by Jeffrey Lent
“Our division, some of it, we’d been sent across country, not the main roads but small lanes and roadways, so that was what we encountered, what we saw. Stuff like that. Then we came to the Neckar River, and across that the town of Heilbronn. And that was where Oliver saved my life. As we got close the Kraut artillery up in the hills around the town opened up on us and we’d finally found what we’d expected. And the city was burning, from their shells, from ours. Later we learned the whole place had been firebombed back in December but the Air Corps guys were back, doing their job. And our own big guns. We crossed the river at night in amphibious assault boats under a cloud of smoke from the bombing, from the burning. But the Krauts knew that’s what we were doing. The sky was red and orange from the fires in the town and obscured by floating oily smoke. And the buildings, it seemed the buildings were all ruins—a wall, a part of a wall, some few standing but with empty windows, burnt out from firebombing, then reinhabited since, best they could. There were snipers up in some of those and we were going forward in the dark, building to building, trying to hold enough of them to shelter for the night. We could tell some of these had been factories or warehouses, those along the river and some blocks in. It was all a mess—we had no idea how many German infantry there were, or where. Except clearly there were a bunch, along with their big guns in the hills.
“And this also—gangs of kids. They knew that ruined town better than anyone, certainly at night. And time to time two or three would pop out, ahead but most often behind and hurl bricks or cobblestones at us. Winged and took down more than a few but they were so fast they were gone before we could do much—and they knew all the ways the interiors of those buildings connected, and how they didn’t. We kept learning that over and over the next couple of days.
“We were crossing railroad tracks, five or six lines altogether, the railyard was what it was. And there was a wooden building burning alongside, somehow spared from all the other fires that winter but it lit the place up like daylight and in some other buildings there were snipers, or maybe just one or two—that was how it was. Nothing could be known for sure. Then one of our tanks rolled up and took down the building with the snipers in it and so we started to cross more easily. I was up at one end of my platoon and where we were crossing was just below where the tracks came around a curve. And at the edge of the light from the burning building. I was holding cover for those ahead of me, and once they were across I started out. Not fast or slow but moving and still watching those ruins, my guys piled up against one wall and waiting to start advancing again.
“Just like that someone jumped me from behind and, arms wrapped around me, took me forward fast and then down and we rolled together into the cinders and gravel down into the ditch of embankment the far side of the tracks. As a single old boxcar slammed on past, came out of the dark up around the curve and then into the light of the fire and one of the tanks put an .88 into it and it burst into flame and collapsed off the tracks. Oliver was already up, reaching down to help me stand. Because he alone saw it coming. And I was right there, my back to it, no idea at all. So there, now. That’s how he saved my life.
“There’s uncountable ways to die in war—I know I saw more than I want to remember, let alone count. I could tell stories about that but won’t and I doubt any man will. But all I know, all I can say is, I was nearly run over by a boxcar. It was about a sure thing. It was probably some of those kids that released the brake and got that thing rolling. And over the next few days, now and then when I had the chance, I scanned those tracks and I swear there wasn’t another piece of rolling stock in those yards, anywhere. Which makes sense—the Germans had been moving troops east, what few they could. By then we’d all heard about the camps and the Air Corps had been targeting rail-lines, anyway, ever since they got over German airspace. So I was nearly crushed by maybe the last unused piece of rolling stock in all of Germany. But Oliver saw it coming and ran across those tracks and both of us were lucky. Do you see? But he wasn’t a hero—I’ve heard about men and read about situations where someone was called a hero. But there aren’t any heroes. There’s just men who see what has to be done and do their best to do it. Some succeed. Many don’t. But, and I’m maybe getting ahead of the story here or perhaps not, once I got home, once the war was done, I knew there were countless ways I could’ve died. But there was only that one time when I knew I would’ve except for another man seeing what was about to kill me and doing what was needed. And what was left of the war didn’t kill me but that night stayed with me. So once I got home I knew one day I had to look him up and thank him. If it’s one man you know for certain kept you alive, how could you not do that? So here I am.”
He took a slow drink from his water and she watched his throat working. His eyes had gone away from her and when he set the jar down he pulled out again his lighter and the pack of smokes and she watched him, the tremble in his fingers as he labored to extract a smoke from the pack and then his struggle with the lighter and once he finally got fire to the tobacco and jetted plumes, she watched him pull himself to his feet, as if there was a great pressure in the room holding him to his chair. Once up, wordlessly he offered the pack to her and she shook her head. He leaned, with great uncertain care, to place the pack and lighter on the table, an offering if she wished to change her mind.
“Yes,” she said. “Here you are.”
“I think,” he said and stopped. Then said, “I think I should leave now.”
She breathed. With great calm of voice as if speaking to a frightened horse about to bolt, some creature, she said, “But you haven’t told me about her. The girl.”
“Oh. No, you’re right. I have not.” His eyes swaying everywhere about the room except upon her.
“Can you?”
The sorrow of him, his sag, his look upon her finally. “But I have to, don’t I?”
