The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  “Thanks, Sergeant, perhaps another time. All we need now is proof of Herr Huber’s membership.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Millie said when they were back in Harry’s office. It had been too noisy to talk in the jeep. And neither of them wanted to discuss the matter in front of Private Meer. “I suppose he could have done some kindness for her at one time or another, even if he was a party member. She was a beauty in those days, hard as it is to believe now.”

  “I believe the beauty part. You can still see the bones. But I don’t buy the milk of human kindness on Huber’s side. It’s more complicated than that.”

  Sitting across the desk from him, she felt herself stiffen. “If you’re suggesting there’s something between her and Huber—”

  “No, I think Huber is up to a different kind of blackmail.”

  “If you mean that she sold out others to save herself, you’re even more wrong. I know Anna. She never would have done that. Never.” She heard the vehemence in her voice mounting and went silent.

  “Nobody knows what anyone would do under the circumstances. Hell, we don’t know what we’d do. The only thing we know for sure is what we did do.” He stopped for a moment, as if surprised at his own words, then shook his head. “But I wasn’t talking about saving herself either. This is a different kind of desperation.”

  She sat staring at him. “You’re talking about finding Elke. You think Herr Huber knows where Frau Kneff is but won’t tell Anna unless she writes a letter for him?”

  “Bingo. She writes the letter, he gets his clearance, and Frau Kneff’s whereabouts suddenly become common knowledge.”

  * * *

  The thought had been hovering since she’d heard about the Documents Center, but it didn’t take shape until she was back in her own office. She retraced her steps to Harry’s and stood leaning against the doorjamb, elaborately casual, as if she’d just now thought of it, as if it were an aimless question, not a matter of life and death.

  “Those files at the Center were pretty impressive.”

  “That’s the Krauts for you.”

  “Are they all like that?”

  “What do you mean all?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. The files of all the different branches. Civil servants. Wehrmacht. The camps.”

  “Don’t ever take up intelligence work, Millie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re as easy to see through as a newly washed window. At least about this. Yes, the camp records are meticulous too. At least that’s what I hear. Nobody has access yet.”

  * * *

  The next evening, Harry Sutton turned up in her office again just as she was putting on her coat to leave.

  “Can I interest you in a trip to the Russian sector?”

  “You found Frau Kneff?”

  “Herr Huber wasn’t exactly a hard case. It took about ten minutes to get the address out of him.”

  Millie pulled the belt of her coat tighter. “Should we pick up Anna on the way?”

  “Let’s get Elke first. In case Frau Kneff isn’t there. Or puts up a fuss. Or any number of snafus.”

  Frau Kneff’s building was a little better than Anna’s, but not much. Though her flat was on the second floor and had all four walls, part of the stairwell had been bombed out. Harry heaved himself up, then turned and reached down to help Millie.

  “You’re a regular mountain goat, Mosbach,” he said as he pulled her level with him.

  “How does a child make that leap?” she asked.

  “Resourcefully. And with her mother’s help.”

  “With her kidnapper’s help,” she corrected him.

  There was no name on the door of the apartment. Unlike Anna, Frau Kneff was not eager to be found.

  “How do we know this is the right flat?” Millie asked.

  “Huber gave me this address and said the second floor front. If it’s not this one, we’ll try all the others.”

  “Maybe we should have brought Huber with us.”

  “That would have meant MPs as well, which would have scared the living daylights out of a seven-year-old child. It’s going to be bad enough when two strangers in uniform turn up to tell her they’re taking her to her mother. As far as she’s concerned, she’s with her mother. But just to be safe, Herr Huber is spending the night in the guard room with those MPs.”

  He knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder and longer. “Frau Kneff,” he called. Still no answer. “Frau Kneff, I have word from Herr Huber.”

