And After the Fire

by Lauren Belfer

  “Who knows, an old book could be worth a lot of money,” Pete said.

  Henry went to the piano bench and opened it. Sheet music was layered into the bench every which way. Some was printed, some handwritten. Some old, some new.

  When Henry was a boy, his mother had forced him to take piano lessons with Mrs. Kaminsky, who lived on the second floor of their apartment building. After her husband died, she supported herself by teaching piano to kids. She wasn’t about to accept charity, Henry’s mother had told him with approval. So every week for four years, until Mrs. Kaminsky’s son took her to live with his family in Cincinnati, Henry went downstairs for a lesson on Mrs. Kaminsky’s battered upright and passed her a few coins. Not having a piano in his own apartment, he couldn’t practice, but he learned a few things. In fact, he learned a lot. He developed a passion for classical music, and he listened to concerts on WQXR. He would never admit such a passion to his Army buddies, but because of it, he felt curious about this sheet music.

  He pulled out a folder that looked old. The music inside, pages and pages of it, was handwritten in a rush, judging from the cross-outs and overwriting. The ink had bled through the paper. He stuck the folder with its sheet music into his rucksack. There was space for more. Why the hell not? He reached out—

  “Was machen Sie?” A female voice, behind him. What are you doing?

  He swung around. A woman was aiming a pistol at him. She held it with both hands, trying to keep it steady. The gun was a heavy, military-issue German pistol. The woman was so thin her arms looked as if they were going to break from the weight of it. Except she wasn’t a woman, Henry realized with a shock. She was a girl, fifteen, sixteen. Her dress gaped in front. Her skin was sallow. Her hair lay in clumps.

  “Was machen Sie hier?” She managed to keep the pistol aimed at his chest. What are you doing here?

  “Ruhig,” Henry said. Easy now. “Seien Sie ruhig.” Easy does it.

  “Oh, fuck,” Pete said.

  “It’s okay,” Henry said in English to Pete. Then in German: “We’ve got cigarettes. And chocolate. Put down the pistol and we’ll share.”

  The girl’s smell was reaching him. She hadn’t bathed anytime recently. She had the war smell, different from the rot of the dead. The sickly, repulsive rot of the living. She seemed to be concentrating all her strength on keeping the pistol upright. On keeping it aimed at him.

  “Come on now, Fräulein, we’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Make her put down the gun,” Pete said.

  “I’m working on it,” Henry said. “Fräulein, the war is over.”

  “Why doesn’t she put down the gun?” Pete said.

  “You think I don’t know Jews when I see them? You speak German like a Jew,” she said.

  The retching reek of Buchenwald swept over him.

  “What did she say?” Pete gripped his rifle.

  “This house belonged to Jews. Nice Jews—not like you.”

  “Tell me what she’s saying.”

  “Nothing,” Henry said. “She’s saying nothing.” To the girl: “Who were they, the Jews who owned this house?” He had to ask, he had to know. He wanted to understand this godforsaken country. “What happened to them?”

  “The Jews? They left.”

  They didn’t leave, Henry realized. They’d been rounded up. “Were they friends of yours?” Her accent was different from what he’d heard at home and in school. Lower class, maybe. “Did you work here?”

  “You Jews aren’t going to take your revenge on me.”

  Revenge? He didn’t like Germans, but he wasn’t about to kill a German civilian. In fact, Henry would prove himself better than the Germans. He would help her.

  “You shouldn’t be here. The Americans are pulling out. The Russians are coming in. We’ve been hearing bad things about what happens when the Russians get ahold of German women.”

  Intelligence reports said that Russian soldiers were raping their way across Germany. Women, girls, grandmothers, cripples even, the Russians didn’t care.

  “You should move west. We can help you. Put down the pistol and we’ll help you.”

