The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  The men went back into the house and came out several more times. Finally, the second man emerged empty-handed, strode to the wagon, and stood waiting. A few onlookers around the edge of the crowd began to drift away. The show was over. Others hung on doggedly for the last act.

  The door to the house opened again and the woman Millie had gone through the flat with the day before emerged. She was wearing the same rusty black dress, and the child was clinging to the skirt with one hand while she clutched the stuffed bear with the other. Chin lifted, eyes straight ahead, immune to her neighbors and their pity or perhaps schadenfreude—the two sentiments are rarely far apart—the woman started toward the wagon. As she did, the first man came out the doorway again. He was balancing the dollhouse Millie had noticed in the child’s room against his chest. Another murmur, a little louder this time, went through the throng. A handful of women surged closer to get a better look. These days a beautifully preserved house, even a miniature one, was clearly an object of wonder. Some of the people who had started to leave turned back.

  The man was halfway to the wagon when one of the soldiers stepped in front of him. The man started to move around him. The soldier stepped sideways to block his path again.

  The soldier said something in English. The man responded in German. Millie was too far away to make out the words.

  “Nein,” the soldier’s voice was louder now. “Ist on the inventory.”

  “It belongs to the child,” the man shouted back in German.

  They stood that way for a moment. Without letting go of the dollhouse, the man managed to raise his elbow to mop the sweat from his face, though the morning was cold. The soldier, who couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen, worked a wad of gum around in his mouth.

  “Nein,” he said again. This time he reached for the dollhouse. The man twisted his body away.

  They stood that way, facing off over the miniature slate roof. The soldier’s jaw was moving faster now. The man was still sweating, but he didn’t try to mop his face.

  A moment passed, then another. The soldier’s eyes were ricocheting around the crowd. He knew he’d made a mistake, first in stopping the man, then in reaching for the dollhouse, but he didn’t know how to get out of the corner he’d backed himself into. Besides, as he kept insisting in what he seemed to think was pidgin German, the dollhouse was on the inventory of the furniture that must stay, though heaven knew why. Perhaps the sergeant who’d compiled the list had a daughter back in the States. It wouldn’t be the largest spoil shipped home, or the most valuable, not by a long shot.

  The woman took the few steps back from the wagon to where the man and the soldier were standing. She seemed unaware that the child was still hanging on to her skirt. Millie couldn’t make out her words, but she recognized the snarl on her face. The soldier went on working his jaw around the wad of gum. “Nein,” he repeated to the woman. “Ist on the inventory.”

  “Räuber,” she shouted. “Dieb.” She took a step closer to the soldier. He stood his ground but couldn’t keep from leaning his upper body away from her. That was all she needed. She raised her hand and began poking him in the chest with her index finger as she repeated the words. “Räuber. Dieb. Schwein.”

  The soldier’s jaw and eyes were going faster now. The mob began taking up the woman’s cries. “Räuber. Dieb. Schwein,” they howled.

  Beside Millie, Meer turned and glanced behind them. “Maybe we better get out of here, Captain. The major wouldn’t want you mixed up in this.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She wasn’t fine—the shouted viciousness was taking her back to a place she didn’t want to go—but she would not let them drive her out again.

  The crowd was still shouting, but now they’d taken up a new word. “Schande,” they howled. “Schande, Schande, Schande.”

  “I got Räuber and Schwein, Captain,” Meer said, “and I think Dieb is thief, but what does Schande mean?”

  It took her a minute to translate for him, though she knew the word. “Shame,” she said finally.

  “They got a point. Don’t get me wrong. They deserve everything they got coming to them,” he repeated. “But a kid’s dollhouse?”

  “If I’d noticed it on the list, I’d have taken it off,” she said, though she wondered if she would have. Maybe the dollhouse had been bought for the child. Maybe her father had made it for her. Or maybe in an earlier life it had belonged to a little girl with the last name of Cohn or Levi or Lowenstein. She thought of the Biedermeier breakfront again.

