“Did something happen?” Hannah asked.
Herman had been watching Hannah’s eyes as they took in the house and the change in her demeanor. It was enough for him to answer.
“Jakob and my sister committed suicide days before the Soviets entered the city. They did not want to face the repercussions for what Jakob was involved with,” Herman said.
Hannah knew “involved with” meant the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables.”
“I am sorry to hear. Your sister was always kind to me,” Hannah said. But she was less sorry than what she had said. In truth, Jakob Hauser had gotten the fate he deserved if he was involved with orchestrating the deaths of millions. Though Ida certainly wasn’t involved, she stood behind her husband.
“The whole thing is a fucking mess. Sorry for my language,” Herman said.
Hannah found people who swore to be more honest. It meant they did not filter what they said and were generally more impulsive. Her parents had always told her to think before she spoke, but as she grew older, she realized that, sometimes, that wasn’t always good. If you had to “choose your words,” you weren’t being honest.
“What about Lena?” Hannah asked.
“Her parents had encouraged her to end her life too. Her husband had been killed. But she had just had a baby boy. She would face whatever came. The Soviets stormed in with their tanks and troops and considered everything in Berlin to be their property. She didn’t tell me, but I know they had a go at her—on more than one occasion. They shaved her head and put a swastika on her forehead with bright red lipstick. She wasn’t allowed to wash it off. She held on for as long as she was able. I was too late. She ended it—for herself and her son.”
Lena had not deserved the fate she had received. Hannah often wondered how grand and great life had been for Lena during the early part of the decade. She pictured endless parties and gatherings. Her family was rich and prominent. She loved Erich, and he loved her. It would have been easy for Hannah to have been jealous, and when she thought long on it, she had been. Hannah had faced horrors she would never forgive or forget, and so had Lena.
Lena had had to make the horrible choice of killing her child before taking her own life. Hannah could hardly fathom contemplating that let alone carrying it out. The time between killing her baby boy and killing herself was most likely a few seconds, but what anguishing bereavement she must have experienced, and for Lena, it certainly had lasted much longer than seconds.
Lena was far from being the only German woman to be raped by the Allies. Estimates—that God-awful, heartless word—conservatively figured around 100,000 women in Berlin alone. It was a horror Hannah had been spared from. Whether for love or lust, sex was a choice. It was a deeply intimate vulnerability, and she could not imagine the horror of having a strange man force himself upon her. Lena had saved Hannah’s life and had been her best friend but, like so many others, she was now gone.
“Where is she buried?” Hannah asked.
“Out back,” Herman answered.
He led her through the back of the house and to the patio door. As they passed through the living room, she looked up to the room where they had played cards on so many nights. For a quick moment, she thought she could hear laughter coming from it but knew the memory had become tangible in a way more like a dream than a memory. Herman opened the door, and Hannah stepped out into the snow-covered yard. But there was no tombstone, no monument.
“Where?” Hannah asked.
“I left it unmarked. I want them to stay at peace,” Herman said.
It was an appalling thought that someone would dig up a dead woman. But Lena and her family were prominent Nazis, and there had been such a strong, but deserved, hatred for them since news of the Holocaust had broken. Herman, no doubt, had feared what would have been done to her body had he gone for a more traditional ceremony. Instead of being gathered by those who loved her, Lena had been buried by her uncle in secret.
“You were close?” Herman asked.
Hannah nodded. There was far too much to go into, and Hannah did not think she could say it without choking up. Somewhere inches in front of her and feet below was a woman Hannah had known and loved. It was the closest to closure Hannah was able to receive for those who she had lost. She had only seen Trugnowski shot down in front of the infamous black wall at Auschwitz. Eleanor, Josephine, and Radley had all been killed without Hannah seeing, and she only knew of her mother’s passing from finding her coat at Kanada and had to assume her father had met the same fate.
She thanked Lena’s uncle, and after a long caesura, she left. Berlin had beaten her heart with a club and left it in an alleyway to bleed out. But Hannah had experienced such a feeling before. She loved that city and the people who made it so special. But, now, they were all gone.
As she boarded a bus and headed south to Schönfeld, she found herself looking at the heaps of concrete and steel rubble. The buildings would be rebuilt, and one would never be able to tell the carnage once there. But to Hannah, Berlin was not a city of steel and concrete skyscrapers, building complexes, and homes. To Hannah, the city of Berlin had been like a rare China dish—a rare China dish the Nazis had taken and smashed into bits of porcelain. The dish could be put back together, but the cracks could never go away or be hidden. It would never be pristine again. The city no longer had the feeling of home she thought it would have when she returned. But her parents were the ones who had made it home. Even though she recognized there was not much of Germany that had been left untouched by war, she held out hope that Wilhelm’s father was alive and well.
As the train took Hannah across the city ravaged by war and collapsed from conquest, she thought of how life seemed to be a revolving circle. Less than thirty years earlier, Europe was in the same state. However, Berlin was in a far worse shape than it had been at the end of the first war. Children stacked piles of bricks for fun, mothers showed both American and Soviet soldiers photographs of their sons, and women offered themselves to soldiers for packs of cigarettes and food rations. The opulent age of Berlin had died. But the damage was not exclusive to Berlin. The areas between cities were covered with craters, where heaps of earth had been blasted upward. Schönfeld had been one of the most beautifully simplistic cities Hannah had been to, but the cost of war had reached it too.
