The Last Year of the War, page 26
When I awoke in the morning the inside of my arm was stippled with red marks from where I had pinched the skin the night before, so many times I lost count.
For the next week, every day was like this. I would pretend around my family that I had fallen down the stairs, and at night I would lie in bed and pinch the tender flesh on the inside of my wrist, over and over and over.
I wanted so very much to confide in Mariko. I wished I could tell her about that day so that she could tell me I had been brave. Smart. Quick thinking. That I’d lied because I had to, and those soldiers hadn’t been deserving of the truth anyway.
You are an American, I imagined Mariko saying. You don’t have to feel bad for saying that to them.
But that’s not why they shouldn’t have tried to hurt me, I imagined replying to her. All those German women and girls that have been attacked. There are hundreds of them, Mariko. What about them?
And here is where my mirage of Mariko would disappear, because I couldn’t imagine what she’d say to that.
* * *
• • •
The French Army stayed in Stuttgart until the first week of July. No one was sad to see them go, least of all me. Two weeks had passed since the walk that was supposed to have been just ten minutes of longed-for sunshine. I wasn’t pinching the inside of my arm anymore to keep from letting loose my pent-up emotions. Instead, I now lay awake each night revisiting them: the fear, the shame, the anger, and the one other feeling that I could not name but made me feel like I was lost in a maze of mist and towering hedges.
It wasn’t that I wanted to relive those moments every night. They just crawled out from where I shoved them each sunrise and pressed themselves against my chest until I held out my hands—literally—as if to hold them, and admit they were real, I guess. And that they were mine.
I’d spent those two weeks in the flat, with moments of fresh air only when evening came and the street was empty because of the curfew, and Papa opened the front door. I sat just inside on the threshold with the rest of my family: they to enjoy the cool night air that chased out the lingering heat inside our apartment, and I reconnecting with the outside world. I had to become comfortable with it again; I knew this. My future was out there, far away, but most definitely outside the walls of the flat.
There were moments during those times at the threshold drinking in the evening, and then later on my blankets with my hands resting open over my chest, that I wondered if the person who’d been thrown down in the alley was still me. I felt as though I’d been one girl before the walk and another after it. But I didn’t know who that new girl was.
The American occupational forces marched in as the French were leaving, and they arrived in platoons by the truckload. Hundreds of them. Max very much wanted to walk out to the main thoroughfare to watch them roll in, as did many others. The Americans were going to be taking over a former military installation only a mile from our flat, where a panzer division and barracks had once been housed, and which the French and Senegalese troops had just vacated. Papa and Mommi came, too, and stood back a bit, to observe and keep an eye on Max and me. I was both hesitant and eager to be outside and to try to recapture my longing to be out in the world again. I told myself that I had taken that walk a few weeks earlier, and it had been uneventful, just a quick stroll around the block, like I had planned to do. I hadn’t gone farther. I hadn’t been dreaming of Manhattan and a yellow linen suit. I had been out for ten quiet minutes; that was all.
To further distance myself from the memory of that afternoon, I kept my eyes on what was happening now, watching the people of Stuttgart as the Americans arrived. The oldest citizens, the ones who perhaps remembered the Great War and that this wasn’t the first time Germany had surrendered to the United States and its allies, kept a distance with suspicious side-glances. The younger adults looked at the American GIs with fear and trepidation, perhaps wondering what kind of treatment they had in store, especially after living under French occupation for the last two months. But the children ran to the trucks and soldiers to greet them, as though it were a parade. Many of the American soldiers opened their packs and C rations and handed out candy bars and little tins of peaches and pineapple, things these children hadn’t seen in years. The youngest ones had never seen pineapple.
The heaviness that I’d been carrying inside me seemed to lift a little as I watched the American soldiers walking happily down the street, talking to one another as they joked with the children. A layer of my dark sadness seemed to peel away at the sound of my native tongue, and I began to cry.
One young GI—he might have been a few years older than me—saw me crying and said in broken German to me, “No fear, Fräulein. We will not harm. No fear.”
His kindness nearly overwhelmed me, and as fresh sobs erupted from me, I replied to him in English that I wasn’t afraid; I was just so very happy they were here, and that I was also an American and that I missed hearing people speak my language.
The soldier blinked at me wide-eyed, incredulous that a fellow American was standing on the streets of a ruined Stuttgart. I could see he wanted to stop and ask me how in the world I had ended up there, but he was in formation and could not stop. He turned to the man marching on his left and said something to him. That soldier turned to stare at me, too.
That second man I would eventually meet, in the course of time. It would be many months later, a few months after my seventeenth birthday. He would remember that day he marched into Stuttgart and his platoon-mate pointed out to him the poor American girl who’d been stuck in Germany during the war.
The second soldier’s name was Ralph Dove.
* * *
• • •
A few days after the Americans arrived, a contingent of soldiers who were patrolling the neighborhoods came down our street to inspect apartment buildings one by one, including ours. They came right on in, announcing their arrival as they strode inside; they apparently did not want to knock first. The leader of the group—I didn’t know what his rank was then—said in broken German that he and his men were searching for suitable housing for many of the soldiers who were posted in Stuttgart now.
