The Last Year of the War, page 28
One afternoon I was feeling particularly concerned that no letter had come from Mariko. I was preoccupied by these thoughts and failed to see that a young American soldier had sat down at one of the smaller tables by the window. He had to call out to get my attention.
I apologized as I made my way to his table with my coffee carafe. He was a private first class, and good-looking but not what I would call handsome. He had a kind face and eyes that made him look like he was perpetually on the verge of smiling. His hair was reddish brown and his eyes light green. A thin scar stretched above his right eye, which I would later learn was the result of connecting with a surfboard when he was sixteen. I hadn’t seen him in the café before, and his surprise at my perfect English was obvious. I was all prepared to answer his What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, when he said to me, “Hey. I remember you.”
“Pardon?” I replied.
“You’re the American girl we saw when we rolled into town last year.” He smiled. “I remember you.”
From the foggy recesses of my mind I recalled that day back in July when Max and I stood on the street to watch the Americans arrive and to cheer the departure of the French. I remembered crying as I heard the American soldiers laughing and talking in English and saw them handing out chocolate. And I remembered the young GI who stopped to tell me I had nothing to fear, that they weren’t going to hurt us, and me replying that I wasn’t crying because I was afraid; I was crying because I was so happy to hear fellow Americans laughing and joking. That GI had turned to the soldier marching next to him and had probably said, “That girl back there is an American!” That second soldier, who was now sitting in the coffee shop, had then turned back to look at me.
“I remember you, too,” I said out loud, oddly delighted by the memory.
“You’re American,” he said gently, not in a shocked, incredulous way. He seemed instantly sympathetic toward me, like he knew it had not been by choice that I was in Germany, and that something had happened to put me on a battered Stuttgart street last summer.
“I am,” I said.
“You spent the whole war here?” he asked in that same gentle tone.
“Not all of it. Just the last year.”
His eyebrows rose.
“The last year? You mean the worst year?” Again, he sounded compassionate, nonaccusing. His tone was an invitation unlike any other I’d been extended to be honest about why I was here.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where are you from?”
I couldn’t help but crack a tiny smile. What a funny question that was to me after all that had happened.
“Iowa,” I answered, nearly attaching a chuckle to it.
He smiled back, as though he knew exactly how sadly absurd that question was. He put out his hand. “Ralph Dove,” he said. “I’m from California.”
Hearing him say the name of the state Mariko had been from startled me, and I failed to give him my own name as I shook his hand. “California,” I said reflexively. “I have a very good friend who is from California. Los Angeles.”
“Really?” he said, his eyes widening merrily. “That’s where I’m from.”
Herr Bloch, annoyed that I’d been neglecting other customers while talking to Ralph Dove, called out my name.
“I have to get back to work.” I hastily poured Ralph’s coffee from the carafe I held.
“Well, it was very nice to meet you, Elise from Iowa,” he said, letting me know he’d paid attention to Herr Bloch’s saying my name.
I felt my cheeks flame to crimson as I walked away. Ralph Dove was very different from the other young soldiers who frequented the shop. They were full of compliments, too, but I sensed that Ralph meant what he said.
I moved away to wait on other people, and when I glanced back at Ralph a few minutes later, I saw that he’d been joined by a few companions and that Herr Bloch’s daughter Margaret, who was a year younger than me and also worked at the shop, had already filled their cups. He happened to look my way at the same moment, and he smiled. I turned away, pretending I hadn’t been looking at him, which made my cheeks burn again, because it was obvious that I had been looking. And that he’d been glad.
I wanted to be the one who brought Ralph and his friends their bill and collected their money, but it was Margaret who ended up being closest to them when they rose to leave. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Ralph rise from the table and move toward the door. He turned his head to look in my direction and nodded a wordless farewell.
I didn’t see him for a week even though I kept looking for him to come through the door. It surprised me how much I wanted to see Ralph again.
When he finally did return, the shop was half an hour from closing and most of the tables were empty. It had been easy to spot him coming in and to make my way to his table with my coffee carafe before Margaret did.
“Good afternoon,” I said pleasantly. “Coffee, sir?”
“Please.” He smiled up at me. “And you can just call me Ralph. I’m not a sir,” he said, nodding to the rank on his sleeve. “Surely you know that.”
“Every man is called sir in here,” I said, pouring his coffee. “But I will call you Ralph if you want.”
“I do want,” he said, grinning but not in a salacious way. “And may I call you Elise or will you insist on Fräulein?”
I grinned, albeit nervously, in return. “I’m not a Fräulein,” I said softly so no one sitting nearby could hear. “I’m just an American. Surely you know that.”
He laughed lightly. I could tell he liked my little attempt at humor.
“You came at a good time today,” I said, feeling awkward and sensing the need to say something else. “We’re not as busy so near to closing.”
He raised the cup to his lips. “That’s why I came now,” he said, and then drank.