Hannah walked through the city and tried to remember where the “Rote Blumen” was. Her sense of direction was based on buildings and store signs, but so many of the buildings had been destroyed and store signs taken down due to closings. But walking gave her peace, and after meandering for an hour, mostly because of a decrease in courage, she found herself standing in front of the “Rote Blumen.” It too had fallen prey to a devastated economy. Nobody had money to spend on flowers, given it was hard enough to acquire enough food to support a family.
The city moved with people but in such a different way. Before, it had been filled with busy people shuffling across streets filled with purpose and destination. Now, people wandered aimlessly like zombies. She left the closed, dark store and tried to ignore the pessimistic feeling growing in her stomach as she walked to Petyr’s home. The house had not changed, and it was unclear if he had been extremely fortunate or if he had seen to repair any damages. Wilhelm had told her, and she knew from her time with him, Petyr was a meticulous man with several obsessive-compulsive disorders. He would not be able to allow damages to remain untreated.
She rang the doorbell and waited. Each second she waited only increased her worry and it was possible if she waited any further, she would puke. But the door opened.
“Hannah!” Petyr said as his eyes widened and mouth gaped open.
But after a moment of paralysis brought on by shock, he smiled. He seemed to have aged twenty years since the last time she had seen him. He coughed into his sleeve before opening the door fully and allowing Hannah to come inside.
“I am so glad you are okay,” Hannah said, wrapping him in a hug.
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“I was so worried about you. You left, and I didn’t hear from you. I called your apartment every day. I even went to look,” Petyr said.
It took nearly an hour to tell Petyr all she had been subjected to. The pain her words caused showed on Petyr’s lined face. But she had not come for sympathy. She had come to find out about Wilhelm’s fate.
“Petyr, have you heard from Wilhelm?” Hannah asked.
Her stomach was a rocky sea, and nerves flooded her bloodstream. The answer to all the questions and doubts over the last eight years would be answered over the course of the next few seconds.
“I haven’t heard anything. One way or another. The last I heard he was on the eastern front,” Petyr said.
Casualties were high on both the western and eastern fronts, but the eastern front had been the home of the war’s bloodiest battle and highest casualties—the Battle of Stalingrad. It was not talked about in America the way it should have been. It was the true turning point in the war.
“I should have gone with you back to Berlin, Hannah. I am so sorry,” Petyr said, his eyes pools of sorrow.
“You did not do this,” Hannah said, taking his massive hands in hers.
“No, but Germans did,” Petyr said.
“I am a German, Petyr. This was committed by some Germans, not all of Germany.”
Perhaps, it was something Hannah would not have differentiated had she stayed in Germany. But every city, apart from Vienna, had had a strong hatred toward her because she was German. But she had known Germans who had been the antithesis of everything the Nazis stood for.
Petyr coughed again. It was much more violent than a common cough and seemed to originate somewhere deep inside his chest.
“Are you alright?” Hannah asked.
“Fine. Just a resilient cough,” Petyr said. He rose from his couch and ensured his shirt was still tucked in and straight. “I have something to show you,” he said.
Hannah followed him to Wilhelm’s old bedroom. The door was shut. How long had it been since he had gone in? Petyr had always been an “out of sight, out of mind” type, and the events of the last several years made Hannah respect that way of coping.
He opened the door and for only a moment, after Hannah had taken a deep inhale, she thought Wilhelm was there. The smell gave her a temporary high as it brought an onslaught of memories and a sudden feeling of comfort. The room had looked exactly the same as the day she had left, and the manila folder was still against the lamp on the nightstand beside the bed.
“You forgot it when you left,” Petyr said.
The sight of the manila envelope started an internal fight in Hannah. She couldn’t decide if it had been a blessing or a curse. She knew what was inside the manila envelope would rip open unhealed scabs, and she would bleed all over again and, perhaps, fatally so.
“I’ll give you some time,” Petyr said.
He was not good with showing overwhelming amounts of emotion and was worse at being around it. As he descended the steps, Hannah could tell how far he was based on the volume of his cough.
She crept to the bed and sat, staring at the manila envelope, trying to prepare herself for what she would find. She slowly extended her hand for it and lifted the two metal clasps on the back. She reached inside, and her fingers pulled the glossy photographs out. She only saw the photograph for a moment before her eyes filled with tears. Her father and mother, wearing the coat Hannah had found in Kanada, smiled at Hannah from the photograph. Their love for each other and Hannah transcended the photograph and had become something palpable. Even the smell of the room had ripped the scabs open. It still smelt like Wilhelm. It had been the first thing to vanish from her memory. But it came swooping back to her in an instant. The next photograph was taken at Lena’s cabin and showed Lena and Erich holding each other in the lake, the water below their hips. Heinrich pushed Wilhelm, and the woman next to Heinrich looked uncomfortable. Hannah had forgotten her name, and even that made her sad. But so much had happened and so much time passed that she could not recall even the letter the girl’s name started with. The next photo was of her and Wilhelm dancing. Lena had taken it without their knowing until the flash went off. But it was one of Hannah’s favorite photographs of the two of them. She loved the way the snow looked under the streetlight and the way she looked up into Wilhelm’s eyes and the way his met hers.
