The girl readjusted the box so it sat more securely on her lap. A decorative design was carved into the lid. Her mother’s chest had had a fleur-de-lis. This one had a cross. Religious relics were one more commodity for sale on the black market. She looked from the box to the girl’s face. It was still, expressionless as a mask. The car lurched to a sudden stop. This time she caught the box just before it hit the floor, and as she did, her face came startlingly alive, her eyes wide with horror, her mouth open in a silent howl of pain. She was, for a moment, a living reproduction of The Scream.
As if she were a mirror, Millie’s own face froze in revulsion. She remembered Mary Jo’s stories of the dead children. The box wasn’t a silver chest or a case for a religious relic. It was a coffin. The woman was carrying a child’s body. She was carrying her child’s body. On a streetcar.
The car came to a halt. Millie stumbled out of her seat. She wasn’t sure which stop it was, and she didn’t care. She had to get off that streetcar. Just as she’d fled Fraulein Weber, she had to get away from that woman and her dead child.
The doors opened. She lurched down, staggered into the rubble, caught her balance, lost it again, and crashed to her knees. As she did, she reached out to break her fall. Later, she’d realize she’d been lucky not to break her hand or wrist. Still, something had shattered.
* * *
She stood on the street, bleeding from her palms and knees, watching the streetcar move off into the fog. She’d never felt so lost. The signposts she’d once used to navigate the city were no longer clear. It didn’t matter whether they were in German or English. She couldn’t make them out. She started walking. She’d thought she was heading for her apartment. Somehow she ended up at his.
She lifted her hand to ring the bell and managed to get blood on the doorframe. She was trying to wipe it off with her handkerchief when he opened the door. He stood for a moment in khaki uniform trousers, a tee shirt, and bare feet, looking surprised. Then he noticed the blood on her hands and running down her shins.
“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You’ve been to the Anhalter Bahnhof.”
“I was seeing Anna and Elke off earlier, but that’s not where it happened.”
He opened the door wider, stepped aside for her to come in, and closed it behind her.
“Then where?”
“Getting off a streetcar.”
He looked down at her legs again and carefully lifted her skirt a couple of inches to see her knees.
“From the looks of it, you flung yourself from a speeding train. Come on.” He let go of her skirt, straightened, and led her down the hall to the bathroom. “Sit.”
“Next you’re going to tell me to roll over and play dead.” She was trying to joke, but they both heard the hysteria in her voice.
“I’ll settle for your paws.” He turned on the water, reached out to take her hands, and looked at the palms.
“I can do it,” she said.
“You can’t even get off a streetcar.” He held one of her hands under the faucet, soaped it, repeated the action with the other hand, then toweled them dry. Funny how adept he was even without two fingers, and gentle.
“I’m getting blood all over your towel,” she said.
“If you look around, you’ll see what a fastidious housekeeper I am.” He moved on to her knees. “Jesus, you must have gone down in a pile of rubble. The ruins of half of Berlin are in here. Take off your stockings.”
She unhooked them from her garter belt. There was no need for her to turn away from him. He was too busy taking methylate and bandages from the medicine cabinet. She sat on the closed toilet seat watching him work and remembering her mother washing and bandaging David the day his schoolmates had cornered him in the alley.
He finished her knees, straightened, and stood looking down at her. “Accident-prone doesn’t begin to describe you, Mosbach. It’s just lucky I’m around to take care of the damage. Again.
“Do you feel like telling me what happened?” he asked when they were back in the living room. “And don’t give me that song and dance about tripping getting off the streetcar.”
She told him about the girl with the coffin on her lap. “At first I thought she was on her way to the black market. I was trying to guess what was in the box. Then I realized.”
He sat looking at her across the expanse of sofa between them. “Do you think that dead baby brought it on itself? That’s our usual excuse, isn’t it? They built the camps. They started the war. They asked for it.”
“That’s what I told Fraulein Weber.”
“What does she have to do with it?”
She told him about the conversation in his office. Then about the translator whose son had been murdered.
He shook his head. “When you about-face, you do it with a vengeance.”
“I haven’t done an about-face.”
He waited. When she didn’t say anything else, he went on. “Just seeing that things are a bit more complicated than you thought?”
She still didn’t say anything.
He continued looking at her for a moment, then leaned forward, picked up the pack of cigarettes on the table, and held it out to her. She shook her head. He went through the rituals of lighting it, inhaling, exhaling, then leaned back again.
“I’ve been thinking about that day in the Anhalter Bahnhof,” he said.
“Which one? I seem to have spent quite a bit of time there lately.”
“I wasn’t thinking of lately. I was thinking of the day that started it all.”
“You’re going to tell me again that I wasn’t such a quick thinker. I was just following instructions.”
“A bit more than that. I was thinking of David.”
“He wasn’t the one who spoke up. He wasn’t the one who denied knowing his own family.”
