The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  “You just wanted to take her home with you,” he said. “Give it up, Mil. Stop chasing little girls on the street—”

  “Could you please drop that?”

  “… and taking them to your heart, or at least wrapping them in your coat.”

  “She was freezing.”

  “And you were kind. But don’t expect anything in return. They don’t have anything to give. They lost it all in the camps.”

  “I know,” she said, but he could tell from the way she said it that she didn’t know.

  He held both hands out to her, palms up. “Okay, fork them over.”

  She reached into her pockets, then stopped. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “What is it?” he asked, but he already knew.

  She handed him the packs of cigarettes from her left pocket, then pulled out the lining of the right one to show him it was empty.

  “Nimble little thing, isn’t she?” she said.

  “You get that way learning to survive.”

  Seven

  Harry Sutton had worried about what might happen if Millie and Theo Wallach got together. He was sure each would stoke the other’s rage. It didn’t happen quite that way. At least it didn’t always happen that way. They often found solace in each other’s company.

  They began having dinner together several times a week. On weekends that were clear and not achingly cold, they walked the city, roaming the wasteland of rubble and weeds that the Tiergarten had become, wandering past the burnt-out hulk of the Reichstag, crossing to the Soviet sector in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, which rose from the ruins more like a charred caution against hubris than a triumphal arch. Though they should have been used to the scene by now, they still couldn’t quite believe it. The destruction filled them with horror, and another emotion they were too ashamed to admit to each other or even themselves. Neither of them could escape a longing for what had been. Though they hated Germany and Germans, they could not hate their happy childhoods. Separately, silently, they ached with the memory of them.

  Some aspects of the city, however, were coming back to life. The Russians were vying with the Americans and the British for cultural as well as political ascendancy. There were concerts and plays, operas and cabarets. The cabarets tended to be raucous and raunchy, but even the more staid events could turn into tinderboxes. One night at a chamber music concert, a handful of music-loving GIs burst into shouts and whistles at the conclusion of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 6. The Germans in the makeshift hall were on their feet in fury. They knew the Americans were barbarians, but to boo a Mendelssohn piece was beyond the pale. The air, so recently vibrating with the sound of strings, was suddenly pulsating with rage. A shoving match had already erupted when an American officer went running up the aisle and climbed to the stage. Only when he turned around to hold up his hands to silence the audience did Millie recognize Harry Sutton. His presence wasn’t particularly commanding, but his uniform was. Germans respected a uniform. Some former Wehrmacht soldiers saluted it on the street, though the Americans were forbidden to return the salute. The shoving match stopped. The shouting subsided. Switching back and forth between German and English so both sides could understand, Sutton explained that in America shouts and whistles were an expression of extreme appreciation.

  “Perhaps not the best mannered,” he added in a German aside he didn’t bother to translate, “but well-meaning and heartfelt.”

  The hostility simmering in the air gave way to suspicion, then evaporated into smiles and handshakes and even a few back slaps.

  “That was a close call,” Millie said as they filed out of the hall.

  “Maybe,” Theo said, “but while he was apologizing for those rude Americans, he should have reminded all those civilized Krauts what they thought of Mendelssohn and his music a little more than a year ago.”

  “You take even fewer prisoners than I do.”

  “Did they take prisoners? I’d like to line the whole damn nation up against a wall and mow them down. No, on second thought, I’d like to make them dig their own graves first, the way they did, and then mow them down.”

  Sometimes she wondered how he could live with so much hate. Other times she knew.

  * * *

  The incident at the officers’ club happened a week or two later when they were having a drink in the bar with Werner Kahn. They’d invited Jack Craig, the fourth interrogator in their department, to join them, but Frauleins were not permitted in officers’ clubs, and Jack couldn’t bear to spend even a few hours of an evening away from his. Though some men tried to sneak in their Frauleins as Poles or Ukrainians, Jack said he was perfectly happy spending nights alone in his Fraulein’s room.

