Nightingale

by Susan May Warren

  “I’ve heard them speak of you.” She turned back to him, and in her sweet brown eyes, she wore a look that brought him back to that moment when Esther had finally heard his words. God loves you more than you can imagine. As if, for the first time, she’d seen morning.

  Somehow he had to expunge her from his mind, or he might just lose it.

  “You’re the one they call the Nightingale.”

  November 1945

  Dear Peter,

  I will admit that I stood at the rail, outside the halo of light, fearing its betrayal even as I watched the guard load you onto the train. You walked like a man with age in his bones—I’ll never forget the way, too, that you turned and stared out at the light, the hope of one last glimpse on your expression.

  How I wanted to press myself into the light then, to lay bare the things still cloaked inside me. How you rescued me, brought me back to myself, or at least the fragments of the girl I once knew, I once believed in. Not only that, but I saw in you a fate I longed for—to believe in a love that might not harden under the brutal glare of one’s transgressions, but become, perhaps, more pliable, even sweeter. A love that pursues, even battles past the minefields of my insecurities.

  But, perhaps you know all this—perhaps this was your intent when you scuttled your freedom to purchase mine. You may not know, however, how it is that you also set Linus free.

  Linus has become the man I met, the one whose smile captured me across the dance floor, charming and gregarious. Somehow, that night in the burning solarium, the angry Linus died and a new man resurrected.

  A man who has become a father to his daughter. And a husband to his wife, Rosemary.

  They were married a month ago, a small ceremony in the Judge’s quarters. I was not invited, to which I harbor no bitterness. I did, however, offer my blessing. Indeed, Linus came to me, and on bended knee, asked for it, right there in the middle of the front parlor of Hanson’s boardinghouse. With the sun streaming through the stained glass transom, the scent of late season chrysanthemums, and so much apology in his eyes…

  Of course I gave it. Because haven’t we been held prisoner long enough?

  Linus knew, probably, that I would free him. He belonged to me no more than I belonged to him, and I saw Rosemary in his eyes even as he embraced me, whispering gratitude in my ear.

  You would probably like to know that Charlie too is showing signs of waking. Small movements of his hands, and his eyes following me across the room after I shave him. Perhaps your sacrifice for him will save his life also.

  So, you see, Peter, you set us all free, and now I pray for your freedom.

  The letter I sent to Fort Robinson returned to my post office box marked “POW liberated.” I admit taking it down to the drugstore and tracing my own handwriting as I shared a phosphate with Sadie, wondering how to find you. Even, if I should. Perhaps I was clinging too much to the shadow of you, what I hoped you might be to me, instead of the truth.

  Love has that power, sometimes. The hope of it can fill our mouths with the freshness of fruited tomorrows. I can taste the sweetness of your smile, see your blue eyes in mine, feel the heat of your hand upon my cheek. I hear your laughter, deep inside, still stirring my rusty soul. You have twined into the fabric of my life—there with me as I read to Charlie, your hands settled upon my shoulders, or when I finish my shift, walking home with me under the bushy elms. You sing with me as I lay Sadie to bed, and afterward, as I sit in the window seat of our room and consider the stars, you are there, counting them with me.

  I pocket them for you, in hopes you are well.

  And then, because you gave me the words, I pray, May Your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you.

  I have to mention, by the way, that Dr. Sullivan has agreed to sponsor my education. I was accepted to a one-year program and am moving to Milwaukee at the first of the year to complete my management course in nursing.

  Sadie will stay with Linus and Rosemary. Of course, Bertha is thrilled, and I suspect that Sadie, who spends the time I’m on my shift with her father, will thrive. I haven’t told her yet, preferring to curl my body against hers in our tiny bed and breathe in her dove-softened innocence. In truth, the idea of not returning to her after my shift can render me hollow, as if a hand has severed my heart from my body.

  But it is for a season, and only because she deserves Linus too.

  I have decided to send this to the International Red Cross center in Dresden, Germany, in hopes that it will make its way to you.

