by Pam Jenoff
She pulls up to the curb but does not switch off the engine. “Come,” she says, gesturing for me to get in the car.
“You can drive,” I marvel.
She nods, concentrating as she pulls from the curb. “I can try.”
“Where are we going?” She does not answer, but drives with both arms extended as though navigating a great ship as we follow the road that leads away from town. Soon the houses on the outskirts start to thin, giving way to the occasional farm. The fields, knee-high with too-dry crops and wildflowers, sway gently beneath the cloudless midday sky. “Beautiful,” I remark. “So peaceful.”
“So different now than during the war,” Krysia agrees. “There were raids almost every night. Once Marcin and I were out walking and we had to hide in an arch at the Louvre.” The war was so far away in London. It is hard to imagine being in the middle of it all.
We come to a roundabout and she follows it three-quarters
of the way around, turning onto the spur that indicates towns to the northeast, the road toward Belgium. Great rolling fields of poppies flank either side of the road, an endless carpet of red.
An hour later, Krysia turns onto a smaller road, not much more than a country lane. Through the now-faded black paint that was used to cover the signs during the war, I can make out that we are headed in the direction of Reims. On a hill in the distance stand the remnants of the once-grand Reims cathedral. Though the tallest of its pillars still stands, the stained-glass windows are now jagged shards and its roof is peeled back like an open can.
Krysia slows as we approach the town center. In contrast to Paris or Versailles, Reims is a ghost town. Ours is the only motorcar on the narrow cobblestone street, which is deserted, save for a cart pulled by a sorry, malnourished mare. From the sidewalk, pedestrians eye us with interest. Here one can see the closeness of the war. Buildings the entire length of the street were destroyed by the bombs and only the front walls remain standing, gaping craters behind the facades, which seem ready to topple at any second. The smell of gunpowder hangs in the air as though the destruction took place hours, and not months or years, ago.
But there are small signs of life. At the end of the block, two low garage walls remain, standing opposite one another like bookends. A makeshift roof of canvas and oil paper has been erected between them, and a woman sells bread and fruit on the ground beneath. Krysia pulls the car to the curb and steps out to buy food from her. She hands the woman a fistful of bills, suggesting a desire to help rather than genuine hunger. A moment later, she returns with several fresh young peaches.
She hands me one, then starts the car again. I bite into the soft flesh, blotting at the juice that dribbles down my chin with a handkerchief. On the next block not even the fronts of the buildings remain, just low piles of rubble. Abri—40 personnes is painted on the foundation of one of the decimated buildings, indicating that shelter from bombs could safely be taken there, a promise broken.
The road leads us out of Reims and I breathe the air deeply, eager to clear the devastation from my lungs. The sky has begun to cloud over, dampness and fog chilling the air. We cross a low bridge, children wading in the stream beneath. Overhead, birds call to one another in seeming cadence with the car engine.
Krysia pulls to the side of the road and turns off the ignition. As I step from the car, moisture from the ankle-high grass seeps through my stockings and the heels of my boots sink deeper into the sodden earth with every step. A wind begins to blow, sweeping away the fog. We are standing in a rolling field that stretches to the horizon like a great wave before disappearing. It is a battlefield, or was. Now it is a graveyard. Small crosses, some painted white and others crudely handmade from sticks, spring up around our ankles like dandelions among the lush clover. A faint halo of mist lingers inches above the earth.
I stop midstep. I had avoided coming here, and might have demurred if Krysia had told me in advance where we were going. For even as I wanted to know everything, part of me had long suspected that I could not bear the truth. But I am here now and have no choice but to see.
We reach a row of trees that have been sheared at the midpoint. Atop the amputated branches, new leaves have begun to sprout. Krysia unties her hat and removes it somberly. Her hair comes loose, billowing around her face as regal as a lion’s mane.
I take a step forward. Krysia grabs my arm and pulls me back as I nearly step on something hard that juts from the earth. “Oh!” I gasp at the sight of naked bone.
She begins to walk up the hill. At the top of the ridge, the terrain that had appeared endless breaks suddenly. The trenches. The long tube of hollowed-out earth is much deeper and wider than I’d imagined, a kind of subterranean city where the men had lived and died, rats in a maze. The smell of peat and earth and human waste wafts upward. About fifty meters to our right, the trench is bisected abruptly by a great crater, maybe ninety feet in diameter. Like the spot where Stefan had nearly died, only so much worse in reality.
My guilt rises up as I see the thousands of Stefans before me, the young men who were killed, or wounded and lay bleeding. Had he called for me? Krysia had brought me here, I suspect, to give me some perspective and show me that life is fleeting. To help me move forward. But, instead, all of the reasons I cannot leave loom larger than ever.
“Such destruction,” I lament, my words sounding tinny and inadequate.
“And not a drop of blood spilled on German soil,” she remarks, gazing off into the distance. It is not meant as an insult; she is merely stating a fact. Picturing Stefan, I want to tell her that we had suffered, too. “There was enough stupidity on all sides, enough blame to go around,” she adds as a concession, reading my thoughts. “But the victors will write history in their own way.” I nod—laid out in the panorama before us is the reason the Allies will not be lenient, why the ideals embodied in Wilson’s Fourteen Points will not be big enough to include the Germans. How can Georg not see that?