  “Doesn’t the mother mind?” Theo asked.

  “Mind? I gave her a turkey from the PX for Christmas. For a turkey, the old girl would get in bed with us.”

  Giving food to Germans was against the rules too, but somehow that infraction didn’t seem quite so offensive, especially if children were involved, though Jack’s Fraulein wasn’t exactly a child.

  That night in the club only one unoccupied stool was left at the bar when a baby-faced lieutenant came in with a girl in a red sweater that turned every male head. The stool happened to be on Theo’s left. Millie was on his right. Werner was on her other side. The lieutenant pulled the stool out for the girl. She slid onto it and crossed her legs. Millie noticed the nylons. They might as well have had the PX tag still dangling from them.

  Theo lifted his drink, took a long swallow, put it back on the bar, and turned to stare at the girl. “This is an American facility, Lieutenant,” he said without taking his eyes from the girl. “No Krauts permitted.”

  “She’s Polish, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  “If she’s Polish,” Theo answered, “I’m Hedy Lamarr.”

  “She is, sir,” the lieutenant insisted.

  “Say something in Polish,” Theo said.

  The girl sat with her head bowed and her eyes on her lap.

  Millie put her hand on Theo’s arm. He shook it off.

  “Say something in Polish,” he repeated, but louder this time. By now half the bar was staring not at the girl but at Theo.

  “She’s not hurting anyone, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  “Not hurting anyone?” Theo was off his bar stool now, his face inches away from the lieutenant’s. “Not hurting anyone!” he repeated. “Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald. Do I have to run through the whole fucking alphabet for you, Lieutenant?”

  “It’s not her fault, sir.”

  “Chelmno, Dachau. Should I keep going or will you get the Kraut out of here?”

  The lieutenant stood staring at Theo. He was an inch or two taller, but had the look of a chubby boy. And unlike Theo, he’d come out for a good time, not a fight.

  “Why don’t you just take her and go,” Werner said quietly.

  “It will be better if you go,” Millie said to the girl in German.

  The girl slid off the stool. The lieutenant stood staring at Theo for another moment, then took her arm and started for the door.

  The others at the bar went back to their own conversations.

  “What if she really was Polish?” Werner asked.

  Theo shrugged and signaled the bartender for another round. “You think they’re any better than the Krauts? There’s a reason Ike had to separate the Jews from the Poles in the DP camps, and it wasn’t to protect the Poles.”

  * * *

  But there was another side to Theo, and it came out on the evenings when instead of going to an officers’ club or concert or cabaret, she cooked dinner for him in the flat. Those were the times she thought she might be falling in love with him, if she were capable of falling in love, or if he were. The data on both those questions wasn’t in yet.

  One of those nights changed everything between them. She knew his fury. It was hard to miss. His kindness was less obvious, but she’d caught glimpses. Sometimes she to
ld herself she was the only one who had. But that night with the Berlin winter assaulting pedestrians and sleet streaking the windows of the flat outside, and domesticity simmering inside, he let her in on his vulnerability.

  They’d finished dinner and moved, with coffee and the bottle of brandy he’d brought, to opposite ends of the parlor sofa. Maybe it was the brandy that made him tell her the story, though she thought it was more than that. He’d taken off his jacket and tie and opened the top button of his khaki shirt. She’d kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the cushion between them. As he began to talk, his hand caressed her toes. The gesture was more affectionate than sexual. That was what she meant about his being a different man when they were alone in her flat. He was certainly different that night. Two or three times before, she’d asked him the story of his arrival in America. She was interested. She was also guilty. She knew she’d had a shockingly easy time of it. In the past he’d managed to slip the question, but now he began to talk.

  “The first day in New York was fine,” he said. “Hell, it was a lark. They took a bunch of us to the Automat. I was thirteen, not exactly a kid, but young enough to get a kick out of slipping those nickels into the slots, opening the little glass doors, and taking out a tuna fish sandwich or a piece of pie or whatever you wanted. I wanted four slices of coconut custard pie. It was a wonder I didn’t throw up.

