The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  * * *

  She kept her appointment at the clinic and left with a small package containing a diaphragm and a set of instructions. Nonetheless, she felt guilty. She was in a bind of guilt. Getting pregnant would be a betrayal of Sarah. Avoiding pregnancy meant letting down Harry, no matter what he said, no matter how good a front he put up. He was the one who had no family at all, except for her. That was the point. He was doing this for her.

  In an absurd attempt at compensation, she became the perfect housewife, a paragon of the misguided virtues she’d never admired. The apartment was, if not spotless—the ugly linoleum of the kitchen floor and the stained bathroom tiles made that impossible—then clean and fiercely neat. Harry’s shirts went to and returned from the laundry with a military regularity. And she cooked. Each evening she returned from the magazine, took off her high heels and suit, changed into slacks and one of his old Army shirts, and went into the tiny kitchen, where she managed to turn out elaborate dinners based on recipes clipped from magazines and newspapers, though it didn’t escape her that the same publications that were promoting complicated dishes designed to keep women in the kitchen for the shank of the day had competed to print shortcuts for getting dinner on the table in twenty minutes during the war. And she walked. As she’d told Harry, she spent hours walking the streets, trying to adjust to them, trying to believe they were the new reality.

  Yesterday, she’d been living in a rubble-strewn world where black markets flourished, Soviet spies and re-emergent Nazis lurked, and homeless, stateless people languished in despair. Today, she paced block after block of intact buildings, among people drunk on postwar optimism, in a turbocharged economy that felt like one huge overstocked PX. Everyone was happy, or at least hopeful. No one wanted to hear about the hunger, deprivation, and desolation that still stalked Europe. But she couldn’t shut it out. She was brooding about it that afternoon on her way home from the supermarket carrying two bags of groceries. The bags filled with crisp apples and freshly baked bread and a chicken she planned to stuff as well as a variety of canned and boxed goods were more evidence of how easy life was here and how harsh it still was in Europe, as if more evidence were needed.

  As she let herself into the building, a cacophony of reedy children’s voices screeching with unrestrained excitement rushed down the stairs to meet her. She hoped Harry had gone to the library. It was Saturday, and he’d planned to study at home, but she doubted anyone could with this din. The noise grew louder as she climbed to the second floor. She turned the corner into the hall and saw what must have been half a dozen strollers and carriages. What seemed like twice that many children chased one another through the obstacle course. Some of them had helium balloons that said happy birthday tied to their wrists. Two little girls were competing to see who could scream her joy louder. Another was sobbing. A couple of boys were hooting as they traded punches. Two women standing in the open door to an apartment, neither of whom was her neighbor, added to the noise by shouting at various children to calm down.

  Clutching her grocery bags, she began to thread her way through the maze of children and their paraphernalia. She didn’t see the piece of birthday cake, but she felt it under her shoe. As she did, her legs went out from under her, and she was toppling back onto a warren of strollers and carriages, her grocery bags tumbling from her arms, their contents spilling out and rolling in every direction. The crash silenced the children, for a moment. Then the crying and screaming and hilarity started up again.

  The two women who’d been in the doorway and a third, her neighbor, were trying to help her up and gathering her groceries and asking if she was all right. She told them, through gritted teeth as she struggled to stand, that she was fine and didn’t need help, though when she managed to get to her feet, the shoe with the birthday cake on the sole slid again and she had to make an effort to regain her balance. By that time Harry, who’d been trying without success to shut out the birthday party racket, but who’d heard the crash and thought, he told her later, that this time the little bastards had gone too far, was in the hall. Somehow he managed to get rid of the women and maneuver Millie and the grocery bags into the apartment. She carried her shoe. She’d be damned if she’d get icing all over the rug.

  He took the grocery bags into the kitchen. She limped after him, wearing one shoe, carrying the other. When she reached for the paper towels to clean it, she noticed that her arm was bleeding. They both stood looking down at it.

  “If there’s any justice in the world, I broke the stroller that inflicted this wound.”

  “Forget justice. You’re just lucky I’m on the scene to pick up the pieces. Again.”

  It took her a moment to recognize the song he was humming as he led her down the hall to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. “Seems Like Old Times.”

  * * *

  The fact-checking job at the magazine wasn’t entirely stultifying. Occasionally, she enjoyed the challenge of tracking down verification of an arcane piece of information. Now and then, she delighted in coming across an esoteric fact. But when she passed her old office in the editorial department, she couldn’t help resenting the vet sitting there. She knew the reasoning. He was a man supporting a family. She was merely a wife, supplementing Harry’s government stipend while he studied for his career. But the rationale didn’t blunt the bitterness. Sometimes her anger was fanned by others. That was what happened the day she had lunch with her old friend Rosalind Diamond.

  Rosalind was back at Bryn Mawr, still in the classics department, but teaching. Occasionally, on Saturdays when Harry was studying, Millie took the Paoli Local out to the school and they had lunch. Sometimes, Rosalind took it in and came to the apartment for one of Millie’s extravagant dinners. Rosalind and Harry liked each other.