I’d been in the college library when one of the maids came to tell me about the armistice. A few days later, we assembled in the courtyard at Magdalen as the bell tolled, marking the official end to the war. We stood shoulder to shoulder—professors and students and porters and cooks, English and German alike. The war had changed so much—dukes and heirs had died alongside footmen and laborers. Women had worked as nurses and drivers and in the factories. Surely it all couldn’t be put together the way it once was, an eggshell cracked in a thousand different pieces.
“The next war, I fear, will be even worse.” Krysia’s voice pulls me from my thoughts.
I turn to her in disbelief. “The next? Surely you don’t think this will happen again.”
“Not the men who fought this war, of course. The strongest pacifists are those who have seen battle. But governments have had a taste of the bloodshed and the power—and the weaponry will only get better.”
My heart sinks as I realize she is right. They had called it the war to end all wars. But already there are whispers of newer, more sinister fears, gasses and other weapons that could take out the civilian populations of entire cities. Georg said militaries are needed in order to keep the peace. If we cannot end war, then his work to prevent it, what he is trying to achieve, seems more important than ever.
“Some say if women could have voted, the war never would have started,” I offer.
“Nonsense. Do you really believe those silly creatures who crow at the salons would have had any more sense than their husbands?” She is right. The war, more so than anything, had been about stupid pride, and the women, with their too-large hats and peacock feathers, had more than enough of that.
“At least one can speak openly of peace again,” she remarks. I nod. Throughout the war it was considered treasonous and cowardly to speak of anything other than military victory. Only during the waning months did the word begin to creep into conversation again, a tacit recognition of the weariness and yearning for the end of the fighting that we had all secretly shared but not d
ared to voice. It was as if no one knew how to behave in peacetime again.
“Marcin wants to return to Krakow.” She speaks into the air, not looking at me. “He can’t compose here, he says, with all of the noise. He’s begged me to come with him. But I can’t leave Emilie.” She has her own pain, I am reminded, of which she seldom speaks. I want to tell her to go with him, to leave the past behind. But who am I, childless and unable to escape my own past, to give her advice? I reach down and squeeze her hand gently.
“We should go,” she says, as the sky begins to deepen at the edges.
“Thank you for bringing me.”
“I’ve been meaning to come. And it can be helpful to step out of one’s own world, even for a bit, to gain some perspective.” It’s true. For a few hours, I’ve been able to escape all of my worries about the missing document, my questions of Georg and Stefan and the future. But as we wind through the hills and valleys, making our way back toward Paris, my heaviness grows once more.
“You’re thinking about Georg.” It is not a question and her voice sours as she says his name.
“You don’t like him,” I say to Krysia, dejected.
She shrugs. “I’m happy for you. It is good to see you wanting something—fighting for something—instead of letting life drag you along. But no, I don’t like him. He’s the enemy.” There is a bitterness in her voice that I have never heard before.
“He’s a German. Am I the enemy, too?” I feel again in that moment the gulfs of anger and hate that the war has sown, even in educated and worldly people such as she, pain too fresh for an armistice paper and a few months’ passage of time to heal. “Don’t you see, if we hate just because of where we come from, we’re no better than the fools who started the war in the first place?”
She does not answer but continues driving. I gaze up at the sky, which is clear, but over the horizon to the west, dark gray clouds are forming. “Krysia, do you believe in fate?”
“You obviously do.”
Suddenly it seems as though all my life I have been searching for the right answers, some hidden script I was supposed to follow without anyone actually giving it to me. Even my little rebellions, studying English instead of Latin, music instead of art, had been well planned and designed in some way to show that my choices were the right ones. “I think there has to be some kind of order, a path.”
But she shakes her head slightly. “I don’t. We each have free will. There may be higher purpose, but the actual path each of us takes to get there, and whether we choose to accept it at all, is up to us.” She turns to me. “If you can’t let go of that fear of making the wrong decision, you will never be able to take the chances you must take to live life fully.” She looks back at the road.
I consider this for the first time. I find romantic the notion that there is a purpose to it all, something that we are intended to do, a path—perhaps not unlike the people who preferred the firm constructs of the good old days. But as Krysia says—we each can choose our way. If it was all preordained and we stepped off, then what would happen? “People make choices every day,” I say, musing aloud. “Turn right or left...”
“Follow someone out of a party or not...” she chides.
I ignore the joke, nursing the more serious line of inquiry. “And things would be very different if they did not.”
“You have a choice. But you have to seize the moment or it may not come again. It is, as they say, now or never.”
“But those choices have consequences,” I counter, and with that she cannot argue. I could refuse to go back to Berlin, but so many people would be hurt—Stefan, for whom all hope would be lost, and Papa, too.
“I just want to go back to the way things were.” But even as I speak the words I am not sure what I mean by them. Back to where? Life in Berlin with Stefan will never feel the same as it once has. London, our temporary stay among the enemy, was not the answer, either. I suppose I mean to some nameless place in time where it is just Papa and I with our books, but that place does not exist in a vacuum. There are others—Celia and Krysia and, yes, Georg.
