The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “Good old Goering,” one of them said. “At the beginning of the war he boasted that the Reich capital would never be subjected to a single enemy bomb. If an enemy bomb reaches the capital, he said, then my name is not Hermann Goering; you can call me Meier! Well, Reichsmarschal Meier, there have been one hundred and nine air attacks on Berlin since the beginning of the year, so now we will call the air raid siren Meier’s Trumpeters!”

  “And Hitler says he’s only bombing England because Churchill called him weak,” another called out.

  “The morning after the war is over, I’m going to go on a walking tour of Germany,” a man said. “But I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do in the afternoon.”

  A few people laughed out loud, but most only chuckled quietly or said nothing. At first, Christine worried that the men were taking a chance voicing their opinions out loud, but then she realized there were no Hitler Youth in the shelter. On the other hand, maybe the isolation of the bomb shelter and the electrifying fear of imminent death had given them the sudden feeling of liberation. Then, the man who had made the joke about Goering stood. There was a yellow star on his jacket.

  “The Nazis say Germany’s problems are because of the Jews,” he said. “But who will they blame their problems on after they get rid of us?”

  “Sit down, old man,” a woman said. “You’ve got enough troubles.”

  Herr Weiler pushed himself up from the bench and looked around, his shiny face glistening in the dim yellow glow of the oil lamps. “This is my root cellar,” he said, scanning the crowd. “In here, we’re just Germans. If you don’t like that rule, you can find somewhere else to hide.”

  After that, people grew quiet again. Between the silences outside, they heard sporadic gunfire and distant shouting. Herr Weiler and the Jewish man stood at the wooden doorway, two old men ready to defend the shelter full of women and children. After a solid hour of stillness, punctuated by the thump-thump of faraway bombs hitting their targets, a long blast from the siren sounded to signal the all clear. Christine’s family and the rest of the villagers crept from the shelter, eyes cautious and blinking.

  Black smoke rose over distant sections of the village, and in the direction of the air base, the hazy glow of burning fires reddened the dark sky. But this section of town looked undamaged.

  Christine linked her arm through Oma’s and held Karl’s hand, then followed the rest of her family through streets littered with scorched paper and roof tiles. The weak glow of a smoky quarter moon illuminated the riddled stucco of nearby houses, along with wooden doors and window boxes pockmarked by flak and shrapnel.

  Halfway up the hill, Mutti stopped in the middle of the street and hung her head in quiet prayer. Their house was unharmed. As they moved closer, they saw shrapnel in the shutters, but the roof and walls were intact, as were the barns and houses in the immediate area. Inside, Mutti built a fire in the kitchen stove while the somber family gathered around the corner nook. After everyone drank a cup of warmed goat’s milk to calm down, they went back to their rooms.

  An hour later, Christine was still awake and staring at the ceiling, praying that Isaac and his family had survived the air raid. She tried to forget the last few hours in the shelter: the shrinking walls, the bone-chilling cold, the relentless fear. In its place, she tried to recall the day on the hill with Isaac. She imagined the warmth of his hand in hers, the soft skin of his lips. She tried to relax her muscles and take long, slow breaths. Finally, she started to fall asleep, dreams of sunny meadows and flocks of sheep playing in her mind. Isaac was chasing her. Then her eyes shot open. The air raid siren was going off again.

  CHAPTER 12

  By the end of May, the Americans had joined the English in the bombing campaign. As a result, the air raid siren howled during the day too. While the lilacs bloomed and the birds built nests in the trees, helplessness and despair seemed to cling to everyone. In the ration lines and on the streets, people hardly spoke, their eyes hollowed by anxiety and hunger, their faces drawn by misery. Fear had become part of who they were, and it showed in their hunched shoulders and hurried pace.

  Throughout the rest of spring and into summer, warplanes droned in and out of the valley with as much regularity as the trains that used to arrive and depart. Without the air raid siren to warn them, it would have been impossible for the villagers to tell the difference between enemy planes and the Luftwaffe.

