Bluebird, page 14
I know who you are.
She levels her gaze at the old woman.
“Eva,” she replies. “My name is Eva Gerst.”
JAKE WAITS, LEANING across the table, his collar loose around his throat. She can smell soap, and the heat of a body that’s been dragging a girl through a city in the summer. He smiles.
“So, what’s it going to be, Bluebird? Name or Nazis?”
That, Eva thinks, is a more complicated question than he could possibly know. She tucks her hair behind her ear. “You should not call me Bluebird.”
“Oh? That’s too bad. It suits you. What name should I use, then?”
“Eva.”
“Well, at least you didn’t say ‘Miss Gerst.’ After getting rid of a Nazi for you, I’d think we could drop at least a few of the formalities.”
He leans back, digging in a pocket, and comes out with a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. He offers one to Eva, but she shakes her head. Yellow-orange light flashes from the other side of the table.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” she says.
“I don’t,” Jake replies, making the cigarette glow. He listens, watching the trumpets tap dance up and down. Finally, he says, “You’re not much of a talker, Eva Gerst. So I think I’ll get the ball rolling. Are you ready to level?”
She doesn’t think she is.
“All right. First question. What do you think?” He tilts his head toward the band.
He’s playing a game with her.
Eva looks at the musicians—all shades of black and brown—blowing out their jazz. At Cherry in her cutaway shirt, threading her way through the tables and chairs like the lights are on. Nothing in this room would have been legal under Hitler except the coffee that hasn’t come yet. She puts her gaze back on Jake and says, “It isn’t Wagner.”
Jake laughs. “I guess it isn’t. But what do you think?”
“That the time …”
“The beat?”
“Yes. The beat is not always where it should be.”
He points with the cigarette. “Or maybe the beat is exactly where it should be, only you don’t expect it to be there.”
“And that,” says Eva, “is why you like it.”
Jake blows smoke and smiles. “Touché. Second question. Do you play?”
Eva shakes her head.
“Liar. Nobody looks at a piano like you did and doesn’t play.”
She looks away. “That was a long time ago.”
“Fingers don’t forget. You should try it out. Lunch is a good time. There aren’t any classes, and the girls sit in the kitchen or out on the back patio to eat. I go up there, sometimes, to practice.”
“You play the … gitarre.”
“Guitar, in English. Very good. How did you know?”
“Your fingers.” She raises her left hand, rubbing the tips. Jake lifts a brow.
“Anything else?”
“You ask too many questions.”
He laughs again, though she’d been serious about that one.
It’s a game. But she doesn’t understand it. Not yet.
Then Cherry’s bright hair appears from the shadows. She has a tray balanced on one palm. “I brought you milk and sugar ’cause I don’t know what your girlfriend likes,” she yells over the band.
“You’re a lifesaver, Cherry.”
Cherry puts the coffee on the table while Jake puts down two coins. She scoops them up, careful of her fingernails, and gives Jake a little sideways glance. He smiles, and she sashays off with her tray. She looks smitten. And every day of forty.
Jake dips a spoon into the sugar bowl. “Thank God you’re here,” he says. “She always thinks I take it black.”
Eva watches Jake stir the coffee while holding a cigarette.
“You could ask her for the sugar.”
“What? And hurt Cherry’s feelings?”
Eva wraps her fingers around her cup. She takes it black, because sugar is expensive. She’d learned that, after the war. She’d learned “take it black” from Miss Schaffer. On the boat.
The boat seems like a long time ago. But the war never does.
Eva sips her black coffee and says, “What did you do to Rolf?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“Do you think I stabbed him with a bread knife and left him stuffed in a closet somewhere in the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center?”
She keeps her eyes on Jake over the coffee cup.
“Fine. I went and told him someone was being sick beside the elevators.”
Eva sets down the cup. Bites her lip. Because she wants to laugh. She should not want to laugh.
