by Matt Killeen
Sarah wanted to tell her everything, to open the door, to accept her help. To be held—
But she knew that Clementine would die if she did.
“You can handle it,” she managed. “Leave me alone.”
Clementine swore and complained, but eventually she went away and Sarah was alone.
* * *
She was going to die.
She wanted to be held. Sarah knew that Lady Sakura’s arms and Lisbeth’s touch, the warmth of another person, was itself a drug. And now, when she needed to be at her most independent, she craved more. Now, when her own touch would be a death sentence for those welcoming arms.
But a touch would make this easier. If she wasn’t alone, she wouldn’t be scared.
* * *
She was going to die.
She floated. If she thought too much about it, she found herself lying in the blood-soaked sheets again, so she cleared her mind. She wafted from one side of the room to the other as the ceiling fan turned. Her vision was so beset by tiny sparks and stars that the walls became an infinite white space to sail through. But each time she traveled, no matter how long she journeyed, she always returned to this same room and the stench of feces and blood and pain.
* * *
She was going to die.
There was a terror in that thought. A state of nonexisting. A state that she couldn’t imagine, but would not be able to feel once it had happened. It was the ignorance that scared her. Everything she had failed to learn, she had sought to belittle, to ignore. But this could not be disregarded, or neglected.
* * *
She was going to die.
She wondered if she had led a good life, knowing that in the last year alone she had caused the deaths, or worse, of half a dozen people. All her achievements were selfish actions of survival that destroyed, blundering through people’s lives, breaking, wrecking, ruining.
She immediately rejected that thought. Her life had been one misery and torture after another, brightened only by spiced sausage or coffee or peanut butter bought by a monster. A good life or a bad life, all of this had happened to her. There was no judging her. She would not be judged.
She wondered if she would end up in the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Hell, with the murderers, the war-makers, thieves, tyrants, and all the other Jews . . . and she started to giggle.
Her lips felt both dry and wet. With great effort Sarah touched them and found the tips of her fingers were bloody. Not long now.
* * *
She was going to die.
Tears welled up in her eyes and she let them. It was a vast and terrible thing, this sadness. As huge as a storm cloud and just as insubstantial. A vague emotion that was unmissable in its sheer scale, yet couldn’t be touched.
Mutti, she called into that cloud.
* * *
She was going to die.
She was angry now. The desire to scratch and slap and punch, to hit bullies with rocks and wound the nauseating men and their cloying, greasy desires, to push that butter knife between the ribs of the man who drugged her, to paint herself with his blood, to seize Elsa’s gun and pull the trigger again and again, each time whooping with the tearing, vaporizing destruction it wrought. To set upon the White Devil in his rubber overalls, to rip the mask from his aging face and beat it bloody. To make Bofinger pay for the thousands of dead people, to pay back the French for the corvées and prestations, and the Belgians for the mutilation and chicote floggings, and the Germans for the annihilation, and the Nazis for their hate and their spite and their whippings and acid baths and marches to the woods, and the people who let that happen—
Sarah wanted to burn the world and felt the flames consume her first as she sat on her bloody throne.
* * *
The Mouse stood by the side of the bed. So small and frail and yet so alive, with those eyes so wide and round, ready to be lost in tales of puppies or kittens or gossip, so near to fear yet so removed from it.
She was fiddling with her uniform skirt, which was too big and had to be folded over at the top. Sarah wondered why she hadn’t noticed this before.
“Mouse!” cried Sarah. It hurt to open her mouth, and making a noise was like swallowing a knife.
“Hello, Haller, how are you?”
“I’m sick, Mouse,” Sarah managed.
“Yes, you are. They should take you to the sanatorium, Frau Klose will give you something for it.”
“There isn’t anything I can take for it, Mouse. It’s the Bleeding. I’m dying.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. Does that mean you won’t be back next term?”
“I’m sorry, Mouse.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I didn’t listen to you.”
“I didn’t say anything, Haller.”
Sarah thought she could hear snuffling and scratching at the door.
“Everything you went through . . .” Sarah managed.
“Yes, and then you left me. But it’s all right. You had a really important job to do.”
There was a yelp and a growl. The door shuddered.
“Really? You know about that?” Sarah said breathlessly.
“No, Haller,” she said, her voice hardening as it had the day that Sarah turned her back on her. “I don’t know that at all. I’m not really here. All I know is that you left me. That you didn’t care.”
The dogs at the door began howling and barking. The wood began to splinter.
“I’m sorry, Mouse, really I am.”
“Tell yourself what you need to, meine Schlafsaalführerin.”
“Oh, Mouse . . .”
“I didn’t hate anyone until I met you, Haller. I didn’t even hate Schäfer; he was just a man and all men are monsters, but you, you were a sister . . . and now you’re going to die. You loved der Werwolf so much—let them have you.”
The door flew open and the dogs came. Sarah could not wake, because she wasn’t asleep, and the dogs tore into her and ate her where she lay.