  Christine’s grandparents wanted to believe the bombs were meant for the air base, but every attack left houses and shops in ruins. In the sections of town left intact after an air raid, laundry hung shredded by shrapnel; trees and gardens were black and scorched. Outside of town, fields were pockmarked with craters, trees were toppled and burned, and sheep and cattle lay dead in scorched pastures.

  Karl and Heinrich complained of earaches and hid under Heinrich’s bed at night, their feather bedcovers pulled over their heads, legs curled to their chests like infants. The first time Mutti went into their room and saw their empty beds, she ran into the hall yelling, frantic that they’d been kidnapped or had run away. When the boys clambered out from beneath the bed frame, Mutti was so relieved to see them that she fell to her knees and sobbed.

  By the end of summer, it was a rare night that they weren’t jolted awake by the air raid siren. On most nights, the warning sounded two or three times, sometimes more. The boys grew so exhausted that Mutti and Christine had to force them awake and pull them from bed, to half carry, half drag them through the dark streets. Mutti worried about how they would ever get up in time for school once it started. But then the announcement was made that school would remain closed until further notice because there were no bomb shelters in the buildings.

  When the raids had first started, everyone in Christine’s family had gotten dressed when the sirens went off. After a few weeks, they just threw their coats on over their nightclothes. But as summer turned into fall and the number and intensity of the night raids increased, they wore their clothes, and sometimes their shoes, to bed. Despite Christine’s protests, Mutti remained adamant that the children run ahead, while she helped Oma and Opa down the hill, through the alley, and into the shelter. It seemed to take longer and longer each time before they appeared at the door, breathless and disheveled.

  Eventually, Karl developed a fear of the siren itself. In the middle of the day, the first rising wail sent him on a panicky search for his mother. And it had awakened him from his fitful sleep so many times that he started to hear it in his nightmares. He’d start for the shelter before he was fully awake, stumbling down the steps in his bare feet. Twice in one week, Mutti reached him just in time to stop him from going out the front door. After that, she let the boys sleep in her room, so she could calm them when they threw back their covers, terrified and ready to run.

  Even though he was nine years old, Mutti ordered Heinrich to stay in the garden or backyard with Karl during the day, so she would know where they were if the sirens went off. They were allowed to play ball in the street, but only if they stayed in front of the house, where Mutti could look out a front window to see them. Heinrich begged his mother to let him run with his friends, to play war or catch frogs in the rain-filled bomb craters. But Mutti was having none of it. And she made no bones about telling everyone that the other mothers were out of their minds letting their sons run loose in the village while there was a war going on. The mayor helped her argument when the Hitler Youth delivered written cautions about unexploded bombs, with instructions to report anything that looked unfamiliar.

  On a sunny day in early September, her mother’s rules and the mayor’s notice were foremost on Christine’s mind as she walked beside Heinrich through a bombed-out section of town on the opposite end of the village. For three and a half blocks, there was nothing but jagged walls, half floors suspended in mid-air, cracked staircases that led nowhere, and vacant windows. Her stomach turned as she imagined charred bones among the ruins and ash. On the second floor of the last house o
n the block, the scorched remains of a blue curtain fluttered in the breeze of an empty window. She instructed Heinrich to stay in the center of the street and keep walking, unable to take her eyes off the ruins that ran the length of the sidewalk like a row of rotted, black teeth.

  They were on their way to the Klause farm, just outside the north edge of the village, carrying their mother’s treasured Austrian tapestry, rolled up in their arms like a giant cigar. Heinrich was on one end, Christine on the other. She could have handled the cloth wall hanging on her own, but Heinrich had begged Mutti to let him come, crying that he was sick and tired of being confined to the yard. Christine could understand how he felt, but because he was with her, her plans to go by Isaac’s on the way home were ruined.