“Then I slipped you down the stairs and brought you to a jazz club, which makes perfect sense if you think about it.” He throws out an encompassing hand. “No Nazis in sight.”
She smiles at the irony. But he has chosen well. They are not going to be overheard.
Eva watches Jake. Thinking. Gray-green eyes under dark brows just over the rim of the coffee cup. Clever fingers stubbing out the cigarette. A smile that says he knows things he shouldn’t. And just a little, she shivers.
Jake is dangerous. Maybe in more ways than one.
And she can never let him find out who she really is.
I AM EVA GERST.
She meets the eyes of the former prisoner, leaning shadowlike against his tree. He knows it’s not her name. It had been a dangerous move. But she needs the old woman’s help, and she can’t be arrested or sent away. Annemarie has to live.
And she will never be Inge again.
You have blood on your hands.
She can see the words forming in his head. She waits for him to decide. To tell what he knows. But he doesn’t. He just leans against the tree.
“Well, Eva Gerst, I’m Frau Henkel,” says the old woman. “This is my grandson, Michael, and that’s Mr. Liebermann over there.”
No one mentions the disgusted man. He seems to have gone away.
“We need to move,” Frau Henkel says. “We’ve heard the fighting is over, now that our Führer has gotten what’s coming to him. A Red Cross hospital has been set up somewhere on the road between here and Berlin. We have to get there.”
A hospital, she thinks. Annemarie needs a doctor and so does Frau Henkel’s grandson. She puts a hand on Annemarie’s shoulder. Sleeping, though her eyes are a little open. Someone has put her arms in the trench coat.
“I should go get our things. Annemarie has clothes. It isn’t far …”
Frau Henkel’s skin sags, pulled downward by a frown. As if going to get Annemarie’s clothes is some sort of pretense. As if she might sneak away. Never come back.
“I won’t leave her.” She tightens her grip on Annemarie. “I would never leave her!”
Liebermann stands. “I’ll go. See if I can find anything to trade for food.”
Dangerous. But there’s nothing else to say.
She gets to her feet, creeps away to relieve herself, and searches the undergrowth until she finds a stone that fits well in her hand. She holds the stone in her palm, her hand in her pocket, limping down the canal path with Liebermann, wary, careful to stay behind him and a little out of reach.
But he doesn’t say anything about blood or who she is and he doesn’t try to kill her. He doesn’t even speak. Just glances once at the Mercedes when she flips back the canvas, then goes on to pick through the litter in the yard. She breathes, lets go of the stone, pushes back her hair. And pauses. She’s wearing earrings. Rubies and diamonds. From her father, for her fifteenth birthday.
She turns away and takes them out. Quickly, before Liebermann can see. She doesn’t want them. But they have to be worth some money.
They leave the factory with what they can take. She has Annemarie’s clothes, all their little collected possessions, her father’s papers, and a dead girl’s identity neatly folded and stuffed behind her waistband, the earrings hidden, pinned to her bra. Liebermann drags a crate full of boots.
He never suggested going inside the factory. Neither did she.
She never wants to see the factory or the car again.
She walks upright down the path, Annemarie’s shoes stuffed with bits she cut off from the blanket.
I am Eva Gerst, she says inside her head. I have no country, Annemarie is my family, and I belong only to myself.
She says it twenty times. Until she’s sure.
They right the cart and load up the boots, the little boy, a sleepy Annemarie, and a rather nice mahogany side table that had belonged to Frau Henkel’s grandmother. No one wants to pull the weight of the table, but Frau Henkel is in charge. The cart wheels groan, the sun rises over their heads, and they maneuver down a track through the trees and onto the main road.
I am Eva Gerst. I am Eva …
The road to Berlin is the apocalypse.
She’d learned that word from one of her tutors. “The end of the world,” he’d said. “Where man has ruined everything just before the coming of God.” Her mother fired that tutor, but too late, because now she knows an apocalypse when she sees one.
