A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  “Tell me everything, Annaliese.”

  Annaliese started with her family’s move to Bonn and the night Rolf saw her dance in Sleeping Beauty. When she was done, her breakfast was cold and Katrine took it downstairs to warm up. When Katrine returned a few minutes later with the tray, she set it down with purpose.

  “You are staying here with me. I will tell anyone nosey enough to ask about you that you’re my very shy cousin from Lontzen. We will find a way to keep you from having to go back to Germany. I don’t know how, but we will figure it out, Annaliese. Don’t worry. The war can’t last forever. And when it’s over, we’ll find someone who can help you stay here with me.”

  “Who? Who can help me?”

  “I don’t know. Someone. For right now you are Anna, not Annaliese. And you’re from Lontzen. And you’re shy.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because the less you say to anyone, the better.”

  For the first time in nearly a year, Annaliese felt hope. Katrine was smiling back at her, and it was as if she were looking at a reflection of herself, happy and whole and free.

  Twenty-four

  PARIS

  OCTOBER 1944

  Simone returned to a Paris still getting used to its freedom. The shoe-repair shop had been boarded up and the flat emptied. No one could tell her where her father and brother had been buried, or if the flat’s furnishings had been taken by the Gestapo and either destroyed or distributed among them. Not knowing where else to go, she returned to the locksmith shop and Celeste Didion, hoping for just a place to stay until she could make other arrangements. Celeste invited Simone to live with her in exchange for taking care of Monsieur Didion, who was now bedridden. With the ousting of the Nazis and the return of Parisians who had fled the city, there had been a flurry of key-making and locksmithing and she was doing it all herself. The grandson who was supposed to come home from the war and take over the business had died in a German labor camp.

  Food was still scarce in the city, and tensions were still high, but the Nazis were no longer in power and no longer the enemy. Celeste told Simone that no one would care that she had shot and killed the Gestapo officer who had attacked her. It was old news that had mattered only to the German officials who’d been in power in the seventh arrondissement, and they were gone.

  Simone had wondered what it would be like to come back home after so many months away. She was not the same woman she had been when she left, and she didn’t know if Paris would be the same either. It cheered her to see the spire of the Eiffel Tower, the two towers of Notre Dame, and, off in the distance, the sparkling dome of Sacré Coeur, but she could sense that Paris had lost its innocence, just like she had. Paris had its ruins both physical and internal, and she had hers. The abandoned clinic was still only a few blocks away from the locksmith shop, and the street where she had grown up—and where Papa and Étienne had been shot as she watched—only a few blocks farther still. She and the city were like two sisters who had shared the same devastating losses, and now they were supposed to shake off the dust of their grief and move on.

  But they would never forget what had been taken from them. Or done to them.

  Weeks would go by in between letters from Everett. Each one had been read and censored before finding its way to her such that most said the same things: he missed her, he loved her, and he was counting the days until he could come back for her.

  “Has he asked you to marry him, then?” Celeste said one bleak evening in February 1945. She and Simone had been sitting in Celeste’s tiny living room and Simone had read part of Everett’s letter to the old locksmith’s wife.

  Simone had not known how to answer. Everett had not asked her in so many words. But she knew she would marry him. It was as if she and Everett both knew he didn’t need to ask a question he already knew the answer to.

  “He will,” she had finally said.

  “It might be best to be prepared in case he doesn’t,” Celeste said, her tone maternal. “He’ll be going back to the States when this war is at last over. He might even have a girl back home. Have you thought about that?”

  Simone wanted to say she knew everything about Everett Robinson. She knew the name of his childhood best friend, and why he had a scar on his chin, and his favorite flavor of ice cream, and his shoe size. She knew he had no girl waiting for him in Texas.

  “He is coming back for me and we are getting married,” she said instead.

  Celeste shrugged. “You don’t want to be another French girl hurt by an American soldier who is only interested in one thing.”

  “Everett isn’t like that.”

  Celeste rose from her chair, teacup in hand. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt, Simone. Not after everything you’ve suffered.”

  Simone didn’t fear losing Everett to another woman. She knew only one force could keep them apart: the German Wehrmacht. Everett had reunited with his squadron and was again in the cockpit of an airplane flying reconnaissance missions and therefore ever a target for German antiaircraft guns.

  As the weeks passed, word eventually reached Simone that Everett had helped the Seventh Army eliminate the Colmar Pocket and provided the intelligence needed for the recapturing of Strasbourg. He and his comrades reached the Rhine during the first week of March and then moved on to capture Nuremberg and then Munich.

  As April eased into May, all of Paris seemed poised to hear the announcement that the Wehrmacht had been defeated. Finally, on the eighth day of May, the bells of every cathedral in Paris began to chime, ringing out the news that the Germans’ surrender had been unconditional. The war was over.

  Several days passed before Everett got word to Simone that he was coming back to France to serve with the Allied occupational forces, photo-mapping the devastation spread across the country. He’d already turned in his request to his squadron commander to be given permission to marry her.

