“But now I understand things. I know that to know love, you have to feel pain first. That is when you can truly understand what it is and how to appreciate it. I have felt pain and I know love, yet the people I should have loved more are all gone. Before the ghetto, I should have spent more time at home. I should have appreciated the people in my life. Everything I wanted was in front of me, around me.”
I study her wistful expression, and she turns to stare at me. My appetite is gone, my throat suddenly tight. New feelings arise for this girl, as if I, too, can finally understand her. I drain a second glass of wine. My mind is foggy, the room too warm. Voices from the streets fuse a mass of undulating sound that travels through the open, heavily curtained windows.
Tears well in my own eyes before I realize it, and Elsi stands up to walk slowly to my end of the table and steps close. I look up at her, both confused and mesmerized by this action. She leans against me and strokes my head, which then rests against her stomach. Something tells me that I must stop this contact, but her touch is so soft, and the scent of her, Lena’s dress, makes me disappear into her. I reach up and put my hand against her thigh. Then she gently turns my face upward and bends to kiss my lips.
I am unprepared for this and push the chair backward to distance myself.
“I can’t,” I say, shocked more for her sake than mine.
She looks bereft, then suddenly ashamed, disappearing down the hall to close herself behind her bedroom door.
It is my fault this has happened. I have encouraged such action. We have spent so much time together.
Or is she doing this out of fear, perhaps to reward me?
I take my coat and leave the apartment to walk. I pass several soldiers and show them my identity card when they step toward me. My head is not clear. I did not foresee these feelings from Elsi, distracted by my return to work and a desire to keep her safe. Yet, strangely, I am not disappointed. I should tell her that we can never be, yet I don’t believe it myself.
Can I take something else from her?
She’s in love with you.
She has no one else. And neither do I.
Two irreparable souls.
I return to the apartment. Elsi’s door is shut, and there are no sounds within.
Forgive me, Lena!
I open her door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ELSI
Late afternoon. I have slept heavily and wake to feel Willem’s lips on my bare shoulder.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he says. “I have to go shortly.”
I roll over to face him and put out my arms. He climbs between them again.
Last night Willem became someone else, and I saw the core of him beneath the layers of gray and black and formality. His mask discarded, he was passionate and considerate. I have only known intimate physical love with Simon, which was a fleeting, distant, urgent love, against a backdrop of fear—necessary, almost. Such love in the ghetto was another mode of survival, to hold and touch, to feel human, and something that we may not have shared outside.
When I heard Willem leave the apartment after my disastrous display, I thought perhaps I had ruined everything we had together. I despised myself, tearfully vowing to leave in the night, to give myself up to the soldiers on patrol in the city that once rejected me—the city that may reject me still. Hours I lay there, thinking that Willem might not return.
And then he came through the door with soft steps and whispered apologies when he saw my distress. He drew me to him near the window, took away the cloth that separated us, and wrapped me tightly in his arms. With my head resting against his warm chest, for the first time I was able to forget our titles, our blood.
He dresses now, gray pants and jacket. Despite what we have been through, the uniform makes me anxious. It is something that represents death, yet something that has also kept me alive.
“Don’t make me anything. I have a dinner meeting with Father and his associates. I could be quite late.”
He is formal again, polite, as if the night didn’t happen. But I know him better now. I know at least that he is capable of love. I wrap the sheets around me and sense a new beginning.
I have been knocked to the ground, waking me violently from sleep. I blink and see lights in the sky from our window, the sound of sirens in the street. The brick wall separating our apartment from the next is shattered, pieces landing only inches from where I lie. I crawl under the bed and cover my ears. The noise is deafening. Then a lull in the storm. It takes me a moment to adjust to the new world, to the gaping hole in the wall behind my bed, to the stillness in my ears. Then gunfire retaliates from the ground from somewhere near. I have to get out. The building is falling down around me.
I crawl out from under the bed wearing only a slip that is covered in white dust.
I examine my hands through a thick haze of smoke, then reach down to feel my feet. I am relieved to find they are still attached. When I stand, the weight of me is almost too great for my trembling legs. Nothing broken, though I am bruised, and something stings my leg. I press my hand against my strangely hollowed thigh, as if the flesh has been scooped. Alarm for this injury is brief when a whistling sound that barely reaches my deafened eardrums reminds me that I am still in the middle of danger.
There is just enough time to reach the stairs before another blast sends me into the wall and nearly tumbling down the stairs that have been showered in glass from the tall foyer windows. Several other people crowd behind me, stomping impatiently like bulls, huddling, each creature slowly released through the gateway at the top of the stairwell and funneled into the void below, now blackened with dust.
I think of Willem then: wondering where he is, hoping he is safe, that he has found a shelter.
Someone lies at the bottom of the stairs. I bend down to check on the man. He stares at me blankly at first, takes my hand as I help him to his feet; both of us then rush into the street.