  “You two thieves will help me?” Her arms and hands became absolutely still. She aimed the gun at Henry’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet missed, hitting the wall behind him. Pete fired his rifle at her feet, to scare her. Neither of them had ever shot at a woman. The truth was, neither of them had ever fired upon anyone. They were in the backup—the translator, the mechanic—not at the front lines. The girl shot again, at Pete. She hit his arm. She turned, aiming at Henry.

  Finally snapping into his military training, Henry pivoted his rifle into position and shot her. She fell backward, onto the floor in a heap. Her body heaved. Blood began to seep around her. Time, which had been moving fast, slowed and then stopped. Henry couldn’t move. He couldn’t grasp what he’d done.

  “Shit, I’m wounded,” Pete said. “The fucking bitch shot me.”

  Henry undid his belt and wrapped it around the top of Pete’s arm to staunch the wound. “Hold your arm up, hold it up.”

  The bleeding slowed. It wasn’t much of a wound. It was nothing, in fact, compared to the ever-widening and thickening puddle around the girl at their feet. Her open, unblinking eyes stared at the skylight.

  “Oh, Christ,” Pete said. “Let’s get out of here.” He moved toward the door. “Coming in here was the most fucked-up idea you ever had. Let’s hope the jeep is still there.”

  Henry said nothing. He couldn’t catch up with himself.

  “Let’s go!”

  Pete was right, they had to get away. As they left the house, Henry closed the door behind them. He didn’t want animals going in, drawn by the smell of blood. What else could he do? Call an ambulance? Europe was littered with dead bodies. Ambulances enough didn’t exist, to pick up all the bodies.

  Miraculously, the jeep was fine. Spare tire in place, jerry cans under the tarp. Neither Henry nor Pete mentioned Tiefurt Palace. They drove back in silence.

  A deranged Gauleiter. That’s how they filed the report, because Pete had to see the medic to get patched up. They couldn’t pretend the whole thing had never happened. A deranged Gauleiter, and they shot him.

  Enough said. The war was over. Nobody cared about details, especially German details. The medic dressed Pete’s arm, and in a few months, Pete had nothing but a scar to show for it.

  The girl had been weak. She could barely hold up the pistol. But she shot first. So Henry’s killing her was self-defense. Right?

  In the years that followed, Henry went through this again and again, trying to convince himself.

  A half-crazed girl, lying dead on floorboards covered with blood. How many days or months until her body was found? Until she was buried?

  For the next sixty-five years, Henry Sachs never stopped wondering.

  Chapter 1

  NEW YORK CITY

  June 2010

  Susanna Kessler spent her days giving away money. Not her own money. She was the executive director of the Barstow Family Foundation, based in the family offices on the twenty-seventh floor of a skyscraper overlooking West Fifty-seventh Street. She coordinated grants of ten million dollars a year aimed at helping children in New York City.

  As she prepared for her usual Monday morning meeting with her boss, she took stock: thirty-four years old, dark hair curling around her shoulders, makeup understated. On this summery day, she wore a sleeveless dress with a fitted jacket. Her shoes were the extra-high-heeled black patent pumps that she kept in her desk drawer for meetings. Recently Susanna had been having a tough time in her personal life, but at work, she was able to keep herself moving forward. Her clothes made her appear to be a woman in charge of herself, who could do what was expected of her and do it well, all day, every day. At least from Monday to Friday.

  Reports in hand, she walked down the hallway, greeting colleagues as she passed. The office suite housed experts who advised the fa
mily on accounting, tax law, investment management, and trusts and estates. (The foundation’s financial and tax advisers were independent, however, and headquartered elsewhere.) Her boss’s office was in the far corner. The décor was modern, but the lines of authority were strictly traditional.

  “Susanna, good morning.” Robertson Barstow, head of the foundation board, rose from behind his desk and motioned to a chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s on your agenda this week?” Rob was a striking man in his early seventies. His manner combined courtesy with playfulness, and he addressed most topics with dramatic flair. He performed with an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and enjoyed some renown, within a limited arena, for such roles as the Major General in The Pirates of Penzance and Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore. He was also an astute businessman, which Susanna kept in mind during their conversations.

