Forever Fleeting

by Bret Kissinger

  “I guess I kind of take it for granted,” Russell said as they looked up at the Statue of Liberty.

  He had flown out of JFK airport nearly two dozen times. He had seen the Statue of Liberty from the ground, sea, and air just as many. But Wilhelm would never understand how it or what it stood for could be taken for granted. It meant freedom for all who came. The United States of America was the beacon for those seeking liberty, and it always answered the call.

  Wilhelm and Russell returned to the airport parking garage, and Russell unlocked his silver 1994 Lexus Es. The drive was four hours without traffic which, luckily, they missed a large majority of. Boston was a city of great colonial history, and Wilhelm knew of the most important events and people during America’s thirst for independence. Wilhelm had always believed the American Revolution to be a war men would be honored to fight in, and it also happened to take place before there were machine guns that could mow down hundreds of men in seconds.

  Russell lived in a luxurious apartment with his wife Lauren. She had hair the color of caramel, eyes like milk chocolate, and fair skin. Russell affectionately referred to her as his ice cream sundae. The two Dobermans Russell had spoken of barked and bared their teeth when they saw Wilhelm.

  “Mars. Jupiter. Quiet down,” Russell scolded, dropping the luggage by the door.

  “It is great to finally meet you, Wilhelm,” Lauren said, wrapping Wilhelm in a hug.

  “Thank you. It is nice to meet you,” Wilhelm said in broken English of a dozen pieces.

  Jupiter and Mars sniffed Wilhelm and had yet to decide if he was to be welcomed or chased out.

  “I may have had better luck if they were German Shepherds,” Wilhelm joked and smiled weakly.

  “They’re all talk, Wilhelm. An hour from now, they’ll be curled up by your feet,” Russell said.

  He poured three glasses of wine. Lauren could only offer a smile, for she spoke little German. She was a doctor, and the apartment had an organized, clean feel to it, much like the examination rooms at her work. Wilhelm had gotten the impression from the way Russell had talked about himself and Lauren that they both were deeply enveloped in their careers and neither had wanted to risk complacency and have children.

  Lauren had done her best to learn a few bits of German so she could be a proper hostess. She showed Wilhelm the spare bedroom he would be staying in, where the towels were in the bathroom, and granted him access to anything he wanted to eat or drink in the kitchen. Jupiter and Mars followed them into every room. They would not trust the stranger with one of their humans.

  Russell had drunk one too many glasses of wine, and the next morning, on his way to work, the miners in his head returned to hammer and chisel. He normally drank a cup of coffee with cream, but he found his headache to grow with each sip and switched to water instead when he arrived at his cubicle. He took off his dress coat and rolled up his sleeves and went to the water cooler. He waited until the editor of the paper, Matt Storin, arrived. Storin had been a graduate of Notre Dame, and Russell knew it was the way to start a conversation. Russell finished his cup of water and tossed it in a garbage can and hurried to Storin’s office. He knocked on the door frame.

  “Got a second?” Russell asked.

  “Russell, good morning. Sure, I have a moment,” Storin said, stopping unpacking his briefcase.

  “Holtz going to win more than ten this year?” Russell asked.

  “Great thing about being a Notre Dame fan is God is always on our side.”

  Russell sat and decided on how to choose his words.

  “What’s up?” Storin asked.

  “I wanted to ask about a piece,” Russell said.

  “Alright,” Storin said, leaning back in his chair and entwining his fingers.

  “Back in 1989, I was sent to Berlin to cover the Wall. I had stayed in a city in East Germany called Schönfeld. I met an older gentleman there—Wilhelm Schreiber. He was a veteran of World War Two. He fought on the eastern front at Stalingrad. He was released as a prisoner of war in 1955, more than twelve years after he was captured. He was married before he left—a marriage that took place in secret because his wife Hannah Goldschmidt was Jewish. She was sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1941 and presumably killed. But, a few weeks ago, Wilhelm found a letter from Hannah dated 1947.”

  “What are you asking to write?” Storin asked.

