The Last Year of the War, page 27
And now we’d all have to discover what we’d allowed the war to make of us.
Or, for some, what the war had made of us despite what we had wanted.
* * *
• • •
As summer gave way to fall, mail service was almost back to normal in Stuttgart and I started waiting for a letter from Mariko. Surely now that the war with Japan had ended, she would write to me again. Every weekday when my father came home from work, I looked to see if he had any mail under his arm. He’d told me I should wait to send the tablets of my unsent letters to Mariko—I had two of them now—until after I had heard from her. It could be that her family had been released from Crystal City and were on their way home to California. While I waited, I reread the pages I had written to her, so that I could send them as soon as I’d received word.
I added to the pages a little bit each day, only happy things, like how lovely it was when Lieutenant McDermott left Max and me the sticks of Juicy Fruit and how much fun it was to have Herr Bruechner for a pet. I was ready at a moment’s notice to send the enormous letter to her.
In late October, the Americans who had been living in our building were billeted to accommodations closer to the former German military base that was now the Americans’ makeshift army post and that was being renovated and repaired for what would be a permanent stay. Major Brown told us to take the second floor, which was twice as big as our flat on the first floor, and to act as if we had always had it. Our building had belonged to the felled German government. A new housing authority was in the forming stages, and at some point, a newly appointed official would certainly be at our door to assess the property and tally its occupants. Until that happened, we would just stay.
A provisional school had been cobbled together for Max and the other children his age still in Stuttgart. There were many families who had left the city for the countryside when the worst of the air raids started and who had not yet come back, as there was not much to come back to.
I continued with my own studies in the morning, with both the German textbooks Papa found for me and American textbooks that Major Brown somehow got ahold of. But I really wanted to get a job for my lonely afternoon hours. Mommi was back at the tailor shop and now had American servicemen coming to her to sew on their patches and mend their torn seams. I didn’t just want to earn my own money; I wanted to have other people to talk to besides my parents and Max. I was sixteen and a half and nearly fluent in German now. Papa was not in favor of my getting a job; he was still worried for my safety. But I continued to plead with him, figuring that at some point he would relent, and in the meantime, I waited for a letter from Mariko.
In the third week of November, the Nuremberg trials began, which I might not have heard much about if Major Brown didn’t have a hankering for Mommi’s Apfelstrudel and Papa’s conversation. He still frequented our flat with copies of Stars and Stripes and surplus C rations. Major Brown was very interested in the trials, and so was Papa, because a great many of Hitler’s men, both military and party leaders, had been arrested and were awaiting their fate.
The first time Major Brown came over to talk about them, the trials were just about to start. I had to ask Papa after the major left what they were. He told me the Allies had agreed to hold individuals of the defeated nations responsible for their actions, and they’d decided on three categories of war crimes: those crimes that violated international peace agreements, those that violated the rules of war, and those that were considered crimes against humanity, which included the deportation, enslavement, and murder of civilians and prisoners of war. Nuremberg had been chosen as the location for the trials because its Palace of Justice was still standing, as was its prison. It was only two hundred kilometers from us, a two-hour drive by car. I was glad those who’d been carrying out the most monstrous of Hitler’s plans were being held accountable for them. I wanted justice, as any reasonable human being would, and the trials were evidence the tilted world was being righted.
Three days after the first of the trials got under way, on the twenty-third of November, what I’d been hoping for for weeks upon weeks finally happened. Papa came home with a letter from Mariko.
He was smiling from ear to ear.
I nearly sank to the floor in relief when he handed it to me, but I did a double take when I saw the return address. Tokyo. The letter was posted the third of October.
I looked up at Papa. I’m sure my surprise was evident on my face. “She’s in Japan.”
Papa shrugged, as if to say he, too, was surprised and could not guess why Mariko was in Tokyo and not Los Angeles. “Kenji got his wish, I guess.”
In our new flat on the second floor, I had been given the second bedroom because, my parents had told Max, I was a young woman who needed privacy. Max had made a room for himself in the dining room, which we never used, as we always ate in the kitchen. I took Mariko’s letter to my room and closed the door, and for several long seconds I just looked at the address on the envelope.
I turned the envelope over and gently ran my finger through the thin closure. It wasn’t a long letter, and I was a little sad to see that it was only two double-sided pages, but my disappointment was quickly swept away as I began to read:
Dearest Elise:
I so very much hope that you are still in Stuttgart and this letter finds you. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since I saw you last. Sometimes it seems like yesterday we were looking for shade in the heat of a Texas summer; sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago.
I know the last few months of the war were terrible in Germany. I hope you are all right.
We were repatriated, just like you, in September, after Japan surrendered. I don’t know why my father still wanted us to come here when the war was over. Someone I met on our ship told me we’d all had no choice.
Tokyo was a shattered city when we got here; I’ve never seen such devastation. We were living with my grandparents for a little while, but now we are in our own place again. I wish I could say everything is fine here now that the war is over, but it’s not. I suppose it’s not any better there.