  That day Millie took the Paoli Local out to Bryn Mawr, and they went to the Deanery for lunch. They talked about the still slow recovery of Europe, the bill to let more displaced persons into the United States, and the Marshall Plan, then toward the end of lunch the conversation turned, as it always did, to lighter, or at least more personal, issues. Rosalind had come back from an academic conference smitten. She and a classics professor from Dartmouth had fallen in love over Ovid.

  “Your mother must be over the moon,” Millie said, “as Harry would put it.”

  “Would that she were.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s not tall. My mother has an obsession with height. She says no self-respecting girl would marry a man who’s shorter than she is. He’s not dashing. Her word, in case you couldn’t guess. And he teaches college, which means he’s poor. She keeps reminding me of how I’ve been brought up. As if that’s an argument in favor of growing up with money.”

  “What does your father say?”

  “‘As long as you’re happy, Princess.’”

  They both laughed.

  “He also offered to buy us a house.”

  “This time your mother is going to have to cry uncle for good.”

  “You don’t know my mother. She’ll probably try to get him to wear lifts in his shoes to stand next to me for the ceremony.”

  Miss Albright was there that day too, with another faculty member. Once, she’d joined Millie and Rosalind for lunch, but it hadn’t been a success. At least it hadn’t been a success for Millie. In the old days, she’d been Miss Albright’s protégée and Rosalind’s champion. Now she was an outsider. It wasn’t only that they were fellow faculty members. It was that they had careers; she had a job.

  Miss Albright stopped at their table on the way out and asked how things were going at the magazine. Millie said they were fine.

  “I keep looking for your byline. If not there, then in other magazines or papers. You know I admired the pieces you published during the war.”

  “Exactly. During the war,” Millie said. “Before the men came home.”

  “That makes it harder, Millie, not impossible. The Dorothea syndrome can rear its ugly head in
many aspects of life.”

  “What’s the Dorothea syndrome?” Rosalind asked when Miss Albright had moved on.

  “She thinks I have a flair for self-mortification.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a flair,” Rosalind said. “Maybe only a tendency.”

  * * *

  She began submitting ideas for articles. She was careful not to send them to Russ. He was the publisher, not an editor. And this time she didn’t want to pull strings. The editors, who were men and knew her place, were not receptive. Nonetheless, she kept at it and finally one of them assigned her a brief interview with a man who’d written a book about the relationship between the economy and the length of women’s hemlines and, after that, another with Bess Myerson about what she was doing two years after she’d become the first Jewish girl to win the Miss America Pageant.

  “You’re a good interviewer,” the editor said.

  She wanted to tell him not to sound so surprised. She settled for explaining that she’d honed her skills weeding out ex-Nazis. He must not have been impressed, because he turned down three more of her ideas. Harry encouraged her to take them to other magazines and Sunday supplements. She had no more success there.

  Then at the end of Harry’s second year of law school, the Soviets closed all road, rail, and sea traffic to Berlin. Two days later, the Allies began an airlift. The British, French, and Americans, especially the Americans, would fly in enough food, medicine, coal, and all other necessities to keep two and a half million Berliners alive for as long as necessary, they said.

  This time Millie went straight to the editor in chief. She walked into his office before he could assign a man to the story and listed her credentials. She was fluent in German. She knew the city. She’d lived there during the Occupation. And, she added after a moment, as a child. She’d proved her interviewing skills.

  He still hesitated.

  “I spent five months interrogating Germans in the denazification program. I know how to talk to Germans. I know the German mind.” The editor went on considering her. “I’m almost one of them.”

  She got the assignment.

  She’d known Harry wouldn’t try to stop her, but she hadn’t expected him to be so enthusiastic.

  “It’ll be good for you.”

  “It’s an assignment, not therapy,” she said, but even as she spoke, she was wondering why, if she didn’t view it the same way, she was so eager to go back.

  “All the same, it’ll give you a chance to see a different side of Berlin or at least Berliners. Remember those stories we had to sit through about how much they’d all suffered under Allied bombings? What was the name of that customer with the pinned-up sleeve?”

  “The one who insisted the picture of Dachau was really of Dresden?”

  “That’s the one. He and all the rest will have to change their tune now that we’re dropping supplies instead of bombs. We got used to living with hate, theirs as well as our own. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like living with gratitude. Maybe it’ll produce a different reaction.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said.

  * * *

  The last time she’d traveled by ship. Now she was flying. These days everyone seemed to be. According to one statistic she’d tracked down checking an article on future trends, in less than a decade more people would be crossing the Atlantic by plane than by ship. High above the ocean, with engines droning, the plane vibrating, and sleep elusive, she didn’t believe it for a minute.

  In Wiesbaden she transferred to a C-47. Once again she was attached to the military, though this time she was wearing a press pass rather than a uniform. She strapped herself into one of the few seats. Most of them had been removed to make room for cargo. Unlike the seats on her flight over, this one was hard and faced the interior of the cabin. She had to twist around to look out the window. Once they started taxiing, she didn’t want to. They were almost at the end of the runway by the time the pilot managed to lift off. The plane shuddered into the air. It was that weighed down with supplies. The descent into Tempelhof an hour later was worse. It wasn’t even a descent, it was a plunge. Her ears throbbed. She twisted around to look out the window again. The ground was coming up to meet them too fast. The plane skidded to a stop what seemed only inches from the end of the runway. The officer across from her noticed her white-knuckled grip of the seat and told her this was nothing compared to flying formation.