  Earlier that day, Mutti had asked Christine to climb on the couch to help take down the tapestry. At first, Christine had thought her mother wanted to put the hanging in the first-floor hall, along with the two suitcases packed with extra clothes, important papers, and what few sentimental belongings they had, to be grabbed by Christine and Maria when the siren went off. She’d climbed on the couch and lifted the corner loops off the nails, thinking it odd that her mother would want to struggle with such a cumbersome object on their flight to the shelter. The recent decision to take the suitcases made sense, because the contents would be all they had left if their house was destroyed. But taking the wall hanging would be too difficult. Who would carry it? Christine and Maria already had their hands full, with a brother in one hand and a suitcase in the other. And Mutti had to help Oma and Opa. But just as Christine was getting ready to suggest that Herr Weiler might let them store it in the cellar, her mother’s face crumpled in on itself.

  “Frau Klause always commented on how beautiful this was.”

  “What’s the matter?” Christine said. She thought of her father, wondering if her mother would tell them right away, or spare them from bad news as long as possible.

  “Nothing,” Mutti said. “I’ll be all right. It’s just an object, a material possession, nothing more.”

  “But why are you crying? Because it makes you think of Vater?”

  Mutti set the rolled-up tapestry on the table and looked at Christine. “We need a rooster,” she said. “I spoke to Frau Klause yesterday. She has three.”

  “You’re going to trade the tapestry for a rooster?”

  “I have the memories of my honeymoon with your father. Nothing can take those away.”

  “But there has to be something else we can use,” Christine said. “Wouldn’t she like some plums or a pound of potatoes?” Christine looked around, trying to come up with something to barter, anything but her mother’s tapestry. But other than the clock on the wall from her Ur-Ur Grossmutti, there was nothing of value.

  “Frau Klause has a garden and fruit trees of her own. A decoration is a luxury. We’ll survive without it. It’s more important that we have new chicks. We have to plan for the worst, Christine. I can’t afford to be sentimental.”

  Christine offered to take the tapestry to Frau Klause, partly to save her mother the misery of handing it over, partly because Karl would be sick with terror if his mother left for any length of time, and partly because she thought she’d be able to go by Isaac’s house on the way home. Now, walking past the burned-out houses and half-melted piles of keys, silverware, picture frames, and other salvaged personal belongings, set out for pickup by the Hitler Youth, she wished she’d made Heinrich stay home too. She watched his pale, wide-eyed face out of the corner of her eye.

  “I’m sure everyone was in a shelter,” she said.

  “I know,” Heinrich said.

  Thankfully, the houses and shops along the rest of their route were still standing. With the relative quiet of the day, Christine could almost imagine that there wasn’t a war going on. They walked another six blocks, crossed a covered bridge, then made their way along a long row of linden trees until they came to the turnoff that wound through the fallow fields of the Klause farm.

  Once they were there, she was relieved that Heinrich had come, because they had to corner the rooster between the house and the barn. The bird was fast and jumpy, and after a half hour of chasing him, Christine wanted to take back her mother’s tapestry. The least Frau Klause could have done was have the rooster inside the coop. Instead, she’d taken the tapestry under her arm and motioned in the direction of the barn with one bent, arthritic hand, telling them not to take the Leghorn or the rooster with the high, black tail.

  Now she and Heinrich were out there, sweating and slipping in the mud, chasing a feathery, flapping bird that didn’t want to get caught. Between Christine, Heinrich, and one of the Labor-year girls, it took them over an hour to corner it. Heinrich dove to the ground and caught it by one foot, the rooster squawking and flapping and turning as if it could feel the heat of a boiling pot. Finally, Heinrich stood, the bird dangling upside down in one hand, mud and chicken poop smeared up and down his trousers. Christine gripped the rooster’s scaly ankles between her fingers, flipped the thrashing bird over, and wrapped her arms around its wings. She cradled the heavy fowl against her side, one hand still clasping its feet, cooing and murmuring to quiet it.