  The shouting was getting louder, and she noticed something else. The throng was closing in more tightly around the soldier. The three other GIs were trying to keep it back, but as they pushed one way, the mob pushed against them. A man in a cap and a torn Wehrmacht jacket dyed an uneven orange—Germans were forbidden to wear proper military garb—came up behind the woman and began shouting, not the words the crowd was chanting but a harangue. He was yelling, and people were screaming, and the woman was poking the soldier’s chest while he stood frozen to the spot. Only his jaw and eyes were moving. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, or the gesture would have been imperceptible if Millie and Meer hadn’t been watching so closely, his right hand moved toward his thigh and hovered above the pistol in its holster.

  Millie felt her breath catch in her chest.

  “Don’t do it, kid,” Meer muttered.

  The soldier’s hand kept going until it found the handle of the revolver, then rested there.

  The woman dropped her hand. The man in the dyed Wehrmacht jacket stopped shouting. A murmur, soft and nervous as a tremor, ran through the mob. No one moved.

  Suddenly an American officer was cutting through the far side of the crowd, and bystanders were stepping aside to make way for him.

  “I think the cavalry just rode in,” Meer said.

  The peak of the officer’s cap cast a shadow over his face, but Millie didn’t have to see his features to recognize him. She knew that long-legged stride, more lope than walk, and the thrust of those shoulders that he’d learned to use as a weapon precisely because they were not broad or powerful. As a boy, he’d fought a lot of skirmishes in a variety of places.

  He elbowed through the last few people and reached the quartet at the center of the dispute. The soldier took his hand from his gun and executed a snappy salute.

  “Who ever thought a fucking salute would save the day?” This time Meer didn’t even try to apologize.

  The woman and the man in the dyed Wehrmacht jacket both took a step back from the soldier. The other man didn’t move, but simply went on standing there, holding the dollhouse against his chest.

  The officer said something to the soldier, then stood listening. After a moment, he beckoned to another soldier who was holding a clipboard. The second soldier handed the clipboard to the officer. He stood studying it, then shook his head slowly as if in wonder. She recognized that gesture too. It was his response to the world’s insanity. He turned to the man with the dollhouse. He was speaking quietly, and the mob couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the man stood with his head down, as if to catch every word. The officer stopped talking. The man nodded and, still carrying the dollhouse, started for the wagon. The woman opened her mouth to say something. The officer cut her off and glanced down at the child for a long moment. Millie waited for him to pat her head. She didn’t know if she’d be able to forgive that. She’d fought the instinct the day before. Surely he would too. He moved aside so the two of them, mother and child, could make their way to the former hearse where the man was placing the dollhouse. He wedged it in among the other possessions, then helped the woman up onto the seat and lifted the child to sit in her lap. He walked to the front of the carriage and bent to pick up one of the shafts. His helper picked up the other. They began hauling the wagon. It rode low and heavy on its wheels down Riemeisterstrasse.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Meer said as he sat watching the gathering disperse. He threw the jeep into gear and
started toward the building where the officer was still standing. As they got closer, the smile on the officer’s face grew wider.

  Meer pulled up in front of the building and killed the engine.

  The officer looked up at them. “I hear you’re in the market for a roommate, Mil.”

  She climbed out of the jeep and stood staring up at him.

  “That is if your kid brother won’t cramp your style.”

  She threw her arms around him and turned her face away so he wouldn’t see that she was crying, though he’d know anyway.

  “I think I can work around you,” she said.

  * * *

  “It isn’t a coincidence,” David explained as he lifted her suitcase out of the jeep and they started toward the house. “Though these days the world is lousy with coincidences. A guy in my outfit—we were at Camp Ritchie together and got citizenship the same day—managed to get permission to take a jeep back to his hometown near Mainz. He just happened to hit the local railroad station as a slow-moving freight was pulling in. His twin brother was sitting on a flatbed. Fresh out of Dachau.” As soon as the words were out, he cursed himself. He knew what her next sentence would be.