“There is no back,” she says gently. “We must forge on.”
I nod. I’ve been a prisoner not of Papa’s expectations or of Stefan, but of my own fears all of these years. “And speaking of forging on, what are you going to do about Ignatz?”
“I don’t know.” If I don’t get the papers from Georg, Papa will be discredited. I am caught between the two men I care most about. “Talk to him, see if we can figure something out.” I cannot keep running from Ignatz.
“I will take you to him.” At the roundabout, she exits on a different road, heading to the northern edge of Paris. We reach the city limits and she continues in the direction of Montmartre, the motorcar engine struggling to ascend the steep hills. The neighborhood is ragtag, empty buildings and littered steps. “The artists used to live here before the center shifted to Montparnasse,” she explains. She stops the car in front of a dilapidated building. “Stein lives on the first floor.” I wait for her to offer to go with me but she does not.
The door to the apartment building is ajar so I enter and climb wood stairs so rickety I fear they will fall through. At the top, I knock. “Da?” Stein’s voice calls and a moment later he throws open the door wearing only an undershirt and trousers. Behind him the flat is a cavernous space, open and bare, perhaps once an artist’s studio. A woman I recognize from the bar sprawls in a chaise longue, clad in a dressing gown. I comprehend then just how far from my world I have come.
His bushy eyebrows pull together in a single scraggly line. “You! Do you have what I want?”
I swallow. “Not exactly. That is, I found it—it was a map and it showed markings at some of the eastern cities....” I falter, unable to convey the significance of what I had seen.
He rubs his hands together. “Perfect. Where is it?”
“I lost it. That is, I got the document but then it disappeared and...”
“Idiot!” Swift as a cat, he grabs me by the wrist and pulls me close. I cry out as great waves of pain shoot down my arm. I have never been struck, even lightly. Papa did not believe in spankings, despite admonitions from Uncle Walter and others that he would spoil me. It is the first time I have ever felt pain at the hands of another and I am frozen, unable to react. “Do you think I care about your excuses?” His breath is foul with vodka and smoke.
I pull away, stifling a cry at the burning of my skin as I wrest myself from his grasp. “How dare you?” I say, trying without success to keep the tremor from my voice. “I could have you arrested.” I realize my mistake as soon as I have spoken. Threats will only feed his anger.
“Ignatz...” Before he can respond the woman from inside the apartment beckons.
“Three days,” he hisses. “You have three days to get me what I want.” He slams the apartment door, leaving me standing in the hallway, shaken.
I walk down the stairs and climb into the car. Krysia does not ask how it went and I do not offer. Instead, we drive silently into the night.
Chapter 11
Papa is at his desk when I return, trying to read with the lamp turned down too low. That morning when I’d returned from Krysia’s to wash and change, the apartment had been neater than I remembered leaving it, as if the maid had come on the wrong day. Now, it is a sea of strewn papers once more.
We eye each other warily. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly, forgoing my usual stubbornness. I have no energy to argue after my day at the battlefields and confrontation with Ignatz.
Relief floods his face. He does not wish to continue our quarrel, either. “As am I. I just worry about you.”
“I’m going to keep working for him, Papa,” I say, struggling not to waver, to keep my voice clear and calm. I have never dared to defy my father like this and I can hardly believe my own resolve. Alienating him and leaving for good is unthinkable. But on this point I stand firm. “The work we are doing is important and it matters for the delegation and
for the conference and for Germany.”
His mustache pulls downward as he bites his lip, unable to disagree. “I understand, but I’m worried, liebchen. You seem to be attached to Captain Richwalder in a very strong way. This is not the time for complicated alliances,” he adds, before I can protest. More so than fretting about propriety, Papa is concerned about me. He does not want me to get hurt. I should not be surprised—he has always put me first. But there is something more urgent about his worry this time, as if he is standing above me on a ladder, able to see things in a way that I can’t.
“And then there is Stefan,” he adds. “He’s a good man and he cares for you deeply. He’s sacrificed much.” I’m your daughter, I want to say. My happiness should be what matters. But to say this would be to admit that my happiness lies with Georg, not Stefan, and how could I tell him that? “Your well-being is everything to me,” Papa says, reading my thoughts. “I only wish...”
That the things that make me happy and the things that are good for me were one and the same. “I know.” I raise my hand, warding off a return to the debate. “I went to Reims with Krysia today to see the battlefields.”
He nods. “I saw your note that you’d gone somewhere.”
“Do you mind?”
“To the contrary. I’m glad. I’ve been so busy with the conference, but it’s no excuse. We’ve been remiss in not going and reminding ourselves of the very reason that we are here.”
“I had no idea about the extent of the devastation. You had not told me.”
“With Stefan fighting, I thought it might be too much. Sometimes I forget that you are not a child.” He had been trying to shield my innocence. Still, I am frustrated by his hypocrisy—wanting me to be educated but not aware, teaching me to be curious and yet sheltering me from the truth.