  She climbed down from the plane onto the tarmac. She might have been stepping back into the Occupation. The group of women spreading sand on the runway could have been the Trümmerfrauen picking up and passing along the rubble of the bombed-out buildings. The men in dyed or camouflaged Luftwaffe uniforms rushing out to service the planes could have been the stream of disgruntled customers who’d passed through her office. And of course there were Frauleins. They stood at wagons parked along the side of the runways, passing out coffee and doughnuts and smiles to the American air crews.

  “So much for non-fraternization.”

  She’d thought she was muttering to herself, but the officer walking beside her heard the words.

  “Non-fraternization is a thing of the past, if it ever was,” he said. “But this is different. They’re bait. If the military wants planes taking off and landing every sixty-three seconds, and that’s the goal, they have to keep the crews on the tarmac. Frauleins are the only way to do it.”

  She left the airport and took a taxi into town. The first thing she noticed was the change. The city was still in ruins and rubble, but more buildings had been restored and here and there a new one was going up. The second was the lack of it. Black markets still flourished, though now the haggling for food and medicine was even more cutthroat. And now instead of scrounging for cigarette butts, children lifted their faces to the sky, waiting for the handkerchief parachutes filled with candy and chewing gum that the pilots rained down on them.

  For the next forty-eight hours, she walked the streets where harried-looking Berliners smiled at her and occasionally said danke and the parks where they were already cutting down trees for the coming winter, visited homes and shelters, talked to strangers, and tracked down people she’d known.

  Frau Kneff was working in a nursery for Besatzungskinder, Occupation children, whom the GIs hadn’t wanted to take home and the Germans preferred not to think about. She grabbed Millie’s hand and kissed it. “As long as you keep flying, the children eat. Mostly dehydrated food, but still nourishing. Once we got Spam. It was like Christmas, the Zahnfee, and every child’s birthday rolled into one.” Millie didn’t like the hand kissing, but she was glad for the children and thought again, as she often did, of the woman carrying the dead body of her child on the tram.

  She found the woman who’d translated children’s books. She was working on a manuscript of her own now, about the House of Shutters and other institutions like it. “Did you know you had hospitals like that in America?” she asked.

  Millie said she hadn’t known.

  “Hitler talked about them. He said America was ahead of us, but we were going to catch up and surpass them.” She stopped and thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose any country is blameless. But now your pilots drop parachutes of candy for the children.”

  She had a drink with Jack Craig, who was still there, though in a new office. He was the only one of the old group who had stayed on, the only one who’d been permitted to stay on. General Clay’s directive that Harry had told her about that night in the officers’ club had finally come down. Anyone who’d been naturalized after 1933 was not permitted to work in the military government. And Jack was still with his Fraulein.

  “Why don’t you marry her?” Millie asked.

  He grinned. “She’s working on it.”

  General Clay’s directive wasn’t the only sign of the return of the old order. She interviewed a German lawyer, a liaison with the American officials, who grumbled about the advantage Jewish lawyers enjoyed because so many of their Aryan colleag
ues were disqualified due to their Nazi pasts. “Of course, that can’t go on much longer,” he assured her.

  She spoke to a Social Democratic politician who complained of Jews who’d fled Germany for easier lives rather than return home to help rebuild the Fatherland. She didn’t point out that the few Jews left to flee were the relatives of the multitude who had been expelled or murdered.

  By the time she headed out to Tempelhof for the flight back to Wiesbaden, she’d filled several notebooks.

  She wasn’t surprised when she saw the crowds milling around outside the wire fence that surrounded the airfield. She’d witnessed the same crush when she’d arrived two days earlier. Men and women were curious. Children were hoping for candy or gum. Inside the airport building, however, the scene had changed. When she’d arrived, there had been a scattering of military personnel and German officials. Now the place was packed with people carrying suitcases and bundles and small children. She asked one of the Army officers who was trying to keep order what was going on.

  “DP evacuation. No point sending all those planes back to Wiesbaden empty. We fly in supplies and fly out the poor beggars.”

  She flashed her press pass and moved past him to go out onto the field.

  The Germans outside the fence had been curious but still suspicious. Could they count on the Amis to keep this up? The displaced persons in the airport building had been hopeful but still wary. Could they really be getting out? The atmosphere on the airfield was more lighthearted. Frauleins in short skirts and silk stockings or bobby socks passed coffee and doughnuts to boys in well-worn flight jackets with their caps pushed back on their heads, the better to smile and laugh and flirt. One particular officer caught her attention. At first she spotted him because he was tall and his head bobbed above the others. He didn’t have his cap pushed back on his head, and he wasn’t laughing or flirting, though he did smile and say thanks as he took the container of coffee and two doughnuts from the Fraulein. Then, unlike the other men who lingered around the truck, he moved a little distance away and leaned against the wire fence, drinking and eating.