Craters, burned cars and tanks, bullet casings. Blasted trees. Smoke and stench and half walls rising from the rubble. She pulls the cart with Liebermann like a matched pair of oxen. Past unburied bodies with crows and dogs, rats, beetles, and flies. Around the ones who have fallen because they can go no farther. Down into the ditch to make way for a Soviet truck—averting their eyes, covering her head in a scarf, covering Annemarie, so the soldiers won’t take any notice—then pushing, tugging, dragging the cart up and back onto the road again. They are one squeaking cart in a wandering horde, all wounded, desperate, lost, either going to Berlin or coming from it or something in between.
Frau Henkel decides when and where they stop. To find water. To forage for food in the woods or an abandoned house. To trade away a pair of Nazi boots. One pair of boots is worth one day of meals, which is two cans of tuna. And Frau Henkel decides where it might be safe to sleep. Keeping them quiet, out of sight, hovering like a brooding hen with the knife and a stout stick she’d found on the side of the road. Watching over her grandson, the girls, and the boots until she can’t keep her eyes open.
And when Frau sleeps, that’s when Liebermann decides to speak.
I am Eva, she whispers in her mind, Liebermann’s words in her ears. I am Eva Gerst …
She’d thought a long time about Liebermann, their first day pulling a cart down the apocalyptic road. About sitting clean and pretty in her father’s office, with her mother and Rolf, and the man in the striped clothes who had brought them the wine. The man she’d vaguely thought must be there because he should have learned better. That her good Papa was going to teach him to be better.
Liebermann looks different from the prisoner with the wine. Maybe everyone looks different. But it really doesn’t matter. He saw her. He knows.
And so he comes. Like a shadow. Like a bad dream every night. To tell her about her father and Sachsenhausen.
He tells her about men who were whipped with salt rubbed in their wounds. About hangings, and shootings, and the ovens belching smoke. About experiments, to see if a certain drug might kill you, or make you see things, or just disintegrate your mind. Experiments to see how long a drug could make a man run—with twenty-pound, forty-pound, eighty-pound packs on his back—run and run until his heart gave out.
But it was Dr. von Emmerich who’d said, what an opportunity. Who’d said have these men run in the boots from our factory, to see the different wear on the different kinds of treads. Make them run on different surfaces. Test even more men this way, and with more kinds of drugs, so Germany could make the very best kinds of boots.
Wouldn’t that make the men productive and useful?
Von Emmerich was just called the Doctor. And it was the Doctor that no one ever, ever wanted to see. Because the Doctor was not even official. He was a friend of the commandant. A friend of Hitler, with no inspections, no records, no reports. You’d choose a hanging rather than an appointment with the Doctor. Because the others would hurt you. Kill you. But the Doctor, he could speak a word and make you do those things to somebody else.
He could make you say things, think things you would never dream of in a nightmare. Cut up this body on the dissection table. Now cut up this man tied to the chair. Piotr, a loyal man, a brave man, went to see the Doctor and told which of his friends had hidden food. Alfred had kicked the hanging stool out from beneath his own cousin’s feet. Done it in front of hundreds of witnesses, and then sworn he hadn’t.
And Mina, meek and obedient even while she was starving, who during her sessions with the Doctor was given a word. Her special word. To make her obey. The Doctor said the word, and Mina shot a man. He said the word, and Mina shot herself in the leg. And at the next session, when instructed to shoot the other leg, she shot herself in the head, instead.
Liebermann whispers and whispers. He whispers until she is exhausted. Wasted. Scraped out inside. And only once did she ask him, “How do you know?” Nodding when he replied, “I was there.”
But she never asks him to stop. She listens to every word. To every story.
Because Liebermann tells her the truth. Liebermann allows her to know.
It is always better to know.
He tells her twenty-seven names. He helps her memorize them. She chants them before she sleeps, while her father’s papers rustle inside her shirt.
I am Eva Gerst. I have no country, Annemarie is my family, and I belong only to myself.
She says it twenty-seven times, for the twenty-seven names, until she is sure.
