She slept soundly on the floor of the shed behind the house, then woke with an ache in her stomach and a pain in her chest, and the sound of hanging tins clinking in the breeze. She came out into the midmorning light that was harsh but warm at least. A man carrying pails yelled at her to get off his property. Charity was dead amid a disunited Germany.
She walked quickly throughout the day, and it was dark by the time she reached the familiar track. She passed the clearing near the river where Georg had played with her and Monique, then past Georg’s house. She nearly ran the last few yards and then the smell, the dreadful smell. She called out to her grandmother as she entered the door, but there was no response. She has left, she thought at first. Part of the corner of the house was missing and haphazardly patched, leaving small gaps in the brickwork. Flies buzzed around a plate of rotting food. She found a jar of pears, tore frenziedly at the lid, then ate the whole lot and drank the juice. A piece of moldy bread sat in the pantry, and she succumbed to that as well.
But the damage to the house wasn’t the worst of it. Upstairs in the attic she found her grandmother. She guessed she had died weeks ago, her face red and green and black, the look of her, a shrunken plum, and worsening in the heat, the sun’s rays eating her away.
She had the task of carrying the stiffened carcass down the stairs, the effort so great it made the baby kick and tumble and gave her pains in her back for several hours. She was not strong enough to dig a hole. She had found some kerosene, used it sparingly, then burned the body. Only when the fire had died down did she make a shallow grave and bury the remains.
Trucks flowed steadily on the roads behind her house. Her days were filled with fear, and then Erich arrived with Georg, but it wasn’t Georg. There was a patch of hair missing from the topside of his head and an indent in his skull. The bullet, Erich said, had pierced part of the brain. Field doctors had treated the bullet wound, but there was nothing they could do for his mental state. As the Russian army neared, Erich stole a car and brought him here.
They were not wearing uniforms. Erich looked disheveled, casual. She had never seen him like that. He had left Georg with her, almost as if he couldn’t wait to get rid of him, and left the drugs as well. She knew the effect of these, knew the danger and told Erich they would not be used. He left some food but not much. He had hidden the car behind the house. People had been walking in front of the car to get him to stop and help them, or try and steal it, and Russian military were stopping everyone. He would come back for it later.
From there, he left on foot through the mountains to his home northeast of Dresden. She would see him again two weeks later with his mother, who also had a head wound. Rosalind did not expect her to live but treated her as best she knew. Erich did not say what had happened to the rest of his family, and Rosalind didn’t ask. Their relationship was like that: few questions, fewer niceties.
Over several days she realized that not only had Georg lost part of his mind from a bullet, but he was also addicted to drugs. Drugs that Erich had continued to pacify him with, to keep him quiet and stable, or drugs to fuel him to make him function, to eat. And then after several more days passed and she had found Georg wandering the woodlands, screaming and scratching his skin, she had given him the drugs for the sake of the baby.
She had stood in line for the British food trucks in the town and would return with vegetables, bread, and sometimes tinned meat or milk. It would do, but it was never enough. Hunger was the new state of normal. There was talk in the town that the Russians would be stationed there soon to take over responsibility of the area. At that point no one seemed to be in control.
One day when she was out front putting on shoes to go to the town to wait for more food, she saw a familiar face walking the track toward her, and Rosalind wasn’t sure whether to be unhappy or grateful. And the baby kicked her, as if rejoicing, and didn’t move again.
Present-day 1945
In the distance she can hear the hum of a truck. It is a sound that she is constantly alerted by, in the silence by the river. She tries to stand up, but her legs give way. She wonders how she walked up the stairs and then remembers, vaguely, that Erich was there. Something he said or did. What? She can’t remember. She drags herself by her arms along the floor toward the stairs, finding her legs no longer work, and she pulls herself up to lean against the banister. There are smells trapped in her nostrils, of something burning, of chemicals.
Her limbs are weak, and her movement is stiff as she makes her way down the stairs and past the kitchen, stopping when she reaches something sharp and broken, a cup she remembers vaguely that someone dropped earlier, and she finds her legs are now steady enough to carry her to the front door. She is out in the sunshine. She puts up her hand in front of her face because the light hurts her eyes. The gold of her wedding ring is dazzling, blinding almost. Did she sleep a whole day? She doesn’t remember. It was this morning that Erich came. It is now the afternoon, she thinks, with the sun low, though she is not certain. She walks to the barn first to find it empty, apart from some ropes left on the ground in the center of the room. Rosalind was here recently—she is certain of it—before the attic. She leaves the barn to walk in the direction of the river, but the hidden track draws her toward it, pulling her with its invisible ties of the past. The truck with Russians is louder, as if it were right behind her now, and she runs, afraid they will crash into the trees and into her, as if there were dozens. She’s not sure. Nothing is clear.