  Finally, the rooster stopped panting and jerking its legs. It settled under Christine’s calm but firm grasp, its red-rimmed eyes blinking in submission. At last, Christine and Heinrich started home with the exhausted rooster half-asleep in Christine’s arms. Berta, the freckle-faced Labor-year girl, was at the end of her shift, so she climbed on her bicycle and rode beside them, too shy to do much more than nod or shake her head at Christine’s attempts to make small talk. After a few minutes, they continued in relative silence, except for the rattle of Berta’s bicycle chain and the squeak of her turning pedals. In the distance, heat rose from the earth, shimmering vapors floating above the fields like hovering apparitions.

  Halfway to the village, Farmer Klause was coming toward them from the opposite direction, his horse-drawn wagon loaded down with hay. To their left, two young boys were walking across the open fields, bags thrown over their shoulders. They met up with Christine, Heinrich, and the Labor-year girl at the edge of the road, eager to show off what they had in their burlap sacks. Christine touched Heinrich’s shoulder, motioning for him to stay beside her as the boys walked ahead, pulling out bullet casings, shrapnel, and hunks of scorched iron from their bags.

  Just then, Christine thought she heard a buzzing noise. She looked around, puzzled because the fall nights had been too cold for wasps or bees. Then she noticed a single plane approaching from one end of the valley, headed in their direction, and a cold sense of vulnerability gripped her bowels. At first, she told herself that it was one of their own, because the Allied bombers never came alone. But the closer the plane got, the faster her heart raced. It looked different than any she’d ever seen. She put one hand on Heinrich’s shoulder, feeling the need to tell him to run. But where? They were too far from the village to make it to a shelter. The plane sank in the sky, lower and lower, and then it dove straight at them. She grabbed Heinrich by the shoulders, the rooster’s wings flapping in her face as it escaped from her arms, and shoved him toward the drainage ditch on the side of the road.

  “Look out!” she yelled, throwing herself on top of him.

  The scream of the fighter’s engine and the rat-tat-tat of strafing guns filled the air. Bullets flew overhead, ripping along the grass and the road, the thud-thud in the dirt like the muted pop of toy guns. The plane growled above their heads, and a whoosh of hot air ruffled her hair and skirt, blowing dirt and grass against her face. Then, as quick as it came, the growl of the engine grew farther and farther away, until it was an angry buzz in the distance. Christine lifted her head to check for more planes, but the sky looked as empty as it had only seconds before. She pushed herself up and felt Heinrich’s shoulders, back, arms, and legs. He wasn’t moving.

  “Heinrich!” she screamed.

  Heinrich groaned and pushed himself up on his elbow
s, a smudge of wet dirt on his cheek. “I’m all right,” he said. He felt his torso and limbs, as if to be sure, then made a move to get up. But instead of standing, he froze, his face slack, paralyzed by something behind Christine. She turned to look and put her hand over her mouth, feeling the sudden urge to throw up. She and Heinrich knelt in the ditch, staring at the carnage on the road.

  Berta was on her side, her bicycle still between her legs, wheels spinning, one arm splayed on the road in front of her, ribbons of blood running from her temple and one cheek. The two boys were face down, the bags of war iron slumped at their heels, growing puddles of dark maroon staining the earth between them. Farther up the road, Farmer Klause’s draft horse was snorting and struggling to get up, one front leg at an odd angle, the wagon tilting to the right behind its flanks. Farmer Klause lay crumpled in the road, his mouth open as if he were about to shout a warning, blood-covered hands still gripping the horse’s reins.

  Christine helped Heinrich to his feet, and they climbed out of the ditch. At the end of the road, soldiers and civilians were running toward them out of the village. Christine wrapped her arm around her brother’s shoulders and led him down the center of the road, between the girl’s body on the left and the two dead boys on the right. The horse had stopped struggling and lay on its side in a puddle of blood, its eyes rolling back, its life blowing out from its nostrils in shuddering, blustery groans.

  Christine wanted to go to it, to kneel and stroke its warm, muscular neck, to talk to it and calm it before it died. But she had to get Heinrich out of there, away from the bodies. They moved to the right, to go around Farmer Klause and his dying horse, and then she stopped. A few yards into the brown field, the rooster lay in a scattered explosion of red and black feathers, its head cocked to one side, half its body missing.