“I think you do.” She stood and said, “Why don’t you step out on the porch and finish your smoke, first? And I’m going to check on Oliver.”
He took a long wavering beat and then said, “That would be good.”
Oliver was sweating, snoring, oblivious. She wet the washcloth with cool water and mopped his face and went back downstairs. And she paused then, thinking, I can just send him away. I don’t have to hear this story. And wished she was strong enough to do so. And wondered if she was strong enough to hear it. She went down the stairs.
She had been gone long enough so he’d clearly used the downstairs bathroom—his face and hair were wet, his hair slicked back with a comb but the unruly cowlick already peaking up wet. He didn’t look tired, as if the muscles of his face had tautened while waiting for her. His eyes bright. This vigor surprised her and reminded her also.
“I never thought,” she said. “Fried eggs or a sandwich?”
“No, I’m fine. There was plenty of that and more.” His voice was relaxed and she then understood his strain had increased. He said, “I’m still not sure about this.”
“I am.”
He nodded. “I thought so. Let’s sit again, I refilled our waters.”
And he had. He didn’t wait but went again to the table and sat. Beside his cigarettes and lighter, beside his Mason jar, he’d also found the cut-glass ashtray from the sideboard and placed it there. She made her way to her chair, her own water, but he was already talking as she settled.
“It was toward the end of the second day. Things had improved but we didn’t know that, yet. We were still in the streets, clearing building by building. Ruins of buildings. Heaps of rubble. The town had been firebombed back in December. Most of what we saw, what we found, were ruins from that time and the winter now over and how people had lived. And still were. And like I said, there were snipers. That’s all there were, as far as regular German Army. Snipers left behind. But we didn’t know that—we still expected any moment to turn a corner where there would be entire platoons waiting for us. And even though we didn’t, it was hard going. Not a square foot of trust all a
round us. Snipers, you have to understand—those guys are not only really good at what they do, but also this: They’d been left behind, had chosen to stay behind, knowing it was the end of the game for them. They knew the war was lost. That they were only alive as long as they could stay alive. Which, except for the few who surrendered, meant killing as many of us as they could, then fading back into the next building. Which I guess they knew as well as the kids I talked about—maybe, likely even, some of those kids were guides. See, there? I’m not painting much of a picture, am I? Except we were figuring it out, that day. Once, I’m remembering this now, we made it around a corner and saw a woman in the street and then she darted toward one of the buildings and disappeared. Except there wasn’t a building, just a pile of rubble. And a group of us went up slow and all jacked up and poked around and saw there was a hole in the collapsed bricks and charred timbers and inched in and saw the hole went down. Twisting down. So down we went and came to a door, a thrown-together door of metal roofing and old timbers and we banged on that, hanging back, all of us packed against the sides of the entryway and our rifles ready and grenades to lob, like that. And finally the door opened a crack and a woman stuck her face out and, in German, said, ‘No guns here, nobody to shoot,’ and we knew what that meant and we could smell them also. It was a basement filled with people, very old or very young and they’d been in there for weeks, maybe months. Living there. And hidden some days, a week or more, waiting for us and terrified and starving and cold and sick and some dying. That was one thing I remember. We got them out of there and sent them back down the line to the medics and the guys taking charge of prisoners. Because, this is key here, every single person was a prisoner at that time. And for weeks, months afterward. Another story, though, that one. But to give you a sense of how skewed everything was those few days.”
He paused and lighted a cigarette and studied her. She looked back at him and waited a moment and nodded, as if giving permission. He answered with his own nod, ground out his smoke and said, “Everybody was exhausted. The spring sun had lifted out of the town and only the hills held light. There were fruit trees blooming. On the hills in orchards and also here and there along the streets. Pale pretty things that seemed to have no place there. Or didn’t care what we were up to. I was right behind him. We’d passed a quiet corner, an old brick house with no roof or second floor and most of the first broke open and there wasn’t anybody there. Then he heard something and swung about so fast a couple doughs almost fell over him. But he was stepping around them and there she was, a girl rushing toward us as if she’d come out of the air and she was holding out a round metal thing in her hands, thrusting it toward him and saying something in a high queer voice that only later I realized was fright but the thing is, she wasn’t supposed to be there—we thought the building was empty and there she was with some sort of bomb in her hands and he opened up and she was blown back against a pile of dirt and burned bricks, the bomb clanking down dead also, and then she was just a girl maybe ten years old in a dirty white skirt and a red-splotched seeping blouse and long blonde hair done up in braids. He yelled for a medic, like you do and she was watching him. He dropped his rifle and knelt down and dug out a gauze pack and pressed it to her chest. Guys were coming up around them, including me and he jerked his head around and again yelled for a Medic and then turned back to her and she was sputtering, trying to breathe and then in that clipped English some Germans had she said, ‘I am alone.’ And then she died. Eyes open to the sky.”
