The Road Beyond Ruin

by Gemma Liviero

  Erich looks up at Stefano, who has not said a word.

  “I have no mother to go home to,” says Stefano after a long pause. “I lied about that, too. She was with my sister and nephew the night you took them. My mother was still alive when your men set fire to the house.”

  Erich is dreading what is coming, but it is inevitable, he sees. They have both lost their sisters and mothers, but such words are weightless now. And it is not yet over. He still has more cards to play, more information to withhold if necessary, and perhaps more that will get under his skin.

  “So, you can kill me now. Shoot me in the head. You have what you want.”

  And if his bluff is called, what does it matter? He is thinking about Genevieve, about Marceline. They are left to fate now. And the information that is buried, a list of safe houses, of places where other Nazis are hiding in Germany, will never be found, nor an address that Genevieve and Marceline will be at now. And his father’s designs will never fall into the hands of an enemy. They are buried, perhaps to be dug up at some point in the future when Germany is different, when the German soldiers, his father, others will be celebrated. In a way he has won. They will not get all that they want. They will not find the others who will celebrate his name. He wants it over with now.

  “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you and Monique,” Erich says in a condescending tone. He feels some of the fight return, his power to demean. “You were in love with an idea. Monique would not have loved you. She was only in love with herself.”

  Stefano laughs hoarsely, as if the sound has been trapped deeply for too long. Erich is taken aback. He has never seen him smile so widely—a smile with teeth that overlap one another, many of them, vicious.

  “You know,” Stefano says, coming close, so close that Erich can feel his breath. “I dug up something interesting from the hill, something very dear to you.”

  It takes Erich only a second to realize what he is saying. He is thinking about the missing body of Monique, but that is not what Stefano is talking about.

  “I had watched you walk to the ridge. I had seen you open the ground, check something. I was curious, so when you weren’t there, I went to see what it was. I’m pleased to say that the contents are now in Soviet hands.”

  Erich swallows. He feels the first pang of hopelessness that he has witnessed on the prisoners. He understands something about them, has a sense of what they felt. He fights to repel the feeling, to regain control. And looking at Stefano, Erich has lost, he thinks.

  He is thinking of his father, of Claudine. It was why his father hanged himself. He had gone to visit Claudine at Sachsenhausen, to try to help her, to plead her case, only to learn on that final visit she was already dead.

  “Was it you who found Monique’s body also?” Erich says.

  “What body?”

  Erich is confused. Rosalind had not witnessed him bury Monique on the hill, and Georg had lost his mind completely that night, disappearing in the woods near the river. Who could have seen, and who would have bothered taking her since? After he walked down from the hill, Rosalind was there in the house with Genevieve. She said she couldn’t look after Genevieve, couldn’t live with her. Couldn’t look at her because she was so like Monique. The child was crying, distraught. Erich did not want to take her, but there was nothing else to do. He would take her, raise her, and teach her to be like him. He hadn’t wanted her at first, but he had quickly grown an attachment. She was of his blood, after all.

  “Why didn’t you kill me before today? There were plenty of chances. You had weapons.”

  “I had to find out where you had hidden Vivi before I released you to the Russians.”

  “And what will happen to her?” says Erich. He is not so in control now, and he knows his voice reveals this. He doesn’t like that Stefano uses the same abbreviated name Monique used for the child. It is too familiar.

  “Does it really matter?”

  He is cold, thinks Erich. Much colder than he could have imagined.

  “So now you can shoot me!” shouts Erich.

  Stefano smiles.

  “Your arrogance amuses me. You will have to live with your past a little longer. The Soviets, I believe, have a few things to discuss with you.”

  Erich feels nauseated at the thought of the Russians and what they might do to him.

  “I shot and killed hundreds of Nazis. You, on the other hand, shot no soldiers, only ordered the execution of many. You took the coward’s way, Hitler’s way. You made others do it, then looked the other way and wiped your hands of any knowledge. The Soviets don’t look kindly on cowards.”

  Erich remembers the blood. He hated the blood. Stefano is right. He never fired a weapon at anyone.

  “Do what you want,” says Erich. “But make sure that Genevieve is looked after, is sent to a good German home.”

  “No one can replace her mother, the person who loved Vivi most. A woman of courage who did not deserve a coward like you.”

  Erich’s head is buzzing with memories. Confused, the war nearly over, still so much to do. He remembers the name Stefano, not uncommon, in a file somewhere, another interrogation. Stefano, Teresa Della Bosca’s brother, and a name that was unimportant at the time. He feels a weight pressing against his chest, the air around him thinning. He is remembering the last letter written by Monique, where she talks of him, a man she was falling in love with. Cold tentacles of terror spread across the back of his neck. He should have seen this. Cosimo. Stefano. The same!

  “You are Cosimo!”

  “And you are finished.”

  Stefano picks up the gun and slams it into Erich’s temple.

  CHAPTER 31

  ROSALIND

  “I thought you had left me,” says Rosalind.

  Monique ponders the statement.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you had died.”

  Monique looks away.

  “Part of me did.”

  Rosalind follows Monique’s gaze across the darkening river toward a violet horizon.

