Chapter 32
32
Inga did her best to forget what happened at the opera house as she threw herself back into work at the embassy. Larry timidly approached her desk the next morning.
“Have you recovered from the horrors of last night?”
“It wasn’t that bad,” she admitted. She’d spent the morning typing reports about soldiers suffering from trench foot, dysentery, and shell shock. It forced her to put her piddly troubles in perspective.
In the days that followed, she tackled crates of letters that flooded the embassy. Some were from American businesses having difficulty collecting payment for goods shipped to Berlin. Some requested help locating Americans believed to be traveling in Germany. One was from the mother of a Red Cross volunteer who’d died in an automobile accident, and his body needed to be transported home.
Her hands were chapped after opening hundreds of letters and they hurt from paper cuts, so Inga kept a jar of rose-scented cream at her desk to soothe them. And yet how could she complain about a little paper cut in the middle of a war?
She’d just finished rubbing the cream into the skin of her abused hands when Benedict approached and set a postcard on her desk. It featured a colorized photograph of a quaint village nestled in a steeply sloped mountainside. The spires of pine trees were so deeply green they almost looked black against the shockingly blue sky. She looked up in question to Benedict.
“The Bavarian Alps,” he explained. “The town is Rosendorff.”
“Rosendorff! That’s where I was born. My cousins still live there.”
“I know.”
She looked at the postcard with renewed interest as fond memories bloomed. She barely remembered what the town looked like, only how it made her feel. She’d been happy there, but her parents found it hard to make a living in the small town of shoemakers nestled in the woods. Her biggest regret during her time in Germany was that she’d been trapped in Berlin and hadn’t been able to visit her hometown.
Benedict loitered at her desk. He was usually so direct, and the way he watched her seemed odd, like he was expecting something of her.
She held up the postcard. “Can I keep this?”
“I bought it for you,” he said with a nod, then started fidgeting again, clearing his throat before speaking. “It occurred to me that we never had a honeymoon, and you may enjoy a trip to Rosendorff. I would be happy to accompany you.”
“We can’t leave the embassy with all this work piling up, can we?”
“I can clear my calendar for a short visit,” he said. “The week after Christmas is always a slow time, and Mr. Gerard agreed that Larry can cover your duties.”
It sounded like everything had already been arranged. Inga glanced at the postcard again, its beautiful mountain landscape summoning nostalgia, and she had to blink a little faster. “This might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
He brightened. “You’ll come, then?”
She shot to her feet and flung her arms around his neck. “Thank you, Benedict. Yes, yes, I’ll come!”
Inga exchanged telegrams with her uncle Albrecht in Rosendorff to arrange the visit. There were no hotels in the tiny village of only two hundred people, so they’d be staying with her uncle. She barely remembered her father’s younger brother, except that he was gruff and scary.
Albrecht closed his final telegram with three terse words: Bring ration coupons .
Did he mean to sound so curt? Perhaps he was merely thrifty and economized on words since telegrams charged by the letter. Americans weren’t issued ration coupons, and she couldn’t ask her family to stretch their meager food allowances. Milk was now strictly rationed, and meat was almost impossible to get. Inga filled a large crate with luxuries hard for ordinary Germans to find, such as chocolate, coffee, sugar, and strawberry jam. Most precious were the fifteen cans of condensed milk. Hopefully, the bounty would help soften Uncle Albrecht.
She and Benedict set off on the fifteen-hour train ride to Rosendorff the day after Christmas. Benedict tried to get them a private compartment, but such luxuries were a casualty of the war. Lack of fuel limited civilian train service, and cars with private compartments had been eliminated throughout Germany.
All kinds of people got in and out of the train during their trip—schoolchildren, soldiers, a pair of elderly sisters. A woman with a cage of smelly chickens sat opposite them for over an hour. Benedict offered to lift the cage to the overhead rack, but the woman clutched the cage, refusing to let it out of her sight. Fortunately, the lady with the chickens got off the train at Leipzig. Her place was immediately filled by a soldier with a hollow expression who never stopped twitching. When Inga tried to welcome him, he averted his eyes and refused to speak.
It was difficult to make conversation with so many people crowding the train, so she simply gazed out the window at the countryside speeding by. They passed a dairy farm, where a one-legged soldier sat in a tree stand, a rifle propped on his shoulder as he guarded the cows.
