The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  It wasn’t the first time he’d flirted with the idea of telling her. She’d worry, of course. And she’d try to talk him out of it. He remembered the weekend he’d come home from school and said he was going to enlist. She’d tried reason and tears and marshalled every argument in the book, but when he’d finally joined up a year later, she’d come around. She wasn’t unreasonable, at least about anyone except herself. But he knew he wouldn’t tell her. He was sworn not to. The vow hadn’t been hard to keep. For one thing, he wasn’t the only one involved. For another, Camp Ritchie had trained him in the habit of secrecy. According to one of his instructors, he hadn’t needed much training. He was a natural.

  * * *

  She knew something was wrong before she opened her eyes the next morning. More wrong than the uneasy feeling that she’d had a little too much to drink the night before. It was one of those vague premonitions that take shape slowly as the mind moves from sleep to wakefulness. The sense of doom is amorphous—a dire medical diagnosis, a broken love affair, a foolish act to be regretted without end—but harrowing. Then it came to her. She opened her eyes. Sure enough, beside her Harry Sutton slept the sleep of the innocent, or the sexually spent.

  She was a fool. Worse than that, she was a pathetic text book case. It wasn’t only the reaction to the film, though that was bad enough. Sex is a common howl of life against death. Eros and Thanatos, as he’d teased her when she’d mistaken the publisher of a pornographic magazine for a Nazi martyr. But why did she have to choose him? If only she’d gone to the film with Theo. The thought of Theo made her feel worse. Even a stranger would have been preferable. She could have forgotten a stranger. She could have pretended the incident had never happened. But Harry Sutton would be a daily reminder.

  The worst part was that it wasn’t only the film that had driven her to him. It was her sense of betrayal. That was where the text book case came into it. Abandoned by one man, she’d fallen into the arms of another. The fact that the first man was her brother and the faithlessness wasn’t romantic or sexual didn’t change matters. He’d let her down. He’d betrayed her. She’d thought he was off on intelligence missions, but he’d been sleeping with the enemy after all. He’d been committing the one act she’d persuaded herself he was incapable of. So she’d turned to the first man who’d come along. It hadn’t even been lust. She could have forgiven herself that, almost. Unvarnished physical hankering would have meant she was normal, just like everyone else in this damn Occupation. No, this had been something more shameful. Need, as naked as their bodies. She’d needed to be connected to another human being. She’d needed to obliterate the feeling of being abandoned, cut loose, let down by the one person in the world to whom she was inextricably attached.

  She turned over so that her back was to him. The rough Army blanket exacerbated the beard burn on her shoulder and breast. She had to get out of here. She started to sit up. If she didn’t jostle the mattress, if she didn’t wake him, she could get into her clothes and away from the apartment without having to face him. It would be bad enough in the office, when they were both fully dressed, when they were both in uniform, when he couldn’t see the rough red patches on her skin.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and leaned forward, hoping she could ease off the mattress without his sensing her movement. Behind her cellophane crackled, then a lighter snapped open and closed.

  “Good morning.”

  She didn’t turn around.

  “You don’t have to salute, but a civil good morning wouldn’t be out of order.”

  Dragging the scratchy Army blanket off the bed and wrapping it around her, she stood and took a step toward the one chair in the room. The move made the beard burn on her thighs sting. The man couldn’t even shave properly. She had to push the two uniforms tossed over it aside to sit. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom was sparsely furnished and impersonal. The only signs of its inhabitant were the books and magazines on the floor next to the bed, and on the night table his military-issue eyeglasses, a full ashtray, a pack of Lucky Strikes, and—oh, God, no—a wrapper from Army-issue condoms. She couldn’t read the print from across the room, but she knew what it said. Put it on before you put it in. She had to get out of here.

  “I take it you don’t think it’s a good morning,” he said.

  “What I think is that last night was a mistake. It never should have happened. It never would have if—” She stopped.

  “If what?”

  “If your Fraulein hadn’t run out—” She stopped again. That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. She’d forgotten the Fraulein until now. At least, she’d forgotten that Fraulein. She’d been too distraught about David’s.

  He propped himself up against the headboard.

  “If I didn’t know your hostility to the entire German population, I’d think you were jealous. But just for the record, she wasn’t my Fraulein. She was with the officer on her other side.”

  “Why on earth did he take her to that film?”

  “He thought she might find it instructive.”

  “Did she?”

  “You were sitting behind us. You saw for yourself.”

  “And I bet now she’s going to say she never had an inkling.”

  “You think that’s impossible?”

  “The first morning I came to work here you told me that the day a German walked into your office and admitted he was a card-carrying Nazi, the entire department would get snookered on your dime.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to know so she managed not to. I’m not saying that’s admirable, merely possible. Would you have wanted to know in her place?”

  She tugged the blanket closer around her as if the physical sting could take away the shame. “Why, every time this subject comes up, do we get into a discussion of my behavior?”

