“Father,” Wilhelm said. He foolishly motioned to give his father a hug, but his father simply put out his large hand for a shake instead.
“Are you going to tell me what I am doing here, Wilhelm?” Petyr asked.
His father had never been one for small talk. Though Wilhelm had zero hesitations in marrying Hannah, telling his father was a different story. But if he wanted his father to treat him as a man, he could not act like a boy.
“Father, I am getting married. This is my fiancée, Hannah Goldschmidt,” Wilhelm said boldly.
Petyr looked from Wilhelm to Hannah, who smiled and extended her hand. His hand trembled as he shook hers, and his face contorted into a pained smile. It may have been his first in ten years.
“It is great to finally meet you,” Hannah said.
Petyr only gave another quarter-hearted, pained smile and nodded.
“Will you require a place to stay?” Wilhelm asked.
“I have made arrangements,” Petyr said sharply.
They walked one city block before Petyr put a hand on Wilhelm’s chest to stop him from walking.
“May I have a word with my son in private, please, Ms. Goldschmidt?” Petyr asked.
“Certainly,” Hannah said, moving out of eavesdropping distance.
“Is she pregnant?” Petyr asked.
“No,” Wilhelm said.
“In trouble?”
“No. Does there have to be a nefarious reason for me to be able to marry her?”
The nervousness he had initially felt had quickly morphed into annoyance and anger. He didn’t care about sounding rude for it was obvious his father didn’t. Wilhelm was no longer living under his roof. He could do nothing to Wilhelm but leave.
“You said nothing on the telephone about it,” Petyr said.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
But his father hated to be surprised, and it was a failed tactic from the start. In a matter of words, his father had turned himself into the victim. Wilhelm could have given him a bit of information on the phone.
Petyr began walking again, and Wilhelm took silent note that it was arguably both one of the longest and best conversations the two had ever had. Petyr was not a dawdler and was a firm believer in walking like you had somewhere to be. If they ever presented legislation for sidewalk speed limit minimums, he would advocate it whole-heartedly. While Petyr sped past the human sloths, Hannah and Wilhelm moped behind.
Petyr had to be enlightened about Hannah’s “condition,” as the propaganda put it. Wilhelm hated to admit it, but his father had sensed something the moment he had set foot off the bus. But that was his nature by default. He was always negative and assumed the worst. He was bound to be correct once in a while. Of all the times his father had accused him of incorrectly drying a flower or having poor taste in designing bouquets, Wilhelm felt his father was wrong. It was all preference. But Wilhelm hated that his father had to be right about Hannah.
“Hannah, I will meet you at your house later,” Wilhelm said.
Hannah did her best to not show her surprise. After all, it had been part of the plan to tell Petyr together. They believed it would lead to less likelihood of an incident, an incident being Petyr shouting at Wilhelm in front of passing pedestrians. Wilhelm gave her another nod, and Hannah crossed the street while Wilhelm and Petyr continued on.
The streets were too busy with people trying to reach their destinations on time, and there were far too many conversations for anyone to care about what Wilhelm and his father talked about. It was a bright-blue-sky kind of day, and the weather was thick and hot. But if there was one man who had the ability to produce clouds of gray gloom, it was Wilhelm’s father.
“You have something to tell me?” Petyr asked, sensing trouble like a bird before a storm.
“I do. Hannah is Jewish, Father,” Wilhelm said.
Petyr rolled his eyes and groaned. “How can you be so stupid, Wilhelm?”
He had nearly yelled it, and those close by stopped and looked. Perhaps Wilhelm had been wrong because, for a split second, all of Berlin had turned to look at him.
“I am not stupid. I love her. I do not care where she worships or what she believes in.”
“If they find out, you will be shipped off and sent out of the country,” Petyr said, his voice rising.
“I know,” Wilhelm said.
Petyr was ready to either implode or explode. For the sake of the innocent people beside them waiting for the light to turn red so they could cross, Wilhelm hoped his father would choose to implode to lessen the number of casualties.