  “After the Automat, they put us on a bus to a barracks upstate. The place was pretty spartan. Long rooms lined with double-decker beds along both walls. I thought it was just fine, but the woman in charge kept telling us it was only temporary until some foster family agreed to take us in. They were lining up to do it, supposedly, Jewish families with a conscience, Jewish couples who had no children of their own, Jews who needed the forty-eight dollars a month they’d get for their trouble. We being the trouble.” He stopped and shook his head. “Apologies for the self-pity. A thirteen-year-old stranger who barely speaks English probably is trouble, though God knows I didn’t plan to be.

  “Sure enough, the couples began turning up. Usually on weekends. They drove up to the barracks, walked through, took their pick of the litter, and off the lucky kid went, sometimes half a dozen in one day, sometimes only one or two. But never me. No one was interested in taking home a boy who could barely communicate. Not like our friend Sutton with his Oxbridge drawl. They’d stand there, right in front of me, and go back and forth about God knows what. I felt like an animal in a pet shop. It can’t understand what’s being said either, but it sure can pick up on the emotional weather. I know now part of it must have been I was just too old. Who wants an awkward thirteen year old when you can have an adorable five year old? Small is cute. Small is lovable. A displaced boy on the edge of manhood is a lout. And I was a lout who barely spoke the language. At the end of two months, I was the only kid left from that first transport. I thought about running away. I even tried it. A policeman from the nearby town took me back. I’m not sure if he was worried about me or a small town in upstate New York with a German Jew on the loose. About a week later, a new shipment of kids came in. This time around I got chosen—next to the last. By then I’d learned English. And the couple who took me in spoke Yiddish most of the time. They were also old and needed help around the house. I’m not complaining. I was damn lucky they chose me, and I know it. But every once in a while, even now, I see that thirteen-year-old kid, standing at the foot of his perfectly made bed—I knew how to tighten a blanket so a coin bounced on it long before I went into the Army—with his hair slicked down, his tie pulled straight, and a smarmy please-take-me-home smile on his face, and it makes me sick to my stomach. God, I was disgusting.”

  “That’s not the way you sound to me.”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, but you didn’t know me then.”

  She sat up and moved closer to him. “I do now.”

  “That’s just pity talking. I never should have told you the story.”

  “I’m glad you did.” She put her hand on his arm and felt the muscle tighten. He always did that. He wasn’t the only one. It was a universal male trait. But his reaction now was extreme. He was trying to compensate for the story. He was slipping back into his tough-guy persona. She reached her arms around his neck and pressed her body to his. He responded as she knew he would.

  They rode out the night in that big four-poster bed as if they were riding a ship in a storm, and in a sense they were. There was sympathy, which is a kinder word for pity. There was passion. There was certainly lust. But mostly there was desperation. Each of them was after oblivion. And lost in their own bodies, drowning in sensation, they found it, for a time.

  After she walked him to the door and they said a properly ardent good night, or good morning, she lay in bed thinking about the evening. He hadn’t been entirely wrong about the pity. But pity is not a despicable emotion. And there had been more than that, much more. She should be euphoric, or at least happy. And she was. Nonetheless, something continued to nag at her. She didn’t realize what it was until she came suddenly awake at three a.m. Their bodies had enjoyed each other. Her flesh still felt tender with the aftermath of pleasure. The physical closeness had been intense. But there had been no intimacy. With his eighteen relatives, several million strangers, and three others whom she’d tried not to think of, the bed had been too crowded for intimacy.

  Eight

  Fraulein Schmidt knocked on the office door and opened it without waiting. Millie always had the feeling the secretary was trying to catch her at something, though she couldn’t imagine what. Fraulein Weber, on the other hand, avoided her at all costs. Millie wasn’t the only one. Weber kept her distance from the entire staff. She wasn’t any more cordial to the Germans who crowded the office on the other side of the slatted wooden divider. Weber was so sour, Millie and Theo agreed, just looking at her made your mouth pucker.