  Russell was slightly alarmed that Storin was not affected by anything of what he had said. But like a baseball hitter in a slump, he could only keep swinging.

  “I want to find out what happened to Hannah. I think it would make a great story. Two lovers reunited over fifty years later,” Russell said.

  “Russell, this is Boston. One of the most Catholic cities in the country. We don’t like Nazis. Nor do Americans. Nazis have been raised to mythology, said in the same breath as Satan and the black plague,” Storin said.

  “He wasn’t a Nazi. He was in the Wehrmacht. He married a Jewish woman. Does that sound like something a devout Nazi would do?” Russell asked.

  “It’s not going to read well. Our own veterans are in their seventies now, Russell. We’re losing guys every year. But there are still plenty of families who remember the war and what it cost them,” Storin reasoned.

  “This is a human story, Matt. This isn’t an American story or a German story. It’s a story about the human condition. It’s a story about love. The war tore thousands of families apart. What he went through and what he lost …” Russell argued.

  Storin was still unsure and tapped his pointer fingers against one another.

  “I know this man. The war never ended for him,” Russell said.

  “I’m sorry, Russell. This isn’t something our readers want to see in our paper. Whether or not he was a Nazi, it won’t matter in the public opinion. It will only read ‘Former Nazi Looks For Old Girlfriend.’ I can’t do it. I’m sorry,” Storin said, maintaining his stance.

  Russell had struck out and wanted to storm the mound.

  “Matt, come on,” Russell begged.

  “He was a German living in Germany during a reign of terror,” Storin said.

  “Would you punish an innocent kid from Alabama because the KKK lynched somebody? Would you punish a parishioner because the Catholic Church murdered thousands over the course of history?” Russell tried arguing further.

  “Careful, Russell,” Storin said, giving Russell a warning look over his glasses.

  “We need to break down these myths, Matt. We can’t stereotype or classify this way anymore. We’re all so much more than that.” Storin started unpacking his briefcase again. “I am going to pursue this thing,” Russell said.

  “That’s fine. You have the Globe’s resources, but it won’t make print,” Storin said.

  Russell nodded and wished silently Notre Dame lost every game the next year. He had hoped if he had printed the story, it would go national, and if Hannah were alive, she would be able to read the paper. He would have the paper’s extensive resources at his disposal but, apart from a few personal favors, it was all on him.

  He brought the picture to a friend and co-worker of his named Robby who enhanced the photograph. When Russell returned the photograph, he also gave Wilhelm a printed copy of the refurbished image. It looked identical as it had when Hannah had given Wilhelm the photo decades ago.

  Wilhelm stayed a week, but progress was slow, and he returned to Germany without much hope. Russell called him at least twice a month to give him updates, but both he and Lauren would travel for work, and there were some months where no calls were made. But in July of 1996, Russell got his first big break. Hannah had been mentioned in a single passage in a Nazi officer’s journal. The name Hannah Smith had fit her description and age. Russell had been searching under Goldschmidt and Schreiber but now added Smith. The name appeared in several declassified documents of the British Intelligence Agency.

  Russell and Lauren spent an hour every night sharing a glass of wine and pouring over thousan
ds of photographs of the war, hoping to spot Hannah. Her picture was taped to the top left of the monitor, and they constantly looked from the taped photo to the pictures on the screen for any similarities. Their goal was to look at a hundred a night, and sometimes, they went above that and other times, below.

  Russell was prone to moments of pounding his fist against the desk when nights came without success. One night, to make matters worse, his aim was off. He smashed his fist against the keyboard and sent the number keys flying from it. Jupiter and Mars came to him and licked his hand, and Lauren rubbed his shaggy hair away from his face.

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” Lauren said.

  “He’s almost eighty, Lauren,” Russell said.

  “You’re doing everything you can.”

  “Sometimes, I wonder if I had been able to do something like this for my dad if he would still be here.”

  “Your dad loved you. Your mom tells you that all the time.”

  “Well, he never showed it. Wilhelm’s a good man. I don’t want that war to claim another casualty.”