There were a dozen photographs in all, and each was an unforgettable memory that brought back not only sights but also smells, tastes, and sounds. She could taste the wine from the photographs at Lena’s home, hear their laughter as they frolicked in the lake at Lena’s cabin, feel the coldness of winter in the photographs of her and Wilhelm standing under the streetlight with the snow dancing toward the ground, and she could smell the smoke wafting off the Hanukkah Menorah and the smell of the apple pie on the kitchen counter.
She slid her hand back into the manila folder, and at first, it found nothing but the sides. But then, it found something else. Hannah carefully grabbed it with her thumb and pointer finger. She knew what it was before she even saw it. She had spun it in her hand almost every night. It had brought her comfort and peace. The dried blue rose did not look any different than it had when she had last held it.
Hannah decorated the room with the photographs and placed the blue rose below the lamp and left the room and went to the kitchen. Petyr was boiling two potatoes and had a few vegetables cut up on the cutting board. He had grown his own vegetables, placing them in front of his windows so they could catch sunlight. The step-out porch outside his bedroom on the second floor had also been a garden, and it was too high for starving thieves to steal from it.
Both were quiet during dinner, and they rarely looked up from their plates.
“I am sorry about your shop,” Hannah said.
The words broke the silence.
“There are worse things,” Petyr said.
Even if that were true, Wilhelm had always said the flower shop had given his father the most joy. It reminded him of his late wife and being in the shop and working with flowers appeased his pain. Petyr was much more talkative than he had been any other time. He was hardly a people person and had kept mostly to himself over the years. They spent the meal talking about Hannah’s degree in nursing and her life in New York City. Petyr only listened, only making a sound if he had to cough.
“Is it alright if I stay here?” Hannah asked as she washed the dishes and Petyr dried them.
“Certainly,” Petyr said.
The following morning, Hannah went to the nearest Soviet headquarters and waited in line. Germans asked the Soviets for information about their missing men. Hannah had brought one of the photographs of Wilhelm, even though the likelihood of finding a Soviet who recognized him was slim. It would have to be by dog tags found or through prisoner-of-war reports. But the Soviets did not report their captured prisoners, nor did they take the time to catalog their dead enemy. Each person in line was shunned away, Hannah included. Hannah had briefly seen both the Soviet zone of occupation and the American, British, and French sections of Berlin. Even if all sections of the city were heaps of rubble, the Soviets had not made the same effort in helping out the people of Germany or rebuilding their destructed cities as their Allied counterparts.
Hannah returned to Petyr’s, disappointed. Petyr had warned her as much. But Hannah started her mornings by trying again every day that week. Afterward, she helped clean, volunteered at the city’s hospital, and returned to Petyr’s for a game of chess. Petyr then tended to his plants while Hannah painted. She often closed her eyes to let flashes of the faces of Eleanor, Trugnowski, Radley, and Josephine fill them. She had not painted in so long and felt like she was dishonoring the fallen with her work. But each day, she improved, and the portraits gained greater detail. She asked and showed Wilhelm’s picture to every young German man she saw, thinking perhaps somebody had served with him.
After two weeks at Petyr’s, she successfully convinced him to reopen
the “Rote Blumen.” Even if they did not sell anything, Hannah knew Petyr had missed it. He showed her how to plant, water, and organize bouquets with themes that evoked loss, celebrations, and different seasons.
During that time, the British and American zones had become one and, soon, the French zone would join and would eventually form West Germany. It was clear the Americans and Soviets had radically different views on how to rebuild Germany. The Americans wanted to help rebuild their portion into a free market democracy. The Soviets, who had lost not only millions of lives but an unknowable amount of money, demanded the Germans produce for them.
Hannah’s train rides into Berlin twice a week had shown her how different West Berlin was from East Berlin, and the gap grew with each trip. West Berlin was being rebuilt and the streets repaved while East Berlin had changed little since 1945.
Hannah did what she could in the hospital, but without medicines and supplies, there was almost nothing she could do. Each night, she looked through her photographs and spun the blue rose in her hand. The question of whether or not the manila envelope had been a blessing or a curse was more lopsided than Hannah could have imagined. She never thought leaving it behind had been one of the most fortunate moments of her life. Had she remembered to pack it into her luggage, it would have been taken by the Nazis when she had arrived at Auschwitz. Hannah found comfort in Wilhelm’s old room, and when she cuddled with his pillow and closed her eyes, she could trick herself into thinking he was beside her. But for some reason, that night, she could not sleep a wink. She was attuned to every sound, and no matter how quiet Petyr tried to be, the opening of drawers and cabinets were amplified.
Hannah rose from her bed and went downstairs. Petyr was at the stove, preparing a cup of lemon tea.
Forever Fleeting Page 50