Was hunger so bad in the countryside that they needed to guard the livestock? She glanced at Benedict, and he nodded, answering her unspoken question. She’d heard rumors about how things were worse outside of Berlin, and here was proof of it.
She’d never seen so many mountains and fields and rivers, all of them reaching as far as the eye could see. They passed small towns where the spires of country churches were the only things to reach above the trees. Other times the train chugged through grand cities like Leipzig and Nuremberg. The farther they traveled from Berlin, the sparser the crowd on the train. Soon they were approaching the outskirts of Munich, which meant they were getting closer to Rosendorff.
In Munich the trembling soldier disembarked until at last they were alone and could speak freely.
“There’s a prisoner camp not far from Rosendorff in a town called Puchheim,” Benedict said. “If possible, I’d like to visit the camp and check its conditions. It’s only about five miles from where your family lives. Would you mind if I excused myself for a few hours to do so?”
“Visiting prisoner camps and bunking in with my scary uncle,” she said. “This honeymoon gets better and better.”
He winced a little, and she squeezed his hand. “Benedict, I’m teasing. The fact that you’re taking me all this way, in the middle of a war ... it means the world to me.”
He leaned down and kissed her. She shifted to fit closer against him, never breaking contact with their kiss. Benedict wasn’t the sort of man she ever imagined for herself. Maybe he was a stuffed shirt with a chilly demeanor, but beneath that starchy veneer, he smoldered.
It was after ten o’clock at night when the train pulled into the station at Puchheim. Inga clenched her suitcase while Benedict went to ensure their crate of food was safely off-loaded from the baggage car. She hadn’t feared for its safety when they boarded the train this morning, but that was before she witnessed the deprivation throughout the interior of the country.
How cold it was here in the mountains! Only a single lantern glowed at the redbrick train station, casting its small pool of light. Throughout Germany, lanterns were kept dark because of fuel shortages. The people gathered on the platform loomed like dark silhouettes. How was she to recognize Uncle Albrecht?
A tall, blocky man approached. “Did you bring your ration coupons?”
So much for a warm welcome. Uncle Albrecht’s gruff, surly voice was exactly as she remembered.
Benedict spared her from replying. “We aren’t entitled to ration books because we aren’t German citizens. Instead, we brought plenty of food and supplies for everyone. We will not be a burden.”
As Uncle Albrecht grunted his reply, a younger man came forward. “Inga?” he said. She nodded, and his smile revealed white teeth in the dim light. “I am Gerhard Mueller, your cousin Gita’s husband. Welcome home!”
She impulsively hugged him, relieved to be greeted by at least one smiling face. His name pricked an old memory, and she pulled back to squint at him in the darkness. “Gerhard Mueller ... didn’t you once hide a dead fish in my lunch pail?”
Gerhard howled as if in pain. “Argh! I was hoping you would not remember! Gita and I had a bet about that, and now I have lost.”
His good humor was contagious, and she laughed as she introduced Benedict. Only Uncle Albrecht did not smile as he hurried them toward an old farm wagon hitched up to an aging nag. Benedict carried both their suitcases, while Gerhard insisted on hefting the crate.
The crate landed with a heavy thump in the back of the wagon. “It feels like there is a ton of bricks in here.”
“Canned milk,” she said, and Gerhard whirled to gape at her.
“Milk?” he exclaimed, his voice brimming with hope.
“Yes, condensed milk,” she affirmed. “We brought fifteen cans of it.”
“Gita will be so glad,” Gerhard said. “We have a ten-month-old boy, but Gita has had so little decent food that her milk dried up, and there is none to be had in the shops anywhere. Thank you, Inga!”
“Come along, the night grows darker,” Albrecht growled as he slid onto the driver’s bench of the buckboard wagon. He insisted that Inga sit beside him, and Benedict and Gerhard would walk alongside the wagon to spare the old horse.
It was two miles to Rosendorff. Little did she know when she agreed to this trip just how rustic it would be. Soon they were beyond the light of the train station and traveling on a one-lane road into the dark forest. Gerhard halted the horse to light a lantern that hung from the wagon.