“No, that was your job. You were older. He followed your lead.”
“Exactly. It’s my fault, not his.”
“Your fault? You saved his life, Millie. You can’t forgive yourself for what you did to save your life, but what if you’d done what you, in your bottomless shame, think would have been the honorable thing and told those SS bastards, sure, we’re with the Jews. We’re the Mosbach family. We stick together. Not only would you not be here. David wouldn’t either. And you don’t have to know the Talmud, which I don’t, and I’m willing to bet you don’t either, to know the line. He, or in this case she, who saves one life saves the world.”
* * *
They didn’t speak in the jeep on the way back to her apartment. You can’t speak in a jeep, only shout. He was still silent as he walked her to the door of the building, but when they reached it, he stood looking down at her.
“Do you ever think, Millie, why your father gave you those instructions?”
“To save me.”
“To save you for what?”
She didn’t answer.
“A lifetime of self-flagellation?”
She was still silent.
“He gave you life. He’d want you to grab it.”
“Easier said than done.”
He turned and started back to the jeep. “Tell me about it,” he said without turning around.
He’d spoken so quietly she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.
Twenty-Four
She never did get to the hospital that night, but a few days later Mary Jo showed up at her apartment. Her eyes were red, the freckles on her cheeks inflamed, and the twin trails of mascara that ran down both cheeks made her look like a tragic clown.
“What’s wrong?” Millie asked as she led her down the hall to the parlor.
“You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Phil’s family. They’re worse than mine. They said they’ll disown him if he marries me. They said they’ll sit … what’s the word when someone dies?”
“Shiva.”
“They’ll sit shiva for him.” Mary Jo widened her eyes. “Can you imagine anything so awfu
l?”
“Unfortunately, I can.”
“You’re not surprised.”
“You think your family has cornered the market on narrowmindedness?”
“But how can they object to me? I don’t mean me in particular. They don’t even know me. But how can they object to a Christian?”
Millie sat looking at her for a moment, trying not to smile. She didn’t want to hurt Mary Jo’s feelings. “Maybe you’d better not marry him after all.”
“But I love him.”
“As in some of my best friends are Jews.”
“What?”
“It’s what people say when they’re trying to prove they’re not anti-Semitic. I couldn’t possibly be an anti-Semite. Some of my best friends are Jewish.”
“You think I’m an anti-Semite?”
“I didn’t until you asked that question about how Phil’s family could possibly object to you, a Christian.”
“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“Nobody ever means it, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t say it. What does Phil think about all this?”
“He says he still wants to marry me.”
“And what do you think? You do realize that if you marry him, your children will be half Jewish?”
“I know that,” she said, but there was a sullen undertone in her voice, as if she wasn’t quite ready to yield the point.
“Maybe you better slow things down a little.”
“You mean break it off?”
“I mean slow it down. A few weeks ago, I got a letter from a college friend who’s already filing for divorce from the Air Force officer she married on his way to the Pacific.”
“What does that have to do with Phil and me?”
“It has to do with the war and its aftermath. Yesterday, bombs were falling, cities were going up in flames, millions were dying, and people were going crazy. Falling in love too easily. Falling into bed too fast. Falling for the wrong people. Then the war was over, they went home, and reaction set in. The problem is we’re still living in a war zone here, and the same crazy rules or lack of them apply. But you’ll be going home soon, and once you’re there you might see things differently.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been in Friendship. I’ve never met your parents. But it seems to me that if you can’t see the equivalence between Phil’s family’s objections and yours, you might not be ready to fight this particular religious war.”
* * *
The realization came to her out of nowhere, except, of course, epiphanies only seem sudden. A slow, secret, even from ourselves, especially from ourselves, gestation period precedes the thunderclap. When she thought about it later, she’d trace the incubation period back to the morning the translator told her about hope, and the afternoon Fraulein Weber taunted her about hate, and the dead child on the tram that evening, and maybe even to Mary Jo’s glimpse of her own image in the mirror.
She was sitting on the sofa, reading a book she’d taken out of the library of Amerika Haus. Like the books she was assigning for translation, the centers being set up in various cities were supposed to introduce Germans to the finer aspects of American culture, but it was turning out that Germans, especially young Germans, preferred Rita Hayworth films to Eugene O’Neill plays and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” to “Fanfare for the Common Man.” She’d had no trouble getting her hands on the library’s copy of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, though it had been sold out in the PX. It was a favorite among the Negro GIs, but had little appeal for former Hitler Youth.
