started to climb in.

  She stood watching him. “Where’s Private Meer?”

  “I know how to drive.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “Just get in.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to the office.”

  Good. He wasn’t going to blow this out of proportion after all. She climbed into the jeep.

  “To clear out your things,” he went on. “Your denazification days are over.”

  * * *

  Of course, David found out about the incident. The fact that he found out so quickly meant that Harry had called him.

  “I hear you had a brush with some MPs this afternoon,” he said as he walked into the kitchen, where she was peeling potatoes.

  “Apparently you and Harry Sutton have no secrets from each other.”

  He put his hand over his heart. “I owe him my life. Or at least my leg. Not to mention getting me out, or keeping me out of a scrape with the United States Army. What were you doing in the station?”

  “I still have those lamb chops from the PX. Do you want dinner?”

  He put both hands in his pockets and leaned against the counter. “Scene of the crime?”

  “How many do you want? Two or three?”

  “Except there was no crime.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You did what you had to do, Mil. We both did.”

  She turned to face him, still holding the knife. “Not both of us. I was the one who spoke up. I was the one who denied knowing them. ‘We never saw them before in our lives,’” she said in a high-pitched imitation of her younger self.

  “Okay, you’re right. You were the one who said it. You were the one who had the guts to say it.”

  “Guts. Next thing I know you’ll be quoting Hemingway. Watch Meike Mosbach show grace under pressure as she denies ever knowing her own flesh and blood. Watch her run like hell for the exits.”

  “I ran with you.”

  She turned back to the counter and began chopping. “All I know is the last thing Mama and Papa and Sarah, because she was young but not so young that she couldn’t understand, heard me do was betray them.”

  Twenty-Two

  She hadn’t argued with Harry when he’d told her that her denazification days were over. She’d even felt a flash of relief. She could stop reserving judgment. She could stop sitting across a desk from the scum of the earth pretending to believe equivocations and evasions and lies. But something still felt unresolved. She’d come to Berlin to find certainty. She’d found it, and buried hope. Now she had to find a way to go on without hope. She had to find a way to step into the Anhalter Bahnhof or pass a group of girls on their way to school without fainting or fighting or falling apart, and for that she had to stay on. Maybe if she found a German who really did have clean hands, if she kept as open a mind as Harry did, she could pull it off. Maybe she could learn to forgive. She decided to tell him she was ready to go back to work.

  She found him in the officers’ mess where he usually went for lunch, a long cavernous room in a former Wehrmacht drill hall. At one end, a stone eagle holding a laurel-wreathed swastika looked down over the rows of tables. At the other, doors to a kitchen swung open and closed as German waitresses carried trays of hamburgers and French fries and corned beef hash to the few men—it was almost two o’clock—who sat eating and smoking and watching the Frauleins come and go. Harry was sitting alone at one end of a long table. He wasn’t watching the waitresses come and go. He was reading what looked like a bound official report. One hand held the pages open, the other a cigarette.

  She approached the table and stood for a moment. It took him another moment to look up.

  “Whatever it is, it must be riveting.”

  He closed the report. She glanced at the cover page. “Report on the Nazi Judiciary” was typed across it.

  “Don’t you ever take time off?”

  “This isn’t denazification. These chaps are too far gone for redemption.”

  She thought of asking why, in that case, he was torturing himself, but she had other matters on her mind. She pulled out the chair and sat across from him. “I’ve had a week off. I haven’t gone near the Anhalter Bahnho
f. I’m ready to go back to work.”

  He ground out his cigarette. “You know I can’t let you do that.”

  “Why not? I wasn’t overly zealous, no matter what you think. I tried to be fair.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what General Clay thinks. Besides, you may be fair to the Germans, but you’re bloody hell on yourself.”

  “What is all this bloody this and bloody that? I’m sure that’s not the English your mother taught you.”

  He shook his head. “You really are impossible. You turn up here asking me to do something for you, then begin insulting me. But in this case you’re right. It’s an affectation. To make people like Wallach think I’m pure Oxbridge. Now you know the worst about me.”

  “Surely that’s not the worst.”

  “See what I mean.”

  “That was supposed to be a joke.”

  “Go home, Millie.”

  “Where exactly is that?”

  “I thought you were so grateful to Uncle Sam for taking you in. You and David both.”

  “I am. But David’s here.”

  “He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Boy, do I love it when you get that tone in your voice.”

  “All I meant was he’s the only family I have.”

  “More than some of us.”

  “I’m aware of that too,” she said, and this time he didn’t complain about her tone of voice.

  “Fine. Stay in Berlin. But get out of the revenge business. Try doing something useful.”

  “Such as?”

  “You’re the one with the Bryn Mawr degree. You figure it out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You didn’t do a bad job in the denazification office.”

  “Talk about damning with faint praise.”

  “You managed to find some decent needles in the haystack. And wasn’t it your idea to team up a Social Democrat, a left-wing Catholic, and an anti-Nazi conservative to run one paper?”