The Enemy

by Sara Holbrook

  Mr. Scholtz leans in to examine the face of the mantel clock. “Is German made, this clock.”

  “Family piece. From the wife’s grandparents.” Dad moves across the room to the fireplace.

  “See, here?” Mr. Scholtz points.

  Dad squints up close to the clock. “Well, what do you know?” Dad answers. Silence interrupts the conversation again. I look around the room, wondering what they can talk about next.

  Then stomping on the basement stairs. Bam-bam-bams, louder with every step. Like a sledgehammer slowly driving in a post. Bam. Bam. I look at the drapes, expecting them to shudder. Or the pictures to fall off the wall. But nothing moves. Frank stands in the doorway.

  “Ah, here we go. Here’s the final member of the family.” Dad makes introductions and watches Frank’s good arm, willing it to shake Mr. Scholtz’s outstretched hand. It takes a few seconds longer than natural, but Frank stiffly sticks out his hand.

  “Good. Good,” Dad says, pointing at chairs for Frank and Mr. Scholtz. Then to me he says, “We’re going to have some man talk here, kid.”

  This is my signal to go to my room and leave them alone. But I want to hear everything. I want to know how this man in the plaid shirt traveled from “the field” to our living room. My entire life, Germans have been the evil enemy, but this man looks about as evil as the ice-cream man. Frank sits beside the fireplace, stiff as the poker, shovel, and broom standing in the brass holder next to him.

  I hold perfectly still. My eyes are begging, but all Dad does is point at the stairs and say, “March!”

  I drag my reluctant feet up the stairs, stomp my way across the bedroom floor and make the bed squeak when I bounce on it. Then quickly, I slide my shoes off and tiptoe back across the room to take a seat at the top of the stairs where I won’t miss a word.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. A Panzer man. You bet. I was in Patton’s army. Following Rommel, were you? Hell of a general.”

  Mr. Scholtz’s voice is ten times softer than my dad’s. I can barely make out his part of the conversation, but it sounds like they have something in common since they were both in tanks in the war. Or kind of in common. They were on different sides. Part of me leans forward so I can hear better and part of me’s ready to run to call the police in case Frank starts a fight. But so far, he says nothing.

  “Officer?” I hear Mr. Scholtz ask.

  “Went in a private and came out a lieutenant. Battlefield commission. You all shot just about every one of my commanders. So one day, they hang a bar on me in the middle of a muddy field, and I’m an officer.” Dad laughs like someone told him a big joke. “Those Panzers packed a heck of a punch. No doubt about it.” There are gaps in their talking. The polite rattle of cups on saucers.

  “I was in Sherman tanks across Africa, into Italy,” Dad says.

  “They hot, the Shermans?”

  Dad laughs. “Hotter than the fires of hell. Your tanks have one of those little fans that didn’t do squat? And we couldn’t take down the armor for a breath of air because your guns never let up.”

  “I am a big man before the war.” Mr. Scholtz’s voice. “I lose ten kilo.” He’s laughing, too.

  “Sweat boxes! We thought you had us when those Panzer IVs showed up. Fast. Man, the only way we could get off an engine shot was to circle around and attack from the rear. That there Panzer IV was faster than any Sherman.”

  Between his accent and the softness of his voice, I can hardly make out anything Mr. Scholtz is saying until he starts making boom boom noises.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Dad. “We had the airpower. If we hadn’t controlled the air after Normandy, you would have had us gun to gun.”

  Is Dad saying the Germans might have won the war? I never heard anyone even hint that the Americans weren’t the winners all the way. I’m thinking about this new information when I hear Dad say he thinks he knows where he can lay his hands on some maps. Just as he tells Mr. Scholtz to sit tight, I spring from my spot at the top of the stairs and fly to my bed. Dad leaps up the stairs two at a time and appears in my doorway.

  “I need to take a look at your box of maps.” He drops to his knees as if he’s about to dive under my bed. I beat him to it.

  “I’ll get it,” I say. The last thing I need is for Dad to pull out the wrong box.