  “You do want to marry me, don’t you?” he had written on a wafer-thin V-mail.

  Simone had rushed up the stairs to the bedroom where Celeste was having lunch with Monsieur Didion. She thrust the letter in front of her.

  “See?” Simone said. “We’re getting married.”

  Everett arrived in Paris in August, and while he was busy flying missions, sometimes for several days at a time, he and Simone found the time to reconnect after nearly a year’s separation. They took long walks, waited for approval from the army to marry, and made their plans for a life together in the States.

  On November 23, 1945, they stood before a magistrate and pledged their vows. Simone did not care what she wore, but Celeste insisted on something bridal. There was no organza or taffeta to be had for a decent price in postwar France, but there was parachute silk. Yards and yards of it. So Celeste fashioned a stylish but simple dress out of snow-white parachute material. The couple honeymooned in Versailles, and eight days later Everett was billeted back to the States.

  Before he left, he made arrangements for Simone to stay with Londoners he’d befriended during the year of preparation for D-Day, believing it would be faster for Simone to get to America if his friends helped her. There were thousands of British war brides who would be getting transported to the States; he’d heard plans were already in the works.

  On her last day in Paris, Simone surveyed the city where Maman’s physical memory dwelled. The horrible sickness that had ravaged her mother’s lungs had taken her from Simone when she was only nine, and the tenuous hold she’d had on her mother had been tied to every dish, every piece of linen, every nook and trinket in the flat above the shoe-repair shop. She hadn’t even a photograph of her mother. All she owned of Maman now was what she saw when she looked in a mirror. The color of her eyes, the set of her brow, the fullness of her lips were her mother’s. Papa always said she looked so much like Maman . . .

  Simone was now the wife of an American man who lived
thousands of kilometers and a sea away from Rue de Cler and all of its beautiful, horrible memories. When she sailed away to the United States, she knew it was possible she might never see Paris again.

  But the part of Paris she loved most was gone already.

  At dawn on the second of January, she boarded a bus bound for Calais, and then a ferry at noon that took her across the English Channel to the coast of Kent. By the time she arrived at St. Pancras Station in London, the sun was setting. Everett’s British friends, an older couple whose only son had died at Dunkirk more than five years before, and who had found purpose in mothering Everett when he was stationed in England, met her on the platform, even though the airfield they lived near was another hour and a half away by train.

  Over the next month Charles and Eloise gave Simone what she needed most during the strange pause between her old life and the new one that awaited her. Charles was good company on the long trips back to London to take care of immigration details at the American embassy, and Eloise provided a warm and loving home to rest in. Not only that, Eloise helped Simone realize that her exhaustion and nausea throughout the day weren’t caused by a virus she’d picked up while traveling but because she was carrying Everett’s child inside her body.

  Though she had only known Charles and Eloise for a short while, she cried when all of her travel documents were in place and they took her to the train station for the last time.

  They, and Celeste and Monsieur Didion, and Henri and Collette, had stood in as parent figures at the most difficult times in her life, times when she had felt like a child lost in the woods, scared and alone.

  As Charles and Eloise waved good-bye, Simone realized she wanted to make them proud of her. All of them. She wanted them all to know that the sacrifices they had made for her had been worth it. She wasn’t the broken child who had been tossed to them by unkind fates. She had survived what had been done to her and taken from her. She was strong. She was alive. Simone placed her hand on her stomach, feeling the tiniest rounded bump that rested there, and she knew Everett had been right. The world was becoming beautiful again.

  Twenty-five

  BELGIUM

  1944

  For the first few weeks after arriving in Malmédy, Annaliese stayed inside Katrine’s half of her rented two-story duplex. The building was owned by an older couple who’d lived in the other half but had long ago fled to Spain when the war began. Katrine had a key to her neighbors’ place and would check on the pipes, locks, and such as had been requested of her in lieu of rental payments. She showed Annaliese where she kept the key. If at any time Annaliese felt like she needed to hide, she was to take the key, go next door, and secure herself inside. German troop presence was light in the town, but Katrine didn’t want Annaliese to take any chances. The war was intensifying with Allied troops on the ground in France. Local occupation forces were thankfully distracted by the possibility that the Allies would be marching into Belgium next.

  When June ended with no indication that Rolf had figured out where she was, Annaliese began to cautiously relax. She was fairly certain he wouldn’t have been granted extended leave during the height of war to pursue her. He might have been allowed a day or two off, but if her parents had said nothing about her having an old friend across the river in what had been Belgium, it would not occur to him that that was where she had gone. He’d no doubt been wanted back in Frankfurt straightaway. His little domestic troubles would have to wait until the war was over. She had some time to figure out what her next move would be.