  “You didn’t tell me that Erich came back,” says Monique. “Why didn’t you warn me he was close?”

  The question is like fire, sizzling and blistering; it causes her consciousness to fade and recede slightly, into the background, as if repelling the words.

  “I don’t know,” Rosalind hears herself saying, as if her conscious self has broken free to take control. “Partly because I felt I owed him something. He brought Georg back to me. We had both been loyal to the führer. In some way I thought that bound us. And that it was something that kept us separate from you.”

  Monique stares at her thoughtfully.

  “He did bad things,” Monique says.

  “So have I,” Rosalind says. She is remembering the last days in the hospital in Berlin, the death of German soldiers. Merciful, she thought at the time, but she knows it was also murder in another form. It makes them equal in a way, her and Erich.

  Rosalind studies Monique’s injuries.

  “What happened?”

  Monique looks at her, her dark brows almost together, her eyes becoming duller at some inner thought, at memories of her perhaps.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” says Monique. “The past is the past. We must start once more at the beginning. We must start from now.”

  Thoughts filter through: pleading, crying, blood. She remembers Monique with blood dripping down her arms, begging Rosalind to stop. She closes her eyes. “I hurt you,” she whispers. Images disperse, and others enter: Georg on the bed, his back to her, distant, always somewhere else in his mind.

  “When did you know about Georg?”

  “Before he knew himself, I think,” Monique says.

  “I hated how you hung around those clubs. But you saw things that I couldn’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “The irony,” says Rosalind. “Georg . . . Erich—”

  “I have to go,” Monique says, her head cocked, e
ar trained on something Rosalind can’t discern. Her hand touches Rosalind’s and she leaves it there a second, her eyes searching Rosalind’s. When Monique pulls her hand away, Rosalind can still feel her hand there, the warmth. She was always warm. And she, Rosalind, always cold. “But I will be back.”

  “Why did you never tell me . . . about Georg?” asks Rosalind.

  “He made me promise. He knew that you weren’t ready for the truth . . . wanted one day to get the chance to explain. He loved you once, Rosalind. You have to know that.”

  But not now.

  Monique opens the door, and she is gone, the door bouncing shut, a dull thud as old wood meets old wood.

  “I have to tell you things,” says Rosalind quietly when she is gone, but she can’t remember what they are. She shuts her eyes, sinking slightly, imagines the murky depths of the river, but other images consume her thoughts. She flows from dreams to wakening, to delirium, though the episodes are coming less now, and memories appear and are not so quick to disappear.

  And surfacing in her mind, those final days after the birth, patches that she can’t quite piece together, followed by another memory that emerges clearly and boastfully above everything else, an introduction to the trauma that she caused. She tries hard, but there is something not right with her, she heard, listening through the wall to her parents’ room. She thinks too much; she thinks too darkly. I don’t think she should be a nurse. She does not have the empathy, the strength of character. Monique would make a better one.

  “But I do try, I do,” she pleads to ghosts.

  July 1945

  Rosalind was in Georg’s house. There were photos on the wall, pennants and silver trophies from athletic competitions, and there was a vase in the shape of a fish, the tail stained in blues and greens, and eyes with each side painted gold. This last one was a present from Monique, something she had bought from a bric-a-brac stall with the money she earned sweeping a café on the corner of their street in Berlin. Georg kept it on his side of the bed.

  Rosalind’s first screams during the contractions had sent Georg shrieking and stomping the floor in their attic bedroom. Monique said it was best for Rosalind to stay in the other house, just until after the birth. Monique said that Georg was confused, erratic, and unreachable; it was better to be away. The baby was born in Georg’s childhood bedroom instead, which was sweet, said Monique to make her cousin feel better, a short time before the truth emerged about the fate of the child.

  Monique was efficient, quick, comforting, though Rosalind didn’t want her there. She wanted Georg. She wanted her mother then. She had never thought of her mother before, had never leaned on her emotionally. Yvonne was incapable of being leaned on, but it didn’t matter. She had still needed her there.

  And then Monique took the child away, and Rosalind wondered if it was because of her cousin that the baby had died. Monique was not looking Rosalind in the eye. She told Rosalind she was sorry it happened. She had tears in her eyes, but Rosalind didn’t believe the sympathy was genuine. Monique also told her she loved her, but that was also a lie, thought Rosalind. She was not there for her. It was always about herself.

  Her baby was dead, and she had not yet come to terms with the strange situation she had found herself in. She should be nursing a healthy baby, but instead it was Monique again who was there, always blocking the sunlight.

  Monique told Rosalind that she must allow herself to grieve, that coming to terms with losing the baby would allow her to face the future, a future where she could try again, return to some kind of normal. There was no kind of normal! screamed Rosalind inwardly. Not now with her baby dead and Monique back from the dead, where she had imagined her, who had arrived in the weeks before her contractions with a healthy little girl in her own image.

  Rosalind looked at Monique who was tired from helping with the birthing, and quite ordinary without the dresses and the makeup and the hats. She looked like a farmer’s wife, a scarf around her head, apron on with stains of Rosalind’s blood. The roles were reversed. It was Rosalind who was claiming the attention finally, but it was attention that she didn’t want.