“There was no point in wasting fuel while the light of the station could still be used,” he said as he hefted himself back onto the bench.
“I hope we are not inconveniencing you,” Benedict said.
“No imposition,” replied Uncle Albrecht. “You shall have the master bedroom while you are here. It is the best room in the house.”
Inga winced. “We couldn’t ask that of you.” She glanced at Benedict, pleading for him to back her up. He needed no urging.
“Herr Klein, we could not impose in such a fashion. We are grateful simply for a roof—”
Uncle Albrecht held up his hand, cutting off the conversation. “I won’t have it be said that we are unwelcoming to guests. My wife has already prepared the room, and that’s the end of it.”
All that could be heard was the clop of hooves and the slow, steady creak of wheels as the wagon thumped along the dirt road. An awkward silence stretched, and Inga strained to peer into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes of the trees, but beyond the pale circle of lamplight, all was black except a few patches of snow.
The night air felt wet and icy, causing her to burrow deeper into her coat. At least Benedict and Gerhard were getting along okay. It turned out that Gerhard was a cook at the prisoner camp in Puchheim. He said he could probably arrange for Benedict to tour the facilities. She tilted her ear to listen in on their conversation. Apparently, half the prisoners were Russian, and the rest French.
“They hate each other,” Gerhard said. “I get called out of the kitchen to break up fights all the time. The Frenchies think I favor the Russkies because I serve so much borscht, but that’s all I can get these days.”
They rounded a bend, and a few lights flickered in the distance. “This is Rosendorff,” said Uncle Albrecht. “I expect most of the village is asleep, though my wife and the girls are probably still up.”
“The girls” were her cousins Johanna and Gita. They were the only people Inga clearly remembered from Rosendorff. The three of them used to play hide-and-seek behind the chicken coop. Would they even recognize each other anymore?
Uncle Albrecht turned the wagon down a narrow lane toward a half-timbered house. A steeply pitched roof overhung the ground floor that had small, deep-set windows. Inga’s feet had no sooner touched the ground than the front door flung open, and Aunt Frieda raced out to greet her.
“Inga!” she shrieked. Then came Johanna and Gita, both laughing and squealing. There were other people too, strangers she didn’t know but whose smiles were wide and welcoming. Aunt Frieda hustled them inside, where the warmth of the fire in the large front room was like a balm. The kitchen and a huge brick fireplace took up most of the front room. Woodsmoke and the musty scent of old plaster stirred a rush of childhood memories.
Benedict lugged the crate inside and set it on the scuffed kitchen table.
“Let’s see what you brought,” Uncle Albrecht said, and Bene dict began lifting out the bounty. Aunt Frieda’s eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of the large smoked ham.
“Look, Gita ... milk!” Gerhard said, holding one of the cans aloft as though he’d just found manna from heaven.
“Bless you!” Gita said, and she hugged Inga.
Benedict continued lifting food out of the crate, eliciting gasps as each new item emerged. Soon the table was filled with cans of milk and sacks of sugar and coffee. Uncle Albrecht watched with a frown, his arms crossed as he scanned the offerings.
“Plenty of jam,” Benedict said as he brought out the selection of jars Inga pilfered from the Alton House pantry late last night.
One of the jars prompted Uncle Albrecht to pick it up and hold it to the lantern. “Brandied cherries,” he said in a wistful tone. He met Inga’s gaze across the table, and for the first time his craggy features softened. “I remember the cake your mother made the year your sister died.”
Inga caught her breath. She hadn’t expected him to remember. Marie’s death had knocked her sideways. Her parents’ insistence on celebrating Christmas with their traditional Black Forest cake had been bittersweet. A pall settled over the family. Marie’s death was part of the reason her parents decided to leave Rosendorff for America.
“I thought perhaps we could make a cake to remember Marie,” Inga said, trying to contain the emotion welling up inside her.
Uncle Albrecht set down the jar of cherries. “I think that would be a fine idea,” he said, his voice breaking as he turned away.
In the past, Uncle Albrecht always seemed so gruff, and yet there was a tender side buried beneath his scary exterior. This wasn’t the first time Inga misjudged someone based on superficial impressions. They were all living through a terrible time, but tonight she would give thanks to God for the chance to see her family again and celebrate the blessings they’d been given.