And then the noises are gone. They were never here, she thinks, but she doesn’t look around. She does not want to know the truth. She doesn’t notice the spindly branches that scratch at her legs. She could make this trip blindfolded, she thinks. It was a game they played, she remembers now. They blindfolded one another, she, Georg, and Monique, and they wandered around the wood, calling out and bumping into one another, and falling over laughing. Back in time when they were innocent of disloyalty and deception, and before she realized it was love she felt, which had clouded her judgment.
She reaches the small hut and pulls open the door, which squeals as it swings back on one hinge. There is a faint outline of an owl drawn in chalk on the wall inside, only noticeable to her, because she saw who drew it many years ago, whose small hand took to every task with enthusiasm.
Standing up suddenly, she hits her head on a beam. She hears the sound it makes, but she strangely doesn’t feel it. She pinches her arm, which she can’t feel either. The skin bounces back in defiance, and she watches it curiously before a wave of nausea washes over her, and she clutches her stomach, where the sickness has pooled. And then come the images, the flashes of Stefano, of Erich, of the medicine bag. It is the drugs, she tells herself. She was given drugs, but she can’t seem to hang on to the thought. It is disappearing into the void, deep into her head.
She sits down, her bottom on the cold earth, and she can see the sky and the river from the window. She tries hard to remember what she did here and turns her head to see something familiar. It is part of the quilt patchwork that Monique began for Rosalind’s baby, scuffed and streaked with dirt from the ground, the cloth pilled and old looking. It is only half finished. She traces the patterns with her finger. One half is heavy with stitching and the other half blank. Georg would come here and hug the cloth like a child.
Georg. Where is he? He has been taken, perhaps by Stefano. Stefano. The Italian should be buried alive, she suggested to Erich, enraged by the killing of Georg. The blankness on one side of the patchwork calls to her. The patchwork asks, no, begs her to complete it. Like the child she almost had. The child that was not completed either.
She fingers the stitching again, the owls made of tiny loops. From someone so eager to leave behind dreariness, who balked at the idea of domestic duties, the stitching is fine and even. War changed Monique. Made her harder and softer at the same time. And Rosalind wants to forget her, has tried. This memory of Monique should have been scrunched up and thrown in the dark corners whe
re she couldn’t be found. She is thinking of the photo that the Italian held of Monique and her daughter. Where was that? Vivi looked out from the photo, her eyes daring the camera, just like her mother, the face tiny, but the same.
Erich made promises, and so did she. What were they? She feels suddenly ashamed of things she can’t remember. She wishes she could start again, rewind, change whatever it was that happened. And suddenly she is crying. And she is perhaps where she thought she would be, deserves to be. She is so alone.
She hears the rustling of branches that hang across the pathway to alert of any intruders. She can sense that someone is standing outside. The door creaks open slightly, and she closes her eyes. It is the Russians, she thinks. They know her deeds. She will be taken away. She can’t look. They will shoot her like they did Georg.
The door makes its final squeak, and Rosalind’s name is spoken in a husky voice that she recognizes. A hand, firm and gentle, touches her shoulder. She opens her eyes, and Monique is there, crouching down beside her. She wears a red dress, white satin piping around the collar, and a small black beret, her hair pulled back, as if to display herself better. A shopwindow display, she suddenly thinks, but there are things that mar Monique’s beauty. She has a cut above the eye that is swollen, pink, and shiny. The bottom of Monique’s dress brushes the dirty floor beside her, and Rosalind worries that it will be stained.
“Rosalind, I will help you.”
“Why would you do that?” croaks Rosalind, surprised at the sound of her own voice in the stillness, and she worries it might carry far down the river.
“Because you need me.”
Rosalind says nothing. She blinks slowly, but Monique is still there.
“I’m sorry about Georg,” she says.
“But you were right,” says Rosalind, her voice in a tunnel, far away, as if it weren’t hers. “I knew you were right. I knew he didn’t love me, but I refused to believe it.”
“I was wrong,” says Monique. “I was torn every time I saw you together. It pained me to look at your happiness after he proposed, knowing I should have told you about Georg long before then.”
“I wouldn’t have believed you anyway,” Rosalind says, the kindness of Monique’s voice forcing her to tears. “It is I who has wronged you!” Though the reasons are still unclear in her mind.
“The war did bad things,” says Monique. “Hitler did worse things. He made people suffer unnecessarily. I suffer because I was part of it, not willingly, but that I am called a German now. We all carry that.”
“But you always tried to help others,” says Rosalind, remembering vaguely. Faces jump in her mind, faces of people she was too ashamed to be around. Though she cannot remember their names. They are somewhere, bobbing in and out of her head, like they are drowning, and she is not quick enough to reach for them.
“Someone had to do something,” says Monique. “But I wasn’t the only one. There were so many who risked their lives.”
Monique looks through the window to the river. Rosalind sees the tiny mole that sits just below her mouth to the side, against skin that is clear. She is an angel, Rosalind thinks, perhaps come to save her, to take her to heaven.
“I hated you and loved you at the same time,” says Rosalind, trying to find more words, willing forth those drowning, ghostly images that she can almost see. “I thought you were taking everything from me.”
“You had as much as me, except you just didn’t notice.”