  And she wondered whether she should tell Monique the truth about the near drowning years earlier. How when Monique was first struggling to reach the surface, Rosalind had paused to watch her from the edge before diving into the river to save her. That she had thought, just for a moment, it was the answer to all her problems. If Monique drowned, Rosalind would no longer have to share Georg. But she had dived in and she had saved her, and she wondered then as blood fell between her legs, the skin of her belly still swollen, whether things would have been different, whether Georg would have loved her more.

  The morning following the birth, Monique had brought her tea in bed. Rosalind hadn’t slept. The combination of lack of sleep over several nights and the loss of the child had put more fissures in her fragile state of mind. The sadness that had nearly choked her had passed, and she was left with a feeling of numbness. She pinched herself as Monique sat on the bed and spoke of things she did not want to hear. She thought of her mother and father. They were good people, but she had never felt wanted by either of them. They never told her she was loved. And there was the strange irony of Monique, whose parents doted on her, but she had lost them. And she had moved on, stronger than anyone. How different Rosalind’s parents had been compared to how they were after Monique arrived. They were lighter, laughed more, when Monique was around.

  But that morning there was no organization to her thoughts. There was no logic; there were no feelings of goodwill—there was no time to think on Monique’s qualities. Beside her, distractingly, was the glass vase that she wanted to smash. There was just one random image after the other. The memory of telling Georg that he was soon to be a father and the smile on his face that did not mean anything. That did not register. A child, a living, breathing person created from his own flesh and blood, would have healed him, she thought.

  And Georg had arrived to see the dead child and his eyes had come alive and he had reached for the boy at first and then recoiled and that had hurt Rosalind; it had burned into her memory. Even a live one perhaps would not have been enough.

  Monique carried the baby carefully as if it were alive. Monique, with her healthy child sitting nearby: the sweet little girl, with downy hair, watching, unaffected by what was in front of her, eating her toasted bread and watching her mother with wonder, soaking up everything about her so that she could be just like her. Rosalind shuddered. The erratic thoughts continued. She still couldn’t sleep. She paced the floor again that day, looked again and again at the dead baby, which was changing color, becoming not so soft or flexible. Perhaps it wasn’t hers. Perhaps hers had been taken.

  Then she did sleep briefly that night, and in the morning the baby was gone and so were the bloody towels now bleached and hanging on a line between the two houses. There was no trace left of him, her child.

  When Monique returned to Georg’s house, Rosalind was waiting furiously in the kitchen and had screamed at her as she entered, demanding to know where she had buried the child. Then Georg walked in and looked at Rosalind as if he had never seen her before. It only fueled her anger, and she pulled pictures off the wall, one by one, smashing them.

  “Be quiet,” he had said, and she had run upstairs, back to the bedroom she had shared briefly with her baby.

  Monique had followed, and so did Georg.

  “You stole him from me,” she had screamed at Monique. “Your child is probably his, isn’t it? Georg was mine, and you stole him. You chased him until he gave himself to you.”

  Rosalind had seen for the first time the redness in Monique’s eyes, the dark circles. She had not slept either, because of her guilt, thought Rosalind.

  “Rosalind,” she said quietly, “you are not thinking straight. You are in shock. You need to sleep. You need to rest. I will give you something to sleep.”

  “Leave me,” Rosalind screamed. “You are not to touch me
!” And she was standing on the bed, and Georg covered his ears and ran from the room. And now it was worse, thought Rosalind. He hated her.

  “You had an affair with Georg and you ruined my life and I will never forgive you,” said Rosalind.

  “You still don’t understand . . . I’m sorry . . . I should have told you,” said Monique, quietly, eyes closed to a memory. “But the truth was hard, and Georg made me promise—”

  “Leave Georg out of it,” she yelled. “You use his name because he can no longer defend himself.”

  “You have to stop giving him the drugs,” Monique said, then continued more harshly. “You are making it worse for him. He will never repair.”

  “Leave me! You will never find your own man. You are a whore! Not satisfied with Erich, you had to take Georg.”

  Monique was silent and still, and she straightened her back and brushed down her skirt, which never needed brushing.

  “You think you know everyone,” shouted Rosalind. “You think you know me. You don’t even know your own husband.”

  “Rosa, stop now! Please! Enough! We are on the same side. I—”

  “You didn’t know that it was Erich who had Alain arrested. That he was the one to round up your friends, and then he pretended he knew nothing. Not even Georg knew about it. But I did. He trusted me. He could see that I didn’t approve of your friends. That I thought like him.”

  “You have to stop this!” said Monique firmly, and Vivi climbed up the stairs behind her. Monique left to take her daughter next door, and Rosalind could hear Monique telling Vivi that Mama would come to get her soon.

  When Monique returned, she broke down and cried, and Rosalind felt nothing, perhaps more hatred because her cousin was becoming the victim, as if she had been wronged somehow.

  “This war,” Monique began, “has changed everyone for the worse, but the truth was always there. It has been there in front of you all this time with or without a war.”