Papa greeted him in English, told him who he was, and offered to assist them in any way he could. This leader, happy to have found a German citizen who spoke English so well, told Papa he was needed as a translator and that whatever job he had now he was relieved of.
“You will be compensated,” the leader said, and he didn’t wait for Papa to say whether he wanted the job. He just went straight on with his questioning.
“Are you the landlord of this building?” he asked.
“Uh. No,” Papa answered. “I believe this building is, I mean, was owned by the housing authority. I’m not sure.”
“Who else lives here?”
“There was a mother and her three children who lived on the second floor, but I haven’t seen them since April. An older gentleman, Herr Bruechner, lives on the third floor. No one is living in the fourth-floor attic apartment.”
The leader then directed two of his men to go up to Herr Bruechner’s apartment and tell him he had two hours to vacate the premises.
“He . . . he’s an old man,” Papa said.
“I’m afraid he will have to have find other housing arrangements,” the leader said, as he signaled with his head for his men to continue with his instructions. Then he turned back to Papa. “Your family, Herr Sontag, will be allowed to stay in your apartment since you will be working for us. Your wife and daughter can take care of the rooms and the officers’ laundry.” He nodded toward the large open room across from our flat that wasn’t being used for anything. “You can serve them meals in there. Breakfast and dinner. Food will be provided for you to make it with.”
This, too, was not an offer of employment. But we knew if we didn’t agree, we would lose our home, such as it was.
“Um, yes. Of course. Thank you,” Papa said, his gaze darting from the man in charge to the stairs. “Herr Bruechner can live with us. Please. If that is all right? We’ll tell him he can stay with us. Please?”
The leader regarded my father for a moment and then nodded.
“All right, then,” the leader said as he wrote on a clipboard he held in his hand. Then he looked up at Papa. “You’ll need to come with us now, Herr Sontag. We have a lot more housing to secure today and we need a translator. We’ll have you back before curfew.” The man turned to Mommi. “The officers who will be billeted here will be arriving before nightfall. The rooms in this building need to be cleaned. Fresh linens for the beds will be delivered to you. Meals will start tomorrow.”
Mommi nodded and didn’t say a word.
As Papa leaned in to kiss her good-bye, he murmured in German, “It will be all right. We can do this. It’s all right. Go tell Herr Bruechner what is happening and that he can stay with us if he wants to.”
A moment later he and all the soldiers were gone, and the little building was eerily quiet.
“I’ll . . . I’ll go up and speak to Herr Bruechner,” Mommi said a moment later, her gaze still on the door, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. “You two start on the apartment just above us. Clean it well.”
“Yes, Mommi,” I said.
A couple of hours later Herr Bruechner, his little dog, and two suitcases had been brought down to our place. Mommi gave him the room she and Papa slept in, which meant the four of us would now be sleeping in the living room.
When his few things were brought into the bedroom, Herr Bruechner curled up on the bed with his dog in his arms. Mommi asked him several times if she could make him some tea and he thanked her and said no.
Papa came home just before dusk with four army officers and their duffel bags. Two of them took the large apartment on the second floor, one each took the flats on the third and fourth floors. Two looked to be Papa’s age and they seemed friendly enough. The one they called Major Brown told me he had a daughter my age named Lorraine. Another one was also a major, but he didn’t want to engage in any kind of conversation with us. Major Brown told us a few days later that this other officer had lost a brother in the Battle of the Bulge.
The other two Americans were younger, maybe mid-twenties. These younger men looked at us with such quizzical faces. One of them said to me as he started to head up the stairs to the attic room, “Your family actually chose to come back here?”
“I did not choose it,” I quietly answered.
He trudged up the stairs shaking his head.
Before the front door was closed for the night, Major Brown hung an American flag outside the building. It made me want to both smile and cry to see it.
A couple of hours later, as we were making our beds on the living room floor, Max asked how long Herr Bruechner was going to be with us. Papa said he would stay until we could help him find another place to live.
But in the morning, we found the old man dead on the bedroom floor, curled up like a lost child. His little terrier, which we would call Herr Bruechner, was nestled in the crook of his arm, fast asleep.
23
Daily life with the American officers billeted in our building settled us into a new routine that was not altogether unpleasant. For the first time in weeks upon weeks we had electricity and gas for more than just a couple of hours a day. We also had coffee—real coffee—to serve the men, something we’d not had since leaving Crystal City seven months earlier. We even had sugar to stir into it.
Mommi was provided boxes of army C rations from which she would make the Americans breakfast and dinner. She would prepare the prepackaged food, like Beefaroni and chicken potpie, and serve it on real dishes, which the men said made the meals taste more like home.
Major Brown was the nicest of the four officers. His family lived in Ohio—not so very far from Iowa, I suppose. The three younger officers Papa did not fully trust, not around me anyway.
“You are a beautiful young woman,” my father had said when I asked him why I was not allowed in the dining room alone with the Americans.