  I am nurturing the feeble hope that I have knitted myself into your days, and nights, as well. Thus, I’m holding on to you, Peter. Don’t let go, and return to me.

  Yours,

  Esther

  CHAPTER 18

  “I could get into real trouble for this.” Rachel’s voice slipped from the shadows of the alley cutting onto Töpferstrasse, in the murky shadows of the square surrounding the Frauenkirche.

  “I know.” Peter let his voice tumble out low along the blackened cobblestones as she walked past him, sat in the chair opposite him in the courtyard of the market, where hamsters and others bartered clothing, medicine, and food for ration cards. A violinist—probably a former performer in the symphony—set up his case in the square, hoping the arias of Wagner’s Der Freischütz might earn him dinner. The sun had wrung out over the river, dripping orange into the Elbe as it escaped behind the scarred skyline of the western banks.

  “How long did she stand after the bombing?” As if God had pressed His almighty thumb upon the cupola of the Lutheran Church of Our Lady, the building lay in rubble, a debris pile of sandstone and metal spilling out across the square, the still-standing altar and the chancel like fingers beseeching grace from the heavens.

  “Three days. The heat rose to over one thousand degrees, and the sandstone pillars simply melted. They couldn’t support the rest of the structure. The dome crashed in, and the entire church crumbled.”

  He looked over at her. Rachel had a prettiness about her, with her blond hair, a grace in her green eyes that belied her profession. The kind of girl he might have met in a country church, wearing a floral dress, a cloche hat, a pair of white gloves. Instead, she wore a pair of army pants and a white shirt under her cloak. “What are you doing in Germany, Rachel? You should be at home with some returning soldier, walking down the aisle, making babies.”

  The wind, perhaps, made her press her arms over her chest, tighten them against herself. “I’ve been overseas since my husband died in the Battle of the Bulge. I just had to—be closer to him.” She gave him a look that nudged the ache lying like a boulder deep inside his chest. “But I’m headed home next week.”

  He looked at her, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sunset. “Did you get caught?” He glanced at the burlap bundle she’d dropped behind him as she passed.

  “No. The Red Cross just received a shipment of CARE packages. I slipped these out before they went into distribution.” She lifted a shoulder, a smile tugging up her face. “I knew you’d need them.”

  “Thank you, Rachel.”

  She smiled at him. “I—I told Glennis who you were. She’ll keep you supplied.”

  Glennis. “Red hair, sort of round face?”

  “Canadian. She is sympathetic to what you’re doing here, Peter. Or, should I say, Nightingale.”

  A pigeon waddled near, perhaps some latent impulse driving it back to the square in hopes of nourishment.

  Peter had nothing to offer.

  “Please don’t call me that.” He glanced at the packages. “I’m just trying to do what I’m supposed to, I think.”

  “Me too, Peter.” She leaned over, and he nearly jumped when she slid her hand over his cold, bony fingers.

  He stared at her hand, pale and clean against his. He stifled the impulse to yank his hand away, but his cold hunger compelled him to cling to the heat of her touch.

  Hold on. But nearly two years seemed too long to wait with just a pocketful of dark
stars.

  “I can’t figure you out, Peter. Are you American? Or German?”

  “I’m German, but I grew up in Iowa. I was a prisoner of war in Wisconsin.” Sometimes the smells could still gulp him whole, the marinating pea silage, the tangy pine that lingered at the edge of the fields, the antiseptic, chlorinated, cottony soup of the hospital, none of it hated.

  The sweet, powdery scent of Esther’s skin, the few times he’d gotten close enough.

  “You were a POW? Why did you come back to Dresden? Everyone’s left for the cities that weren’t destroyed. You can’t find food, shelter is horrid, at best. And influenza is sweeping the city.” She glanced over at the miscellany of the Frauenkirche. “There’s nothing here to come back to.”

  “My family lived here. I came back to find them.”

  She looked at him then, a sadness in her eyes. “Your family was in the firebombing?”

  “I don’t know. I—someone suggested that the Gestapo took my father away long before the attack. But I think my mother could have been here, that she went into hiding after my father’s arrest—”

  “Was he Jewish?”

