Bluebird, page 15
Eva and Liebermann exchange another look and start pulling the cart toward the truck.
“My grandson!” pleads Frau Henkel.
The nurse climbs out and hurries to the cart. Her eyebrows are plucked thin, and she’s pushing them daintily together, looking up and down the road. They’re standing in a thin spot along the parade, and Eva can see the nurse doesn’t want anyone else to catch up and ask for help. There probably isn’t room.
“You … speak … English?” she says. In very bad German. She sounds Swedish.
“I speak it,” says Eva, in bad English.
The nurse looks beneath the bandages on Michael’s hand while Frau Henkel explains things she can’t understand, going much faster than Eva can translate. Then the nurse calls out, and two medics jump out the back of the truck with a stretcher. Two young men in caps. Coming fast to the cart.
“Don’t,” Eva tries to say. “Stay away from …” But one of the medics is already reaching over Annemarie to get to Michael.
Annemarie lets out a scream. A horrible, strangled shriek impossible in its length, rolling and kicking and hitting out against nothing.
The nurse turns, mouth open, but the medics know their job and get Michael up and out of the cart. Eva tries to soothe, hold Annemarie’s hand, but she’s beyond reason. Eva isn’t sure she even hears the words. Michael is being put swiftly and smoothly onto the truck, Frau Henkel chasing, calling out instructions in German.
And then Annemarie goes quiet. Suddenly, in mid-scream. Like someone flipped a switch. But her flailing doesn’t stop. Now it’s rhythmic. Her back arching up and down in a way that is unnatural, body beating itself against the cart.
Annemarie is dying. She was supposed to live, and Annemarie is dying.
“Help!” Eva shouts.
The nurse barks a word in Swedish, the medics come rushing back with the stretcher, and Annemarie is surrounded. Another shout. Someone produces a medical bag, and the nurse turns Annemarie on her side and puts a needle in her.
Eva watches, too stunned to feel any of her fractured pieces. Annemarie relaxes. Her body quiets. Then the medics do the same thing to her as they had to Michael. Up and out, onto the stretcher, and away to the back of the truck.
“Wait,” Eva whispers.
The nurse picks up the medical bag and trots toward the truck. The medics shut the back doors.
“Wait!” Eva yells. “I’m coming!”
The nurse turns around. “No,” she says in bad German. “Sick only.”
“But …”
The nurse climbs into the truck. The gears change, the motor chugs, and the truck lumbers off.
They’re leaving. Annemarie is leaving. Without her.
And then she isn’t stunned anymore. She is the inferno.
The truck lurches forward, moving slow through a pothole, and Eva runs. If Frau Henkel can catch it, then she can, too, even in her stuffed shoes.
She flies down the road, like she’s on air, like she has wings. She hears voices calling, but her anger has no time for them. The truck picks up speed, then slows again as it dips down into a rut. Michael’s carved soldier is on the ground, dropped into the mud. Eva bends down and snatches it with barely a pause in her stride. The truck pitches downward as Eva grabs the back door handle, just getting a knee on the flattened bumper.
One foot underneath and she’s up, hanging on to whatever she can grab. She pulls down the handle. The door flies open and she nearly falls off. But she doesn’t. She sways and steps inside, reaching out to pull the door shut again with a bang.
The truck finishes navigating the potholes and shifts to the next gear. The young medic behind her just shakes his head and goes back to work on Michael, Annemarie lying quiet and still on a higher bunk. Eva puts the muddy soldier in Michael’s good hand.
And when she looks out the back window, palm flat to the glass, she can see Liebermann and Frau Henkel, standing beside the cart. Just watching them go.
JAKE SETS DOWN his coffee cup. She sets down hers.
She hasn’t given him an answer about her name or Nazis, because she doesn’t have one.
“You’re a strange girl, Eva Gerst,” he says. “Interesting, but strange.”
He lights another cigarette. The music has become a saxophone’s slow sway, though she hadn’t noticed the moment it changed its mood.
“Want to know why I think that?”
She’s not sure she does.