  Dad’s eyes fix on my neat piles of maps and brochures. “Zowie, kid. That’s quite a collection there. You got a map of Africa?”

  “The Congo?” I ask. “British Kenya? Ethiopia? South Africa?”

  “Northern Africa. Not that I expect you to know these countries, but Morocco? Egypt?”

  I start pulling out maps. “You want Tunisia, too?” I ask him.

  “Yeah, kid. I want Tunisia. You’re just full of surprises. How ’bout Greece? Italy? Good gravy, Marjorie. Czechoslovakia? Yep. Here, give me all you got for Europe.” And he’s gone with half of my map collection.

  “Wait till you get a load of this,” he says, his feet drumming down the stairs.

  For the next two hours they talk over those maps. Who was where, when. Whose tank was stuck in the mud and how deep. Why a British starched shirt named Montgomery wouldn’t engage. Which army left its flank open. Where they both were positioned in the Battle of the Bulge. The cracking of the Siegfried Line. West Germany. Austria. They even talk about the weather.

  I wonder if Inga knows what her dad did in the war, if he talks to her about it. I wonder what it was like when he came home from the war.

  Paper confetti rained down on parades of GIs when they arrived back in New York City. That’s what happens when you win a war. You get your picture in Life magazine, waving from ships or kissing pretty girls in the street. First New Yorkers line up for a parade and then your hometown puts you in a convertible and parades you around again. All the GIs got that after they won the war. I’ve seen the pictures a hundred times.

  But what happens when you lose a war? For sure, no one throws you a parade. Do you just go home and pick up where you left off? What if your home’s not there anymore? Lots of German towns were bombed flat, nothing but a few broken-down walls left. Do you just forget about the place that used to be home and find somewhere else to live? Do you move to Canada?

  “Capture here,” I hear Mr. Scholtz say. “Schwarze Soldaten. How you say?”

  “Black soldiers! You were picked up by the 761st Tank Battalion. Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Different American army.”

  “Same army, just separate. Separate mess halls, separate quarters. All kinds of stories swirling around those GIs. Cornpones from Iowa saying that blacks have horns and tails. They howl at night. Plain ignorance. You know, Patton didn’t think the blacks had it in them, but I knew better. Yep. Played football at East High School in Akron, Ohio, with Negroes and I knew they could hit hard as a white boy. I heard of that battalion—their motto was ‘Come out fighting.’ Guess you caught the business end of that stick, eh?”

  Patton. Rommel. Montgomery. The tank commanders’ names are as familiar to me as the characters in Alice in Wonderland, real and unreal at the same time. General Patton was in charge of the American tanks, General Montgomery was in charge of the British, and General Rommel was in charge of the Germans. I know they were real people, but I have only heard about them in stories. To me they are as fictional as the Queen of Hearts, who waves her wand and says, “Off with their heads.”

  Would Inga know those names just like she knew about Curious George? The more they talk, the more I wish Mr. Scholtz had brought her along, even though it would make Bernadette’s head explode if she heard that Inga had come to my house after I’d signed the loyalty oath. I start making a mental list of questions for Inga. So many questions, I might have to write them down. But not in the slam book. Definitely not there.

  The questions in the slam book are stupid questions with made-up answers. I have real questions. Like, do you just hide in the basement when a war breaks out in your neighborhood? Mom says we had food rationing
during the war, with stamps and books. Did they do that in Germany? What happens in a war if the grocery store’s bombed out? Where do you buy bananas? Do they close school when there’s a war? Do people go to church on Sunday, or do they wait for Monday if there are too many bombs?

  Was her dad different before the war than he was after, like Frank’s pop? Is it easier or harder to turn back into a normal person after you’ve won a war or lost a war? How do you become a normal person again after being a Nazi?

  And what happened to her brother?

  Dad’s voice interrupts the stream of questions rat-a-tattatting in my head. “Maybe they should have set up a boxing ring and let the three of ’em have at it so the rest of us grunts could go home.” Dad laughs.

  I sit and listen at the top of the stairs until my forehead hurts from squinting to hear their words. A lot of their conversation makes no sense to me. I don’t know if it would make sense to Inga, but I’d sure like to talk about it with her.

