The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  She left Harry’s office and went straight to Theo’s. The air was thick with smoke and the place reeked of cigarettes, though he wasn’t interrogating anyone at the moment. He looked up from the papers he was studying.

  “You know that dinner you keep suggesting,” she said.

  The angry eyebrows lifted in surprise.

  “I’m free tonight.”

  * * *

  Before Millie had left the States, she’d been cautioned about the hardship of the posting. Despite the requisitioned living quarters, officers’ clubs, and bargain PX luxuries, Berlin was the reputed crime center of the world, a bombed-out Wild West where drunken soldiers brawled; thieves, murderers, and rapists preyed on the unsuspecting and one another; spies plied their trade; and werewolves, as unrepentant Nazis were called, schemed to rise again. It was a black market free-for-all where heirlooms, weapons, drugs, title deeds to property, and every kind of sex was for sale. She’d been warned of all that, but no one had told her about the hedonism. Perhaps it was the euphoria of peace, or the distance from home, or human nature, but whatever the cause, all of Berlin, at least all the American and British forces in Berlin, were on a spree. Many of them worked hard during the day. Most of them played harder after hours. The Occupation was an ongoing binge, fueled by alcohol, oiled by sex. So far she’d avoided the latter. She knew her emotions were too raw, her nerves too jangled by walking this tightrope between past and present to risk it. She feared an intimate touch would unravel her, an explosion of pleasure unhinge her. She could not risk losing control. But evenings out, if she remained on her guard, were harmless. And Harry Sutton’s comment about what would happen if she and Theo got together was almost a dare.

  The officers club that Theo Wallach took her to was an art deco fantasy of carved mahogany and etched glass, once a popular Weimar restaurant, then a favorite Nazi haunt, despite, or perhaps because of, its luxurious decadence. An impossibly lithe couple in evening clothes danced the tango across a mural on one wall; opposite it, two women in revealing diaphanous gowns did the same. Below the dancers sat men, boys really, and a few women from America’s small towns and farms, cities and suburbs, offices and gas stations, assembly lines and Ivy League colleges, leveled now by the rough cloth of their uniforms, half homesick, half dazed by this softly lit pleasure palace from another era. A German oompah band played Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” again and again, badly.

  Somewhere between the martinis before dinner and the wine with it, she found herself wondering why she’d resisted Theo’s invitations until now. Conversation between them was easy. She felt as if they’d known each other for years. In a way, they had. They’d both had German childhoods and German-Jewish adolescences. They’d both experienced the hope and terror and guilt of stepping off a ship into a new land. She and David had arrived in New York in 1938. Theo had come to the States alone in 1935, if you could call arriving on a ship with ninety-nine other children alone. Sitting across from each other in that out-of-time restaurant where no one belonged, it was almost as if they did, for a moment.

  As the evening wore on, she discovered they had one more thing in common. They were both appalled at the rampant fraternization.

  “Yesterday they were bombing them,” Theo said. “Today they’re bedding them.” And he was even more critical of Harry Sutton than she was. “Every time he starts to go on about guiltless Germans, I think of that Hemingway line.” English and American literature, it turned out, was one more shared interest. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  They said good night in front of her building on Riemeisterstrasse. He joked about her inviting him up, but he didn’t press the point. He merely kissed her a few times—for an angry man he had an extremely soft mouth—and said good night. She stood watching the beam of his flashlight slice through the darkness as he made his way down the street. An elderly German hobbling on one crutch was coming the other way. Theo veered toward him, forcing the man into the gutter to pass. The ploy was familiar. The Nazis had done the same thing to Jews for years, until there were no more Jews on the sidewalks to force off them.

  * * *

  David wasn’t in the flat when she got upstairs. She reminded herself again that he was a grown man. He didn’t have to account to her for his comings and goings. She couldn’t even fault him for a lack of consideration. When he planned to be around for the evening, he always left a note suggesting dinner at an officers’ mess or club or together at home.

  She took Der Weg, the newspaper Harry Sutton had asked her to look at, out of her briefcase. There was a reason she’d tried to persuade him to give it to one of the others.

  The war was over. The camps had been liberated. The forced laborers were free. But existence in the Jewish community was still a tale, thousands of tales, of suffering and loss and heartbreak. Every night, or at least the nights he came home, David returned overwhelmed by the vastness of the misery and his helplessness to ameliorate it. The loneliness was unspeakable. Old people, children, and everyone between left without a single child, parent, sibling, aunt, uncle, cousin, or relative several times removed. The physical toll was appalling. Bodies maimed and broken by disease, hard labor, and starvation. The lawlessness and violence were terrifying. Survivors hadn’t survived by following the rules. They’d lived by stealth and theft, lies and betrayal. Individuals who had spent the past two or four or eight years being brutalized had learned brutality from the masters. The destruction and filth were sickening. Men and women and children who’d forgotten what sanitation was urinated and defecated in hallways and courtyards and wherever the urge moved them. And underlying the acquired bad habits was rage. The fury filled them from the stumps of their frozen toes to the roots of their deloused hair. Perhaps the fury explained David’s nightly disappearances. Sex was a means of amnesia, even oblivion. She didn’t begrudge him girls, only Frauleins. According to stories she’d heard, some Jewish GIs used sex with Frauleins as an instrument of revenge. She didn’t think the boy she’d grown up with was capable of such cruelty. But she had to admit she was barely acquainted with the man the war had made him. Still, not David. Not with a Fraulein.