The worst part for me is that in all the moving we’ve been having to do, my parents found all my old letters from Charles and they figured out he is not a girl from Los Angeles named Charlotte. Papa took all those letters and burned them. I can’t even tell you how mad I was. I said things I shouldn’t, and now my father is very angry with me. I should have kept my mouth shut and realized I don’t need Charles’s old letters. I have them all memorized anyway. What I need is to be quiet and compliant and just mark off the months until we’re both eighteen and can make our own decisions.
The family business was destroyed in the bombing, but my father has a longtime friend who is also in clothing manufacturing. Mr. Hayashi had gold and silver hidden away during the war, a lot of it, so he still has money and his business wasn’t bombed. He’s hired Papa as an assistant manager, which is why we have our own place. Papa is making a decent wage again, finally. I think he misses working outdoors among the cabbages and herbs, maybe even the bees, but he’s relieved to be making money again, even if there’s hardly anything to buy with it.
He is not talking to me right now, and my mother is on his side this time. So I spend a lot of time imagining our future life in New York.
I haven’t been able to write a word in Calista’s book since you left. I think her story is something we need to finish together, in Manhattan. That will be the perfect place to write “The End,” anyway. That’s where all the book publishers are.
I want you to write back to me, I do, but I’m afraid if my father sees a letter from you, he won’t give it to me. You’re too American, he thinks. Bad for me. I’ve tried to tell him you’re German, but I know you’re not, and apparently so does he.
So maybe you could send a letter to my grandparents’ house. That is the address on the envelope. My grandmother is my mother’s mother, not my father’s, so she might have pity on me and let me read a letter from you.
I miss you very much. And I miss Twinkies. We will be eighteen before you know it!
Your best friend,
Mariko
I read the letter over and over, savoring the words. I pictured packing my suitcase, kissing my parents and Max good-bye—there’d be tears, of course—and boarding a ship bound for America. I was more convinced than ever that I had to get a job so that I could start saving money for my passage. I was going to have to find a way to convince Papa to let someone hire me.
Mommi and Papa wanted to know how Mariko was, and I told them, but I didn’t share the letter with them and they didn’t ask me to.
I wrote to her that same evening. I told her how very glad I was to get her letter, and I chose among all the pages I had written for her in the last ten months a few of the ones that I thought would make her smile. I told her there were more pages like that and I would send them if she got this letter—meaning if her grandmother hadn’t confiscated it.
I told her she was my best friend, too.
When Papa posted the letter for me, I asked him how long he thought it would take for Mariko to get it. He told me he had no idea. A month or more, he thought, but he didn’t know for sure. The world was still such a chaotic place.
Still, I figured if Mariko got the letter in mid-January, she’d surely write to me again right away, which meant I might possibly hear from her in the first part of March. That would be right after her seventeenth birthday, and about a month before I, too, would turn seventeen.
By the time she would get my return letter, the countdown to our reunion would have begun.
24
We spent Christmas 1945 on the quiet outskirts of Munich, with Oma and Uncle Werner’s daughter Emilie and her family. It was obvious as we rolled into the train station that Munich had seen its share of Allied bombing. Hitler had several residences and offices there, and it was considered the birthplace of the Nazi Party. But Emilie and her family lived far enough away from the Allies’ target areas that there were few evidences at their home of the hell out of which we had all emerged. Emilie’s husband, Lothar, was a dentist, and he also came from a wealthy family whose investments had been held in other countries, like Switzerland and Portugal and Spain. Lothar had lost friends and family in the war, but not his business and not the family wealth. He had returned from the field hospital where he had served in the German medical corps with a limp and, according to Emilie, a shock of gray hair.
Their house reminded me very much of Oma’s; it was half-timbered, three stories high, and set against a stunning Bavarian backdrop of pines and diamond-bright snow. Their two boys were young—six and eight—and I suppose they reminded Oma of my father when he’d been those ages. Oma was very happy at a house that was so much like hers had been and with the boys who allowed her to recall better days when her own son had been young. The war could be forgotten at Emilie and Lothar’s house, if you didn’t listen to the radio or read the occasional newspaper or open the pantry to see the sparsely stocked shelves. Oma was happy we came for Christmas, and yet it seemed as if it pained her a little to see us. I think she felt as though she had abandoned us, and it had been easier for her to deal with that knowledge when she didn’t have to see us every minute of the day.
Papa spoke to her about when she might return to us. He was saving money to rebuild the house in Pforzheim. I was probably not meant to hear their conversation. They had been alone in a room that was like a library, full of books and warm wood paneling and comfortable chairs. I was on my way there to look for a novel to pass the long hours of the day after Christmas. Before I reached the open door, I heard him ask Oma when she was coming home, and I heard her tell my father tearfully that she would not be returning to Pforzheim, not when everything that she had loved about it was gone.