TWENTY-EIGHT
October 29, 1940
SARAH FELT SOMETHING soft between her fingers. Something like . . . hair.
Her arms were around something soft and warm, that smelled of French perfume and expensive makeup. She was being held by strong arms. She opened her eyes with difficulty, with the same sensation as pulling the skin from an orange. The door lay in pieces on the floor, and there was golden and auburn hair between her fists.
“No, no, no, no, no . . .” she croaked, a feeling of failure consuming her.
“Shh . . . it’s all right,” Lisbeth purred.
“I’m dying—you’ll die,” Sarah managed.
“You’re not dying, you have malaria.”
She felt a shaft of sunlight, of hope, immediately shadowed.
“But I’m bleeding . . . it’s l’hémorragie.”
Lisbeth relaxed her grip. “Lie down, Liebchen.”
Sarah struggled to lie down, the pain in her head worse than it had been.
Lisbeth rearranged the sheets around her, lifting them out of the way. “Relax,” she whispered, and placed her hands on her knees.
“What . . . ?”
“Trust me.”
Sarah let Lisbeth open her legs. Then she carefully placed them back together and covered Sarah with a sheet.
“You don’t know what this is?” Lisbeth said gently. “Your mother hasn’t told you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mein Engel, you’re menstruating.”
The word flitted through Sarah’s raw and battle-scarred mind, in search of a connection. Something to do with mammals.
“I still don’t . . .”
“The Regular Bleeding? Strawberry Week? It’s very heavy, but it’s normal.”
Sarah was just shaking her head now. Something
other girls at Rothenstadt had talked about.
“The Red Pest?” Lisbeth added.
“Scheiße!” Sarah’s whole body was shaking now. “This is the Red Pest? This is what happens . . . all. The. Time?” She was hyperventilating now.
“Oh, Liebchen, come here.” She gathered Sarah in and rocked her back and forth as the girl began to cry. “No, you have malaria, that’s the fever, aching, and the squits.”
“My lips . . .” Sarah touched them, quivering.
“You’re dehydrated, quite badly. Your lips are cracked. And you’re anemic. I’m going to put you on a drip.”
“I thought I had your disease. I sealed myself in here. I . . . I . . .”
“You’re very brave,” Lisbeth whispered into her ear. “That was a really courageous thing. I’m . . . proud of you.”
Sarah kept shivering, not with fear or fever now, but with something else. Relief? “How long . . . ?”
“You’ve been in here six days, I think. What did you drink?”
“Rainwater, it hasn’t stopped, I used the canteen . . . six days?” Sarah tried to pull away. “My uncle . . .”
“Your uncle is fine. Well, he’s sick, too, a very different kind of sick.”
“Ein Morphinist . . .”
“Well, there it is.”
“He was shot, he nearly died. He has a lot of pain,” Sarah said, wondering at her need to defend him.
“I’m sure . . . but he distracted me from you for too long.”
“Will he be all right?” Sarah asked.
“He’s nearly over it, but you’re my focus now. You’ve a lot of tablets to take.”
It took over a week to recover to something approaching normality, fed a steady diet of chloroquine and iron tablets. Her strength seeped back into her veins via a bottle hanging above her bed. Lisbeth soothed her, bathed her, and read to her, as she overcame the disease and the unanticipated attack of her own body.
Sarah stopped worrying. They had money, or rather Lisbeth had money and was happy to feed them. The Captain was being taken care of, although Clementine was far from happy.
“You’re a stupid, stupid, idiotic . . .” Clementine’s vocabulary failed her. “Sealing yourself off to die, with something that might have killed you only because you locked your door on me. Dumme Schlampe.”
Sarah looked up sharply, filled with a sudden rage. “I was trying to watch out for people like you.”
“People like me? What do you mean, people like me?” Clementine growled.
“People, humans, the team, my servant, whatever.”
“So I was supposed to be happy you were dying?”
“I didn’t think you’d care,” Sarah muttered.
“Of course I care,” Clementine grumbled. Then she stopped and looked down. “I mean, who’s going to take me home if you die? Herr Morphinist, the wonder-spy, who can’t get out of bed?”
“Well, you could have broken down the door yourself . . . or climbed in through the window.”
“Oh yes, black African servants breaking things on purpose aren’t beaten or dragged off on a prestation at all. Unheard of, in fact.”
“And the window?”
“I don’t like heights. Planes are one thing, shinning up the shutters to the third floor is another.” Sarah looked at her through narrowed eyes. Clementine made a face. “Hey, I’m not perfect. Never said I was.”
“How is the wonder-spy?” Sarah asked.
“He’s a mess.”
* * *
But Sarah felt reborn. Not in a joyful or celebratory way that might greet good news or a pleasant change in fortune, but in the shocking and traumatic way that a baby is ripped from the warm into the cold outside world and slapped into breathing. The rest of her life had been, unexpectedly, returned to her, but she had no idea what to do with it. She was newly and suddenly aware that she hadn’t known for some time.