  She sat on the sofa in the parlor, switched on the lamp beside it, began skimming, then turned from the first page to the inner two. The broadsheet was only four pages. Paper was hard to get. Type was impossible. The result was ugly and amateurish, black letters swimming blurrily on the rough yellow stock. But she knew, even as she widened and narrowed her eyes to focus, that her inability to read had less to do with the quality of the publication than the pace of her heartbeat. She hadn’t expected the list, though she supposed she should have. Name after name looking for name after name.

  Her finger trembled as it raced down the column, then returned to the top and moved down it more slowly. Stranger things had been known to happen. She thought of David’s buddy from the Army who had driven into town at the same time his twin rolled in on a freight train from Dachau. She couldn’t stop thinking of that story.

  She ran down the list a third time. Some of the names seemed to ring a bell, but then some of the names were scarcely unusual. How many Sophie Rosenbergs and Hermann Steins had there been in Berlin, in all of Germany, in all of Europe, because millions of people were on the move, before the war? Now there was only one of each. At least there was only one of each in Berlin looking for someone else in Berlin. She went through the names a fourth time. Finally, she gave up. No, she gave up for the night. No one was calling out to her on this list, but there would be other lists. And she could be on them. Tomorrow was Saturday. No Jewish paper would be open on Saturday. But first thing Monday morning she’d place an ad of her own.

  * * *

  David was sitting at the heavy carved table drinking coffee and eating tasteless PX white bread when she came into the dining room carrying the copy of Der Weg the next morning.

  “Have you seen this?” She put the paper down beside his place.

  He made a noncommittal sound.
He’d seen a copy at work but had been hoping she hadn’t.

  “It’s amazing. All these people searching for one another. I bet lots of them find whom they’re looking for. Like your friend whose twin rolled in on the freight train. It gives you hope.”

  “You call it hope. I call it an obsession that makes you chase little girls down the street.”

  “I never should have told you about that.”

  “They’re gone, Meike.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Mr. Streit who was with Papa in the camp said so. One of Mama’s friends told us the same thing.”

  “They could be wrong. Crowds of people. Mistaken identity. And who knows where anyone was being sent. People shunted from camp to factories to other camps. Forced marches. Prisoners driven east and ending up with the Soviets.” She was silent for a moment. “And we didn’t find anyone who knew anything about Sarah.”

  “Please, Mil, you have to stop this.”

  “It’s easier for you. You fought them. You killed them. You did something.”

  He put down his coffee cup and sat staring at her. They both knew it had nothing to do with what he’d done in the war. It had to do with what he hadn’t done before the war, and what she had, and the gulf between the two that he felt bound them and she was sure separated them.

  He picked up the paper, carried it to the kitchen, and dropped it in the trash.

  “What are you up to on this frigid Saturday morning?” he asked as he came back to the dining room.

  “I don’t know. What are you?”

  “Feel like going to a bar mitzvah?”

  “What?”

  “You know. The coming-of-age ritual when a Jewish boy turns thirteen and is considered responsible for his actions.”

  “No one likes a smart aleck. I meant since when did you become observant? I thought you believed religion was the opiate of the masses.”

  “No, you believe religion is the opiate of the masses. I know the accurate translation. Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes. But I promised the kid I’d go.”

  “The kid?”

  “One of the kids from the displaced persons center. Actually, I’ve gone to a few since I’ve been here. Some of us who were in Camp Ritchie together usually try to. There aren’t a lot of fathers left to do the honors.”

  “How can you do the honors? You can’t read Hebrew. And you haven’t set foot in a synagogue since…” She let her voice trail off. It hadn’t been a deprivation. He hadn’t wanted a bar mitzvah. The family wasn’t observant, as her father had repeated again and again during those whispered discussions she’d eavesdropped on through the heat register. But choosing not to participate in the ritual of your own volition was one thing; deciding not to do it out of fear of having everyone involved beaten, or worse, was another.

  “Mostly I lend moral support. And a little glamour to the proceedings.”

  “Glamour? You’ve got to stop hiding your light under a bushel.”

  “Haven’t you heard? A guy in a U.S. Army uniform is sexy.”

  “So I gather from your nightly disappearances. But to a teenage boy?”

  “Especially to a teenage boy. Especially to a Jewish teenage boy. I fought a war. I beat the hell out of his Nazi tormentors. I did to the Nazis what those poor boys in the camps dreamed of doing. I’m a hero.”

  “What about a girl in a U.S. Army uniform? Will she be as welcome?”

  “That’s a different kind of sex appeal. Pure pinup. Come on, it’ll be good for you.”

  “Okay, I’m game. Where is it?”

  “A cemetery in the Soviet sector.”