She is right, Rosalind is thinking. She is right, and Rosalind can see that now. There is no one to blame. The past is done.
“Monique, I’ve felt so alone for years.”
Monique puts her arms around her, and Rosalind cries then on her shoulder. She likes the feel of Monique’s arms and the floral smell of her, not like herself, harsher, acidic.
“You weren’t yourself. I know that,” says Monique, her voice soft, syrupy. “I should have tried to understand you better. You were always looking for the faults in people, in things. You were always living in shadows, under clouds. I’m sorry I didn’t see that until it was too late.”
“I should have been there for you, too,” says Rosalind.
“You were. You practically raised me. You lent me your wings.”
Rosalind laughs, pulling away from Monique to wipe away her tears. “You grew your own wings. You would have grown them without me.”
Rosalind suddenly notices the bandages on the arms that hold her, and then she is thinking, remembering. There was more: Monique in the attic.
Images rise to the surface now: Monique injured, Rosalind watching, angry.
Why?
CHAPTER 29
STEFANO
Stefano is slapped awake, water thrown in his face. He coughs and spits out water, eyes opening, stinging from the light, and a throbbing pain in his head. He comes around slowly to the stillness in the room, to the man who still has him tethered, elsewhere now.
He is told that he will feel better in a few minutes.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Stefano,” he says, eyes fighting to stay open.
“The photo of Monique . . . Why do you have that?”
Stefano’s head feels clouded as he tries to put his thoughts in order.
He remembers Erich reaching into Rosalind’s medical bag, a cloth over his face, something odorous, and fighting the feeling of being smothered under the force of Erich’s weight against him. And the memory that came just before that, of Rosalind staggering toward the barn door but never reaching it, falling to the ground, her hands flat on the earth at first, before submitting to it fully, and Erich carrying her outside. Stefano did not see that coming, the tables turned so brutally.
He leans back, nauseated with the sweet, sickly smell of the drug still in his nostrils.
“I told you already.” His head rolls slightly on a bar of metal behind him.
“Tell me again.”
“I found it in the house.”
He is tied to the leg of a large iron bed in another house, his wrists bound again behind him, the ropes anchored to the rim of the bed.
“Where are we?”
“It doesn’t matter where.”
Stefano looks out the window. They are on the top floor of a house in a valley, the sun low, almost gone but burning brightly. He can see a road twisting upward, and beyond that there is nothing but rolling green hills and the faint sound of a helicopter. He has been here before, just before Dresden. He had chosen it specifically, searched it for clues.
“I underestimated Rosalind,” Erich tells him. “She said that she didn’t trust you on sight. And I convinced her otherwise. She told me the first night, after she saw you in the wood, that I had to get rid of you. For once she saw things that were there instead of things that weren’t.”
“And you rewarded her with an injection. I would hate to see how you treat your enemies.”
“You should know that Rosalind wanted me to give you an overdose, then bury you dead or alive. I was not ready to give up on you yet. I feel there is unfinished business between us, more words to be said.”
“I never found talking worked with Nazis.”
Erich looks at him. At first Stefano thinks he will hit him, but he breaks into laughter and wags his finger at him.
“That is why I first trusted you. You wear a cynically honest view of the world. I understand what you are feeling,” says Erich, stepping closer. “But now I need the whole truth. I worked for Hitler’s protection squad. I interrogated people, I listened to them beg, and most times when I’d had enough, I would order them killed.”
He tilts his head and looks at Stefano curiously.
“But you knew all that before you came to the river, didn’t you?”
Stefano notices that there is a slight tremble to his voice that he didn’t have before. Events haven’t worked out quite as they should. Though it could also mean that he is unhinged, that he will not control himself, and may not be prepared to
negotiate.
“You don’t need to do this. I do not care who you were in the war. I just want to go home.”
“To Italy? To your family? To your mamma who is waiting for you?”
Stefano’s heart pounds against the walls of his chest. He does not like the mention of his mother, and Erich knows this, too. He has probably taunted countless prisoners with the mention of family.
“I will tell you honestly. That I don’t know if that is true. I don’t know if Stefano is your real name and whether you fought originally on the side of Germany. That much I can’t tell since I no longer have access to intelligence. But I can tell you that the other things you said are a lie. You never heard of my sister, Claudine, who was kept locked in a cell of her own, away from other prisoners. When she tried to escape one day, push past the guards to reach her lover in another cell, she was taken away and gassed in a truck.” He says this coldly, faster, as if he must speak this way or break.
“I’m sorry about your sister.”
“It is what happens to traitors,” he says, but he has turned away to say this so that Stefano can’t see his face.
Stefano scans the room, the window, assessing the height from the ground. “I have told you everything. There is very little to tell. I was a language student before the war. When I get back to Italy, I hope to pick up where I left off.”
“I can’t let you go. You have been given orders to find me. Perhaps you gave the orders yourself.”
“I promise that you will never see me again. I will go away, and I don’t care what you did before. Just let me go . . .”
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