  They heard footsteps inside the apartment. Berlin was still that silent. The door opened a crack. Harry’s scuffed shoe was between it and the doorframe in an instant. He pushed his way in. Millie followed. Then she saw something she would never forget, though neither would she ever mention it to Anna. Elke—for who else could she be, this wraith-thin child with silky red hair that even malnutrition couldn’t dull?—moved to Frau Kneff’s side, wound her arms around her mother’s torso, and hid her face in her mother’s shoulder. The gesture rang a bell, more specific than the generic sight of a child clinging to a mother in fear. The day Millie had requisitioned the flat, the somewhat younger girl had clung to her mother the same way.

  * * *

  The jeep was crowded on the return to the American zone. Private Meer was driving, with Harry beside him, and Millie, Frau Kneff, and Elke between them in the back. They’d decided not to tear Elke from one mother until they could replace her with another, as if mothers were interchangeable parts in a child’s puzzle of life.

  Meer pulled up the jeep in front of Anna’s bombed-out building and killed the engine. Harry turned around to Millie. “How do you want to do this?”

  “You wait here. I’ll take Elke in.”

  Harry climbed out of the jeep to let Millie get out, then reached into the back for Elke. She clung to Frau Kneff.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Millie said, though she knew she was lying, just as she would have if she’d spoken the rote words the day she’d requisitioned the flat.

  Elke’s arms tightened around Frau Kneff’s middle.

  “I want you to meet someone,” Millie said. “Someone you knew a long time ago.”

  Elke still clung.

  “Go, Schatzi,” Frau Kneff said, “go.” She gave the child a gentle nudge, and for a moment the fury that had been churning in Millie since before she’d laid eyes on the woman succumbed to a terrible pity.

  Harry lifted Elke out, and Millie took her hand. It felt small and icy in her own, but at least the child didn’t pull it away. They started over the rubble-strewn plot of ground. Clouds raced across the thin sliver of moon, throwing shadows in and out of their path. Every few steps, Elke stopped and turned back toward the jeep. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but Millie thought Frau Kneff waved. When Elke stopped the third or fourth time, Frau Kneff called out again. “Go, Schatzi.” This time her voice broke on the words.

  They descended into the damp basement hall. Now Elke was holding her hand tightly. In this black cave, even a stranger was better than no one at all.

  Millie walked slowly, trying to avoid the worst of the rubble and broken glass that crunched beneath their feet. When they reached the door of Anna’s flat, she stopped and hunched down until her face was on a level with Elke’s. The child’s eyes, too big in her emaciated face, glinted with fear.

  “Do you remember another lady, Elke, from when you were very small? A baby, really. She had hair just like yours, red and silky and beautiful. You used to wrap it around your hands and put it in your mouth and tug so she laughed and laughed.” Elke went on staring at her with those huge, terrified eyes.

  Then it came to Millie. Music. You never forgot the lullabies of your childhood. She racked her brain for what Anna used to sing to Elke. All she could remember was what her own mother had sung to her, and then Sarah. Her unmusical mother had frequently been off-key, but she hadn’t minded. Neither had Sarah. “She used to sing t
o you, Elke.” She began to hum “Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf.”

  Elke’s hand relaxed in hers. That was better.

  “Mama,” Elke said and began to pull toward the road where the jeep waited. Millie cursed her own stupidity. What German mother didn’t sing that lullaby to her child?

  She straightened, turned to the door, and lifted her hand to knock. Nothing was going to prepare Elke. No song, no explanation, no reassurance was going to mitigate the destruction of the only world she knew.

  Millie knocked. “It’s me, Meike,” she called.

  She stood listening to the silence on the other side of the door. A mattress does not creak like a bed when you rise from it. Cloth slippers make no sound on a cement floor. But the rusty hinges of a door creak as it’s pulled open.