  “A cemetery? I know there are no synagogues left, but doesn’t a cemetery seem a little ghoulish for a coming-of-age ritual?”

  “Where else can you find family and community these days?”

  She sat looking at him. How could she ever have suspected he was sleeping with the enemy?

  * * *

  They came out of the building into a dazzling winter morning. Beneath a cloudless sky, the air felt sharp as glass. The snow that had turned to slush the day before had frozen again. She turned up the collar of her Balkan bunny and pulled the belt tighter, though the fabric bulked around her hips. He’d stuffed her pockets with the packs of cigarettes he couldn’t fit in his own. When she’d gone into his room to see if he was ready, she’d been amazed to find stacks and stacks of cigarette cartons.

  “Where did those come from?”

  “The PX of course.”

  “You’re dabbling in the black market now? Or from the look of it, more than dabbling.”

  “I’m not selling them, I’m giving them as gifts.”

  “To a thirteen-year-old boy?”

  “To the guests. And some other people I know. Just don’t let them show on the U-Bahn or we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

  They had to elbow their way into the U-Bahn car, which stank from too many unwashed bodies packed too close together. Some of the riders scowled at their uniforms, others made way for them, several did both.

  They came up into the same grim bombed-out world, except for one difference. Everywhere she turned, red flags and red streamers and red banners with Soviet slogans she couldn’t read whipped in the wind. There were also red-bordered posters of Stalin.

  “This remind you of anything?” she asked.

  “The mustache is bushier this time around.”

  The snow in the cemetery, a few days old but still pristine, lay like a shroud over the toppled and vandalized gravestones. As they made their way through the gate, she noticed one headstone that had been brushed clean. At first she thought someone had visited it to pay respects. Then they came around the other side and she saw it. A swastika was scrawled on the granite surface. The marking was fresh. She was sure of it. She hurried her steps to catch up with David.

  Off to one side of the grounds, a crowd of thirty or so people were milling around. A few of the men had gotten their hands on white prayer shawls, but with the exception of three other GIs in uniform, most of the men and all the women wore dark threadbare suits and coats. They stood out against the white landscape like a murder of weather-beaten crows. Even the movement of some of the men who were already praying, dipping forward and back, made them look like birds pecking. The unforgiving landscape, the smashed monuments, the broken beings struck her as heartbreaking, but as she got closer, she saw something else. These people did not see themselves as a heartbreaking murder of crows. They saw themselves as celebrants. Standing in that desecrated graveyard, with hunger in their bellies and mourning in their hearts and scars that would never heal on their souls, they were celebrating this one child who had survived, one among millions who had not, but still one, and a cause for joy.

  Two of the men carried a scroll to a wobbly wooden table and opened it. Another man began to read from the parchment. Some bowed their heads, others watched carefully, bearing witness. Beside her, a small girl in a thin wool coat stood shivering. She was looking up at Millie. No, not at Millie, at her trench coat with the collar turned up over her ears. Millie smiled down at the child, a rictus admission of guilt. The girl smiled back. Only two teeth were visible in her small mouth. Suddenly it came back to her. Berlin was having that effect. Every corner she turned, every face she saw, every figure she followed was taking her back. The night before she’d lain in bed scratching Sarah’s back and telling her lies of safety, Sarah had lost her own front tooth and collected a coin from the Zahnfee for it. This child shivering in a snow-covered cemetery had received no gifts from the tooth fairy. And who knew if the teeth had fallen out from natural causes, or malnutrition, or violence? She was still smiling up at Millie and still shivering. Millie unbelted her coat, undid the buttons, and held it open. The girl looked up at her quizzically. She smiled down and nodded. The girl moved into the depths of the coat and Millie folded it around both of them, leaving only the child’s face exposed to the brittle air.

  Now the boy was s
ummoned to the open scroll on the table. His face was red, but whether from the cold or embarrassment was impossible to tell. With the man standing at his side, pointing to words in the scroll, he began to chant. His voice was high and reedy and cracked occasionally, but as he went on, he grew more confident and his voice stronger. He chanted the sounds and sang the cadence, and the sacred words beat like wings out over the silent snow-covered cemetery. They couldn’t right the toppled stones or recarve the defaced names or erase the fresh swastika, but they did defy all that.

  When it was over, they filed out of the cemetery in small groups and made their way to a displaced persons center a block away. The girl stayed inside Millie’s coat all the way, bumping Millie’s hip with each step. She knew it was ridiculous. Her Lady Bountiful complex, she told herself when she caught herself at it. But more extraordinary things had happened. She’d been taken in by strangers, she and David both. They’d been saved. Why shouldn’t this child? Why shouldn’t Millie pass on the good deed? She wasn’t foolish enough to think it would absolve her, but it would be a way to do some good.

  Only when they went through the doors into the damaged building, held up on one side by wooden struts, did the girl break away. Bent over, hugging herself, she fled down a hall and skidded around a corner. Millie stood looking after her.

  “What did you expect?” David asked. “Lifelong gratitude?”

  “I just wanted to know something about her.”