  “Maybe because part of this job is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

  “Or Nazi boots.”

  “Pretty small boots in this case. She must have been all of seven or eight when Hitler came to power, barely fourteen when the war started.”

  “You know what the trouble with this Occupation is?”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “It’s not an attempt at denazification or building democracy or anything like that. It’s an orgy.” Still holding the blanket with one hand, she gestured around the room with the other. “I’m as bad as the rest of you. But at least I’m not fraternizing with the enemy.”

  “Is this the way you treat a friend?”

  “You think it’s funny. You all do. Jack, who probably studied German at Yale with visions of Frauleins dancing in his head. My brother, David.”

  He sat looking at her for a moment, his eyes strangely naked without his glasses. “So that’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your brother, David.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Did you see those two men having a grand old time with the Frauleins at the U-Bahn station last night?”

  “When you almost fell?”

  “One of them was David.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Millie. It was pitch-black. For all you know, that was Uncle Joe Stalin lurking in the night.”

  “I saw his face when the flashlight swerved. All those nights when he didn’t come home, I persuaded myself he was doing some kind of intelligence work. Now I know better.”

  “You don’t know better. Even if it was David, and I’m not saying it was, I wouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions.”

  “What other conclusion is there?”

  “Ask him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She thought of the bitter abandoned woman she was determined not to become. She stood, picked her uniform up off the chair, and started for the door. “I just can’t.”

  “At least now I understand what happened last night. I had a feeling it wasn’t only the whisky that made me suddenly so irresistible. You
didn’t have enough to drink for that. Neither of us did.”

  She stopped and turned back. “Can we not talk about last night?”

  “I don’t mean the sex. I mean the rest of it.”

  “There was no rest of it.”

  “Don’t you believe it. There was a lot more going on last night than the sex. Which, if you don’t mind my saying, and I’m sure you do, I enjoyed thoroughly. But if you hadn’t stumbled and seen your brother with that girl, you never would have ended up here. But you did see him, or you think you did, and suddenly you were, shall we say, amenable. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m glad I could be of service in your hour of need. But now I understand that’s all it was. Last night had to do with you and your brother. What that’s about I don’t pretend to know. What I do know is that it had nothing to do with me.”

  She pulled the blanket tighter, though it was like a hair shirt against her bare skin.

  “Wuzza, wuzza, did I hurt the major’s feelings?”

  He took a deep drag on his cigarette and sat staring at her for a long moment. Then he picked his glasses up off the night table, slipped them on, and went on staring.

  “You know, Millie, for a nice girl, sometimes you can be such a bloody bitch.”

  * * *

  When she arrived at work later that morning, the door to his office was closed. She made it to her own without having to see him and stayed holed up there with interrogations until lunch. Then she slipped out quickly and walked to a mess some distance away. She didn’t want to take a chance of running into him at the one closer by. When she returned, his door was still closed. As she headed for her own office, she heard Fraulein Schmidt telling someone on the phone that Major Sutton wasn’t in today. She felt a flash of satisfaction. At least she’d had the guts to face him. Then Schmidt went on. “He’s at headquarters in Frankfurt.”

  He didn’t show up in the office until the following afternoon. His door was open when she went by on her way out that evening, but he didn’t look up. At least she didn’t think he did. She couldn’t be sure, because she didn’t look in.

  A few days later, Fraulein Schmidt stuck her head into Millie’s office to say Major Sutton wanted to see her. She reached for the compact in her handbag. It had nothing to do with that night in his apartment. What girl didn’t check her lipstick before a meeting? Then she told herself she’d be damned if she would and started for his office. Werner and Jack were already there. Harry had called the three of them in to meet Theo’s replacement, a man named Bill Shirley. Shirley, Harry explained, had learned his German at Stanford. He didn’t even glance at Millie as he said it. Those confidences in the officers’ club had never happened.

  Seventeen

  She was quiet letting herself into the flat that night. She and Werner had taken their new colleague, Bill Shirley, to the Russian sector for a production of Uncle Vanya, and she didn’t want to wake Anna and Elke. Then she realized it wasn’t as late as she’d thought. The Russian sector ran on Moscow time, and she was always temporally disoriented when she came back from the future.

  A lamp was still on in the parlor. Anna must have forgotten to turn it off. Years without electricity could do that to a person.

  She started into the room, then stopped. David was sprawled on the ugly red sofa.

  “I didn’t expect you home,” she said.

  He turned toward her and grinned. As he did, his lip, which was crusted with a red scab, started to bleed. He raised a handkerchief to it. “Don’t worry, Mil. It only hurts when I laugh.”

  She crossed to the sofa, sat beside him, and took his hand with the handkerchief away from his mouth. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Really. Just a fat lip. Or it will be tomorrow.”

  “Do you mind if I’m indelicate enough to ask how you got it?”

  “I walked into a door.”

  “David!”

