Chapter 25
OZZIE
Two weeks after Katja was born, Ozzie won a Land camera off a white boy from Boston in a heated game of poker.
The camera produced a glossy Polaroid photo in sixty seconds.
Each weekend he wasn’t on active duty, Ozzie visited Katja and would snap a photograph of her.
Ozzie had to restrain himself to one picture each week because the Polaroid film was expensive.
Only ten film sheets came in a pack, and he had to make them stretch.
Ozzie liked the ritual of capturing her forever in a picture, and he wanted to hold on to her infancy as long as he could.
Jelka wanted her to look perfect in every photograph, but Ozzie’s favorite shots were the ones when he caught her lying on the floor after a diaper change in a white tee, or on her stomach, eyes droopy from her nap or mouth wet with milk.
During the week, Ozzie carried the latest snapshot in his breast pocket above his heart. In the evenings, before he went to bed, Ozzie pulled out the pictures of Katja and lined them sequentially across his bed, marveling at her growth in just five short months.
“You got it bad,” Morgan would tease him during this ritual.
“Ain’t that something, got me wrapped around her pinkie and she ain’t even walking,” Ozzie snorted.
The rooming house where he had taken Jelka for most of their relationship was for lust, not for families. Now, on the weekends when Ozzie wasn’t on active duty, he stayed overnight at Jelka’s house, sleeping on the coral woven carpet on the floor, with Katja on his chest.
For every month’s milestone, Jelka insisted on a small celebration for Katja.
On the Saturday in March when Katja turned six months, Ozzie walked into Jelka’s living room to the smell of soup boiling on the stove.
Alpine folk music played from the gramophone, and a fire curled and crackled around wood in the tinplate belly stove.
Katja was on the rug, rolling around on her back.
“She can crawl.” Jelka pawed the air, mimicking the movement. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face, and her skin looked freshly scrubbed and oiled.
Ozzie removed his olive drab coat, scarf, and leather gloves and rested them on the back of the recliner. “When did this start?”
Katja heard his voice and turned her face toward him. Then she started to cry and kick her legs. Drool ran down her chin and dripped onto her white tee as Ozzie scooped her up in his arms.
“Hello, Kitten,” Ozzie purred.
Katja went from crying to giggling as he blew bubbled lips on her tummy.
A curl flopped down over her eye, and he massaged her scalp with his fingertips.
Ozzie lived all week for this moment with Katja.
He could deal with First Sergeant Petty talking down to him and assigning him menial tasks if, at the end of the week, it meant that he’d see the joy on his daughter’s face.
He had long since reached the point when he could not remember his life without her.
“Just a few days.” Jelka stood, smoothing down her cotton dress. She had lost the baby bulge around her waist and in her cheeks. Only her breasts were still swollen.
She stood on tippy toes and kissed his jaw, then rubbed away the red lipstick with her finger. She smelled of the vanilla-scented Drene shampoo that he had brought her. “I missed you,” she said, smiling.
The space that had grown between them since he’d found out that she was married had slowly dissolved. Somehow they had found a comfortable rhythm of pretending like her spouse did not exist.
“Yeah?” He grinned. “Well, I got you something.”
Ozzie repositioned Katja in the crook of his arm as he rummaged in his jacket pocket for a package of Lucky Strikes and a Mr. Goodbar with peanuts, her favorite American candy.
“You are too good to us,” Jelka said as her mother, Maria, shuffled out of the back room and nodded at him. Ozzie used his free hand to pass Maria the provisions he had bought for her. Coffee, sugar, and a few potatoes.
“Danke.” Maria patted his arm and carried the goods into the kitchen.
“Ma made pea soup with speck and dried beans,” Jelka said. “Are you hungry?”
Ozzie nodded. “Always.”
He propped Katja up on the sofa between two throw pillows. He had his camera draped around his neck and put the viewfinder to his eye to watch her through the lens. She was a lovely child. Long lashes and dark eyes that followed Ozzie around the room.
“You never take a picture of me,” Jelka said, pouting. “Are you ashamed?”
Ozzie pulled the camera from his face. He had been careful with his film but realized that Jelka was right. He should have a picture of them both. “Okay, come hold her.”
Jelka’s face lit up. “Let me change her first.” She swooped Katja up and disappeared into the back room. When she returned, Katja was wearing a white dress, and Jelka had reapplied her lipstick.
The mother-and-daughter duo looked beautiful, and the way Jelka held his daughter with tenderness melted Ozzie’s heart. “Okay, ready?” he asked, aiming the camera.