“We can rebuild the house,” Papa said.
Oma told him she loved him, but he could not replace what she had lost. She did not want a new house; she wanted the one that had been taken from her, and all that had been inside it, and the family members who had been living in Pforzheim. Papa could not give her those things no matter how much he loved her. I think Papa understood then that Oma’s sorrow was deeper than what he could fix, and he wanted her happy more than anything. Oma had again mentioned to Papa that we could come there to Munich, especially now that the war was over and Papa was not obligated to stay in Stuttgart. There was room for us in the house until we found our own place, and the situation in Munich couldn’t be any worse than in Stuttgart. But my father finally had a good job again, and I don’t think he was ready at that point to give up on rebuilding a house on the site of his childhood home.
Our good-byes on New Year’s Eve felt somewhat permanent.
After the first of the year my father and I came to an agreement about my getting a job. When I turned seventeen in the middle of April, I could look for work.
I spent the first three months of 1946 schooling myself on whatever I could, counting the days to my birthday, and waiting to hear from Mariko. By my calculations, unsubstantiated as they were, I should have heard from her by March, but the letter did not come. I had written her twice, once at Christmas to wish her a merry one, and again in March to wish her a happy birthday, but I hadn’t sent any additional pages from those tablets. I didn’t want them to become kindling for her father’s little fires.
When my birthday finally arrived, it had been almost a year since Germany surrendered and yet Stuttgart was still a shattered city. No birthday greeting arrived for me from Mariko, either, and I began to worry that she had not gotten any of my letters.
The one bright spot in all of this was that I got a job at a bakery and café near the military base frequented mostly by Americans. Papa was moderately happy with this arrangement because he could walk me home since he worked nearby at the U.S. Army’s Stuttgart headquarters. The owner, Herr Bloch, was happy to have me on his waitstaff because I was fluent in English. The café had been damaged during the war, but Herr Bloch had managed the needed repairs by salvaging what he could from the rubble of other shops. He had reopened after the first of the year, after making arrangements with the occupying forces to purchase coffee beans so that he would have coffee to sell in his shop. When we didn’t have coffee, we served tea.
My job was to wait on the little tables, pour the coffee, serve the pastries and Brötchen, and clean up after the customers when they left. The shop was always busy, always filled with American GIs, and I was always an object of their interest. Papa had told me it was nobody’s business why I was living in Germany. He’d reminded me of the oath that he would not discuss the details of his repatriation, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his job with the U.S. Army. If a GI asked me, “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?”—and I was asked it usually every day—I was to say, “I’m serving coffee. Would you care for some?”
It was thrilling and unsettling to have men flirting with me, eager to get my attention, wanting to know where I lived, asking me to parties and movies, and even to get the occasional whispered invitation to find a quiet place where we could be alone. My experience with romance to that point was watching Cary Grant movies and reading dime-store novels I used to have to hide from my mother. My experience in the alley was something altogether different, and yet when American soldiers flirted with me, I couldn’t dismiss from my thoughts those moments the French soldiers had me pinned. What the French soldiers had wanted to do was hurt me; what the American GIs wanted was affection, distraction, or perhaps just recreation. I knew what all the girls had been whispering about the day Lucy Hobart ran off with the draft dodger. I knew what had happened to all those women and girls when the French troops arrived in Stuttgart and what almost happened to me. But I also knew my parents loved each other and their love had produced Max and me. Somewhere in the mix of all of that—Lucy and the draft dodger, those French soldiers, and my parents’ marriage bed—was something mysterious and powerful. I could feel its wonder in the depths of me, when I sometimes allowed myself to imagine being embraced and kissed and touched by a man.
Papa cautioned me that I was to take none of the GIs up on any kind of invitation to do anything. Not even a walk, he said. Plenty of young German women who wanted chocolate and attention and a young man still in one piece were getting pregnant and then were being abandoned. And since I was reminded of what happened in the alley every time a soldier got too friendly, I didn’t mind Papa’s overzealous caution too much. Part of me still very much wanted the attention, and I even wanted the invitations, because they made me feel pretty and desirable, even after everything I’d been through.
Spring gave way to summer, and still there was no word from Mariko. I had sent her two more letters in the meantime, letting her know I was thinking of her and missing her. Papa knew of my distress over this, but he encouraged me to keep writing because my letters were not being returned to me, which surely meant they were being delivered.
“It could be that she is getting your letters but is unable to write back to you, especially if her father is not allowing it,” he said. “I wouldn’t stop if I were you.”
The ache of not hearing from Mariko was soothed by working. By this time I had been at the café for four months and some of the GIs who had become regulars began to see me as a little sister, I suppose, because they stopped pressuring me to sneak off with them to some little quiet place. They would give me the candy out of their C rations, and cigarettes if I wanted them—I didn’t; they made me gag and sputter—and magazines from home. Being at the café was like being back in America. It was the best part of my day.