She looked up from the page. Later, she wouldn’t be able to remember why. Nothing had moved in the room, but something must have shifted in her. She put the book down on the sofa, stood, and crossed to the breakfront. Now she knew why David hadn’t commented on it when she’d first led him through the flat. It was nothing like their family piece, or at least it wasn’t that piece. The inlays in that breakfront had been swans. How had she forgotten? Sarah had named the swans. These insets were sphinxes. You’d have to be blind to mistake one for the other. Willfully blind. She crouched down to look at the legs. These were straight. The legs of the piece she’d grown up with had been gently curved. She stood and went on looking down at the piece. Fälschung, the woman had said. Authentisch, Millie had insisted. She had no idea whether this was a reproduction or the real thing—her knowledge of antique furniture wasn’t nearly as good as she’d pretended to Harry—but she did know that it was not the piece she’d thought, not the one that had stood in the parlor of their house. She couldn’t imagine how she had confused them. Only suddenly she could.
She had to tell David. She looked at her watch. It was after nine. He might be on another mission to Stettin or on his way to the British sector to see the knockout aid worker. She had no intention of trying to track him down in either case. And there was only one other person who would be interested.
* * *
He was in his uniform khakis, a tee shirt, and bare feet again.
“I owe you an apology,” she said before she even stepped into the apartment.
“Probably more than one, but for what in this specific instance?”
“That Biedermeier breakfront.”
“You mean Art History 101 let you down? It’s a reproduction?”
“I don’t know if it’s fake or authentic, but it’s not the one I thought it was.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She didn’t answer.
“Okay, I won’t gloat. But as long as you’re here, you might as well come in.”
He stepped back. She stepped into the apartment. He closed the door behind her.
She reached up and put her hand against his cheek. “I hope you’ve shaved recently.”
“What?”
“Just a private joke.”
“Want to let me in on it?”
“Maybe. Eventually.”
It went on from there. She supposed she’d known it would. That was why she’d had to tell him. Even if she’d been able to find David, she would have had to tell him.
Nothing had prepared her for making love with Harry. Not the weekend back in the States with the medical officer who was shipping out. That had been a desperate end run around the specter of death. Not the times with Theo when they’d thrashed and panted in that overcrowded bed and tried to pleasure themselves into amnesia. Certainly not the one-night stand with Harry when even locked together, hungry and breathless and desperate on her part, she’d managed to keep him, and herself, at arm’s length. Nothing had prepared her for making love with Harry except the last months with Harry. Somehow all the disagreements and misunderstandings, the times they’d snapped at each other and the times they’d declared uneasy truces, the shared horror of damp basements festering with evil and photographs of murderous lies had bred that most elusive human connection, trust. It was a powerful aphrodisiac. It electrified touch and heightened sensation. Mouth to mouth, skin to skin, it inflamed. It made them laugh at the wonder of their coming together after all this time and hushed them into wide-eyed silence as they put a few inches between their sweat-slicked, shocked-with-joy faces to measure each other’s desire. She took his maimed hand and licked the wound. He moved his other hand. Does this please you? it asked. His tongue. Does this? And this? And this? Does this excite you? her mouth taunted in return. And this? And this? Until finally the watchfulness gave way to abandon. He was above her, and she locked her legs around his hips and hung on for dear life. She straddled him, and he bucked with bliss. Little by little, then faster and faster, they yielded to each other and themselves. A moment, or a lifetime, later, her world exploded in a galaxy of light. When her vision cleared, she looked down at him in time to see his face contort with the agony of pleasure and hear his howl split the Berlin night.
* * *
He woke her twice in the darkness, once intentionally to make love, a second time inadvertently when his cry split the night again, though
this time not in passion, at least not that kind of passion. She couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, or rather there was no sense, only a string of curses alternating between English and German. “Bastards,” he cried. “Drecksack. Sons of bitches. Schweinehunde.”
Mary Jo had told her about the wards at night with men howling curses and shouting warnings to buddies and begging for their mothers. But beside her now the curses turned to moans, and these were not battle cries but pleas for forgiveness. “Verzeihung,” he begged. “Verzeihung,” he sobbed.
She shook him gently, enough to startle him out of the nightmare but not to wake him completely. He murmured something and wound himself around her. It took her a little longer to fall back to sleep. She kept wondering what he’d done to be forgiven for.
Neither of them mentioned the incident in the morning. There was nothing odd about that. People frequently didn’t remember being saved from themselves in their sleep. But she had a feeling he did and didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t blame him. Trust doesn’t demand full disclosure any more than family ties do.
Twenty-Five
The thing about Harry, she’d think at odd moments when she was sitting in her office or standing under the shower or lying next to him while he slept during the long days of summer that gradually began to shorten, was that he had an uncanny sense of her interior weather. It never occurred to her to ask how he’d come by that exquisite sympathy. No, not sympathy, empathy. All she knew was that he sensed when her furies were circling. And he knew that at those times she was beyond his reach. But at other moments when she emerged from the blackness, he tried. God, did he try. She wondered how she’d gotten so lucky. She knew she didn’t deserve to be.
The Living and the Lost Page 25