Chapter 55 War Brides #2
“And meanwhile,” I said, “we can take turns reassuring each other. A useful skill in a marriage, I think.”
It was hard to keep believing, though, over the next months.
Dr. Müller came home eventually, very thin and tired, but at least he had medicines now.
That was so much better, and it also meant Joe could come visit again.
“And it’s good we can’t marry yet,” I told Joe one evening, walking home from the music shop, “because I couldn’t possibly leave him.
Not like this. Now that you’re bringing so much good food, though, he’ll surely improve.
” But he didn’t, and one cold, rainy morning in March, he didn’t rise for breakfast, and when I put a hand on his shoulder, he was stiff and cold.
I stood there and cried helpless tears for another friend gone, then dried my eyes and arranged to bury him in the frozen ground.
When Joe and I stood over the cold, dark hole to say goodbye, I told myself he was going to be with his wife, but I couldn’t quite believe it.
I still went to Mass every Sunday, but more out of duty and hope now than faith.
Hope that I could believe again someday.
It was so hard to believe as my parents had, living in a world where such things happened, and God sometimes seemed very far away.
There were many burials that year, and when the winter came again, there were more.
People were calling it the Hungerwinter, or the Weisse Tod—the White Death.
The frost came early, freezing vegetables in the ground.
The temperature dropped more, staying below zero for days, and chickens froze in their coops as fuel became more and more scarce.
Engines froze up in the cold, and goods couldn’t be transported.
The electricity was only on now for a few hours a day, and mothers brought their children into bed with them so they wouldn’t freeze to death during the night.
Babies cried for lack of milk, and mothers cried for their inability to supply it.
Refugees died of cold and hunger in cellars and bombed-out buildings and on the streets, and the living took their coats and blankets for themselves.
How many were dying, we didn’t know, for information was as scarce as coal.
The end of the war had been hard, but this peace was even worse. I found myself at times being glad that Dr. Müller hadn’t lived long enough to experience it. He would have suffered so.
One benefit came of the harsh conditions, though: Frau Wentzl, my landlady, stopped glowering at me.
That was, of course, due to Joe. At first, when he’d seen her—for she always seemed to be hovering around the front door when he walked me home after our meager dinners at the brewery or our musical evenings—he’d asked what he could bring her.
Canned ham? Toilet paper? Margarine? Chocolate?
She’d snapped in response, and he’d stopped asking.
One very cold morning, though, when I was in the corridor, wrapping myself in the final layer of scarves for the walk to the bakery—Herr Adelberg had had to ask me for my potato bread recipe, for there was not a scrap of wheat flour to be had—she said, looking past me, “It’s a pity one doesn’t have soup cubes anymore,” as if speaking to herself.
“And ham, of course. And, oh, for a bit of sugar!”
It was as if we communicated via code, after that.
She would sigh over some longed-for item: cooking oil, tea, or the ever-popular toilet paper, I would tell Joe, Joe would bring the thing at his next visit, and I would knock on Frau Wentzl’s door and say, “I have a small gift for you.” She would act surprised and pretend to accept the gift only grudgingly, but I was allowed to stay in the little apartment, where I slept in Dr. Müller’s bed, read his books, and missed him.
He’d educated me, and I tried to repay his gifts by allowing him to educate me more.
I lay there each evening, through that October and November and on into December, with all the blankets and both our coats piled over me and a hot-water bottle on my stomach, and read my way through loneliness, through uncertainty, through sorrow.
I read a great deal of Shakespeare—the comedies only, for I couldn’t manage tragedy now—and Goethe, Dickens, and Austen, too.
I tried to read Kant, but gave it up—space and time were mere “forms of intuition,” and what we experience mere “appearances?” No, the philosophers were too much for me, or I had the wrong kind of mind for them.
Whether intuition or appearances or whatever else, what was before me was my reality, and the only thing I knew how to deal with.
I saw Joe as often as he could get away and was never alone with him, we played music together in the little shop, where it was often nearly too cold to perform, and I hugged Matti and talked to him about school and told myself things would get better.
But, oh, that little flat was empty and cold, and the future so far away.
Joe had written to his Congressmen, and then he’d written again, “every month like clockwork,” he’d said, but there was no change.
We were all paying still for the Nazis’ sins.
Perhaps that was right—Heaven knows the Poles, the Ukrainians, and every Jew in Europe had suffered more than this—but can the deaths of children ever be right?
I tried to see the larger picture and consider such things as objectively as Dr. Müller would have done, but I’m afraid I often failed and was merely lonely and too often afraid.
In late September, Joe told me he planned to sign on for six months more with the Army.
“There are going to be more trials,” he said, looking weary.
“Even though the Germans almost wholly disapprove, and none of the other Allies want to be involved. Are we doing any good here, or just fooling ourselves? How is this winning hearts and minds, especially when people are going hungry?” Despondent, the way Joe never was.
“Who will they be trying?” I was startled by the news.
He was right—many Germans seemed to feel more victimized than remorseful during these hard days, blaming the English and Americans for their plight at least as much as they blamed Hitler and the others, and the trial had become increasingly unpopular as it had dragged on.
The end was drawing near, the German lawyers mounting a passionate defense of their clients, who had merely followed orders, as was the duty of any military man.
So the newspapers said, and so many of the customers said in the bakery, too.
I found I couldn’t agree—some things, surely, one simply cannot do—but the few times I’d offered my opinion, it was to dark looks and muttering about “her American man.” Women didn’t actually draw their skirts aside as I passed, but I was certainly less popular than I had once been, and at times, it was almost more than my temper could bear.
Joe said, “The next trial will be of doctors,” and looked more tired still.
“Doctors?” I was puzzled.
“The euthanasia program,” he said. “And the so-called ‘experiments’ in the camps. Torture, more like.”
I said, “That’s too hard, surely. Too much for you. It’s hurt your soul to do this much. You must leave instead, as we discussed. Leave, and send for me.”
“Marguerite.” He took my hand. “I can’t. I’d go crazy, leaving you in this mess. I have to stay and make sure you’re all right.”
“We both agree,” I said with the last of my nobility, “that I can survive.”
“No,” he said, “and that’s an end to it. I’m staying.”
On the first day of October, the judges returned their verdict.
Twelve of the twenty-two defendants were sentenced to hang; one, who hadn’t been found, in absentia.
Most of the others received long sentences, and three were acquitted.
The debates in the bakery were heated, but Joe barely spoke of it.
And on the first of November, when the men went to the gallows as war criminals—all but Goering, who’d somehow got hold of a cyanide capsule, a coward to the last—Joe took me to the music shop, where we played for two hours straight.
He poured himself into Pachelbel’s Canon in D—Pachelbel, who’d been born in Nuremberg and had created such beauty, and that was reality, too, wasn’t it?
I played along with him, the music rolling through me as the tears rolled down my cheeks.
I cried for Joe’s pain, I cried for the loss of too many people I’d loved, and I cried for my country.
A month later, the Army lifted the ban.