Until Inge is gone.
Inge is no more.
And after three days on the road, Frau Henkel says, “Eva?”
She looks up, startled. She’d been running her fingers through Annemarie’s hair, trying to find fleas by the firelight before Liebermann comes. They’re safe inside a house, with the back half still intact and doors they could block, and it’s the second time Frau Henkel has spoken. She hasn’t gotten used to the name.
“Yes?” Eva replies.
“I don’t think a hospital will do her any good. I think she’s given up.”
She means Annemarie.
The first day riding in the cart, Annemarie had cried, huddled, arms tight around her chest. The second day, she’d murmured and she’d slept. And today, Annemarie hasn’t spoken. Her swelling has mostly gone, the brilliance of her bruises dulled and fading. But she’d spent the day staring while the cart rocked, wide blue eyes open to a wide blue sky. She ate only what Eva put in her mouth. Walked only when she was led. She didn’t take herself to the toilet. A person who’s fallen asleep while they’re still awake.
Until Liebermann, or a man passing down the road, or a grandfather trading for their shoes happens to stray too close. Then Annemarie wakes up. And she screams. Like she had in the bomb crater. Flailing. Yelling herself hoarse. She frightens Michael, who lost two fingers picking up a dead soldier’s loaded gun. Liebermann used the kitchen knife she’d taken from the factory to carve Michael a soldier. For bravery. To clutch in his good hand when Annemarie screams.
Annemarie has a mind that is leaking. Draining. The person she’d been seeping away to a place that no one can see.
And Eva knows whose fault it is. She knows exactly.
But Annemarie has to live. Doesn’t she?
After four days on the road, Frau Henkel says, “Eva?”
“Yes?”
“Michael has a fever.”
Eva nods. They have to find the hospital. The waistband of her skirt is so loose she’d tied a rope around it. To keep her papers in. The earrings are still hidden. She’ll sell them or trade them before they starve, but she can’t get what they’re worth on the road. And she will need something to pay Annemarie’s doctor. But there’s no one coming from the right direction. No one to tell them which way the hospital might be. Just a long, macabre parade on its way to and from Berlin.
On the fifth day, while they’re stopped so she can shade Annemarie’s eyes with the blanket, to keep her from staring at the sun, Frau Henkel says, “Eva, when we get to the hospital, even if it’s the Red Cross, the Soviets might be in charge. They might not let the doctors treat Michael because we’re German. The enemy.”
“They will treat a child,” says Liebermann. He takes his side of the cart yoke, waits for Eva to take hers, and they give a heave together, making the cart wheels squeak and rattle. They are a good team of oxen. Michael whimpers. Annemarie is silent.
“They might not,” Frau Henkel says. “It was like that before, in some places, during the last war.”
The last time Germany had been defeated. Eva tries to imagine having hell happen twice. “What did you do, Frau Henkel, during the last war?”
“Starved, nearly. And dragged my grandmother’s table all the way from the Rhineland after my brothers were killed.”
And now, she thinks, I am dragging it to Berlin for you.
On the sixth day, they come to a stretch of road where the going is easier. The wreckage has been pushed off to one side. Mounds rise up by the roadside, the dead people tucked away neatly underneath them. Where the houses that are not destroyed have people trying to nail their roofs. There are more Soviet trucks, and then Frau Henkel shouts, “Stop! Wait! Stop!”
She takes off like a shot.
Eva exchanges a look with Liebermann. She would have never guessed Frau Henkel could run so fast. If they had known, they might have asked her to pull the cart. Frau Henkel propels herself down the pockmarked road, waving her arms at a truck lumbering slow among the potholes and the ruts. It has a red cross painted on its side. Frau Henkel catches up to it, bangs on the metal. Gears grind to a halt.
A woman sticks her head out the window. She has on a nurse’s cap.
“Please!” says Frau Henkel. “A hospital. My grandson. He’s just a little boy …”