  “Then we’ll start looking at a hundred and ten,” Lauren said with an encouraging smile.

  “Thanks, sundae,” Russel said and returned the smile.

  She squeezed his hand. It was coated with dog saliva. “Oh, great,” she muttered, wiping it on his shirt.

  Adding a further ten photos a night seemed like little, but over the course of a month, it was three hundred more photos, and because of that, they discovered Hannah had worked as a nurse and aide during the D-Day invasions. But the invasion was top secret, and no unauthorized photographs were allowed to be taken. But there were a few authorized photos of General Eisenhower saying goodbye to the paratrooping soldiers in which a young blonde girl could be seen.

  Russell and Lauren had bought Wilhelm a computer, as mailing new developments took far too long. They had flown to Germany, and Lauren had shown Wilhelm how the computer worked. When they left four days later, he had been able to open his email and type, though it took him nearly ten minutes to write a single paragraph. To him, the keyboard had no pattern, and the letters shifted worse than the enigma code had. But when he opened his email and saw the photograph, the struggle had been worth it. The woman in the picture was Hannah. There was no uncertainty. The photograph was proof Hannah had experienced millions of memories since the date she had supposedly died.

  In November of 1997, Russell uncovered that Hannah had checked into Ellis Island in New York in 1944. She had lived in New York City and attended New York University for nursing. She had received her degree in 1948. Russell and Lauren flew Wilhelm to New York and brought him to the immigration building on Ellis Island and showed him where she had signed. The signature matched perfectly with the letter she had left him apart from Goldschmidt being replaced with Smith. But a graphologist confirmed Wilhelm’s certainty. The two signatures came from the same person. But the case again ran cold, and 1997 ended without further news.

  The spring months of 1998 came without much word, and Wilhelm felt every bit of his seventy-eight years of life. Perhaps, it was for the best he did not see her. At least, in this way, she could remember him for the way he looked in his youth and not the wrinkled, white-haired, and slightly overweight man he now was. It wasn’t a peace that had come over him as much as it was an acceptance. He would never see or find out what had happened to Hannah—not in this life. But the fact Hannah had lived years longer than 1941 was far more important to him.

  It was yet another Thursday for Wilhelm, and his lunch consisted of a bun covered in liver sausage and the other end with peanut butter and jam. But unlike the hundreds of other Thursdays, his telephone rang.

  “Hello?” Wilhelm answered.

  “I found her.”

  The Blue Rose

  It had to have been a dream—the same dream Wilhelm had for the last fifty-nine years. He had thought about, prayed, hoped, dreamed, and wished of returning to Hannah ever since he had left for war. There had been other women after his return in 1955—women who wanted his whole heart and had given him theirs, but Wilhelm could not. Hannah owned such a large portion of it, and what was left had been pieced and stitched back together but never whole. The women had either left or Wilhelm had ended it before they got too hurt. But he had stopped dating after turning fifty, and the last thirty years had been lonely.

  The flight to New York was filled with nerves. Russell had only told him he had found Hannah and nothing more. Lauren had a glass of wine waiting for Wilhelm and Russell when they walked in. She made small talk while Russell disappeared into his study to retrieve his findings. Wilhelm was greeted by the dogs like a grandfather by his grandchildren. Lauren tried to put an end to their jumping and licking, but Wilhelm did not mind. A moment later, Russell stepped out of the room with a manila folder in his hand and took a seat at the kitchen table.

  “Before we discuss Hannah, I thought you would like to know I found information about your friend Heinrich Hess,” Russell said.

  “Heinrich?” Wilhelm asked in disbelief. His face spread into a smile, as old memories rose from the depths to the surface. But then, he remembered Heinrich had never returned home, and his smile vanished.

  “Heinrich was taken prisoner by the Americans outside Normandy in 1944. He was sent to Wisconsin and was a prisoner of war there until the war ended in 1945. He married an American woman by the name of Patricia Ainsworth in 1946. They lived in Wisconsin and had five children. He passed away in 1992 from lung cancer at the age of seventy-two,” Russell read from his notes.