His answer threw me for several reasons. First, I had begun to finally make it through the day without thinking about that walk I took, but his caution took me right back to that alley even though I knew Papa wasn’t thinking the Americans would attack me there in the dining room. He was concerned about my naïveté, I think—that I might be too easily seduced by their charms. But my mind took me back to the alley nonetheless.
Second, I didn’t think I was beautiful. I wasn’t altogether ugly, I thought, maybe slightly pretty. I had grown a young woman’s body and was as tall as Mommi. My hair had not been cut in more than a year, and it fell in long golden locks down my back if I didn’t braid it. When Papa said this, I wondered half-crazily if those French soldiers who had tried to hurt me had thought I was beautiful, and I’d had to physically shake my head to dispel the ludicrous question. Papa had asked if I was all right and I told him I had been chasing away a sneeze and excused myself to the bathroom.
This idea that a man might think me beautiful—desirable—perplexed me because I’d not yet considered this was true of me. Not only that; I was conflicted about my body and what it hungered for. I hated what those French soldiers had wanted to do to me and yet I still wanted to be wanted. I longed to again imagine what it might be like to have a man touch me, kiss me, pull me to him and whisper to me that he loved me. One of the younger officers, a lieutenant named McDermott who shared the second floor with Major Brown, had a girlfriend back home he was always talking about and writing to, but Papa seemed to think this did not guarantee he would not try to win my affections, or flat-out demand them. Lieutenant McDermott would always leave sticks of Juicy Fruit gum for Max and me on the table after he ate. He also left his copies of the American paper Stars and Stripes, which I devoured, not just for current news—which we’d long been without—but because the papers were written in English and also gave me news from home. I didn’t think for a second Lieutenant McDermott was expecting anything in return for the sticks of gum and the newspapers. He was just being nice. The captain, who had Herr Bruechner’s apartment, and the other lieutenant, in the attic room, didn’t speak to us or leave us treats. Both of them treated me and my family as if we were invisible. Papa trusted the two of them the least because they were impossible to read.
Despite not having a choice about his new job, Papa liked working as a translator with the American military. He was treated with respect and was paid better than what he’d been earning at the water-treatment plant. And I think the Americans liked Papa. Of course they would. How could they not? He was like them in so many ways.
Stuttgart was still utterly ruined, but for the first time since we sailed into Marseille in January I did not feel like we were on the brink of disaster. But the war was still being fought in the Pacific.
One night about a month after the Americans took over the city and our apartment building, Papa came home from the army base to tell us that an atomic bomb had been dropped on a city called Hiroshima in Japan. I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, and I didn’t know where Hiroshima was, but Papa had such a grave look on his face. He explained that this was a kind of bomb that was massive and terrible. It was the kind of bomb he’d nearly been appointed to help Germany create, the kind of bomb that is so powerful, just one of them can obliterate an entire city.
Three days later another atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, on a city called Nagasaki, a place far from Tokyo, like the other one had been.
“Do you think Mariko’s grandparents and aunts and uncles are all right, then?” I’d asked Papa.
“I hope so for her sake, Elise,” he said, but his tone suggested that the war had taken a heavy toll in Japan, just like it had here in Germany.
Major Brown had heard Papa and me talking about this because we kept our flat door open during the day in case the Americans needed something, and he’d been in the common room. He came to our open door and asked who it was that I knew in Japan. Papa explained to him that I had made a good friend in the internment camp in Texas and that this friend had many Japanese relatives living in Tokyo but that I did not know them personally. I was merely concerned for my friend’s extended family.
“It won’t be much longer for them,” the major said to me. “Japan has lost. Mark my words. It’s just a matter of time.”
He was right. Six days later, all the Americans came home, already drunk, with open bottles of champagne in their hands. They threw their arms around Papa.
“Japan has surrendered!” they shouted, and they poured champagne into a coffee cup so that Papa could celebrate with them.
It was over. This horrific contest of wills that had spanned the globe was finished, for everyone. It had begun when I was ten, far away from here in calm, pastoral Iowa: so far away I gave it barely a thought anymore. But now I was sixteen and no longer that same child. I’d been plucked from my home and sent to live in a battleground. I’d been branded the enemy, had hidden in cellars while bombs rained down above, and had dug out the dead from ruined homes. I’d been hungry, scared, mad, and lonely. I’d been witness to unspeakable evil—at the camps via those radio broadcasts and in that alley upon my own body. People could be terrible to one another in war. I’d seen it, felt it, grieved over it.
I wanted to keep believing that we aren’t who we are because of where we are born and raised but rather because of how we think, yet as the champagne sloshed that day, I was overcome with a renewed hunger for home, my home. I wanted to go back to America, not just so that Mariko and I could take up where we left off but because I wanted to be there. I wanted to have its soil under my feet, its sky above my head. The land of my childhood mattered to me, maybe because it was where my life began. I felt a part of that land somehow, just as Papa’s heart was tied to the land of his birth. It was the land he loved, not so much the people, because people can change. People can be good and people can be monsters. Even as I realized this, it seemed the earth gave a shuddering sigh of relief that we humans were done with our fighting.