He knocked out another cigarette and smoked and then said, “It wasn’t a bomb at all. It was some sort of copper hot water bottle. She was trying to make a gift of it. An offering of some sort. It was likely a family treasure she’d held on to. All she had left. Because over the next few days Oliver asked around, as things settled, and he learned that she and her mother were the only ones of her family that survived the December bombing. Her father had been sent to the Eastern Front in ’43 and not heard from since. She’d had two younger brothers who died in the December raid and their house had been destroyed. But she and her mother had held on. Living with others like them. Then a month before we arrived her mother got very sick, a fever, who knows—most everyone in the town was sick or ill from the winter, from the entire war, from bad food or no food. And her mother died and she was alone. That’s what Oliver learned. Her name was Brigitte.”
He looked down at the floor then. Spread his knees and leaned his elbows upon them and studied those old floorboards.
Her heart was thumping hard in her chest. Almost a panic with this news, this story. She said, a gulp of words, “But it was an accident.”
He looked up but was quiet a long time before he answered her. He said, “Sure, it was. But war is a strange and terrible business. There she was, lived through all of it. And just weeks to go before it was done. Truth is, for her, it would’ve been that very day. And Oliver knew all that. How it struck him. That, but for him, she’d be alive today. And, I don’t know, but I’d say killing her was a cumulative of everything else he’d been through.” He was quiet a moment and then said, “She was the moment it became too much, for him.”
She stood and took one of his cigarettes and smoked and walked about the kitchen and he watched her do this. She stubbed the smoke out in the ashtray and said, “So. You show up and three days later my husband is lying in bed struck sick from drinking. Is that because you came? Can you tell me that?”
But she waited no answer and went to the sideboard and poured a finger of gin into a glass and then crossed to the fridge and cracked ice cubes and filled the glass with quinine tonic. She offered him nothing but took her seat again and waited, her eyes bright and liquid upon him.
He said, “I think all he wanted was to show me a good time, to keep me here another day and I can’t say why except maybe to show me how he was. We drove a couple hours north to a fiftieth wedding anniversary party—the kind the old-time Canucks have. There was a tent set out in a field from the house and forty or so cars and trucks parked around. In the tent there were tables of food and tubs of iced soda and beer, one with watermelons in it—some Mon Onc had driven to Boston for those. And the old couple were holding court under the tent, in armchairs carried down from the house. It was a couple hundred people, maybe more. And people playing music all over the place—fiddlers teamed up and fiddlers playing with men or women playing accordions, a pair of guys with guitars playing cowboy songs. A grand old party, it was. And loads and loads of kids—well fifty years married—how many grandkids would there be, and great-grands also? He and I were both wandering around talking to people the way you do and drinking a beer or two—at least I was. And then I saw it all, clear as day. There was a girl cut through the crowd and she walked right up to Oliver and was talking to him and she was the spit image of that girl from Heilbronn. I saw it, even from the distance I was. How do you explain something like that? Chance? Of course there’s people in the world look like one another. But there she was. She even had her hair braided up on the sides of her head. And in one hand a fiddle, a smaller one like a child uses. And I saw him lean and talk and then sway back. She stepped closer and tugged at his shirt and he looked around, his face wild as could be and then he was gone. Ran right out of the tent. It took me a while to find him. But, a party like that, there’s always a place a few men find, away from the others. Wasn’t the house or anything like that. But I got far enough away, out to the edge of all the parked cars and I heard a single fiddle playing and followed that and the old empty chicken shed where a half-dozen men crouched in the dust, smoking and passing some clear liquor back and around; one old guy sitting on an upturned crate playing those old slow sad songs. Oliver wouldn’t talk to me but was intent on the drink and I let him be, although I didn’t leave. I took a couple sips offered by another fella and it seared my throat. So I sat out in a chicken coop most of the night. At one point I left him and walked back to the tent and ate and kept my eye out for the girl—I wanted to se
e her again, but I never did. Then when I got back to the coop Oliver seemed sober as a judge and was angry with me. Said it was time to go. And just then another man stepped up with another fiddle and handed it to him and challenged him to play reels and airs and whoever quit a song first got to call the next one. And used his teeth to pull the cork on a new bottle of that liquor and Oliver stood a moment and his knees sagged and I thought There, I can get us home now. Then he tucked the fiddle to his chin and scraped the bow and they began to play. And drink. And play. This went on a long time and the sun came up and after a while I trailed off with a couple other men up to the tent where there was a breakfast spread out and I ate and had coffee and after a while I went back down to the chicken coop and it was empty but for Oliver and the other fiddler, both sunk down in the old hay, both near passed out but both still scratching out songs. Sort of. It was then I was able to get him up and pretty much carried him to his truck and found my way back here. I guess I could’ve done better but at the time I didn’t see how.”
There came a silence then that stretched out. Ruth finished her drink and leaned to set the glass on the floor and remained bent over, pressed down. They could hear the Seth Thomas clock ticking the seconds in the next room. Faintly came the sounds of slow labored snoring from upstairs. Incongruously, a flittering rise and fall of birdsong came through the screens. Ruth whispered, “Oliver. Oliver.”