  And she would, too. I know she would. She would talk to me, and I would listen and then not tell anyone if she didn’t want me to. And I have the feeling she would keep my secrets, too. I remember the scared rabbit look in her eye that first day, and how she trusted me. I wonder if she could trust me again.

  I go downstairs to pour a glass of milk because it’s a good excuse to peek into the living room. Dad doesn’t even notice me. A dozen maps are spread out all over the floor, and he and Mr. Scholtz are on their knees. The coffee cups sit abandoned on top of the television, open beer bottles on the floor. Even Frank’s leaning forward, cradling his busted arm, though he hasn’t left his chair.

  I walk slowly back to my room. When the front door opens, I hear more laughter and good-byes. Dad tells Mr. Scholtz to “Keep it on the road,” and Mr. Scholtz tells him to “Rest easy.”

  Rest easy? I race down the stairs just as Dad holds up one hand in a final wave. He taps his eyebrow with one finger, almost in a loose salute.

  Mr. Scholtz lifts the black cap above his head in a wave. The scary commie spy cap. The same cap I saw hanging on the hook at Inga’s house. The cap he stood twisting in his hands on our front porch earlier. He slaps it on and taps the brim with one finger. He turns and starts walking down the sidewalk.

  Frank stands at the front picture window, one arm in its sling, the other in a triangle propped on his hip. Silent. So silent I wonder if he’s breathing.

  Dad and I stand inside the glass storm door. Dad puts his arm across my shoulders. The house gutters are dripping, and the snow glistens and streams toward the sewers under the brilliant sun. The back door opens and closes. I hear Carol Anne burbling in the kitchen, home from Harriet’s house. The front yard’s almost grassy again, except for the U-shaped snow mound where our fort used to be.

  “Your friend’s papa, he’s a good man. A good soldier.” Dad says, his head nodding.

  I look up at my dad and try to smile. I nod, too, because all my whole forever life I’ve been told what a good soldier is. A good soldier doesn’t cry. Keeps his chin up and doesn’t pull a face when there’s work to do.

  Mr. Scholtz is a good soldier?

  I lick my lips. A thousand questions pound on my eardrums. One question booms the loudest. I don’t know if it’s a question that’s okay to ask, or if it’s something I’m not supposed to talk about, like the box of books under my bed. This question is the one written the most in the slam book. It’s what everyone wants to know.

  “Daddy?” I clear my throat. “Was Mr. Scholtz a Nazi?”

  Dad looks out the door and is silent for only half a breath.

  “War’s over, kid.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “That’s it.” He pats my shoulder twice.

  Frank scuffs behind us, heading into the kitchen. His head’s down. Stuff’s got to be simmering in him, too. He drifts along like a shadow, saying nothing. For once, I wish he would say something. Anything.

  I can’t let it go, even if Dad did say, “That’s it.”

  “But you were in a war with him, Daddy.”

  “Yup. Soldiers work to make the war and then we got to try and make the peace. That’s how it goes, little darlin’,” he pauses. “You see what I see?”

  I look, but Mr. Scholtz has turned the corner and is out of sight.

  “Right there, in the drive. You see those salt stains on our car?”

  “Yeah,” I say, though the car looks perfectly clean to me. Just like it always is, polished and shining in the sun, the whitewall tires glowing.

  “I say we get to work and wash that car before the salt eats clean through the fender. Be a good soldier and run to the basement and grab me the pail, will you? Weather’s giving us a break today. Might as well take advantage of it.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I don’t move.

  My dad looks down at me, “Sport? Don’t just stand there, lead, follow, or—”

  I know what he’s about to say, so I say it first. “Or get out of the way.”

  “That’s my girl. Now make up your mind, and get it in gear.”

  I start for the basement and then change my mind. I turn and dash up the stairs to my room.

  “Hey, sport, where you off to?”

  “I’ll get the bucket. Gimme a sec.” I bolt into my room and tear open my book bag. I grab the slam book and bolt back down both flights of stairs, all the way to the basement. The bucket is sitting beside the washing machine where it always is, but I turn to the furnace.