Away from Clementine’s acerbic presence, Sarah smiled at Lisbeth’s face and giggled at her jokes in a way that she couldn’t remember doing for a long, long time . . . if she ever had.
And they cried. Sarah told the story of Ursula’s mother, reaching deep into her sorrow to make the story seem real, seeing her own mother’s slide into aggressive helplessness and swapping out the names and eventual fate. But the emotional weight of this, once so great Sarah staggered under it, was now like the end of a tray of ice cream. It required constant, repeated scraping to gather enough to be useful.
And Lisbeth talked about the Red Pest, about pads and bandages, about the nurses in the Weltkreig and what they discovered about battlefield dressings that had changed everything.
“What is that?” Sarah said suspiciously at the tangle of elastic and metal pins that Lisbeth was holding up.
“It’s a, you know, belt, for holding everything in place.” She began to giggle.
“You didn’t have any barbed wire to spare?” Sarah smiled and sighed. “I don’t think I’m going to enjoy being a woman.”
“You and me and all the rest, Liebchen.”
And Lisbeth told her story.
“At the end of the Weltkrieg, I was eighteen. Germany had to surrender its empire—not that anyone else felt the need to decolonize, but Germany had to be punished.” Lisbeth practically hissed that. “We had to leave our homes—driven out of the place I grew up—and went back to Germany.
“The country had been destroyed. There was no food and no work, the communists and the Freikorps were fighting in the streets, killing one another and anyone in their way.
“And we had nothing. We were missionaries without a mission, and everything we’d saved was swallowed as prices rose. The banknotes were so worthless you needed a wheelbarrow load to buy a loaf of bread. That was when we got sick.
“Have you ever seen anyone with smallpox?” Lisbeth asked.
Sarah shook her head. “Just photos,” she murmured.
“A face full of sores and blisters, highly infectious. It’s terrifying.
“No one got smallpox in Germany back then. There were just a hundred thirty-six cases in the five years before the war, but after 1918, people were poor and malnourished, and the hospitals and doctors were overwhelmed. The disease spread through the slums, and my mother, who was helping in a soup kitchen, contracted hemorrhagic smallpox. I watched her insides dissolve into a bloody mess. Then I was infected, too, so I didn’t actually see her die—”
Lisbeth stopped talking and stared into space.
“This is hers, was hers,” she said at last, fiddling with her necklace. “Everything went in the furnace. I stole this afterward. It’s made of stone, so it didn’t burn.”
“I’m so sorry . . . How do you deal with that?” Sarah asked.
“I do this,” Lisbeth answered, gripping her necklace, closing her eyes, and screwing up her face. When she opened her eyes, she giggled and they both laughed. Then her expression became defiant. “And I became a doctor to do the work that wasn’t done, because all France and Britain and the United States were interested in was revenge. To extract every pfennig they could, and all for doing what everyone else was doing—making empires, making money, causing trouble . . . but look where it got France. I think we’ll see that the French got off lightly. What do the Chinese say? ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’”
“Confucius . . .” Sarah looked at the floor. “Only it’s more, ‘attacking a task from the wrong end can do nothing but harm.’”
“Oha! How do you know that kind of thing?”
“Says the doctor,” Sarah pointed out.
“Yes, but I’m a grown-up. Didn’t you ever play?”
Sarah saw the taunts of the other children, the beatings, the hunt for food, the alcoholic mother, her belongings sold—
“In my own way,” Sarah said softly.
; Sarah thought about something.
“Smallpox,” she began. “The blisters, don’t they . . . ?” She trailed off as Lisbeth met her gaze.
Lisbeth blinked and Sarah saw something deep, dark, and painfully desolate behind those eyes. She slowly drew a finger down her cheek and turned the tip toward Sarah, a smear of greasepaint glistening at its end.
“Maybe if I were brave, I’d show the scars off as a badge of honor. Maybe if I didn’t care . . . but I do. So, I chose to be strong, instead of hard, and,” she added, smoothing the paint back into her cheek, “an artist.” She smiled.
Sarah opened her mouth to speak, but Lisbeth spoke first.
“Just don’t say it doesn’t matter, because you’re a clever girl and you know that isn’t really true.”
There was an edge to her voice that discouraged another question. Sarah changed the subject. “So you didn’t stay in Germany?”
“It wasn’t my home, and anyway, who wants a woman doctor at the best of times? Especially one that looks like this.” She laughed without mirth. “Just those with no choice.”
* * *
When the Captain was finally able to see her, he looked washed out and gray, like a man twice his age.
How old is he?
Sarah dismissed the thought.
“I had no idea how sick you were,” he said, something approaching but not quite touching contrition.
“If you had, there would have been nothing you could have done about it.”
Sarah thought about that sentence again and regretted it. She had no wish to attack him, but there was no way to say any of it without the implicit criticism.
“How do we proceed?” Sarah began again.