  “Did any of the rest of the family survive?”

  “I didn’t want to ruin the party by asking. The point is, it’s not a coincidence I’m here.” He pushed open the door to the building, then followed her in. “When you wrote that Russ had wrangled you a job with the denazification office in Berlin, I managed to pull a few strings of my own. I’d already volunteered for the Control Council. Camps and displaced persons.” He was damned if he’d call them DPs. The survivors had already lost so much. It didn’t seem fair to abbreviate even their miserable status. “I didn’t need to pull too many. There aren’t a lot of men who want to stay over here to work with these people. For one thing, they find the survivors distasteful.” He drew out the last word to milk the irony. “All that lice and TB and other communicable diseases. Not like the nice clean, blond, blue-eyed Germans—”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  He grinned. Years ago a teacher, new to the school, had singled him out as a perfect specimen of Aryan superiority. The class had snickered, but no one had corrected the teacher. In German schools, no one did.

  “For another,” he went on as he followed her up the stairs, “they’re all hot to get back home. At least the ones who did the fighting are. The armchair officers are another story. They can’t wait to get over here. But they want cushy jobs pushing papers around an office, living in formerly Aryanized, formerly Jewish mansions, and driving confiscated Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. They aren’t about to get their hands dirty with those dirty Jews. Or in Patton’s words, and I quote the general, those animals.”

  “You did the fighting. Aren’t you hot to get home? The GI Bill is waiting.”

  “It will still be there in a year or two.” They’d reached the door to the flat, and he turned to her. “In the meantime, I am home. And I’m not talking about this damn city.”

  They stood staring at each other. Except for the oval shape of their faces, there wasn’t much of a resemblance. They had the same wide mouth, but on him it was firm and determined, on her mobile and vulnerable. His shock of corn silk hair that had misled the teacher so many years ago was always falling over the blue eyes that had also fooled the teacher. Her dark hair grew back from a widow’s peak that made a neat v in her high forehead. Nonetheless, to each of them it felt like looking in a mirror.

  He turned away. “Come on, show me my new digs.”

  She led the way inside, and he followed her through the rooms. They argued about who would take the master bedroom with the carved four-poster.

  “You’re older,” he said.

  “I haven’t been sleeping in foxholes for the past year and a half.”

  “That just means I’m used to hardship. Which this isn’t by a long shot. Besides, a girl needs her beauty sleep.”

  “I resent that.”

  “Don’t. You look good, Meike.” The name had slipped out. He waited to see how she’d take it.

  They’d been standing in the doorway, staring at the huge carved bed, and now she turned to him.

  “No one’s called me that in years. Not even you.”

  He stood staring down at her. “How does it feel?”

  She thought for a minute. “I wish I knew.”

  She’d saved the sitting room for last. When he followed her into it, he understood why. She led him to the breakfront, and they stood side by side staring at it. He knew what she was thinking. She was wrong, but he didn’t want to argue with her, not about this, not about anything.

  Three

  She lay in bed staring through the darkness at the faint outline of the ceiling moldings. Every now and then, headlights swept through the room like searchlights, then passed, leaving it in shadows again. There wasn’t much traffic, but she’d been lying there for long enough to distinguish what little there was. An army truck lumbered by. A jeep rattled. Once a horse clopped over the cobblestones.

  She turned on her side, but it was no good. The mattress she’d pretended to test in order to irk the woman was too soft. Only she knew her insomnia had nothing to do with the mattress. She didn’t understand it. She’d been sure she’d sleep tonight. She’d sleep tonight as she hadn’t for the past two years. David wasn’t parachuting out of a plane or storming a beach or—and this was the image she’d tried again and again to banish, but had never been able to—lying dead in a ditch. He was safe in the next room. And she was exhausted from the incidents of the day, from the events of the past week. Everything was new and difficult, or familiar and more difficult. So why couldn’t she get to sleep?

