by Ryan Graudin
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TO KATE—TALENTED WRITER, TRUE FRIEND
SON OF MAN, CAN THESE BONES LIVE?
—EZEKIEL 37:3
PRELUDE
THREE PORTRAITS OF CHRISTMAS EVE 1945
I
The family room was cramped. Too small for a mother and her three children and the crooked branch the older son had sawed down for a Christmas tree. Everywhere Felix Wolfe turned there were pine needles, tinsel, and the faces of his family. Each child stared eagerly at the trio of modest parcels under the spindly branch, waiting for their mother’s blessing.
“Make sure you don’t tear the paper,” she instructed them. “We need to save it to use again.”
Martin, as the oldest, went first. His gift was the smallest and held a secondhand pocket watch. Felix opened his own parcel with delicate fingers, carefully unfolding corners and smoothing out creases to find a toy car. It wasn’t new—there was a dent in the far right door and some scratches on its bright red paint—but Felix didn’t mind. New toys, his schoolteacher had said, were selfish and took away materials the Führer needed to win the war. Metal was needed for Mausers and bullets, not child’s play.
Adele tore at the edges of her parcel. Inside lay a doll, with yellow yarn hair and eyes made from the blue buttons of one of their mother’s old silk blouses. The doll’s dress was made from scraps of its cobalt fabric, sewn with cramped stitches and care.
Felix knew, as soon as his twin stopped and stared at the gift, that she was unhappy. He always knew these things.
“I made other dresses,” their mother said. “You can change her clothes every day. And I’ll teach you how to braid her hair.”
Adele’s own plaited pigtails whipped her cheeks as she shook her head and shoved the box away. “I don’t want a doll! Why can’t I have a car like Felix?”
Their mother’s mouth pinched. Her eyes went all shiny, the way they sometimes did when she read their father’s letters from the front. The sight twisted Felix’s stomach.
“Here.” He pushed his own present toward his sister. “You can play with my car.”
Adele’s eyes lit bright as she grabbed the toy. She started making motor sounds and pushing it across the floor. Martin was busy winding his watch. Felix wasn’t really sure what he should do without his car. At least his mother was smiling again, wiping her eyes as she watched her children playing.
“There’s one more gift,” she said.
All three Wolfe children froze. Felix looked under the tree, but there were no packages left. Perhaps they were getting oranges. Or maybe their mother had saved enough rations to bake gingerbread!
Their mother made her way through the room, dancing through bent paper and children’s limbs and forgotten toys. She reached the door to her bedroom and placed her hand on the latch. Her smile was wider than Felix had seen it in a long time.
The door opened. Standing at the edge of the bedroom, arms outstretched, was their father, still wearing his army uniform. His field cap slouched over sun-pale hair as he knelt down to greet his children.
Adele was the first child to barrel into his arms, with the delighted shout of Papa! Martin—since he now owned a pocket watch and was practically a grown man himself—tried to contain his excitement to a firm handshake. Felix hung back, taking in the sight of his whole family together: Mama grinning by the doorway, Papa pulling both Adele and a not-really-reluctant Martin into a bear hug. Felix’s heart warmed while he watched them, brighter than the cinders in the wood-burning stove.
He wanted to capture this moment, hold this feeling inside him forever.
“Felix! My little man!” His father smiled. Even with two children in his embrace, his arms were long enough to reach out for his son. “Did you look after this lot? Keep them out of trouble?”
Felix nodded as he joined the hug.
Their father explained that he was home for good. The war was winding down on the Eastern Front, and the army no longer needed him. He didn’t have to say good-bye to them anymore.
No more good-byes. The warmth inside Felix stoked and flared. After years of letters from the front—and Felix always fearing that the next would spell out his father’s death—the Wolfe family was together again.
II
Luka’s father had been home for many months, compliments of the artillery shell that ripped his left arm off. The Kradschützen, elite motorcycle troops who’d been a key part of attacking the Russian front, had no use for limbless drivers, so Kurt Löwe and his remaining arm were shipped back to Germany with a Silver Wound Badge and a second-class Iron Cross. Scars and medals: the marks of a war hero. Luka was awed by both.
There were no hugs or smiles involved in the greeting, just a stern nod on his father’s part. Luka’s mother told him later it was because his father was tired. (After all, he’d been at war for six years.) He just needed time to rest.
Luka’s father rested. He sat in a chair for hours and days at a time, staring blankly at the portrait of the Führer that hung over the mantel. When he spoke, it was never to ask Luka how his classes were going or to praise his wife’s cooking, but about the war. He told them about the endless, snowy kilometers he drove on his motorcycle. The firefights he and his fellow soldiers endured. How many Soviets he shot and killed. All for the sake of mein Führer.
Kurt Löwe rested for months, but the smiles and hugs Luka’s mother had promised never appeared. Not even for Christmas Eve.
The Löwe family sat around the small table, eating roasted carp in silence. It wasn’t the contented, holy-night type of silence that filled the holiday’s church services, but a strained one—full of chewing and scraping forks. It made Luka squirm in his chair.