“See, when I get an assignment, usually I take my new friend around town, show them how to use the subways, count money. Maybe take them to a museum or a baseball game. Until they settle in or find some place to move on to. And it’s interesting, right? Nobody cares where you come from at Powell House. So I’ve been assigned to a Catholic and an atheist and others who never said. To immigrants from Latvia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Older, usually. Grandmother, grandfather types. You wouldn’t believe the stories. But you …” He points with the cigarette. “I asked for you. Do you know why?”
Eva shakes her head.
“Because you’re German. We don’t get many Germans anymore. Either Uncle Sam won’t let them in or Hitler did his worst, right? And I wanted to talk to a German. Because even though my grandfather came here from Berlin a long time ago, his brothers didn’t. And my uncle David, he went back for business, with his wife and kids, back in 1934. So uncles, aunts, cousins, there were more than twenty of them in Berlin, and do you know how many my mother has heard from since the war?”
Eva shakes her head again. The tiniest of shakes.
“Zero. Because they’re dead. All of them. That’s what we think.”
He’s probably right. But Eva doesn’t say it. She feels sick.
“So I wanted to talk to someone from Berlin. Find out what happened that wasn’t in the newspapers. I didn’t think they’d know my family, but … I just wanted to know. You can understand that, right?”
This time she nods. It’s always better to know. She digs a fingernail into her palm.
“So last week, I get into the car with Bets to go pick up this interesting girl. A pretty little thing who looks like she’d just love to knock my block off. And what do you think happens? A greasy guy smoking on the corner at the ferry shows up all the way across town, doing the same thing at Gabertelli’s. Then he follows us to Powell House in a rusty car. And then again, right out of the front door, and I have to lose him in an ice-cream parlor. And not only that …”
Jake leans forward, face lit by the orange glow.
“… that same day I pick her up, I’m having a nice time, drinking coffee, and I see this girl sneaking down the stairs like she means to steal the silver. And when I go down to check on her, there’s another guy in the kitchen, talking tough and calling her by a nickname, ‘Bluebird.’ A guy who changes his accent as soon as Olive walks in. Then this same strange and interesting girl drops something in a vase outside her room. A card with a bird drawn on it in blue ink, and the name of Mr. Cruickshanks. And when I called that number …”
Eva digs the nail deeper into her palm.
“… the guy on the other end says he doesn’t know any Cruickshanks and tells me to get lost. And if all this hasn’t been interesting enough, this very same girl—just an hour ago now—goes running off down the hall of a hospital and hides in a closet, because the janitor is a Nazi. Not to mention that I’m pretty sure she’s got the bread knife nobody could find in the kitchen—the bread knife that had been sitting on the table right in front of her—tucked away in that purse, on which she has cut her finger.”
Eva looks down at the nick on her finger. Jake sits back.
“Okay,” he says, exhaling smoke. “I laid it on the table. So where are you going to start? Mr. Cruickshanks?”
“GO ON IN, MISS GERST,” SAYS THE WOMAN BEHIND THE DESK.
Or at least, that’s what Eva thinks she says. Eva has been working on her English, but the woman is difficult to understand behind the scarf wound around and around her head and face. Eva envies that scarf, though she’d give more for a pair of pants. Her legs are bare, and the snow blowing in beneath the door does not melt.
She has no time for her own envy. She is much too busy with fear.
Eva doesn’t know why she’s in the camp director’s office. There’s no reason for her to be in the director’s office. But she can guess, and that is why she’s afraid.
Eva helps Annemarie to stand, an army blanket pinned over her head and shoulders like a cloak. Her eyes are lovely, the way they’re framed. Clear blue. And empty.
“No, dear. Just you,” says the muffled woman. Eva pauses, and then turns Annemarie around. Like they’re walking out the door. “Oh, never mind!” the woman says, waving a gloved hand. She’s shivering.
Eva knocks on the office door, smiling steadily at Annemarie. Annemarie does not react well to fear. And then someone says, “Come in,” in German and she knows she is in trouble.