I was fairly certain he was telling me that he came when he did, not to get an unrushed cup of coffee but to see me. It was an exhilarating feeling. But I wasn’t sure this was the reason. He wasn’t flirting with me. The character of his voice was so very different from the toying tone that the other soldiers used. He was interested in me because of something he saw in me, not because of what he was imagining I looked like underneath my apron and cotton dress.
“So, Elise,” he said, as he placed his cup back on its saucer. “How do you happen to have a friend from Los Angeles if you’re from Iowa, if I may ask?”
His curiosity thrilled me a little. Perhaps I had been on his mind as much as he’d been on mine.
I knew I should politely tell him that was something I wasn’t comfortable discussing, but I found myself wanting to tell this man how it was that Mariko and I came to be best friends. I hadn’t realized this desire to have someone know who I really was was ready to burst out of me. I looked at the rank on his uniform and I considered that if I did tell Ralph Dove how I got here, who could he tell at the army base that would get Papa into trouble or cost him his job? This soldier was a lowly private, albeit a sympathetic one.
“I met Mariko at an internment camp,” I replied quietly.
His silent response was what I expected: wide eyes, the initial moment of disbelief, and then the astonished comprehension that I wasn’t joking.
“An internment camp.”
I nodded.
“You visited her at one?”
“I lived with her at one.”
“You’re not Japanese.” He said this slowly, as though he was trying to puzzle it out himself. Being from Los Angeles, he surely knew what had happened to the West Coast Japanese Americans. But it was clear by his expression that he hadn’t heard a lesser number of German immigrants and their families had also been rounded up and detained, and for the same reason; we were incapable of being trusted.
“My parents are German,” I replied. “They immigrated to the United States before I was born, but they hadn’t become citizens yet when the war started. They had always thought there was plenty of time for that.”
“Was your father a member of the American Nazi Party or something?” Ralph asked, ever more curious.
“No. He was just a chemist who worked at an agricultural company.”
Ralph was visibly perplexed by what I was telling him, and I was itching to explain what had happened to us. I looked round the coffee shop, saw that Herr Bloch was in a deep conversation with a fellow German and that Margaret was waiting on a table across the room. I slid into the chair across from Ralph and quietly told him everything. From the FBI agents ransacking our house, to Crystal City’s barbed wire and armed guards, to meeting Mariko, to boarding the Swiss ocean liner in New Jersey, to the view of a bombed Marseille, to the ID tags around our necks and the bombing of Pforzheim and why we were back in Stuttgart. I even told him the five things Papa told me he would have done differently if he could turn back time.
Oh God, how good it felt to say it all out loud. What had happened to my family and me had been real. Being unable to talk about it with anyone had started to make it seem like I’d imagined that I used to have another life. I wanted to cry with relief, except a slender rivulet of fear was now traveling through me because I’d told a man I barely knew everything Papa had asked me to keep secret.
“Your father is innocent of any crime, then,” Ralph said when I was finished.
“Yes.”
Ralph shook his head. “I can’t believe the U.S. government did that to you. Your father lost his job, his house, everything? And after you were imprisoned, you were all traded like baseball cards?”
He hadn’t said that last part very loud, but it still made me startle in my chair. “You can’t talk about that with anyone. It’s supposed to be secret.”
“Yeah, I can see why.”
I didn’t know what to say then. I said nothing. But I liked it that he seemed indignant on our behalf.
“So, is your father planning to take you all back to America?” Ralph asked a moment later. He asked it as if it wasn’t a forgone conclusion that we would return to where we belonged.
“My parents have to apply to reimmigrate,” I replied. “And my father says the process won’t be quick or easy. But I’m going back.”
“Really?” Ralph tipped his head in interest.
“Yes,” I told him confidently. “My friend Mariko and I have it all planned out. It won’t be hard for us. She and I are both American citizens. As soon as we’re eighteen and can do what we want, we’re going back. We’re going to meet in Manhattan and get jobs and share an apartment.”
My words sounded juvenile as I heard them coming out of my mouth, but Ralph didn’t laugh or roll his eyes. I could see he was taking me very seriously. “So you want to go back.” He didn’t phrase it like a question.
“Of course I do,” I said. “This place isn’t home to me. I don’t have any friends here.”
He leaned back in his chair a little bit. “Not one?”
“Who would want to be my friend here? I’m an American. I was the enemy.”
Ralph regarded me for a moment, and I could see that he was picking apart my answer. “So you haven’t tried to make a friend. That’s what you’re saying, right?” He shrugged and then added, “Just being honest.”
I hadn’t made much of an effort, true, but neither had I been in situations where friend making would have been easy. And then there was Brigitte.
“I did try. Once,” I said.
“And? What happened? She found out you were an American and bailed on you?”
“She was killed in that bombing raid on Pforzheim. I saw her body. I helped clear away the debris so rescuers could get to her. But she was already dead.”
Ralph swallowed hard but his gaze never left me. “I’m sorry,” he said a second later.
