Chapter 33 Joe
JOE
The man waiting for us inside the flat wasn’t seven years old anymore.
More like eighty-three, if my math was correct.
He was a small man, as he’d been a small boy, and grown smaller with age.
A little stooped, but still with a fine head of white hair, bright blue eyes, and a gentle smile.
He put out a hand to me, and I grasped it, then had to put my other hand over it.
We were laughing, but there were tears in our eyes, too.
“Matti,” I said. “I can’t believe it’s you. Do you remember, then?”
“Of course I remember,” he said. “How could I forget?”
“Do you still have the tin soldiers?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Come, and I’ll show you.”
I followed him over to a bookshelf, where he took down a tin box—the same tin box!
—and removed the lid, and there they were: dozens of flat painted figures with stands at the bottom so you could move them around.
Infantry and cavalry and artillery, Wehrmacht, British, and American.
Figures taken from the first war, for they were very old.
“Konrad here played with them as a boy, too,” Matti said, “and these days, my great-grandson plays with them on his visits. Perhaps I should discourage it—who of us who lived through it can have any love for war?—but boys will play with toy soldiers all the same. How happily Gerhardt and I spent the hours with them!” He looked up.
“What happened to Gerhardt, do you know? And to you? You married, I know.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know about Gerhardt, sadly. We lost touch.”
“Ah, well,” Matti said. “It happens in war, and it was, after all, a very consequential war.”
“Indeed it was,” I said. “This is my granddaughter, and—” I introduced the rest of them, using a mix of German and English. “Ashleigh is making a sort of record,” I told Matti. “A video record, for this tick-tack and so forth.”
“TikTok, Oma,” Alix said.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one. About the war, and my return.”
“Come, then,” Matti said. “Sit down, all of you, and tell me about it. Or—wait. Konrad, what can we do about Mittagessen? Our guests must have lunch.”
“Oh, please don’t bother,” I said.
“Nonsense,” Matti said. “It’s time for my walk anyway. Let’s walk to the Grüner Brauhaus, shall we?”
“It can’t still be there,” I protested.
“And why not?” he said. “It’s been there since 1709, hasn’t it?
It would take more than a war to kill the place off.
They make an excellent Schnitzel and a very fine Bratwurst, and, of course, it’s still a brewery, too.
A fine day to sit outside and enjoy a beer.
They also have potato soup, but you and I will skip that, no?
” His smile reached all the way to his blue eyes, and he was still so dear.
How I laughed! “Yes,” I said, “let’s skip the potato soup.” I remembered the others, then. “I’ll do my best to translate,” I told them, “but—”
Matti said in English, “I have some English. Enough to follow, even if perhaps not speaking so much.”
Alix said, “That’s great, then. Let’s go do that, and you can catch up.”
“And eat,” Ben said. “I’m starved.”
Matti smiled a bit and said, “Ah. Starved. Well, perhaps.”
We did put up Frau Adelberg’s Swiss flag that first afternoon—April 17th, 1945.
We could hear the deep boom of shelling more distinctly now.
“Artillery fire,” Dr. Becker explained, though I couldn’t imagine how he knew.
It was coming from the west, and heading our way, “because,” Frau Adelberg said, “the Americans must come east, mustn’t they?
Perhaps they’ll even drive my Emil toward me, who knows? ”
The shelling grew louder as the afternoon progressed, and Dr. Becker boarded over the lower windows as best he could, pulling apart packing crates for the purpose.
There were still gaps, but they weren’t man-sized.
“Who knows what the Americans will do?” Frau Adelberg said.
“They’re still men, after all, and if they’re anything like the Russians …
” She stopped and looked at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?
When they come, you and Andrea must hide. ”
“I understand,” I said. I hadn’t understood, when I’d been that protected princess in Dresden and the warning was coming from my parents, but all those women fleeing from the east had long since told me the tales.
No female from eight to eighty was safe, they’d said.
Some girls had even died of their injuries.
Oh, I knew very well by now what she meant.
“Will you show me the kitchen now, please?” I asked. What use to worry about things that hadn’t happened yet? “You can explain your techniques so I’ll be prepared to work in the morning. What time will I need to get up?”
“I begin work at four,” Frau Adelberg said.