  Just as Millie would always remember the way Elke had clung to Frau Kneff, so her reaction to her real mother, though who was to say what constituted real and counterfeit under the circumstances, would sear itself in Millie’s memory. Anna’s response was predictable. Her eyes went straight to her daughter. She fell to her knees with a scream and clutched Elke’s thin body to her so tightly that Millie feared the child would break. But as violent as Anna’s reaction was, it was the image of Elke that Millie would be incapable of expunging. As Anna clutched her daughter, and cried, and laughed hysterically, and thanked God, and pushed her away to look at her, and drew her close again, and cried and laughed some more, Elke stood stiff and stoical, barely present in her own body. This was a child who had learned to weather hardship and terror, hunger and cold, bombs from the sky, invading forces on the ground, and a line of filthy-booted soldiers forcing her mother onto the bed, one after the other. Unlike Anna, she didn’t cry. She didn’t try to pull away. She just went on staring over Anna’s shoulder into the darkness, her hands, Millie noticed, balled into small fists of willful forbearance.

  * * *

  This time Anna accepted the offer of the flat. She had insisted on staying in the room because she’d been waiting for word, but now word, no, now a miracle had arrived. She and Elke went home with Millie that night.

  Even before they entered the apartment, Millie could feel the tension, as if distant bombs or an earthquake were making the air around them vibrate. Anna could not stop touching Elke, holding her hand, stroking her hair, hugging her shoulders. Elke put up with it. That was the only way to describe it. But the fear in those big eyes was giving way to anger. Millie could read it, and it was making her angry in return. She was trying to put herself in Elke’s place, snatched from one mother, suddenly told she had another, but her heart beat with Anna in the pain of her loss and the thrill of her reunion.

  She gave Anna and Elke the big bedroom with the high four-poster bed and carried her things into the small room that had belonged to that other child. Then she went into the kitchen and began taking tins and packages of food from the cupboard and a bottle of milk, a stick of butter, and a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. Fortunately, she’d been to the PX the day before.

  “Elke must be starving,” she said when Anna came in a little later, still holding Elke’s hand, as if the minute she let go of it the child would bolt.

  “Are you hungry?” Millie heard the singsong patronizing tone people use with children in her voice and hated herself for it. Elke must have recognized it too, because her small mouth shriveled with disdain.

  Anna led Elke to the chair in the corner. “Sit, Schatzi, sit.” Her voice was even more off-key than Millie’s. It came out as half plea, half command, an order to a dog that might obey or might just as easily lunge at your throat. They were two grown women in terror of this twenty-five-pound tyrant.

  She heard Harry moving around the parlor. He’d said he’d hang around for a while in case they needed anything. He meant in case there was trouble, though she couldn’t imagine what that might be. Frau Kneff wouldn’t dare return. Furious as Elke was, she was still a child. Nonetheless, something about the way he was prowling the premises reminded her of the bomb disposal experts who were dispatched to defuse an explosive device, or at least contain the damage.

  Anna crossed to the counter and nudged Millie aside. “Let me do it. Please.”

  Millie relinquished her place. She could imagine how long Anna had been dreaming of preparing this meal. She went back to the big bedroom, put another eiderdown on the bed, plumped the pillows, arranged Elke’s thin coat and extra sweater in the armoire, straightened Anna’s comb and brush on the dresser. That was when it came to her. She should have thought of it before. Anna was already unhinged. She didn’t want anything else to set her off.

  She hurried down the hall and pushed open the door to the bathroom. The bar of Naumann Caressa soap sat on the sink next to the cake of Ivory. She’d brought it home that night she’d been sick, unwrapped it, and put it on the sink, but she’d never been able to make herself use it. She didn’t know if David had. Now, wasteful as it seemed, she wrapped it in toilet paper, dropped it in the trash basket, and went back to the kitchen.

  Elke was still sitting in the chair, her head bent, her face now hidden by the cascade of hair. At the counter, Anna was stirring soup, whisking eggs, and buttering bread in a frenzy of eagerness. Surely filling a child’s stomach accounts for something. Surely that is one way to motherhood. Every few seconds she turned her head to make sure Elke was there. The gesture reminded Millie of Elke’s turning back to the jeep to make sure Frau Kneff was there. But Frau Kneff was gone now, back to her own bare, unheated flat.