  “No. He just… He took in fleeing Jews, especially the ill. He…”

  “Was a nightingale, like you. Comforting. Going into enemy territory to save the hurting.”

  Hmm. Perhaps. “I came back to find my mother. Then, I hoped to scrabble together passage to America.”

  “America?”

  “I—I grew up there. And I left behind—”

  “A girl?”

  His heart. He drew in a breath, with it the smell of dust, char.

  She didn’t remove her hand, and for the moment, he needed it. “There’s a list, you know. Of the dead? The Red Cross adds to it every day as they identify victims.”

  “I put her name in, but I’ve never heard back.”

  “I’ll find out, Peter.” She gave his hand a squeeze, and for the first time since he’d left, since he’d made the journey from Roosevelt on the train to Fort Robinson, across the ocean to Great Britain, through the processing centers and finally back to Germany, something inside him eased. That terrible fist that tore into his chest, spearing him when he loved too fast, when he thought too long about his losses, loosened a fraction.

  “Thank you, Rachel.”

  She held his hand in silence, and he watched a woman hurry past them, holding a child in her arms. Merchants, with their feeble offerings of cigarettes, eggs, even the occasional perogies filled with unidentifiable meat, packed up their wares, surviving through, at least, this day.

  He wanted to brush his thumb over the top of her hand, but his bones forgot how to move.

  “How’s Ana?” He should have stopped by the hospital today, but—“Thank you for the penicillin—”

  She held up her hand. “You need to know that there is a new duty nurse taking my place next week. She might be better at counting than I am.”

  He drew in a breath.

  “And Ana is very ill. She has no milk for the baby, and I can’t find a wet nurse.”

  “You need milk.”

  “We need everything.”

  He glanced at the POW packages. “I can get you milk. These packages will trade on the black market. Or I’ll find a hamster, have him find me some milk.”

  “If they find you trading on the black market—the Russians killed a man they found selling his luger, probably for food for his family.” She tightened her jaw. “They don’t want the Germans to have anything that might be spoils of war.”

  He’d seen that man. Hanging from a light post along the Elbe, a sign around his neck: Thief.

  “I don’t have weapons to trade. But I’m not going to let Ana’s baby die.”

  “Maybe it’s for the best, Peter. What kind of life would he have—belonging to no country? He’ll be lost.”

  He’ll be lost.

  Peter reached for the burlap bag. “You’re the nightingale, Rachel.” He looked over at her, smiled. Wanted to love her.

  Wanted to feel anything but the rubble in his chest.

  He glanced at the church. “One-thousand-degree heat. That’s… unimaginable.” The kind of heat that could bubble a man’s skin, turn him to ash, his blackened hands curled to his body. Still, he would have thought the church might have survived. He remembered the few times he’d stood in the cupola overlooking the city, the expanse of so much history—the cobbled streets where Bach strolled in search of a tune, or perhaps Goethe trolling for his muse. The church stood sentry over the city, pillared their faith. Yet the flames had loosened its foundations, crushed it to dust.

  “I’ll meet you here tomorrow night,” he said, and she let him go, his hand colder with the loss of hers.

  Peter picked up the burlap bag, carried it over his shoulder to his flat, climbing the stairs just as the light winked out from the city. He lit a stump of a candle, trying to decide whether to coax to life the tin can fire or simply abide the chill. Opening the burlap bag, he fished out the CARE boxes—three of them, filled with corned beef, bacon, margarine, lard. Honey, raisins, chocolate, coffee, and bless her, Rachel had found two cans of beer and a carton of cigarettes. Yes, he could barter these for fresh milk. The rest, he’d distribute.

  As he put the supplies beneath his bed, he noticed a tiny package, wrapped in brown paper, set in the middle of his blanket. He picked it up, unwrapped it.

  Held it to the light.

  Creamy white, veins of lime green, and encased in the floppy folds of purple-veined leaves… Someone had left him a turnip.