I nodded, and there was silence for a few moments as the sting of the words I’d said ebbed.
“Well, I’ll be your friend here, Elise,” Ralph said kindly, and without a hint of impropriety. But still. Being friends with Ralph Dove was probably an impossible scenario.
“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think my father would like it if we were friends.”
“He wouldn’t like it?” Ralph laughed lightly. “You mean me. He wouldn’t like me; that’s what you’re saying. Even though I haven’t done anything good or bad to him or to you?” His grin intensified, and I could see the irony in my words, that my father, who had been so cruelly judged by people who didn’t know him, would do the same thing to someone else.
“You know what I mean,” I said, my face coloring a bit.
At that precise moment my father walked into the café to walk me home. I sprang from my seat, but not quick enough. Papa had seen me sitting at Ralph’s table.
I practically tripped over my feet to hurry and clock out.
Papa stood by the door, waiting, with an unreadable look on his face. I didn’t dare look back to Ralph as I made my way to the door to leave.
“Guten Abend, Herr Bloch,” I called out to my employer.
The door had barely closed behind us when Papa spoke.
“Who was that you were talking to just now?” he asked calmly.
“Oh,” I said nonchalantly. “Just a customer.”
“You were sitting at his table.”
“The shop wasn’t busy. We struck up a conversation. That’s all, Papa. Don’t make more of it than what it is.”
He paused a moment. “And what is it?”
“It’s nothing.”
But I knew it wasn’t nothing. I wasn’t in love with Ralph Dove. But I was intrigued by him. I liked him. He made me feel alive.
25
By the beginning of September, I was looking forward to seeing Ralph with all the expectation of a child waiting for Christmas. I had been so starved for a friend that having one again was balm to my soul.
I think he knew this. Ralph’s sympathy for my predicament bordered on pity, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I needed his friendship more than he needed mine. He told me he liked talking with me because I wasn’t like all the other German girls wanting his attention purely for what he could give them.
And perhaps he did enjoy my company almost as much as I enjoyed his. From the get-go, Ralph wanted to meet my parents, and he thought my caution in that regard was excessive. But I wasn’t ready for Papa and Mommi to meet Ralph. I’d convinced myself they would think I was infatuated with him and that Ralph just wanted to get me into his bed. Neither of these things was true; at least Ralph did not hint that he was playing at friendship so that he could lure me into an affair. But I was seventeen and I didn’t think my parents understood me or would believe me if I told them Ralph was just a friend.
So our meetings outside the café were secret. I had the mornings to myself in the flat, as Mommi and Papa were both at work and Max was at school. I would leave a little early on the days Ralph and I would meet, abandoning my self-schooling lessons for that day so we could meet outside a candy store several blocks away from Herr Bloch’s shop. We would stroll the rubble-filled streets and talk. Sometimes he would bring treats from packages his mother sent him. One day he brought two Twinkies and I cried a little when I saw them. I told him they were Mariko’s favorite.
On our walks we talked about our lives back home. He already knew much about mine, but I didn’t know anything about his. He told me he was twenty-three, the youngest of three children, that he had a brother named Hugh and a sister, the middle child, named Irene.
Hugh had wanted to serve in the army from the very beginning but was denied an officer’s commission because of health issues. He’d been born with a weak heart that made strenuous exercise not only difficult but dangerous. Ralph told me Hugh was very smart but far too serious, that he was thirty years old and still single and likely always would be because he never dated. Hugh had worked for their father, Errol Dove, but Errol had died the summer Ralph graduated from high school and now Hugh ran the family business.
Their sister Irene was twenty-six, married, and had two little children, a girl and a boy whom, Ralph said, she hardly ever saw because she was always out socializing with her Bel Air friends or playing tennis or shopping for clothes she didn’t need or sleeping with other men.
“You mean she sleeps with men besides her husband?” I asked, incredulous.
“I’d bet any amount of money that she does,” Ralph replied. “Irene and responsibility have never mixed well.”
He told me his father’s company secured rights and funding for Hollywood movies. Hugh, who had gone to law school, had started out in the legal department. The business had been lucrative, especially when silent films transitioned to talking pictures. Errol Dove, who had been born into wealth, had made millions of his own during Hollywood’s golden era.
“I’m the black sheep,” Ralph had said with a smile. “I don’t care about the things my brother and sister and parents care about. Hugh wants to honor the family legacy—my father’s memory and all that—and Irene only cares about her own happiness. My mother sent me to Stanford to get a business degree, but I have no desire to work in the family business. I’ve always liked photography, but my father didn’t think I’d be good enough at it to make any money. Even though my brother, sister, and I all have trust funds left to us by our grandpa, my father’s father, Dad thought it was important that I make my own wealth even if I didn’t need it. He didn’t want me blowing through the trust fund and living a useless life. I think those were the words he used as he lay dying: as though photographers are useless people.”