“I called you here because I want you to be there. For my mother’s sake. If it is something you cannot do, please board a bus and return home. I am marrying Hannah with or without you there. And I did not invite you here to ask your permission,” Wilhelm said firmly.
The light turned red. But Petyr and Wilhelm stayed on the curb as dozens moved past. There were a hundred things Petyr wanted to say, which he had expressed silently through a dozen facial expressions.
“You should have told me in advance. I could have prepared a floral arrangement,” Petyr said.
Petyr was hardly an anti-Semite. He did not care enough about people to classify them, but he was not willing to meet Josef and Emma at their shop or their home above. Instead, they met at the Tiergarten where they could distance themselves from the bustling city and the hawk’s eyes. Wilhelm had warned Hannah’s parents that his father was a man of few words and it was best to not push the conversation if it was not natural.
“Expect a lot of one-word answers,” Wilhelm had said.
After the awkward conversation of less than fifty words had run its course, Petyr went to his motel room, and Hannah and Wilhelm went to meet Father Declan, the Roman Catholic priest Emma had mentioned.
The Holy Cross Church was an ancient building that had seen some recent restoration to it. The inside was covered in a bright white paint that mimicked the light people professed to seeing during near-death experiences. A golden trim danced around it with sculptures of saints behind the altar. The giant cross with the figure of Jesus nailed to it hung in a way that made it look like he was looking into the eyes of every parishioner.
Both Hannah and Wilhelm thought it would have been discourteous to not join the mass. Hannah had to whisper answers to Wilhelm’s questions throughout. She explained the differences between Judaism and Catholicism with the major difference in their belief—the Messiah was not Jesus Christ but was yet to come. When the mass ended, the priest, cloaked in white robes that drowned his thin frame, shook hands with many. After the entire clergy had cleared from the church, Hannah and Wilhelm approached Father Declan. His hair was as white as his robes. He appeared to be in his seventies, but his charming smile matched that of a man a quarter his age.
“I have not seen you here before,” Father Declan said, extending his hand. Wilhelm shook it first and then Hannah.
“No, Father. I am Wilhelm Schreiber, and this is my fiancée, Hannah Goldschmidt,” Wilhelm introduced.
“Pleasure,” Father Declan said politely. He flashed his charismatic smile a second time as he surveyed the young couple. “You would like to be married here?”
“We understand that you help those with no other choice,” Hannah said.
“I am an extension of the Lord our God, Miss,” Father Declan said.
“You marry those the Reich would not allow,” Hannah clarified.
The Nazis not only had problems with Judaism but with Catholicism as well. They did not like any organization able to bend thousands to its knees apart from their own. They were removing priests from churches, and they had many spies.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” Father Declan said.
“Please, Father. We need your help,” Wilhelm pleaded.
Declan was silent as he switched glances from Hannah to Wilhelm in an attempt to decipher if their plea was a well-practiced act or a genuine call for help. Hannah wanted to re
tract her eyes from his gaze but knew to do so would look as though she had something to hide.
“Who will be present?” Father Declan asked.
“My parents and Wilhelm’s father,” Hannah answered.
“Which of you is Jewish?” Father Declan asked.
“I am,” Hannah said.
“Your passport?” Father Declan asked.
Hannah removed it from her pocket and handed it to him.
“You have been marked,” Father Declan said, looking the passport over.
The front cover had the Nazi Eagle near the top with the words “German Reich” above it. Declan flipped open to the second page. A photo of Hannah was on the left-hand side and on the right page, her date of birth, address, hair color, eye color, and other pertinent information. But Jews had a large red J stamped over the information.
“We were told you can help with that,” Wilhelm said.
Emma had also said that Father Declan had studied calligraphy as a part of his vocation, translating old texts into different languages. He had been born in Sheffield, England, and when the Great War broke out, he served as a priest and wandered the battlefields, giving last rights to not only the Allied powers but the Central Powers as well.