“Stop fidgeting,” his father growled from the other side of the table.
Luka’s mother shot her son a meaningful look. He stopped moving. He felt as if he were sitting on eggshells. As if something was about to break…
His father was dividing the carp into neat little pieces with his fork. “When I went on night patrols on the front, we had to be quiet as ghosts. We moved without a sound. Had to, or else we would’ve been shot.”
His mother cleared her throat. “Kurt, I’m not sure this is very good table talk—”
“Good table talk?” Luka’s father set his fist on the table. He was still holding his fork, tines up, tattered fish meat hanging from the metal. “Losing my verdammt arm for the Fatherland earns me the right to talk about whatever I want at the table.”
His wife didn’t reply. Instead she set down her own fork and looked at Luka. “Would you like to open your gift now?”
Luka straightened in his chair, nodding. He’d been waiting for this moment for weeks. A bicycle (shiny and red) was the only thing Luka wanted. Sometimes Franz Gross let him play with his. Both boys took turns pretending to be Kradschützen motorcycle troops, revving imaginary engines as they stormed lines of invisible communists.
“Your gift is by the Advent calendar,” his mother said. “Go and fetch it!”
There was no tree this year, but Luka’s mother had set up the family’s Advent calendar on the mantelpiece. Most of its twenty-four paper doors hung open, revealing a hand-painted Nativit
y: Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child all gathered in a barn, surrounded by curious animals and poking hay. Blue-eyed angels hovered over the Holy Family. Above them hung a single brilliant star. And above the star…
The Führer’s immortalized face loomed, its painted eyes following Luka as he ran to the package by the hearth. The box was much too small for a bicycle and wrapped in old newsprint. Dated headlines told of the advance of the Wehrmacht through Russia, the Reich’s impending, undeniable victory. Inked across the package was a picture of the Führer giving a speech about the future of the New Order. Luka ripped through it all to find a set of new shoes and a toy pistol. He stared at them, disappointment bitter in his throat.
“What do you say, Luka?” His father had followed him into the sitting room, watching the whole affair in silence.
“I know you wanted a bicycle”—his mother’s voice was soft in the doorway—“but the ones at Herr Kahler’s shop were too expensive. Maybe next year, when the war is over.”
No bicycle. After weeks, months, years of waiting, still no bicycle. A crying feeling crept up Luka’s throat.
“What do you need a bicycle for?” his father asked. His hand strayed up to the second-class Iron Cross that hung from the button on his tunic. “You walk to school.”
“I—I want to play Kradschützen with Franz.” As soon as the words left Luka’s mouth, he wanted to swallow them back. But they were out, along with his tears, swimming through the sitting room.
“Play?” His father’s face went hard. Something in his eyes reminded Luka of the painting above the fire. Blue and lifeless. “You want to play Kradschützen?”
“I want to be like you.”
In a single blitzkrieg movement, Luka’s father dropped his Iron Cross and grabbed the boy by his collar. Nina shrank against the doorway as her husband dragged their child past, into the kitchen, out of the house.
It was a snowy evening. Luka’s father plowed through the spinning flakes, into the street. His knuckles stayed tight around Luka’s collar as he stopped in the middle of a growing snowdrift. “You want to be like me? I spent more nights than you could count in weather far colder than this. Curled up in a verdammt foxhole while the commies tried to put a bullet through my skull. You think I spent that time sniveling?”
Luka shook his head. There were more tears now, blurring against his eyelashes.
“Don’t show emotion.” Kurt Löwe gave his son a rough shake. “Don’t you ever show emotion. Tears are weakness. And I won’t have any son of mine being weak. You’re going to stand here until you stop crying.”
Luka tried, but the squeeze in his throat only grew worse. The tears that had already fallen were starting to hurt his cheeks: burning cold.
His mother shivered barefoot in the doorway, on the verge of tears herself. “Kurt! He’ll freeze!”
“You’ve let our son grow soft and ungrateful, Nina. Filling his head with art and fanciful Scheisse! If I could endure an entire winter in this snow, the least he can do is stand ten minutes in a drift.”
“You had a uniform to keep you warm! Luka doesn’t even have a coat.”
Kurt Löwe took another look at his son: hunched over, teeth chattering, shin-deep in the snowdrift. He stepped back into the house and returned moments later with his prewar brown leather riding jacket and his dog tag. Both items were shoved into Luka’s arms. “Put them on.”
The jacket was far too big; its sleeves dragged far past Luka’s fingers, into the piling snow. The dog tag hung all the way down to his belly button.
“A German youth must be strong. Tough as leather, hard as steel.” His father pointed at the jacket and the dog tag in turn. “Stand your ground. Don’t bother knocking on that door until the tears are off your face.”
Kurt Löwe’s arm cut like a scythe through the falling snow as he marched back to the house, hooking around his wife’s waist to usher her inside. When the door shut, Luka tried to wipe his cheeks with the oversized sleeve. His father was right. The leather was hard, too tough to blot the tears.