  March 1946

  Peter,

  I think of you too much when I’m studying late, when the night forces my nose into the crease of my textbook, and I release myself into the ethereal memories of your smile. I can smell you, sometimes, not the man in the hospital bed, but the one who came to me, the scent of rescue on his skin. I feel your arms enclosing me, the sweetness of your voice in my ear.

  God loves you more than you can imagine.

  Those words, more than your smell or touch, found the thirsty place inside. It feeds me when I am rising early for my shift, the absence of Sadie’s body next to me turning me febrile.

  I moved to Milwaukee, as planned, right after Christmas, leaving Sadie with her father and Rosemary, in whom I’ve discovered an ally.

  Rosemary is pregnant with Linus’s child, but she has made room in her heart for mine, which seems another miracle. Sadie writes to me daily in Rosemary’s loopy scrawl, and sends me pictures. Every three weeks I take the train to Roosevelt and Sadie joins me in Caroline’s room at the boardinghouse, although by summer, I will have to find other accommodations. Caroline is finally marrying Teddy. Indeed, we are slowly slipping free of the grip of war.

  Our ward is full of evacuated soldiers, but so many more able-bodied GIs return home every week, triumph in their smiles, many bearing souvenirs and pictures of their “tour” in France or Italy. They disembark from the trains, a band greeting their first steps, and banners and speeches and glad scenes of women piling themselves into the arms of their husbands and brothers and sons.

  I sometimes walk to the end of the block, watch the returns, seeing myself in your arms, wishing you might have worn a different uniform.

  But you should know, your uniform doesn’t matter to me.

  I wonder, however, when the lack of you finds its way inside me, if it is wise to linger inside the memory of you, to let your voice pull me from my life, launch me into a place where you and I are together, perhaps strolling along your beautiful Elbe or seated at a picnic on the shores of Lake Michigan. I see us hand in hand there, the lap of waves passing time as we find each other’s smiles.

  I am a foolish woman, I suspect, but the fool has wooed me, and I am still hoping that one day it will be you off the train, and I rushing to your arms.

  Meanwhile, I will take my exams in May, and am considering my future. My old director of the Red Cross wrote to me, after Doctor Sullivan scripted a lette
r of recommendation. I couldn’t believe his kindness, but he told me in confidence before I left for Chicago that he too had a son who was a POW in Germany. He hoped compassion might find him there, care for him as I did you those weeks after your beating. Red Cross Director Wynn invited me back into its ranks, and I am debating my application. Sadie, of course, needs me, especially with Rosemary and Linus beginning their family.

  I am at Milwaukee County General Hospital, working a shift on the rehabilitation ward, not unlike convalescent ward in Roosevelt, and I’m living in the nurses’ dormitory. I have always feared the city, the specter of my older sister, Hedy, hovering over the stories of speakeasies and gin joints. Of course, she lived in Chicago, but any city whispers danger to me. I told you she died—but perhaps I failed to mention that Al Capone’s men gunned her down in a basement swill called Tony’s. I went there not long ago on the train and discovered it boarded up, the candy store above it blackened and gutted, the wind moaning out the sounds of whisky jazz, liquid blues. I will never return.

  My roommate, Doris, loves the cinema—she is raving about a new film, The Best Years of Our Lives. I suppose—although I’m still wondering, if mine aren’t ahead.

  Which brings me, inevitably, back into your arms.

  Holding on.

  I am hoping this letter finds you, that the reason you haven’t written has to do with the chaos of repatriation and not…

  Well, holding on,

  Esther

  The Russian patrols—or brute squad, perhaps—Peter couldn’t really assign military function to what he recognized as men gluttonous over the spoils of war—food, resources, women—came alive at night, fueled by too-ample shipments of vodka and the taste of dereliction in the air. The patrols roamed the streets, two and three to a group, after curfew, sometimes finding prey, most of the time simply terrorizing the streets with the mean reality of occupation.

  Peter pressed himself into the gated shadows behind the grammar school, his gaze on the grizzle-toothed remains of a cigar shop his father once frequented. He hoped that inside waited Spider, a man Peter had heard about after dropping the right tidbits around the city. Spider, Adolf Mueller said, could find anything.