Lauren sensed the nerves running through Wilhelm, but years in the medical field told her there was little one could do to help them. Honesty was the biggest priority, and one could not substitute truth with comfort. Wilhelm’s nerves only worsened when they landed in Chicago and waited for the rental car. It was a gorgeous December day, and Lake Michigan was a frozen sapphire with steam rising from it. The skyscrapers of the city stood tall. Russell drove the rental car north toward one of the city’s affluent suburbs. The homes were much larger than anything Wilhelm had ever stayed in, with only the Hauser’s house being an exception. The roads and driveways were well plowed and shoveled, and the lawns were coated with half a foot of snow. If Hannah lived here, it meant she lived a comfortable life.
Wilhelm was in the very city Hannah lived. It was the closest he had been to her since they had kissed goodbye that fateful Christmas morning. He twirled the blue rose in his hand. Its color had faded, and its petals looked as though they could fall off at any moment. Both the blue rose and Wilhelm belonged to Hannah and, soon, both would be back in her possession.
Final Dance
The horrors of war never truly faded, but Hannah had learned to silence her demons. Her life in America had been everything she had hoped it to be. Her home contained a lifetime of memories and knick-knacks from her apartment in New York City, her first home in Milwaukee and, now, her home of thirty-nine years in Lake Forest. Photographs were everywhere, and some would say there were too many. Hannah had made the most of her life, but she never sat idly by when it came to elections. Democracy was something taken for granted by many but only because, even though colonists had lived under the unfair rule of a British King, Americans had never lived under the rule of a dictator.
She was active in Holocaust testimonies and worked to help Jewish survivors adjust to a life away from their homes and tried, through legal processes, to help return Jewish possessions to the families they were stolen from. In America, she had worked for Civil Rights and marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and thousands during his march on Washington and his famed “I have a dream” speech. She had voted for General Eisenhower for president in 1950. There was no better man for the job, as the new war seemed imminent, than the Supreme Allied Commander of the Second World War. It was the first time she had voted in a presidential election, and only possible after she became an American citizen. She had volunteered to support the young John F. Kennedy in 1960 and had even traveled to Berlin to hear him speak to her former countrymen. But a bullet ended the charismatic president’s life, and turmoil ensued. She had supported LBJ during the ’64 landslide and President Kennedy’s younger brother Bobby in ’68 before a bullet ended his campaign and his life. She had strongly opposed the Vietnam War and joined the anti-war rally. However, she understood the sacrifice the young men made. She never spoke against the soldiers—only the war.
Her bedroom drawers were full of political pins and fliers and over five thousand photographs. She almost always had a camera on her. In her bedroom, she had drawings and paintings of every person who had helped her survive. But as time went by and her memories diminished, she could no longer remember the small details that made individuals stand out. She still had the painting of the sunset of purples and oranges done by Radley at his farmhouse. It hung in her hallway. She loved her two-story home, but it was empty now that her children were gone and her husband had passed away almost ten years ago. Truthfully, she had always preferred Milwaukee more than Lake Forest. It had a strong German aura that reminded her of her childhood home and the best years of her life with Wilhelm and their friends.
She kept every photograph of Wilhelm hidden in drawers, away from her husband’s eyes and her children’s. There were too many questions the photographs would attract, the answers to which would cause too much pain. They were like ships carrying treasure that had sunk in an ocean of memories—memories that she wanted to keep for herself. Children wanted to believe their parents were soulmates—the one in a million type. But the truth was though her husband had been kind to her, it had taken many years for their friendship to advance to anything further. Even after they had married, it took a decade for her to truly love him. Being a foreigner was a scary time during the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Red Scare made all foreigners out to be Soviet spies. Her husband, Clayton Lauer, had given her a sense of security she could not have achieved on her own. But now that her children had moved out and her husband had passed, Wilhelm’s photos and the blue rose he had given her adorned her nightstand beside her bed.
The setting sun poured into the kitchen as Hannah dried the last of her dinner dishes. She was now seventy-seven years old, and the tattoo on her left forearm had faded and smeared. The black ink looked more forest green in color now. Her arm had age spots and had gotten saggy in her old age. She did not consider herself a vain person, but looking in the mirror had become a depressing necessity.
A dark red colored car drove past, and Hannah took special notice of it. She knew each of her neighbors’ cars, and the neighborhood itself was in the middle of a series of left and right turns that were far away from any highway or busy city streets. Whoever drove past had intended to be driving on that road. A car door shut, and Hannah could tell it was her driveway the car had pulled into. She tossed the towel onto the kitchen counter and peaked through her living room blinds. The car pulled away and drove the same way it had come from. Perhaps, the driver was truly lost. But a soft knock permeated through the door and penetrated the house. Hannah opened it. An elderly man smiled at her.