  “There’s a woman here to see you,” Fraulein Schmidt said.

  “Put her name on the list and tell her she has to wait her turn.”

  “She says she wants to see you especially.”

  Millie wasn’t surprised. Fewer women than men applied for clearance, but the ones who did, especially the older or less attractive ones, often wanted to see her rather than a male officer. They thought a woman would be more sympathetic. “If they only knew,” Harry Sutton said when he heard that.

  “She still has to wait her turn. Has she filled out a Fragebogen?”

  “She says she doesn’t have to.”

  “Everyone has to. You know that, Fraulein Schmidt.”

  “She says she doesn’t. She says she’s”—Schmidt hesitated for only a second, long enough to give offense without seeming to mean to—“a Jew.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Fraulein Schmidt shrugged, as if to say who would pretend to be a Jew if she wasn’t. “She has a card to prove it.”

  Millie thought of the little girl who’d lifted the cigarettes. She didn’t blame her. At least she tried not to. A child isn’t likely to come out of a concentration camp with a well-boxed moral compass. Still, she wasn’t going to be played again.

  “Tell her to come in. The others can wait.”

  Fraulein Schmidt’s rosebud mouth shriveled into a frown. Clearly she didn’t approve of favoritism, but it was not her place to say so.

  A moment later a woman appeared in the open doorway and stood for a moment, as if debating whether to go through with this or bolt.

  “Come in, please.”

  The woman took a few steps into the room. She had a slight limp. Half the people who walked through that door limped, and Millie felt sure at least some of them were faking it, but this infirmity looked real to her. She thought of the filched cigarettes again.

  The woman took another step, then stood waiting. She was gaunt, with a tight, nervous mouth and dark eyes sunk in darker circles that gave her the appearance of a raccoon. Her white hair, so thin her scalp showed through, made the sooty eyes more striking. She took the last f
ew steps to the other side of the desk, and Millie inhaled the pungent reek of unbathed flesh. These days it was the scent of Berlin, just as the smell of fresh bread and silver lindens had once been. Still, it was better than the stench of rotting corpses, which, she’d been told, had been the bouquet of the city in the first weeks after its fall.

  “Meike?”

  A charge, jolting as an electric current, went through Millie.

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  “Of course I recognize you,” Millie lied.

  The woman shook her head. “I have a mirror in the room where I stay. Even I do not recognize myself. I am Anna. Your cousin Anna Altschul.”

  Millie was holding on to the desk now. This wraith could not be Anna, the glamorous older cousin who had taught her to ski and swim and navigate the world. Even her voice was different, thinner, less resonant, more tentative. She thought again of the gap-toothed child who had stolen the cigarettes. This broken vessel was an impostor, out to beat the system and bilk Millie. But the impostor smiled, and something in the knowing curve of the mouth opened the floodgates. Millie saw herself, Meike, streaking down the mountain in Anna’s wake, blinded by the sun glinting off her silky red hair. Anna had refused to wear a ski cap—she was vain about her hair, with good reason—so Meike hadn’t worn one either. She saw herself treading water as Anna carved a perfect arc from the diving board into the lake with every pair of male eyes on her as hot as the sun. Meike perfected her dive that summer, but no scorching eyes followed the arc of her movement. She remembered the sly knowingness of Anna’s smile, that same expression that had crept through a moment ago, as she instructed Meike about boys and sex and other forbidden topics long into the night in the rooms they’d shared on family holidays. One night Meike had covered for Anna when she returned to the room long after she was supposed to. She’d been out walking along the lake, in the moonlight she said, though as Meike had sat nervously waiting she had noticed the night was hot and overcast, without a moon. She’d been out walking in the moonlight with a man named Sigmund.