  “Okay, someone took a swing at me.”

  “A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have asked why. I thought I knew what you were up to. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “What made you change your mind about whatever it was you thought I was up to?”

  “I saw you on the street in the Russian sector. You were with another GI and two Frauleins.”

  “Must have been a case of mistaken identity. The Russian sector is pretty dark.”

  “I had my flashlight. I was upset about the Frauleins. But I figured okay, you’re my brother, not to mention a grown man, and I’m not about to sit in judgment on you. But now you’re brawling in the streets too. Or did it happen in a bar?”

  “The open air.”

  “What I don’t understand is how you can spend your days doing so much good and your nights getting up to so much trouble.”

  “Maybe because I’m not doing so much good. I’m not doing any good. No one is. The job’s too big. The problem’s insoluble. Millions of homeless, stateless people no one will take in. Hunger. Sickness. Old people giving up. Babies dying. Or being killed.”

  This was better. This was the David she knew.

  “Did I tell you the latest?” he went on. “One of the workers was on garbage duty. Guess what he found in the trash?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “A baby.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Wait, there’s more. There was a mark on its throat, a pale lavender smudge that looked a lot like a thumbprint.”

  “That’s inhuman.”

  “Now you get it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We couldn’t do much for the baby, obviously. The mother was another story. It didn’t take long to find her. DP camps are hotbeds of rumors.” She noticed that he, like everyone else, had started abbreviating the expression, turning those miserable souls into a convenient shorthand. “Some of them are even true.”

  “What will happen to her?”

  “What do you think should happen to a fourteen-year-old kid who gives birth all alone in a field behind the camp? Seems the father decided not to take her back to the States after all. But I bet he took the story. I can hear him now. Boy, did I have me a hot Jew babe in Berlin. A hot Jew babe. She didn’t even know how babies were made, let alone what to do with the one she had. She was terrified she’d get tossed out of the camp. No parents. Not even a distant relative. No wonder she took up with that bastard. But there’s a happy ending. We managed to keep her out of jail or even court. We told the officials she was mentally deranged from her experience in the camps. Not the DP camps, the concentration camps. And who’s to say she wasn’t? So now she’s just locked up in a mental ward. Do you still want to talk about how much good I’m doing?”

  “It would be worse without you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You think the answer is nights of debauchery?”

  “Debauchery.” He started to laugh again. The blood dripped down his chin onto his shirt. “Jesus, when did you turn into such a prig?”

  “When you started screwing Frauleins.”

  “I prefer to think of it as emergency love.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was. It wouldn’t kill you to let go occasionally.”

  She thought of Harry Sutton. Only she wasn’t going to think of him. “Let go of what? Humanity? Decency! A sense of right and wrong? The memory of what happened?” She stopped.

  “You think I don’t remember what happened?”

  “You don’t behave as if you do.”

  Again, he thought of telling her the truth. But of course he couldn’t. And then suddenly he didn’t want to. He was tired of her self-flagellation. He was exhausted by her need for constant reassurance. He was fed up with her stubborn refusal of the very comfort she kept demanding.

  “We didn’t do anything,” he said quietly.

  “All right. What I did.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. We got out. That’s it. End of story.” He sat staring at her for
a long moment. “Did you ever think, Mil, that forgiveness, like charity, begins at home?”

  “I’m supposed to forgive you for screwing the enemy?”

  “I wasn’t talking about forgiving me. There are two people in this conversation.”

  * * *

  The morning after they had words about forgiveness beginning at home, David walked Millie to work. It was his way of apologizing, though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for.

  After they said goodbye in front of the building, he stood for a moment, watching her make her way up the steps and through the massive doors. Her back was straight. No, not straight, rigid. Her stride was long and purposeful, as if to deny the girlishness of those long legs and the second-position tendency of her feet. Her eyes were focused directly ahead. She thought she had herself under control. People always did when they were about to unravel.

  At first Berlin had seemed like a good idea, for both of them. They’d navigate the past together. They’d rely on each other, as they always had, to lay it to rest. He should have known better. The minute she’d led him to that damn breakfront in the flat and stood waiting for him to say something, he should have known better. She hadn’t come back to Berlin to lay the past to rest. She’d come to wreak vengeance for it. More important, and more grievous for her, she’d come back to resurrect it. That was why she chased little girls down the street and combed the columns of Der Weg for survivors. More than resurrect it. She’d come back to rewrite it. If they could all be together again, her action would be undone.

  * * *

  The camp guard from Sachsenhausen recovered, fortunately for Theo, and, as Harry had predicted, would go on trial. In certain circles Theo was something of a hero. The Army was of a different opinion. They wanted him out of Germany. He wasn’t sure where he was being sent—he’d find that out when he got his orders in Frankfurt—but he knew he wasn’t headed anywhere desirable. “Do we have a base in the Antarctic?” he joked with Millie that afternoon on the way to the Anhalter Bahnhof.