“Hannah?” the man asked.
“Yes?” Hannah answered, studying the man’s face. It was oddly familiar to her but in the most peculiar way, like she had known him from a dream or another life.
“Hannah Goldschmidt?” the man asked.
Hannah was taken aback and partially alarmed. She had never gone by Goldschmidt in America. Her name had been Hannah Smith until she had married Clayton Lauer in 1957 and taken his surname. She studied the man’s face, but it was his eyes Hannah found. When he stared into her brilliant blue eyes, hers met his. And, in an instant, she knew exactly who the man was.
“Wilhelm,” Hannah muttered.
In her shock was absolute certainty. Her hand went to her mouth to cover it, and she didn’t blink for nearly a minute. Wilhelm smiled, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. He had always feared she would forget about him entirely.
“Yes, Hannah,” Wilhelm said, holding out the blue rose in his hand.
She rushed forward and hugged him.
“How?” Hannah asked, her voice was barely audible.
“There is so much that happened, Hannah. To me. But to you too. I am so sorry for what happened to you and your parents,” Wilhelm said.
Hannah could barely comprehend what he had said, for she had been rethinking the last five decades of her life.
“Part of me always thought you were alive, Wilhelm. I waited for you,” Hannah said, taking the blue rose from him—it was the very same she had dyed and dried in 1947. “I lived with your father in 1947, helping in his shop. But he told me I needed to move on. I wrote you a letter.”
“I was in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp until 1955, Hannah. My father passed away before I returned home, and everything was in boxes and in storage, and the shop was closed when I returned home. Your name was on the list of victims at Auschwitz,” Wilhelm said.
There had been so many events and significant people that had allowed Hannah to live such a long and fruitful life. Each name deserved a proper story, and to limit the length simply for convenience was a disgrace to their memory. Hannah invited Wilhelm inside and disappeared into the kitchen to prepare a cup of coffee. Wilhelm hovered in the living room, gazing at the dozens of photographs adorned on the wall—photographs of children she had and her wedding. Hannah had moved on in a way Wilhelm had never been able to.
Hannah, with two cups of coffee in her hands, looked on in silence. Wilhelm was hypnotized
by the wedding photo. She had always been beautiful—young but beautiful—but in her wedding photo, when she was in her mid-thirties, she had truly transformed into a gorgeous woman. None of the other faces in the photograph were known to him, and Wilhelm’s eyes kept returning to Hannah in that striking dress. A series of emotions washed over him—some soft like a calm tide and others, a rogue wave.
“He passed away a few years ago,” Hannah said, interrupting the silence and breaking Wilhelm’s trance.
“I’m sorry to hear,” Wilhelm said.
“Stay here. I want to show you something.”
Hannah struggled up the steps to her bedroom. Wilhelm continued to look at the photographs. Each one caused him heartache. They were memories the two of them should have shared—children they should have raised and vacations they should have taken. He could only hope the man in the photo had treated Hannah like the queen she was. Hannah came back down with a handful of framed photographs.
“I was staying with your father before I was taken to Auschwitz. I had forgotten a manila folder on your nightstand. All of these photographs and the blue rose you gave me were in it. Had I remembered it, it would have been destroyed or lost at Auschwitz,” Hannah said.
Wilhelm took the first photograph in his hand. His younger self stared into the eyes of a young Hannah and was immortalized on the glossy five-by-seven-inch photograph. Their arms were wrapped around each other. Heinrich and a girl he had forgotten were beside them, and Lena stood in front of Erich. Even with the picture being black and white, Wilhelm was transported back to Lena’s cabin. The sunshine beat on the back of his neck, burning his skin. The breeze wafting off the water made Hannah’s hair dance. Their laughter echoed in his ears. The next photograph was of Wilhelm, Erich, and Heinrich preparing dinner on a Friday night.
“I saw Heinrich after the war. In 1950, he visited New York City, and I met him and his wife there. Patricia. It was so great to see him. They lived just over two hours away when I lived in Milwaukee,” Hannah said, the memory bringing a smile to her face.
Heinrich had been fortunate to be sent to the western front. Fate had taken a cruel turn when it had sent Wilhelm to the east. Yet, fate had forced both him and Hannah to make cruel turn after turn to the point where they could no longer remember how to get out of the macabre maze.
The last framed photo was of Wilhelm and Hannah dancing in the snowfall in Berlin. The white border of the photograph was signed Berlin 1939. It was the last photograph taken of the two. The snow fell under the city light. Hannah and Wilhelm held each other close. The blue rose he had given her so long ago was inside the picture frame.