  “I’m going uptown to evaluate progress on the library renovation at P.S. 629. I’ll confirm that they’re on schedule to reopen in September, with new books on the shelves.”

  Unlike Robertson Barstow, Susanna had attended public schools until college. Her elementary school had boasted a terrific library where she’d learned to love reading. Susanna wanted the same for public-school kids in New York City, and the foundation was working in conjunction with the Fund for Public Schools to make this happen.

  When Susanna discussed her job with her friends—a twenty-thousand-dollar grant here, thirty or forty thousand there, a million or more for a capital project—she tried not to sound naïvely idealistic. Nevertheless, she was making a difference, and this fact gave her a reason, beyond the necessity of her salary, to go to work in the morning.

  “Tomorrow I have a meeting at the Greenwich Music School to discuss expanding their after-school programs in the autumn.”

  Item by item, she went through her list. The foundation supported dozens of projects across the city: shelters for homeless families, storefront health clinics for kids, remedial tutoring, ballet scholarships. Susanna’s job involved initiating and evaluating grant proposals and making recommendations to the board. If it approved the grants, she followed up to determine how the funding was actually used and whether the children involved had benefitted from the programs.

  “Next: I’ve been approached by the city parks department about increasing our funding for their free learn-to-swim programs at city pools this coming summer. The demand for this is tremendous. The swim programs already have long waiting lists.”

  Rob said, “According to the department’s own statistics, not every child learns to swim in their programs. Are the programs as effective as they could be or should be?”

  “This is a gray area. Overcoming panic in the water is itself a positive step for kids. Not panicking can prevent drowning. Knowing how to float can prevent drowning. I don’t think we should hold the programs to the standard of a Red Cross swimming test.”

  “Meet with the parks department, collect the most recent statistics, and we’ll discuss this again next week. Investigate whether other swimming programs have better results.”

  “Will do. The final item on my list is your anniversary gift for Cornelia.”

  Rob and Cornelia had been married for forty-five years and shared a mutual sympathy that Susanna hoped to find for herself someday. The money for their anniversary gifts came out of their personal funds, not the foundation; Susanna kept these lines clear.

  “I believe I’ve found the ideal choice,” she said.

  The official portion of their meeting complete, Rob leaned forward with boyish eagerness. “Yes?”

  “In a word, rats.”

  “Rats?”

  “Giant rats with a mission.”

  “I do like the sound of that. What’s the mission of these giant rats?”

  “They have two missions: to sniff out land mines, and to identify tuberculosis infections.”

  “I must say, that’s perfect.”

  “I know.” Cornelia Barstow had interests in both medical care and the clearance of land mines. “Giving credit where credit is due, I first read about the rats in The New York Times.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “The rats are a type called the African giant pouched rat. They’re calm and cooperative. Easy to train. Most important, they have an amazing sense of smell. They have a terrific record sniffing out land mines in Mozambique. They’re beginning land-mine work in Thailand, along the Thai-Cambodia border. In Tanzania they’ve been picking up the scent of tuberculosis on people and thus identifying infections that established methods miss.”

  Susanna gave him a folder with the charity’s annual report, a collection of photographs, and her own summary and opinion sheet. He studied the materials.

  Glancing out the window as she waited, Susanna saw Central Park, Fifth Avenue . . . the city and its infinite possibilities laid out in silent magnificence. From a certain perspective, say the perspective of a young woman like herself who’d only recently finished paying back her college and business-school loans, the job of advising a wealthy family on how to give away its money was a little daunting. After Susanna’s father died when she was young, her mother had worked as a legal secretary. Susanna’s family had never been poor, but the cost of things had been a constant question for them.

  Not so for Rob and his family. Back in the 1870s, Rob’s great-grandfather Joshua Barstow had patented the Barstow process for refining oil, still used around the world. Rob had worked in the oil refinery business for more than forty years, and when he retired, he set up this office to manage financial affairs for himself and his extended family. He expanded their charitable foundation and hired Susanna to run it.