Inside the office is something wonderful. A heater, with a few glowing coals. The room is deliciously warm, and a stranger sits at the camp director’s desk. A thin man, with a thinner black mustache, wearing a civilian suit, his heavy wool coat and gloves thrown unneeded over the chair behind him.
Eva turns Annemarie’s back to the desk, quickly pulls a chair close to the heater.
“Annemarie,” she says calmly. She waits for the empty eyes to make contact with hers. “Sit here.”
Annemarie sits, her back to the man, and she opens her hand. Eva lays three buttons on her palm. Annemarie looks at the buttons, and when Eva turns her attention to the man again, he is watching with amused interest. He smiles, stands.
“Miss Gerst? Can I offer you a seat?” The German is formal. Official. Fear jolts through Eva’s veins in tiny shocks.
“No, thank you. It would be better if I stand here.”
“I see. Annemarie, is it? You take your friend everywhere, do you?”
Annemarie whimpers. She doesn’t like the man’s voice, but she concentrates on her buttons, like Eva taught her.
He looks at his papers. “Has she been to a hospital?”
“Yes. At a Red Cross camp and in Berlin. They said she has had a bad war.”
“Did she see the doctor here?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he say?”
“That she has had a bad war.”
“Ah.” He consults his papers one more time and says, “My name is Mr. Cruickshanks. I am an American, here doing special service for the United States government, working with the German people.”
He smiles, stretching the thin mustache. She was right to be afraid. This man is hunting Nazis.
“And where were you before the Düppel Center?” he asks.
“With the International Red Cross. Until the field hospital was closed.”
“And before that you were in …”
“The hospital in Berlin. With Annemarie.”
“And before?”
“Dresden,” she lies.
He holds out a hand for her papers, and Eva takes them automatically from the pocket of her coat. Her identity papers are brand-new. Crisp. With a photograph of herself. There was an office here for such things. She is Eva Gerst now.
Sometimes, when Eva glances at her new photograph, she thinks it could be Inge. Then she doesn’t know the girl in the picture at all. Mr. Cruickshanks barely looks at it. He smiles pleasantly.
“And you have been doing well here in Berlin, in the American Zone?”
Since Annemarie left the hospital, Eva has learned how to scour pots, fumigate clothing, sew a hem, and comb lice from children’s hair. She can disinfect medical equipment and knows how to erect a Quonset hut. And she has done it while managing Annemarie at her side, working among the survivors of the concentration camps, the slave labor factories, people whose families and villages were obliterated by Nazis who believed they had no right to exist. People who would happily see her shot.
She doesn’t make friends with them. They should not be her friends. But she listens to them. All of them. Every story.
And she gets two meals each day—including one cup of milk and one tin of meat—and the room she shares with five other women has walls during the worst winter anyone can remember. Some are in tents. Others are dead.
“Yes, I’m doing well here,” Eva replies.
“What can you tell me about your parents?”
She tells a noncommittal story about living with grandparents, about not knowing much about her parents, in case Mr. Cruickshanks knows something she doesn’t. Which is likely, since she doesn’t actually know anything at all.
“Hmmm,” he replies. “And you are sure this is correct?”
He looks her in the face this time. Straight into her eyes. Eva tilts her head. Looks right back at him. Lies don’t make her flinch anymore. Especially when the truth will not help her survive.
“Yes. Very sure.”
“I have information,” he says, “that the daughter of a prominent Nazi family is using the name Eva Gerst.”
Annemarie whimpers. She has heard the change in tone. Eva puts the fourth button—the blue one, held back for this purpose—into Annemarie’s palm. But she doesn’t take her eyes off Mr. Cruickshanks.
“Then you must have the wrong Eva Gerst. I would think there’s more than one.”
“Yes, yes,” says Mr. Cruickshanks. “I imagine we do. But you can understand why we are interested, of course. Dr. von Emmerich …”
“That is his name?” Eva asks. “The Nazi you are looking for?”
“Correct. He is a man my government would very much like to find. I’m certain you are familiar with the trials at Nuremberg. There will be a trial for the Nazi doctors as well. For crimes against humanity.”