  I am not allowed to touch the furnace. Ever. It sits like a black iron mountain in the corner of the basement. And I am definitely not allowed to creak open the grate and expose the orange flames. But I have watched Dad open it hundreds of times and know to first pull down the asbestos mitt from its hook and slip my hand inside of it.

  That’s just what I do.

  Then I jerk the latch to the side and swing wide the door.

  Because of the higher temperatures outside today, the glowing coals are lying in a low pile instead of jumping in flames that lick out into the room when the grate swings open.

  When the slam book hits the coals, it bursts into red and orange flames. I don’t wait to see the words Go Home melt into the fire. I slam the door, but not before part of the warmth of the glowing coals seeps inside of me. I put the fireproof mitt back on its hook.

  “Marjorie? You get lost?” Dad calls from the top of the stairs.

  “I’m coming!” I shout. I grab the bucket and fly up the stairs.

  I hand him the bucket. “I need to go tell Bernadette something,” I say as I reach for my coat. He looks at me with a tip of his head. “I really need to, Daddy.”

  “You bugging out on me?”

  “I’ll be back soon. I promise. Carol Anne wants to help, don’t you, Carol Anne?”

  But I don’t wait for her to answer. I don’t touch the stairs as I launch off the porch, putting my coat on as I fly. I hear Mom’s voice calling after me, but I keep running.

  Lead, follow, or get out of the way. The words have a rhythm that carries me right up to Bernadette’s front door. I repeat them in my head the whole way there. One foot lead, one foot follow, next step get out of the way, over and over, until I reach her front door.

  Panting, I study the wooden door with its brass knocker. I could tap my knuckles against the storm door like I usually do, but instead I open it, reach up, and give the brass ring on the inside door a big whack. And then I whack it a couple more times. I let the storm door ease shut as I hear footsteps on the other side. It’s Mrs. Ferguson’s high heels.

  As if the door is invisible, I can see her in her straight skirt and sweater set. I can see her pearls. I can see she doesn’t want any part of what I am about to say in her house, and I just can’t wait to say it.

  “Marjorie, you scared the living daylights out of me,” she says as she opens the inside door, leaving the storm door between us. Bernadette appears behind her.

  “Marjorie?”

  “It’s too
close to dinner to have your little friend over, Bernadette,” says Mrs. Ferguson as she turns on her heel and disappears into the darkness of the house.

  “You should have called first,” Bernadette starts. But this conversation doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to me.

  Bernadette doesn’t know that, and she looks down at my hands, opening the glass door a crack. “I thought maybe you were returning the slam book,” she whispers. “I’m going to need it by tomorrow.”

  “I’m not returning the slam book,” I say. “Not now, not ever.”

  “You have to,” she says, her face pinched tight as a balloon knot. She leans into the outside air, “You have to.”

  “No, I don’t, and besides, I can’t,” I answer. “I burned it up.”

  “What?”

  “In the furnace. Burned to bits.”

  “But—”

  “And now I’m going over to Inga’s to tell her I’m sorry.”

  “What for? She doesn’t know anything. We didn’t give it to her yet.”

  “You think she’s stupid because she’s just learning English, but she’s really good at French and German. She’s not stupid, Bernadette. You don’t know what she knows, and neither do I, but I’m going to find out and tell her I’m really, really sorry.”

  “But we didn’t even decide if we were going to give the book to her. We have to ask everybody.” Bernadette talks fast, as if she can undo what I did; only she can’t.

  “No, we don’t. It’s up in smoke.”

  “Are you saying you want to be friends with a Nazi?” Bernadette stands tall now.

  “I’m saying I want to be friends with Inga.”

  “But you agreed. You agreed with everyone. You signed a loyalty oath, remember? We all did. You said she’s not like us. I heard you, Marjorie.”

  I stop for a second on that one. “You’re right,” I answer. I look hard at Bernadette. I look into her so hard I can see the pigtailed, kindergarten-Bernadette, who I know still lives inside of her. “She’s not like the rest of us … she’s nice.”