The sound of war is above us. We are too close to the battle. Some people run, screaming, into the clouds of dust that disguise the night. Fires burn on roofs nearby. Outside a man is yelling, describing yellow-and-green flashes smoldering and spreading across the rooftops.
“You have to cover that quickly,” calls a woman to me as she rushes by. It is the first time I have seen the gaping wound on my leg that burns as it meets the air.
I cross the road, following the group, hoping they are leading me to shelters. I look back at the building, once majestic, made from red brick and imported stone, according to Willem, its facade now torn away. My heart sinks at the sight of it, not from the damage but that Willem cannot find me there.
A truck pulls up beside me, and several men jump from its bed, bravely running toward another large pile of ruins. Several floors still hang, bizarrely, from the sides of the apartment block: it is a giant, abstract sculpture, a broken dollhouse.
I follow the men from the trucks. The streets are lit up from fires. Several men carry the elderly through doorways, their faces unrecognizable under blankets of ash and dust. Someone pushes an elderly man out of a doorway. He can barely stand. I catch him and lead him to where people are laying down the dead beside the living. One man is burned, one eye burned closed; the other stares out at me as if he knows me. At first I think I know him and then am selfishly relieved that I don’t. I hold his hand and tell him that a doctor will be with him soon.
Some people are pulled from the rubble, while ambulances tear around corners. Someone is yelling that he has found a woman still alive and buried in the debris. I step across broken bricks, the soles of my feet tearing, as several of us begin to clear the area, pulling away the shattered pieces of buildings. We work furiously. It is a race for life. As the woman is pulled from the debris, I see that we have lost the race.
Someone is screaming that the zoo has been hit.
The bombing has ceased, but a siren still wails somewhere in the distance. Another person announces that the raid is over for now. T
all floodlights are erected along the footpath, and ambulances arrive to collect the dying.
“Sheets!” someone yells. They have already started to wrap the dead.
I have come to the restaurant where Willem and I had dinner, where I could not look upon the faces of those considered superior. The glass is smashed, the ceiling now on the floor. The men from the trucks are yelling that there are no survivors inside.
I stop and crouch down on the footpath. Blood has streaked my leg. I am too tired to move, my ears and eyes filled with dust.
Then out of the haze he comes, streaked with artificial light: the man with golden skin.
I rush to him and he to me.
He enfolds me protectively in his arms and kisses my temple.
“I thought I had lost you! I went first to the apartment. You weren’t there. I can’t lose you. Not you. You are all I have.”
We are the same, I am thinking. We are meant to be.
“Who were they?” I ask, while he bends down to check the wound on my leg.
“British,” he says, though it is not with hostility. “It is time to leave Berlin. This city will not fare well in this war. I can sense it.”
Not even Germany is free from death.
MAY
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MATILDA
“The new commander is coming,” says Jacek from underneath the flap. “He will be here tomorrow.”
This news makes no difference to me here in the small house. I have nothing to say on the matter. Every time I hear a truck, I think it is time to go. Nurse has told me that I am to be sent away on the next one that arrives, that Berlin has given permission. I do not know what Berlin has to do with it. I do not want to know.
“Why don’t you talk?” says Jacek.
I don’t answer. I lie on my mattress and carve words into the wood. I have become quite skilled with the end of my spoon. There is dirt under my fingernails. I pick it out. Mama used to say that it is a sign of the poor.
I have been here for weeks. While I am in here I turn the age of ten. Sometimes they let me out during the day, but I am tied to a rope attached to a stake in the ground so I cannot go far. I can sit in the sun and watch the other children play on the swings but they are not allowed to speak to me. Juliane has been missing from the group. Jacek has whispered through the gaps in the walls that it was Cook’s idea to let me out, and Nurse finally agreed. Though it is only when Frau is not there. At these times, Cook gives me some fruit and milk. When playtime is over for the children, I am locked back in the small house.
I am kept separate so that I do not influence the new children who have arrived.
I am not allowed any paper to write on.
The door of the hut is open, and the sun is glaring down at me.
“Out! Now!” says one of two older girls. She steps back slightly when I emerge into the air. She does not want to be too close.
“She smells,” says the other girl, who holds her nose. She looks just as disgusted, though her eyes linger on the scratches and bites on my legs. Then she looks away.
I follow the tall girls in the direction of the hut where I used to sleep. I notice that the door is closed. They probably don’t yet know that I have been released.
I have been in the room for weeks.
The girls walk past the hut, and I tell them they have gone too far. That they have missed the doorway to the hut for the orphans.
“You are not going there.”
I am suddenly worried that I will not see Jacek again.
“Please . . . can I see the others?”
The first girl comes up close to me this time. “You are not in a position to ask for anything, little Gypsy. Frau doesn’t want you here.”
“Frida,” says the other. “Stop! That is enough.”
My legs feel wobbly—I have not been able to use them much—and Frau is standing at the front of the house with her baton.