  “I must admit, I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Rob said. “Although from the photos I don’t think the rats are truly ‘giants.’ They aren’t as big as, for example, Hoover.”

  Hoover was Rob and Cornelia’s overweight cat.

  “Hoover is large for a domestic cat,” Susanna said.

  “Only too true, alas.”

  “And even if these rats aren’t as big as Hoover, you wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark alley.”

  “Indeed. I see that when they’re working, they eat bananas. They consider bananas a treat. I consider bananas a treat.”

  “So you already have something in common. Cornelia is sure to appreciate that.”

  Rob gave her a wry smile. He enjoyed being teased. “I also see that you can sign up to receive letters from your rat. Cornelia would delight in snail mail from a rat.”

  “I know I’d delight in it.”

  “Let’s sponsor forty-five rats in Cornelia’s honor,” Rob said, closing the folder. “That’s a lot of rats, but after forty-five years of marriage, it’s a meet and fitting number.”

  “I agree.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know what she’s giving me?”

  “Yes, I do know.” In view of his love of honey, Rob was receiving from Cornelia a donation of forty-five beehives to farmers in Albania. “I’m not at liberty to say, however.”

  “That’s very unfair.”

  “Totally unfair,” Susanna agreed.

  She stood. Rob stood. He was forever a gentleman.

  “After our anniversary, let’s put up a large-format photo of the rats in here. An inspiration to one and all.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  “And Susanna,” he said, his mood shifting, “I want you to know that Cornelia and I are keeping you in our hearts. You’re on our prayer list.”

  Rob attended St. James’ Church. Although Susanna was not a believer, and her family background was Jewish, his oblique allusion to her difficult divorce touched her.

  “Thank you, Rob. I appreciate it.”

  He looked away. “Just what we do.”

  Returning to her office, Susanna stood at her desk and scrolled through the two dozen e-mails she’d received during the meeting. No emergencies. Outside her office window, a geo
metric panoply of towers glinted in the sunlight, a sliver of the Hudson River visible among them.

  She checked the voice-mail messages on her cell. Lisa O’Shea, a close friend since high school, had called to confirm their plan for a girls’ night out this evening.

  The tailor reported that the two dresses she’d brought him for alteration were ready to be picked up.

  Third message: “Susanna,” a woman said. “It’s Aurelia.”

  Susanna felt taken aback. Aurelia was her uncle Henry’s home health aide.

  “Susanna,” Aurelia repeated, as if she could overpower the voice-mail recorder and reach Susanna immediately, wherever she was. “Mr. Henry . . .”

  Chapter 2

  Susanna leaned against the front-porch balustrade of the two-family home in Buffalo where she’d grown up. The overhang of the second-story porch sheltered her. After Susanna’s father died, she and her mother had lived upstairs from Uncle Henry and Aunt Greta, in the rental unit.

  Reluctant to return inside, she studied the street. The longest day of the year was approaching, and the lingering sunlight felt consoling. Lynfield between Bird and Forest Avenues was a block of two-family houses on narrow lots. During her childhood, the street had been treeless and bare. Today it was a luxuriant garden, part of the city’s yearly garden festival. Lilies, hydrangeas, and peonies covered the front lawns. The young trees, replacing those killed by Dutch elm disease, reached only the second story of the houses, but their foliage was thick. In front of Susanna’s family home, ornamental grasses concealed the broken pegs of the porch’s balustrade. Susanna ran her hand across the tops of the grasses. Still warm from the day’s sun, they were a velvety caress upon her skin.

  She was alone now, waiting for her mother and stepfather, Evelyn and Jack, to arrive from Tampa, where they’d retired. This afternoon, after the brief flight from New York to Buffalo, Susanna had spoken to the police, identified Henry’s body, arranged to receive the death certificate, contacted an attorney.

  And she’d searched Uncle Henry’s desk and his bedroom for a suicide note. She didn’t find one.