“Maybe Jutta should take a picture of the three of us.” Jelka smiled, then called to her younger sister in German before Ozzie could protest. “Show her how to take the photo, please,” Jelka said.
Ozzie held the camera to his eye and mimicked what to do for Jutta, who nodded her understanding of the task at hand. Ozzie then sat on the sofa next to Jelka and put his arm around her shoulders.
“Teeth,” Jutta said, and both Jelka and Ozzie chuckled. Flash.
“Take one more,” Jelka said to Ozzie. “One for you and one for me?”
Ozzie nodded, and Jelka conveyed the message to Jutta. She held the camera to her eye again and snapped.
Jutta placed both Polaroid pictures on the coffee table, and all three of them watched as the photographs developed.
“Nice.” Jutta pointed.
“Thank you,” Ozzie said, patting the young girl on the hand, then he reached into his pocket and handed her two chocolate morsels.
The pictures developed, and he let Jelka choose which one she wanted to keep for herself. The other he slipped into his breast pocket until he could add it to his collection back at the barracks.
“Eat?” Maria clapped, then motioned a pretend fork into her mouth. That was the way she communicated with Ozzie, one or two words in English and a lot of hand motions.
Ozzie nodded. “Ja, danke.”
By June, nine-month-old Katja was pulling herself up by grabbing on to the coffee table, and when she saw Ozzie, she babbled, “Dadadadadada.” Slobber pooled at her chin as she showed off her four teeth.
Ozzie had made it a habit to read American books to Katja on the nights he was with her before bed.
He had just finished reading his latest purchase from the commissary, Curious George, when Jelka walked into the living room carrying a basket filled with Katja’s laundry.
She sat next to him on the sofa and let her thigh rest against his as she folded the diapers, undershirts, and cotton dresses into piles on the coffee table.
The radio was on in the kitchen, tuned to the local German news.
Jelka’s parents were asleep in the back room.
“I received another letter from him,” she whispered.
Ozzie’s shoulders stiffened. “Who?”
“Gottfried,” Jelka hissed in a way that conveyed her agitation at Ozzie for making her say it. As if saying his name broke the fragile incantation that Katja’s birth had cast between them.
“And?”
“He’s fallen ill. He hopes that because he can no longer work, they will make his transfer back to Germany quick. It could happen at any time.”
Ozzie looked down at Katja, sleeping peacefully across his lap.
Her belly rose and fell as her sweet, milky breath curled against his arm.
From his comrades in his platoon, Ozzie had heard stories about the radical behavior of German POW men returning from harsh conditions in Polish mines, Soviet camps, and war-ravaged France, only to find that their wives had betrayed their sacrifice by taking up with other men and bearing their children.
Ozzie had done a little research and discovered that because Gottfried was married to Jelka, it was his legal right as her husband to make decisions as far as Katja was concerned, and that worried Ozzie.
He would have no rights and no claim to Katja because Jelka was married.
The last thing Ozzie wanted was another man in charge of his daughter.
A scorned man who would no doubt resent Katja because she wasn’t his and because she was Negro.
“I’m scared,” Jelka whispered.
“You don’t have to be.” Ozzie reached for her hand, but she pulled away.
“My neighbor’s son returned two days ago from a camp in the Soviet Union.
He was the one who brought me the letter from Gottfried.
He was so skinny and hunched over. His eyes had no life in them.
” Her lips quivered. “Gottfried is going to expect me to take care of him. Maybe he would try to get you arrested and have them remove Katja from our home. I lie awake at night thinking of all these things.”
“Shh.” Ozzie reached for her with his free arm. “It’s going to be all right.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I said I will protect you, and I will.”
Ozzie just didn’t know exactly what that would entail.
If he were to tell the truth, the horns of this dilemma kept him up at night too.
He had witnessed the German women at the American bars on payday with their half-Negro children, hungry and begging for scraps.
Katja deserved better, and he wouldn’t let Jelka’s husband lay harm to his child.
But going AWOL? That was a different beast.
“Maybe you can take the baby down to your friend’s house in Ulm and stay with her and her American husband for a while. Till we figure things out.”
“I want you to come with me. I want us to be a family. I do not love him.” She grabbed his chin, blinking back tears. “Now I am with you.”
Ozzie didn’t know what else to say, so he squeezed her hand. This was his family now, and Ozzie’s first duty was to protect them at all costs.