“Go!” says Frau.
I walk toward her and see the truck with its large doors at the back, waiting like a monster, mouth open. The monster grumbles and hisses, angry and impatient; smoke is shooting from its back.
“Come on,” says the one who is not called Frida, coaxing me. Her voice is neither kind nor horrible. It is just a voice that says this must be done and finished with, perhaps so she can go back to what she was doing.
I turn to look at the hut and wonder if Jacek is standing on one of the chairs inside to spy on me from the small windows at the top. Dirty glass eyes, too high to clean. We found that if we dragged one bed to rest on top of another and then stood on the headboard, we could just see the front gate.
A soldier steps off the truck. He holds a clipboard and a pen. I hear him say my name, and Frau nods. The girls stand on either side of me.
“It takes three of you?” jokes the driver. “This one must be a handful. Come on now! Bring it this way.”
I am a thing, not a child. He doesn’t even look at my eyes. Perhaps he doesn’t recognize there is a human behind them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
WILLEM
The place where I am employed is under twenty-four-hour guard, its occupants considered a flight risk. It is a lower stage in the Germanization process, where the bad ones are weeded out and the good ones educated to Hitler’s standards, using German propaganda.
The subjects I will be managing at the new center are mostly Polish orphans, husbandless mothers-to-be, and teenage girls. Several orphans require extra and specific instruction before they are adopted. The health levels—Father’s code phrase for Aryan traits—of the orphans are to be checked by me, and as commander I am to decide who stays and who goes, who is admitted and who isn’t.
I must enforce strict hygiene and health practices for all residents, and interview the families who apply to adopt the younger children. My father, it seems, has assigned me a very busy position, as I would expect; his aim is to prevent me from having time to reflect on anything but my role.
Admittedly, I am keen to start work. This job is a welcome diversion from other potential employment that Father originally intended for me.
Before commencing my new position, Father requested that I visit another center close by, a school for young, elite German women. My father believes it is a model for what all centers will become one day. Instead of security guards at the gate, robust girls greeted me at the door. The residents of these centers are part of the League of German Girls: an entitled group of members who keep active and domestically skilled and healthy and fertile for the future of the Fatherland. They are put through rigorous physical training, work the land, and stand ready to lend their support to war in any capacity that the Führer sees fit.
There is also a medical center installed just near the school not only for these girls but for the wives of the SS, and it is my father’s wish that I call there once a week to operate this practice. I have visited the medical center and found it meticulous in its upkeep; sterile, white, and heavily supplied with medicine. However, I was keen to leave. Stark places often mean excessive control to me now, and rules that I suffer, rather than agree with. I yearn to be the one in control.
Elsi and I have spent several days settling into our home, several miles from the Center. Our new house sits between other houses, blending into the picturesque hillside. The town is colorful and quaint, with a school, restaurants, and churches now used as clothing and household donation centers for widows of war. Elsi has taken to the place straight away. She has mingled with the locals and, even with her strangely accented German, has been greeted well, perhaps because I stand just behind her. We have been employing furniture makers this past week, and Elsi insists on making the curtains and a quilt for our bedroom.
“Do you love me?” she asked me this morning as I was getting dressed for my first day of work. She was lying on her side, her legs bare, tangled in the sheets, her white back exposed.
“You need to sit up. I want to check your leg before I leave
.”
I pulled away the dressing and ran my hand across the shallow indentation. The wound is no longer sticky and raw, the skin now hardened and healing. There will always be a mark, a slight indent of the skin: a harsh reminder of our time in Berlin.
“You haven’t answered me.”
“What?”
“Love? Me?”
“Of course,” I said.
Though the word is used too casually; is it not? Love is more than just a word. It is something you grow into with time. But I cannot explain that to Elsi. She may not understand, skeptical of my response at these moments. She has seen some cracks in my makeup that I am unable to explain.
It is only when she sometimes cries that she seems too young, and I wonder what I have done. It feels right, although in the eyes of some it is not. Not in the eyes of my countrymen, especially not my father, and perhaps not even Lena, now that our relationship has changed. It is not love I feel—perhaps that will come—but it is something more powerful. It is a sense of purpose.
I was deeply attracted to her, but it was not until the bombing in Berlin that I discovered just how important she was to me, that new thoughts arose: we could share a life together; we could build something out of the most tragic of circumstances. The thought of suddenly losing her was intolerable as I ran several blocks to our apartment. I believe that the feeling of potential loss was close enough to love, and enough for me to declare that I had feelings for her. After the bombing, we escaped to this house in the countryside.
As much as I hate to admit weakness, I believe that Elsi has saved me from self-pity.
“You only care about your work and my leg,” she said.
“It is a good leg,” I said playfully.
She laughed then, and it was a strange and wondrous sound, this new happiness that she is slowly unwrapping.
“Even when you joke it sounds serious,” she said.
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