  Annaliese spent the remaining summer months reconnecting with Katrine and her own sense of well-being. During the day, when Katrine was working at the school, Annaliese read, mended their clothes (Katrine had given her half her wardrobe), maintained a little vegetable garden, and listened to Katrine’s English phonographs in the cellar with the volume on low—no recordings or printed matter in English were allowed. In the evenings, Katrine taught her French or they played cards or simply talked about the dreams they still carried deep within them. Katrine no longer danced, but she still loved the ballet and the big city. She wanted to go back to London and spend some time with her maternal grandfather, whom she had not seen since Britain declared war, and she still wanted to visit America to see Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. Annaliese didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life after the war. She only knew she didn’t want to go back to what she had been doing. And Katrine assured her that she would remember how to dream again.

  At the end of August, word came to Malmédy that Paris had at last been liberated by Allied forces. The commander of the German garrison had been directed to burn the city to the ground before surrendering, but he defied that order. On August 26, General Charles de Gaulle led a jubilant march down the Champs-Élysées. On everyone’s mind in Malmédy was how long it would take before the Allies marched into Belgium. Whispered conversations overheard by Katrine in the faculty lunchroom suggested it wouldn’t be long. If the Allies reclaimed Belgium, all that would stand between them and an advance into Germany were all the little border towns. Things might get worse before they got better. The good news that Allied troops had entered Brussels on the third of September was slightly tempered by concern that fresh German ground troops would likely be dispatched to meet the Allies as they continued east. Reports that the retreating Germans were burning homes and businesses and telegraph wires as they fled was also cause for worry.

  Over the next three months the Allies worked their way eastward. The Nazi propaganda ministry dropped leaflets over their German border towns, including Malmédy, warning their citizens that American troops were using riding whips on German women, and that everyone, in uniform or out, was expected to defend Germany to the last man. Katrine and Annaliese spent many nights in the cellar as the far-off boomings of artillery echoed in the distance. As October eased into November and the first snow fell, the first American troops arrived in the village to map its contours, study its position, and gauge the mood of its historically Belgian but heavily German-speaking populace. A hushed sense of expectation seemed to creep across the village.

  The day that the American first lieutenant knocked on the door of the duplex, Annaliese stayed in the kitchen out of sight while Katrine talked to him.

  Annaliese could only make out some of the English words. Katrine was not fluent, but she knew far more English than the majority of villagers in Malmédy. They talked for several minutes and then Katrine invited the man in and closed the door. She called for Annaliese to come out.

  When Annaliese rounded the corner, she saw a soldier of average height, slim build with wavy brown hair cropped short. He was attractive, but in a different way than Rolf. This man had a kind face and gentle gaze.

  “This is my cousin Anna,” Katrine said in English. “She knows only a little English.” Then she turned to Annaliese. “This is Lieutenant John Sawyer with the . . .” Katrine turned back to the man, a quizzical look on her face.

  Lieutenant Sawyer smiled and put out his hand. “The 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. A pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I would have thought you were sisters.”

  Annaliese shook his hand numbly as he said the word sisters in English. He had taken them for siblings, like most people did.

  “The lieutenant and a few of his men need a place to stay until the rest of their battalion gets here in a few weeks.”

  “Here?” Annaliese echoed. “In Malmédy?”

  “The war is coming to our village, Lieutenant?” Katrine asked.

  He said something to Katrine in English. Annaliese only caught half of the words. Intent. Village safe. Women and children. Battle. Away.

  Katrine turned to Annaliese. “They hope to avoid staging any battles here, but if the Germans counterattack, they must be ready. The city may be instructed to evacuate at some point. They are taking control of Malmédy.”

  The lieutenant said somet
hing else and Katrine answered him. Then she retrieved the key for the other side of the duplex.

  “I’m going to open the rooms next door. I told him we’d be able to give them a hot meal tonight. There will be four of them. We will need to add more vegetables to the soup.”

  “Four of them?” Annaliese didn’t hide her surprise. Food was in short supply.

  “They are here to end the war, Anna,” Katrine said simply.

  For the next three weeks, the lieutenant and his men used the duplex to sleep and shower in and Katrine not only gave them a hot meal at night, she and Annaliese took a warm breakfast to them every morning. Katrine had many long conversations with the lieutenant, of which Annaliese could only understand the barest minimum.

  At night when they were alone again in Katrine’s bedroom, she would tell Annaliese all she’d learned from him, about the progress of the war and what was happening in the other parts of the world—details that had been denied them by the Ministry since the war began—and about life in the United States.

  “Teach me more English,” Annaliese said one night after Katrine returned to their room. She’d spent two hours talking with the lieutenant about America.

  “All right, I will. But you have to promise not to say much around the lieutenant or any of the other Americans, Anna. You have a German accent when you speak.”

  “So do you!”

  “But not like yours. You don’t want them to find out who you are married to.”

  Annaliese had almost forgotten that she was still married. Almost.

  The second week in December, the lieutenant, whom Katrine called John now, and his men left to join the convoy that was the rest of the 285th. The mapping and study of the city was complete. If the enemy was to be engaged there, the occupying Americans would have the advantage. Annaliese watched from the open front door as Katrine and John said good-bye at the side of the road.