“I can. We must do this tonight. Thirty minutes past eleven. Enter through my rectory. There is a passage under the church. I will leave the door unlocked. Do not come all at once,” Father Declan instructed.
“Thank you,” Hannah said.
“I shall get to work on this,” Father Declan said, waving her passport.
He had blank copies of the information page of the passport and would have to copy the handwriting perfectly from Hannah’s passport to the new page and then glue it down perfectly so that, to the human eye, there was nothing to alert there was a hidden page underneath. It would not hold up under extreme scrutiny, but it would suffice for a quick glance. The Nazis had programmed their Stormtroopers to look for a certain type and failed to realize Jewish was not a race.
Hannah and Wilhelm stepped outside the church. The sun was high in the sky, and the temperature had not dropped in the hour they were at mass.
“I wish I could tell Lena,” Hannah sighed.
“So do I,” Wilhelm said.
It was weird to get married and not have Lena, Erich, and Heinrich present or any of their relatives apart from their parents. They would not be able to even mention it to them, for there could be no believable story to make them understand why they would have gotten married without them there. Lena’s wedding was to have over two hundred people present. If the laws changed or a new power took order, perhaps the laws would be different, and Hannah and Wilhelm could have the wedding they both wanted.
The suits displayed in the windows of the Goldschmidts’ shop had not changed in months. The only people who shopped there were fellow Jews, and as more time passed, the tighter their funds became, and necessity trumped wants.
“Wilhelm, may I have a word with you?” Josef asked.
Wilhelm followed Josef to the back of the store and the area where he took his measurements.
Hannah stepped through the black dividing curtain and walked up the steps.
“You are getting married. You will require something worthy of marrying my daughter,” Josef said. He pushed his drooping glasses back on and glanced toward the black curtain to ensure Hannah would not step back through. He opened a cabinet and carefully pulled a white penguin tuxedo with a black bowtie from it. “Barring any sudden gain in weight, these measurements should be to your liking. Emma suggested the color though she knows you are partial to black,” Josef said.
“It’s perfect. But you shouldn’t have,” Wilhelm said.
“Please, Wilhelm, we had the fabric. It only cost us time.”
“You have been so kind to me since the first day I walked into your shop.”
“If I knew you were going to be stealing my daughter from me, I would have locked my doors,” Josef quipped.
Wilhelm’s father had rejected his hug hours earlier, but a handshake didn’t display his gratitude. He hugged Josef, and Josef hugged him.
“Don’t spill anything on it,” Josef said, glaring at Wilhelm over his glasses. He gave Wilhelm a final pat on the shoulder, and the two went upstairs.
Hannah had been fasting all day as part of a Jewish custom, and Wilhelm could not fathom how hungry she must have been. There were numerous times when going seven hours without food while he slept seemed too long and he had gone into the kitchen for a midnight snack.
When the clock chimed nine times, Wilhelm bid goodbye and took his new tuxedo, covered in a black bag, and walked to his father’s motel. He could not get dressed at his apartment for it was bound to raise questions from Erich and, possibly, Lena. Wilhelm knocked on the motel door and wondered whether or not his father had left town. But the door opened, and Petyr ushered him inside.
“Can I get dressed here?” Wilhelm asked.
Petyr nodded and turned away. Wilhelm disappeared into the bathroom, showered, and dressed while his father sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the same painting on the wall across from him the entire time. It was the sort of generic painting of flowers that most likely hung in every room of the motel. Wilhelm had always been a person who could walk through an art museum in ten minutes and his father the type who could stare at a single painting for an hour.
“Something wrong?” Wilhelm asked. He had stared at his father for nearly thirty seconds, but Petyr’s gaze was fixed on the painting.
“Can you sit down?” Petyr asked.
Wilhelm almost didn’t recognize it as a question and not his usual ordering. He sat on the bed, his bow tie still untied and half of the buttons of his shirt left undone. Petyr rubbed his thumb against something in his hand—only bits of silver visible. He stopped and held it out for Wilhelm to take. But Wilhelm knew what it was before he even grabbed it. It was the same medal he had been beaten for looking at. His fingers remembered every indent of it. The hunched-over skeleton that had traumatized him as a child was as harrowing over a decade later. “Die Weltblutpumpe” the inscription read.
