The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  They spent afternoons lying on the sand at Wannsee or walking the shady paths there; evenings alone in his flat or out in the raw, pulsing city that was already rising from the ruins; a weekend in Cologne, where they passed hours wandering the cathedral; another in the Bavarian countryside, where it rained the entire time and they’d gotten out of bed only to go down for meals. Even then they’d skipped lunch one day and made do with the cold coffee and rolls from breakfast. That was the afternoon she let him in on her joke with herself about the beard burn. At first, she’d been afraid to mention that night. She didn’t want to ruin what they had now. He hadn’t mentioned it either. She hadn’t believed it at the time, but she knew now that he really had been hurt.

  * * *

  Then everything began to change. She’d known it would once they started going home. David was supposed to be the first to leave. As she kept reminding him, if he wanted to return to Haverford on the GI Bill, he had to be back in the States for the start of the academic year.

  “Now, don’t get upset,” he said to her one morning when they were alone in the flat, sitting at the massive carved table, drinking coffee, and eating good German pumpernickel spread with PX butter.

  “That’s a disheartening start to a conversation if ever I heard one. What am I not supposed to get upset about?”

  “I can’t go back to Haverford.”

  “Fine. Go someplace else. The States are full of colleges and universities.”

  “What I mean is I can’t go back to school. Not after all this.”

  She should have known it was coming. She had known. “I understand what you mean. I really do. The idea of sitting in lectures, studying, writing papers must seem pretty tame to you after what you’ve been through. But did you ever think it might give more meaning to what you’ve been through?”

  “You think History 101 is going to explain Hitler or the war or anything?”

  “I think it might give you some perspective. Others seem to think so. You aren’t going to be the only GI in those classes. The one thing I do know is that willful ignorance isn’t the answer.”

  “No one’s talking about willful ignorance. Maybe I’ll go back eventually. But not yet. Not until the job is finished.”

  “The war is over. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Not for all those survivors desperate to get to Palestine.”

  “So you’re going to stay here to go on smuggling them out?”

  “I’m not going to stay here. I want to work at the other end of the operation.”

  This was worse than she’d expected. He wasn’t just putting off going back to school. He was running away. From her.

  “You’re going to Palestine?”

  “It’s not the end of the earth.”

  “I thought we were going to stay together.”

  “We will. After I finish this. Besides, you have Harry now.”

  She wanted to slap him for that. Harry hadn’t been with her that afternoon in the Anhalter Bahnhof. Harry hadn’t sat beside her sweating and trembling in the crowded fear-stalked compartment as the train alternately hurtled and crept toward the border. Harry hadn’t shared all those years, first of desperate hope, then of the shameful realization that there was none. Instead, she pushed her heavy chair back, stood, and left the room. She had turned into that unloved familyless woman after all.

  * * *

  She couldn’t change his mind, though after that first painful morning when she walked away in silence, she tried. Oh, did she try. But two of his old Ritchie buddies succeeded, though one of them, Heinrich Kauffman, had to die to do it.

  Among the Ritchie boys, attitudes to the country of their birth varied. Some went back to search for family. A handful returned to live. Many, perhaps most, swore never to set foot on German soil again. Heinrich Kauffman belonged to the last group. He made his way to Palestine, where he had a brother. When Heinrich had been fourteen and his brother twelve, their parents had managed to get their older son to the States and the younger to Palestine. Their parents had perished in the camps, but now, finally, the brothers were together again, living in a settlement. They were also possibly, probably, fighting British rule. In August of 1946, British soldiers shot and killed both Kauffman brothers.

  “British soldiers!” David raged when he got the news. He had friends among the English military who worked with DPs. “Our fucking allies!”

  Millie was sure that was the last straw. Now nothing could keep him from going to Palestine to continue the fight. And putting himself in danger again. But she hadn’t counted on Peter Gruenbaum. That and the fact that her line about willful ignorance hadn’t gone entirely unheard.

  Peter Gruenbaum, one of the oldest of the Ritchie “boys,” had been teaching German at a small Midwestern college when he’d enlisted and been posted to the camp. Now that the war was over, he was teaching again, but at Columbia. He was the one who’d written David of Heinrich Kauffman’s death. Now he wrote again for another reason. He’d won a grant to set up a program to study the writings of survivors and those who had perished in the camps and was looking for an assistant. If David was interested, the university would admit him as a sophomore on full scholarship.

  “I told them that between your work with survivors,” Peter wrote, “and your record at Ritchie, you’re uniquely qualified. There weren’t many men there who were tapped to stay on as instructors. In fact, you’re the only one I know. You refused the offer then. I thought you were foolish, but I understood your motives. You had to prove yourself. Kill Nazis. Beat Hitler. You did. Now it’s time to move on. It’s time to understand not only what happened but why and how it happened. To make others understand. Thinking is better than killing, David. Knowledge is better than anger. Understanding is better than revenge. Come work with me. I don’t know if we’ll make the world a better place, but perhaps we can make it just a little more tolerant.”

  “You never told me they asked you to stay on at the camp as an instructor,” she said when he showed her Peter Gruenbaum’s letter.