So Luka stood staring at the glowing kitchen window—minute after frigid minute, while his legs grew numb and his heart grew hard—waiting for his sadness to dry on its own.
III
A fresh pan of gingerbread sat on the ledge of the farmhouse window. The glass was cracked a few centimeters, just enough to let the cold in. The confection’s heat clouded into steam, carrying scents of clove and ginger and molasses all the way across the snow-covered yard, into the barn.
Yael tried her hardest to ignore the smell. She’d already settled down for the evening, taking shelter in the scratchy piles of hay. The barn was warm enough, and the handful of oats she’d scooped out of the horses’ feed bin kept the gnaw of her hunger away.
But the gingerbread…
Never in her seven years of life could Yael remember eating anything as good as that dessert smelled. Food in the ghetto had been scarce. Food in the camp had been scarce and rotten. (Bits of gruel, spoiled vegetables, moldy bread.) Ever since Yael escaped those barbed-wire fences by using her skinshifting abilities to look like the camp kommandant’s daughter, her diet was substantially better. During summer the woods burst with blackberry thickets and mushroom caps. Orchards were so fruitful by autumn that the farmers’ wives never seemed to note how the trees on the borders of their property lacked apples. Now that the weather was harsher, Yael took shelter in barn lofts, sustaining herself with horse feed, hoping the owners wouldn’t notice that their horses seemed to eat twice as much without getting fat.
She’d lurked in this particular barn for a week. It was an unusually generous length of time, but the family who lived in the house had been too distracted by holiday festivities to pay much attention to clues of her presence. Yael had watched the whole process from the safety of the loft. The decorating of the Christmas tree, the singing of carols, the baking…
She’d watched the mother stir the gingerbread together into a deep brown dough. One of her blond daughters (the same one who trudged across the yard every morning through blank-slate snow; whose breath frosted the air as she sang “Silent Night” to herself and milked the cow; who had no idea that Yael was listening in the loft above) popped the pan into the oven. The other daughter peeled potatoes. Their two brothers played Stern-Halma at the kitchen table—a game full of laughter and elbows.
The family was off in the dining room now, eating dinner and waiting for the gingerbread to cool. The oats in Yael’s stomach did not feel like enough as she watched them. She wanted to be in that house. Chuckling, full, and not alone.
That, of course, was impossible.
She was not one of them. She could never be one of them.
But she could snag a piece of that gingerbread.
The milking cow gave Yael a lazy, low greeting as she crept down the loft’s ladder. She made certain before she stepped out of the barn that her sweater sleeve was rolled down to hide the tattooed numbers on her arm. Her hair, tangled though it was, was as golden as the straw. Her eyes were bold and blue. No one would recognize her for what she truly was.
Snow was falling thick enough to cover her footprints for a short trip to the kitchen window and back. After a few minutes there would be no sign she was even there. Just a cracked window and an empty pan.
Yael slipped across the yard, ignoring the sting of the snow through her thin shoes. The smell of gingerbread was stronger now, the family’s laughter louder. She could hear one of the boys telling a joke—something about talking cows riding bicycles. The youngest sister giggled so hard she snorted.
Yael hunched under the window, reaching for the pan with hungry fingers.
“And then the first cow turned to the second cow and said—”
“OUCH!”
Yael, who was always so quiet, so careful, had not taken into account that a steaming pan meant the metal was still hot. She clamped her mouth shut, but it was too late. The youngest sister stopped laughing. Five different chairs scra
ped across the farmhouse floor as the family leapt to their feet.
“What was that?”
“Eric,” the mother said to one of the boys, “go get the rifle.”
Yael was off, sprinting across the field, leaving a whirl of footprints behind her. The farmhouse door opened to a yell. Yael did not stop. She did not look back. And it was a good thing, too, because—
KA-BOOM.
Silent night. Holy night.
All is buckshot. All is bright.
She was not one of them. She could never be one of them.
Yael could not go back to the barn (trigger-happy, cow-joking Eric would only follow the footprints, find her there), so she did what she always did.
She kept running.
PART I
EXODUS
CHAPTER 1
APRIL 2, 1956
Luka Löwe’s evening had started out on a promising note. The most powerful men in the world were throwing him a party at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Champagne toasts prickled the air, Luka’s name braided with praise from the lips of the Third Reich’s highest officials. The Führer himself had offered Luka a job and called him a “fine specimen of the Aryan ideal.”
The compliment was not undeserved. He’d conquered the Axis Tour—a cross-continental motorcycle race from Germania to Tokyo—not once but twice. A 20,780-kilometer journey of sandstorms, sabotage, and secrets. Two first-class Iron Crosses draped around Luka’s neck, signifying that he was a double victor. The best of the best twice over.
So why was he standing outside his own party, staring through the towering windows, feeling like Scheisse on a shingle?
It had to do with a pang in his chest, near that cardiac muscle most people called a heart. It had to do with the fräulein in the scarlet-branch-patterned kimono, the one who’d been dancing in his arms moments before. The one who’d stared straight into his eyes and said, “I do not love you. And I never will.”