  Though he was still dead, the news changed everything. Heinrich had lived a good life, still ten years shy of what Wilhelm considered a long life, but much longer than Wilhelm had thought he had lived. He could not help but smile. Heinrich had found a woman to stifle his uncommitted spirit.

  “Thank you for telling me that,” Wilhelm said. He could have been jealous, and in ways, he was, but he was not spiteful. He was beyond grateful his good friend Heinrich had lived a great life filled with love.

  Russell, Lauren, and Wilhelm all stared at the manila envelope that looked an awful lot like a big gray elephant in the room.

  “Wilhelm, I know after these past few years, you have developed certain presumptions or thoughts on what Hannah’s life has been. I want you to tell me if you want me to read this,” Russell said.

  It was a symbol of the level of friendship Russell and Wilhelm had developed. Even if Russell had not been given the green light to write the story, he had spent nearly three years of his life researching and looking through thousands of photographs, documents, and newspaper clippings to figure out what had happened to Hannah. Yet, he knew, sometimes, the truth was more painful.

  Wilhelm had pondered over the question ever since Russell had called and told him he had found her. He had tossed and turned in his bed and sat at his kitchen table in the middle of the night, trying to come up with an answer and, truthfully, he did not know. What good could come of it? It would not change the past. But he had to know if Hannah had lived a good life.

  “Read it to me,” Wilhelm said. His tone was soft and uncommitted, but he repeated himself with a confident and strong voice.

  “Okay,” Russell said, sliding a pair of reading glasses onto his face.

  He opened the folder and pulled out a small stack of papers from the envelope.

  “Wait,” Wilhelm said. Russell’s mouth had opened but no words escaped. He looked up and pulled his glasses off. “Do you have an address?” Wilhelm asked.

  Russell nodded. To Wilhelm, it was unnerving how much information could be uncovered about someone. Strangers could learn intimate details only a few friends ever knew. It made him shudder to think what the Nazis could have done with such easy access to information.

  “She lives in Lake Forest, Illinois,” Russell said.

  Lauren rose from her seat and disappeared into her own study and came back with three plane tickets—Logan International Airport to
O’ Hare International Airport.

  “These are not refundable,” Wilhelm said, looking at the tickets and hovering over the line of saying yes and saying no.

  “This is our gift, Wilhelm. Whatever you decide to do, we will support it,” Lauren said.

  The tickets were not for until two days later, which gave Wilhelm plenty of time to mull over it. When he thought he had his mind made up on going, the unknown ushered in a plethora of questions. What if she was married? And what if her husband answered the door? Did she have children? Her life over the last fifty odd years had surely changed her. There are a handful of moments that shape—that define—a person’s life, and she had undoubtedly experienced plenty. Every answer was in the manila folder. But, perhaps, he was too old-fashioned to want to learn about someone’s life by simply reading about it. He wanted to have conversations and earn the trust that brought disclosure of personal thoughts. But Wilhelm had decided his answer. Hannah had been subjected to truly awful things and, no matter how much time had passed, he felt partially responsible for it. He needed to apologize to Hannah. He needed to see that those atrocities had not dictated her life the way they had for him.

  Russell and Lauren rearranged their schedules so they could join him. It never had to be spoken, though Lauren was much more open to discussing it, but Russell and Wilhelm had developed something of a surrogate father/son relationship. Russell had never been able to gain an understanding with his father the way he had hoped. But he recognized the same demons that had dwelled inside of his father also dwelled inside Wilhelm. It was the primary reason Lauren had no problem with Russell devoting so much time to helping Wilhelm out. But oddly, some of their best nights together were at their computer screen, sharing a bottle of wine. It was time together every night, something that didn’t always happen. Most nights, they were enveloped in their individual studies, working.

  Wilhelm recognized the sort of union he and Hannah had was exactly what Lauren and Russell had—if they could only fully embrace it and minimize life’s distractions. Lauren had come from a loving, supporting family. She and Russell considered each other equals. They supported and motivated one another to be greater than they were the day before.