  “I couldn’t do it. I had to get into the fight.”

  “Apparently,” she answered, but there was no anger in her voice. She knew he wouldn’t have shown her the letter if he wasn’t going to take Peter Gruenbaum up on his offer.

  * * *

  Ten days after she saw David off from the Anhalter Bahnhof, without any dire side effects, she accompanied Harry to the station. He had his own academic plans. That day she’d tracked him down in the officers’ mess, he hadn’t been reading the report on the Nazi judiciary for pleasure. The road to the Third Reich, he’d decided, had been paved by the negligence and betrayal of judges and lawyers. He’d taken to quoting John Locke on the subject. Where the law ends, tyranny begins. It stood to reason that if the judges and lawyers had been at fault in the past, they could save the future. He’d applied to two law schools, been accepted by both, and decided on the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That way he and Millie could be together. She’d be going back to work at the magazine, as a fact-checker again. A returning vet, Russ Bennett had written, sat in her old office in the editorial department.

  Harry hadn’t wanted her to come to the station to see him off. She knew what he was afraid of, but she assured him she could handle it. And she was handling it. She heard no echo of her heels as they crossed the rubble of the station. She imagined no Nazi banners snapping above her in the September breeze that blew through the open roof. The MPs were just American boys in uniforms, not kindhearted or well-intentioned perhaps, but not out to get her. She was fine. He was the one in trouble. No, he wasn’t in trouble. He simply wasn’t there. He was already back in the States, a civilian, sprung from Berlin’s dangerous madness. She told herself she’d be following him in two months, but still, his distraction frightened her. Maybe they wouldn’t make it after all. As she’d warned Mary Jo, you couldn’t rely on love you’d found in a war zone. Mary Jo hadn’t. A month after she’d returned to Friendship, she’d w
ritten that she was engaged to, literally, the boy next door. They’d played together as children. She said the wedding would be in November and added that she’d love to have Millie there but doubted she’d be home by then. And even if she were, Mary Jo went on, Millie probably wouldn’t want to come all the way to Indiana just for her wedding. Besides, it was going to be a very small wedding. Millie wanted to tell her that one excuse was always better than two or three.

  Now she and Harry stood on the platform beside his compartment, facing each other, except that he couldn’t meet her eyes. He kept lighting cigarettes in that singlehanded way, taking a few puffs, then flicking them away. Every time he did, a swarm of kids lunged for the butt.

  “Why don’t you just give them the pack?” she joked.

  He didn’t even smile.

  Beneath the brim of his officer’s cap, dark smudges underlined his eyes. He’d been up half the night. She knew because she’d been up, listening to the click of his lighter, watching the ember of his cigarette, feeling the mattress shift as he turned one way, then the other. As far as she knew he’d had no nightmares, except the waking ones, whatever they were.

  She asked for the second or was it the third time when the train was supposed to get into Bremerhaven.

  He went on staring over her head without answering.

  She asked the name of the troop ship he’d be sailing on, though she already knew it.

  He unbuttoned the flap of his uniform jacket, took another cigarette from the pack, and lit it.

  She gave up. “Maybe I shouldn’t wait for the train to leave after all.”

  He still didn’t answer her.

  She was angry. She admitted it. But the gesture didn’t show her exasperation. She was sure of that. She took a step toward him, put her hands on his shoulders, and leaned toward him for a farewell kiss. His body went rigid. He might as well have slapped her face. She dropped her hands and took a step back.

  Now he was looking at her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “It has nothing to do with you.”

  She made a show of looking around. “I don’t see anyone else at this going-away party.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them. “Don’t you believe it.”

  She stood looking up at him, and suddenly she saw him. She saw him as clearly as she had the breakfront after all those months. And she understood his exquisite sensitivity to her internal weather.

  “You left from here the last time?”

  “And I’ve managed not to come back since.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I can still see her standing on the platform. I can still hear her voice. ‘Soon,’ she kept saying. ‘We’ll be together soon.’ She knew she was lying. But I believed her. At least I pretended to believe her. How else could I get away? Hell, I didn’t even cry.”

  “You were being brave.”

  “That’s what I told myself. But I wasn’t being brave. I was glad. I was getting out of this rotten country where I’d become a dirty Jew. I was getting away from her. Don’t misunderstand me. I loved her. But after my father was killed she circled the wagons around the two of us. I was all she had, and she hung on for dear life. I was amazed she was letting me go. And let’s remember, I wasn’t just going away. I was going to America. The land of big, sleek motor-cars, and jazz music, and gangster movies. Hell, standing on the platform, I was too excited to cry.”

  “That was normal.”

  “Maybe, but what I did next wasn’t. When it was time to board the train, she reached out to hug me. Just the way you did now. Some boys were standing near us on the platform. Bastards from my Gymnasium, from what used to be my Gymnasium before Jews were forbidden to study there. Hitler Youth bastards. God knows where they were going. Not fleeing the country, that’s for sure. They were on their own. No mother on the verge of tears. No Mama trying to hug them, to hold on to them, to embarrass them. When she stepped in to hold me, I didn’t only stiffen the way I just did with you. I took a step back, away from her, out of her reach. I can still see her face. She looked as if I’d slapped her. That was the last I saw of her.” He took a drag of his cigarette, then flipped it away. “Or to put it another way, that was the last she saw of me. A boy pulling away from his mother. A boy ashamed of his mother.”