“The World Blood Pump. And the world bled,” Petyr said.
He took a deep breath to prepare himself for the pain his words were about to cause him.
“I’ve only told your mother this once, and I don’t know if I am strong enough to tell you it now,” Petyr started but paused to stifle his emotions already thickening in his throat, “but I will try. Verdun was called a meat grinder. That’s what it was. Both us and the French would push forward, and Verdun would spit us back into piles of flesh and bone. The thunder from the artillery did not stop. You couldn’t hear anything else, and that was fortunate. For everywhere you looked, there were people dying. The fields were littered with so many dead. I couldn’t believe the world had that many people, and I didn’t think there would be any left when the fighting stopped. We hid in trenches created from artillery, but when it rained, we had to crawl out or risk drowning in the mud. They picked us off and we picked them off. The men who were supposed to supply us with food and water were gunned down. We had no choice but to drink from the crater—drink the water laced with poisonous gas, blood, oil, and corpses. I had friends who were so sick of fighting that when the poisonous gas came, they took off their masks. It would take us six weeks to push forward a hundred meters only to be pushed back the same distance. When the artillery did break, I could only hear screaming as men looked for their legs and arms. Horses and cows neighed and mooed as they were shot. The grass was covered in blood and poison. It was hell and nothing short of it. Then, one day, the battle was over and another day, the war was over. They gave me this medal. It took me years to figure out what it meant to me and only after your mother died that I accepted what I had realized.”
“What did you realize?” Wilhelm asked.
“I am the skeleton on the coin, Wilhelm. Everything that made me who I was was burned, shot, blasted apart, and washed aw
ay. Each time I press down on the pump, I’m forced to relive it. Flashes come to me when I close my eyes—moments where I can hear the artillery, the screaming of men and beast. I can smell the decay and death. I am just bones now, Wilhelm. Whatever fragment of my soul that remained was taken by your mother, and I’m truly sorry to say there is nothing salvageable to give you.”
He squeezed Wilhelm’s hand, rose from the bed, and left the motel room. Wilhelm traced his thumb across the medal as he looked at it. The medal held the fate of his father and, once again, Wilhelm was in tears from the pain it caused. It was not that his father didn’t love him, it was simply he had nothing left to give.
Wilhelm wiped his eyes and stood. He finished buttoning his shirt and tying his bow tie and left the motel room. As he and his father walked to the church, Wilhelm made no further reference to his father’s cathartic moment. They passed the Gestapo as they crossed the streets. To instill more terror, they had German Shepherds leashed up who disliked anyone or anything but their masters. They barked and growled at anyone who got too close. Wilhelm snickered—as if dogs could sniff the Jew out of someone.
Wilhelm and Petyr turned down the street of the Holy Cross Church and headed toward the rectory. It was the same color brick as the church, gray, and separated by less than ten feet. Wilhelm knocked on the door. Father Declan opened it.
“Is Hannah here?” Wilhelm asked.
“They are in the church,” Father Declan answered.
Wilhelm and Petyr stepped inside, and Father Declan closed the door behind them, checking the streets for followers before doing so. Wilhelm introduced his father and Father Declan, and the latter led them into the basement of the rectory. He opened the wooden door, revealing a locked iron gate. Father Declan used his key, and the gate sprung forward with a scratching squeal. A fresh snowfall of dust fell from the ceiling. The mold inside the tunnel had gone untreated for decades. Father Declan held a rectangular flashlight with a single circular bulb as he led them through it. He was able to walk with his back straight, but Wilhelm had to bend his head and Petyr, nearly six feet four, had to almost crouch through the narrow tunnel. The ten feet between the church and the rectory seemed to be ten miles in such a cramped space. But they came to another gate, and Father Declan unlocked it.
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