And that is where her father belongs. On trial. She would give him to Mr. Cruickshanks if she could. Only she can’t. And she knows what has happened to the other families, the ones whose mothers didn’t kill themselves. Arrested. Exiled. Farm laborers in France.
Annemarie is quiet now, focused on the new button. Eva is quiet, too. Without Eva, Annemarie will not eat. And they will put her somewhere. A hospital. An institution.
She knows what the Nazis did to people in institutions. They murdered them. Because they were useless. That’s what people like her father said. A waste.
She will not let Annemarie go to an institution.
“We are also looking for someone else,” Mr. Cruickshanks says. “Anna Ptaszynska. Do you know anyone by that name?”
He’s staring straight at her again. Looking hard into her eyes. And Eva knows that this time, for a moment, she flinched. She blanks her expression, replaces it with curiosity. Shakes her head.
“Who is she?”
“A long-term patient of von Emmerich’s, we believe. Someone with whom he had fairly regular contact. A faithful Nazi. The daughter and Miss Ptaszynska, they would have the best information for finding him, you see.”
Eva nods. Innocent. Wide-eyed. Mr. Cruickshanks is observing every move of her every muscle.
“Well, that’s all for now, Miss Gerst. Thank you for coming.”
She gathers up Annemarie and is not sorry to go even if the office is lovely and warm.
Liebermann. He’s the only one who knows, and he has been talking. She doesn’t blame him for talking. He wants the Doctor to pay. But he is going to ruin everything.
She needs to think. Think.
She waits. Does her turn in the kitchen. Breaks the ice in the washing bucket and warms it for Annemarie. And three hours before dawn, while the moon shines down through the frost on their window, while the other women are sniffling and shivering in their cots, Eva sits on the freezing floor and carefully rips out the lining stitches of her duffel bag. She’d been given the duffel bag at the hospital, and she likes it. She’ll have to sew it back, and that will mean finding thread. But for now, Eva reaches between the lining and the canvas and pulls out her father’s papers.
She’s read these notes many times now. Every word. Sometimes she needs to read them. When she is sore inside. Missing the feeling of having a papa who loves her. When she needs to remember.
Anna Ptaszynska died July 11, 1934.
She is gone now. She is no more.
Cruickshanks is mistaken. Her father had killed Anna, trying to train her to be someone “better.” To make her mind forget who she was. To make her do things she would never do. Like what Liebermann had said about the prisoners. Controlling them. It is cruel to read, unbearable, but it’s all here, written in her father’s slanting hand. She pulls her feet underneath her, trying to stay warm. What could Cruickshanks think he knows?
Eva reads the papers again. “She is no more” is a strange thing to say for a scientist, lacking her father’s usual precision. And he doesn’t say how Anna died. Eva had assumed starvation, because the notes said Anna had stopped eating. But, then again, she doesn’t have all the notes.
Someone her father had regular access to, Mr. Cruickshanks said. That must be true. These were personal observations. And “faithful Nazi.” Even the best of German four-year-olds could not have been called that. Had Anna survived? Had she survived as … someone else? Is that why she was “gone”? No more? Like Inge?
A faithful Nazi.
Anna Ptaszynska.
Annemarie turns in her cot, shivering beneath her coat and blanket, the moonlight shining on her hair. Eva tucks her in more tightly. She is so cold sitting on the floor that her toes have gone numb. There’s ice on the inside as well as the outside of the glass, despite the bodies and breath in the crowded room, and all the other cots are pushed to the opposite wall. As far from Annemarie as they can get.
Because they are afraid of her.
The day Inge drove the stolen car, Annemarie had said Dr. von Emmerich was the “nicest man.” How had she known that? When had Annemarie ever even met her father?
Anna.
Annemarie. Who looked nothing like her brothers and sisters. Or her parents. Why had she never noticed that before?
A faithful Nazi.
The wind comes right through the walls. But Eva stays where she is. There’s something she should remember. Something about violets. Something about a bird. But the thoughts dissolve like her freezing breath.