“I think I’ll begin a little sooner,” I said. “I’m bound to be slow the first day. How about three-thirty?
It didn’t work out that way. Oh, I rose at three, right enough—Dr. Becker had slept with the two boys in one bedroom, while Andrea and I shared the other.
What luxury, to share a room with only one other, and to once again have someplace to wash!
The shooting and shelling continued through the night, but I slept straight through it, so accustomed was I now to odd discomforts.
In the kitchen, though, with the sounds of battle much nearer, Frau Adelberg said, “No customers will come today, surely. They’ll be hiding.”
“Then I’ll make only enough bread for us,” I said. “That works out perfectly—I can learn without being anxious that I’ll spoil the whole batch. As our flour supplies are low, I’ll bake potato bread this first time. That one, I know well.”
Frau Adelberg raised her arms and let them fall. “For one so young—” She shook her head. “You have the confidence of a queen. Or the foolhardiness.”
“Or both,” I said. “Almost certainly both. But please—watch what I do and correct me if I go wrong.”
I started by peeling, chopping, cooking, and draining a pot of potatoes—still the easiest foodstuff to come by, alas—then mashing them in an enormous commercial mixer in which they were nearly lost. The bowl held forty quarts!
When the potatoes were well mashed but not gluey—I knew the difference, for I’d made that mistake more than once—I used some of the warm cooking liquid to dissolve the yeast, along with a scant teaspoon of precious sugar, before adding the mixture to the potatoes along with salt.
“The Holy Trinity,” Frau Heffinger had once told me, “sugar, salt, and butter. You cannot cook well without these.” Sacrilegious; but then, she was Lutheran.
I didn’t have butter, but I did have a bit of oil, so I added that to the potatoes along with the flour.
As much wheat flour as I could bear to use up, and rye flour to stretch it.
As the mixer ground slowly away, the dough began to look shaggy, as it should, less like mashed potatoes and more like bread.
What a relief it was to know that the laws of baking, at least, hadn’t changed, whatever else went wrong with the world!
After the mixer had labored away for five or six minutes, I tipped the mound of dough out onto the wooden counter and finished the kneading by hand, partly to feel when the elasticity was right and partly for the pleasure of accomplishment.
I’d put the dough in the oven with a pan of hot water, and then—
The explosion was so unexpected, I jumped, banged my side against the counter—I’d feel that bruise tomorrow—then ducked, purely from reflex.
Frau Adelberg called from the bottom of the stairs, not venturing into the room, “You must come up now and hide!”
“Nonsense,” I said, as the noise increased.
A chatter, now, that must be machine guns?
“I have all this dough. What, is it to go to waste? No, I’ll go on and prepare it.
” I went to the blackout curtain and said, “Turn out the light.” Frau Adelberg ventured from the stairs, then, and the two of us pulled back the curtain and peeped out of the open spaces between the bits of packing crate.
The light outside was still gray with approaching dawn, but I saw a flash from a high window. What was that?
“Muzzle flash,” Frau Adelberg said. “From a pistol. Who would shoot a pistol now, when the Americans aren’t even in the street yet? The foolish Party officials have given out weapons and ammunition to the Hitler Youth, and here’s the result. We’ll all be killed by mistake, as like as not.”
“Mm,” I said, then dropped the curtain, turned on the light, and went back to my kneading. Whatever was happening out there, at least we’d have bread.
Did I become less philosophical as the shelling and shooting came ever closer?
Well, yes, I did, but I went on baking all the same.
The walls were filled with brick in this kind of half-timbered house—Frau Langbein had explained that to me—and the squared-off oak timbers were enormously heavy.
If we were actually shelled, we could certainly be killed, but mere bullets could penetrate only the windows.
I wasn’t any more likely to die while baking than while cowering in a bedroom!
I punched down my dough, set it to rise again, and went to work on my Pumpernickel.
True Pumpernickel bread takes at least four days, and surely this battle wouldn’t last four days.
So I turned the crank to mill rye berries into coarse flour, working carefully—the machine guns were chattering constantly now—then poured the boiling water over it.
Tomorrow, I would add more flour and salt, then mix and bake it; it would take nearly twenty-four hours to bake.
I could hear shouts now, and running feet. Frau Adelberg had long since gone upstairs again, after urging me without success to come with her.