  Another pair of headlights swept through the room, then the world went dark again. She wasn’t going to be able to do this. Even with David in the next room, with the two of them together again, she wasn’t going to be able to do this. She’d thought once she was back in Berlin she’d be able to see the world more clearly. In Berlin, she’d find certainty. All she’d found so far was turmoil. Nothing felt as she’d expected it to.

  She turned on one side, drew her knees up in a fetal position, stretched out, turned on her other side. It was no good. She sat up, swung her feet over the side of the bed, and slid down until they were touching the floor. Even that motion brought it all back. The beds she’d slept in back in the States—the Danish modern twin in the house where she’d lived when she’d arrived, the narrow cot in her dormitory room at Bryn Mawr, the single bed in the apartment she’d shared in Philadelphia with two other girls—had all been lower slung. This bed was straight out of her childhood, high enough to have to climb up to rather than sit down on, made higher still by the thick mattress and eiderdowns. There had been enough of those in the household to requisition some and let the woman take the rest.

  She pulled on her robe, slid into her slippers, and started down the hall. Outside David’s door, she stopped and stood listening. In the old days, when they were on holiday from school in their adopted home in the States, she would have opened the door, crept in, and stood looking down at him, reassuring herself that he was there, that he was safe, that they had each other. She wondered if he still slept on his stomach, arms and legs flung out. Her hand hovered over the doorknob. She wouldn’t disturb him. She just wanted to see him. Her hand gripped the knob, then let go of it as if it were hot. He was a grown man. He’d seen more of the world than she ever would. The days when she could slip into his room in the dead of night to reassure herself he was all right were long gone.

  She reached into her pocket, took out a handkerchief, and blew her nose, then started down the hall toward the kitchen. They’d brought wine home from dinner. Surely that would help her sleep. But when she reached the kitchen, she kept going, past it and the dining room, into the parlor.

  The night had been cloudy when they’d come home, but now the sky had cleared and the light of a full moon streamed through the French window
s and illuminated the breakfront.

  “How did you know?” her mother had asked as the two men, one brawny, the other seemingly too frail to make a living moving furniture, set the breakfront down between another pair of French windows, opening onto a different street where no bombs had fallen and, they were all sure, none ever would. That was how unimaginable the future had been.

  “How did I know?” her father repeated after the two moving men had left. “Every time you passed the store you stopped in front of the window. Like a kid in front of Kranzler’s. Worse than that. It was easier to pry the children away from the strudels and pfeffernüsse in Kranzler’s display than it was to get you past that breakfront in the shop. Now you don’t have to go out to enjoy it.”

  “It’s beautiful,” her mother said.

  “Beauty should live with beauty,” her father answered, and her mother opened her amethyst eyes wider. That was how you knew she was really smiling, not just curling her mouth. David and Sarah had both inherited their mother’s eyes. Meike had got her father’s more pedestrian brown. Brown, but of a most interesting almond shape, her mother always insisted.

  Millie crossed the room and stepped into the pool of moonlight. She was back there. She was Meike. She was safe and happy with the whole world ahead of her. Her biggest worry, her monumental worry, was her rapidly changing body and whether she’d emerge from the transformation pretty like her mother and cousin Anna or ugly like the girl she sometimes squared off with in the mirror.

  She ran her fingers over the inlaid pattern, as her mother had that last day. How many years after the moving men had delivered the breakfront? Four? Five? All she remembered for certain was that she had just turned sixteen. It was early November, and they were wearing coats, her mother in her Persian lamb with the frog closings, her father in his Mannheim Berliner, she and David and Sarah in their navy blue chesterfields with velvet collars. She was supposed to have gotten a new coat that winter. She was too old to be dressing identically to her younger brother and little sister. But more pressing matters had intervened. Five suitcases were lined up beside the door, one for each of them, though they were all packed so full that Sarah wouldn’t be able to manage hers, and her father would have to carry it. In the end that made a difference.