  “Normal behavior for a boy that age,” she said again.

  “Normal behavior for a callous little prick.”

  She didn’t argue with him. He knew every word she could say. He’d said them all to her. They were two of a kind after all. His hand was the minor injury. The truly debilitating one was invisible, just as hers was. The city and the way they’d left it would always be a festering wound eating at them from within. It was a bond. It was also a barrier. Loss can be consoled. Pain can be solaced. But there is no comfort for shame. Because shame is not the result of a wrong suffered but of a wrong committed. Nothing can breech the isolation of that. Not sympathy. Not sex. Not even love.

  The whistle sounded. All up and down the train, people were climbing into compartments and slamming doors and leaning out of windows. He bent to kiss her, quick and a little angry, then took the two steps up in a single stride, settled into his seat, and sat staring through the window at her. But she knew he wasn’t seeing her. He was seeing his dead mother. And she was looking at the girl who, years ago, had flung herself into the compartment, breathless, terrified, stunned at her treachery. They were each other’s ghosts.

  The train started to move. As it did, the angle of the light striking it changed, and she recognized her own reflection in the window. Not the image of the scared, scarred girl she’d been but the likeness of the woman she was becoming. It was superimposed on him. Maybe she was wrong about love being no balm for the shame. Maybe they could make it after all.

  Twenty-Six

  Everyone was having babies. The halls of the apartment building in West Philadelphia where they lived among other students on the GI Bill and their wives were an obstacle course of carriages and strollers. Men who’d thought nothing of dropping a few hundred or even a thousand dollars in a high-stakes poker game because who knew if they’d be alive tomorrow were saving nickels and dimes for the once-a-month babysitter and movie. Their wives were giving one another hand-me-down maternity dresses, then reclaiming them a year later. The world was hell-bent on repopulating itself. Millie’s Jewish friends were especially determined. They had so many murdered to make up for. Her old suitemate Barbara already had twin toddlers and an infant.

  Millie didn’t know what was wrong with her. Not that she couldn’t conceive, but that she was reluctant to. Two weeks after they were married in the living room of the Bennetts’ house in Ardmore—David had refused to give her away; he said he didn’t like the terminology, but he did walk her down the short makeshift aisle between the rented chairs—ten days after they returned from a weekend honeymoon in the Bennetts’ house on Martha’s Vineyard, she told Harry that she’d made an appointment at a clinic on Walnut and 20th Street. They were having dinner at the small table in the corner of the living room nearest the kitchen, beside a window overlooking Baltimore Avenue. During the day the view, if you could call it that, was unlovely and treeless. In the evening, she drew the heavy curtains he’d hung to keep out the glare from the streetlamp. The apartment was on the second floor.

  “What kind of a clinic?” he asked, and she knew from the even tone of his voice and the careful expression on his face that he was thinking of her two episodes in the Anhalter Bahnhof, though he never mentioned them.

  “Not that kind of clinic,” she said. “The Psychiatric Institute is on 48th Street.”

  “How do you know something like that?”

  “You forget how much I walk the city.”

  “Then what kind of clinic?”

  “Birth control.”

  She waited for him to say something. When they’d first moved into the apartment, he’d found her in the bedro
om one day, sitting on the side of the bed holding the hand puppet she’d smuggled out of Germany for Sarah. She’d expected him to ask what it was. He hadn’t. There was no reason to think he associated her decision now with the incident. She hadn’t made the connection until recently. Her dread of pregnancy was the dark underbelly of the dream of a world filled with the sweetness of her Sarah and eventually David’s. Bringing another Sarah into the world wouldn’t bring back Sarah. It would only exacerbate the betrayal. It would be saying I’m still here, alive and well, with a new Sarah to love. It would be dancing on Sarah’s grave. Only Sarah didn’t have a grave.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked finally.

  “That I married a frugal woman.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Do you have any idea how much money we squandered buying out the entire stock of condoms in that little drugstore on the Vineyard?”

  “Now you’re bragging.”

  “Not in the least. Every last one. We were the scandal of the island. Why do you think everyone was staring at us when we left on the ferry?”

  “Because we’re such a devastatingly attractive couple?”

  “That too.” He grinned. That was when she knew she’d been wrong. He’d understood her brooding on Sarah’s puppet that day. He’d intuited her dread of dancing on Sarah’s grave. That was why he was making a joke of it.

  They made love that night. There was nothing unusual about that. They’d been together less than a year, married only a month. But she sensed a difference this time, a certain gravity in him, a recognition that this was serious business they were up to, more serious than pleasure or even procreation. It had to do with a fierce unspoken pact between them.

  Afterward she turned on her side for sleep, and he molded himself against her. She was just drifting off when he spoke. “I kind of like the idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “Of its being just the two of us for a while.”