  Anna turned again. “Supper’s almost ready, Schatzi.”

  “I want to go home.” Elke didn’t raise her eyes from the floor, and the words were so quiet that at first Millie wasn’t sure the child had spoken them. Then she saw the look on Anna’s face.

  “You are home, Elke. This is your home, yours and your mama’s for as long as you like.”

  “I want my real mama.” Again, the words were almost a whisper, but again Anna must have heard them, because her hand froze above the pot she’d been about to stir and her thin shoulders stiffened.

  “Anna is your real mama,” Millie said in that saccharine tone she hated. “The other lady was just taking care of you until your real mama came back.”

  The silence in that shabby scoured kitchen was brittle as glass. Then Elke shattered it.

  “No!” The word was a howl. She was out of the chair, hurling herself across the room, butting Millie in the stomach with her small head, a demon determined to break free.

  Millie caught her and tried to quiet her, but Elke struggled and pummeled and kicked. Her shoes struck Millie’s shins; her fists hammered her face. Then Harry was prying Elke off. He wrenched her free and wound his arms around her to keep her in place. She struggled for another moment, then went limp in his arms. Maybe she knew she was no match for his strength. Or maybe she didn’t have the same animus against someone who was not a candidate for motherhood.

  He carried her into the parlor. Anna and Millie followed. He was still holding her, and she’d buried her face in his shoulder. Anna started across the room to them, then stopped a little distance away.

  “Elke,” she said. Not Schatzi, Millie noticed, but Elke. “Would you like to invite Frau Kneff for supper?”

  Elke lifted her head from Harry’s shoulder and stared at her.

  “The other…” she hesitated, “… mama. Would you like her to have supper with us?”

  Elke went on staring. She was clearly expecting a trick.

  “Would you like that?”

  She nodded.

  Harry said he’d send Meer and the jeep to get Frau Kneff.

  Twelve

  During the crossing on the Statendam, Meike and David never once mentioned their close call in that crowded railway compartment. They never brought up the jeweler. They didn’t say, Can you imagine if they hadn’t arrested him, what might have happened to us? They didn’t speculate on whether the officers would have found Mama’s diamond bracelet or the Leica lenses. Th
ey were still too afraid. They were also superstitious. Celebrating their close call would be tempting fate.

  “You’ll see. They’ll get out,” Meike reassured David.

  “Of course they will,” David agreed. “Papa’s smart. He knows his way around. Remember the time in Switzerland when the hotel didn’t have our reservation and he talked them into giving us a suite?”

  “Look how he managed to get the visas,” Meike said. “It took him a year, going from consulate to consulate, being first in line before the offices even opened, but he pulled it off.”

  “The visas are still good,” David said.

  “We just have to be patient,” Meike agreed.

  Nonetheless, they decided to wire the Bennetts from the ship to tell them what had happened. No, not what had happened, but to alert them to expect only two of them. For now.

  “The others have been detained,” Meike wrote. She started to slide the form across the counter to the wireless officer on duty, then pulled it back and penciled in a ^ sign between the words been and detained. Carefully, so the officer could read it, she wrote the word temporarily above the caret.

  The ship was packed with Americans fleeing the war that everyone was sure was coming, Jews escaping the Nazis, several Dutch families and businessmen, and an Austrian student who strode the decks spouting Nazi dogma. He must not have realized that Meike was Jewish, because one night in the tourist-class lounge he asked her to dance. She refused and, in case her distaste wasn’t sufficiently clear, accepted an invitation from another student immediately after. This one was an American, returning from medical studies in Vienna.

  As they were dancing to, ironically, the ship’s orchestra’s rendition of the Andrews Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” an American woman who had taken Meike and David under her wing, or at least tried to, drew David aside. “In America”—she leaned close, because she didn’t want to shout, and the orchestra was loud—“we don’t do that kind of thing.”