“You kept it,” Wilhelm said with teary eyes.
Hannah nodded. She too had tears in her eyes. Wilhelm tried his best to keep his from falling. He had not come here to make her cry. There was so much to talk about—the forgettable and the unforgettable. But how do you pick up where you left off when it was nearly sixty years ago? They had been together for only less than two years. Hannah had been married to her husband twenty times longer.
They sat at her kitchen table, sharing glasses of wine, fits of laughter, and moments of tears. She told him about the farmer and his wife, Eleanor, Trugnowski, Radley, and Josephine, and he told her about Höring, Jonas, Aaron, Torben, Old Uncle Joe, and Alexander Kozlovsky. As she recalled her own heroes and listened to Wilhelm’s, the difference between Catholicism and Judaism filled her mind. In Catholicism, the savior had come. He was Jesus Christ. But in Judaism, the savior had yet to come. But Hannah no longer found that to be true. The savior was neither a man nor a woman. The savior was a group of people. The savior was Eleanor Cole, Rafel Trugnowski, Josephine Moreau, Radley Durand, the Czech farmer, and his wife. And the savior was Wilhelm. Wilhelm had experienced the same—Hannah, too, had been his savior. The two had kept each other alive with memories of the past and hopes of the future, which overpowered the direness of the present during their crucibles. But their fates would never be one again.
Wilhelm rose to his feet and hugged Hannah goodbye. He walked out the front door. Hannah stood in her doorway. Flashes of watching him leave on that fateful Christmas morning came back to her. She had let Wilhelm go then. She had ignored her intuition and the terrible ominous feeling that had swept over her as he had left. She would not repeat that mistake again.
“Wilhelm!” Hannah yelled.
Wilhelm turned to look at her. Russell and Lauren were in the dark red rental car parked in the driveway. Their hands were entwined, and both were overcome with emotion. Russell had not expected his life to change when he had walked into that bar in Schönfeld, Germany in 1989, but it had. Both he and Lauren had a strong understanding that their careers came before their relationship. But Wilhelm and Hannah’s story had redefined their priorities.
“I don’t want you to think I got over you,” Hannah said, gently taking Wilhelm’s hands in hers.
“You don’t have to explain, Hannah. You should have,” Wilhelm said.
“I never got over you. I knew I needed to, but I just couldn’t. I stared at our photo every day. I felt guilty that I loved your ghost more than my living husband. You were the man I wanted to spend my life with.”
It was a truth she could never tell her children—the truth that Wilhelm Schreiber had been the love of her life. The more time had gone on, the more she had realized it. It was no fault of Clayton. It is a rare thing, perhaps the rarest of things, to find someone to connect with, share with, confide in, and have the level of intimacy and desire Hannah and Wilhelm had had with and for one another. Wilhelm’s lip quivered, and the tears he had done so well to keep from falling slowly slid down his wrinkled cheeks. All the struggle finding Hannah had been worth it for that one sentence. Every minute of fighting in the fields, in the streets, inside the apartment buildings, every frozen night, and oven-hot day, every year in that Soviet camp was worth it.
The radio played loudly from the rental car. The song had been one Hannah and Wilhelm had danced to on countless occasions, and it was the final card Russell and Lauren had to play. They exited the car, smiled, and walked down the street to give Wilhelm and Hannah privacy. The headlights of the vehicle were like a spotlight at a theatre and cast them in a blue lighting. The stars shined overhead, and the snow fell.
“May I have this dance?” Hannah asked.
“Always,” Wilhelm answered, taking her hand.
They danced slowly to the music, staring into each other’s eyes. It was a mysterious thing that the crow’s feet around their eyes vanished. The longer they stared, the more they found their wrinkles smoothening out and the skin tightening and regaining its healthy glow. Both their white hair returned to its true color—Wilhelm’s to jet black and Hannah’s to nearly white blonde. Their bodies shed the excess weight they had gained over the years, and age itself reversed like the hands of a clock. Hannah and Wilhelm were young again. Wilhelm held her close, the blue rose gently pressed between their hands. Perhaps, it was a mirage of what could have been or maybe a higher spirit had taken pity and granted them a Cinderella-type experience with an unknown curfew.
There are a handful of moments that shape—that define—a person’s life, and Wilhelm could remember them all, but in that moment, he let go of every one of them, except Hannah. In those four minutes the song lasted, all was right in the world for the first time since 1939. Wilhelm and Hannah were dancing once again.
About the Author
Forever Fleeting is the debut novel by Bret Kissinger. He has taken his passion of writing and history and combined them into a truly compelling novel set during the Second World War. He was born and lives in Wisconsin.
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