“Thank you is danke schön; schön by itself is pretty, very pretty.”
I gave him his pain medication.
“Why didn’t you tell me that while I was in prison you’d seen action?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t seem relevant.”
“Not relevant to be shipped to Italy, to have gone through Cassino, to have been wounded? Kathy, what happened to you happened to me. What you saw I saw, and the men locked in the psychiatric ward saw. It’s relevant, Kathy. Believe me, it’s relevant.”
The day Erich stood for the first time with his artificial leg, a change came over him. Once on his feet he said, “I begin to imagine I am a man. I don’t imagine I will do snowplow turns again or a downhill schuss, but the world is definitely meant to be grappled with from a standing position.”
I laughed and agreed.
But now the parallel bars were an agonizing obstacle course. He faced them daily and marched along between them, not reaching for them, not even touching them, but, after a step or two, collapsing.
I always caught him. That was my job and I did it. Then one session in the therapy room, it all came together. His strength, his sense of balance—he walked unaided.
He turned to me in triumph. I shared it with him. He didn’t want to go back to bed, but sat on the edge of it. “I no longer feel that terrible sense of Weltschmerz.” He smiled and translated, “World weariness.”
“I know.”
“Kathy, you fought right alongside me. I wonder why.”
“I’m your nurse,” I said, and went about the thousand and one duties that called me that morning. I had asked myself the same question, but always backed away from it as I did now.
Now that I had gotten him this far along, discharge and prison lay ahead. A man with one leg was vulnerable, and given a second chance would that same fanatical clique of prisoners succeed in killing him?
I went with this problem to Egg.
She looked over a mound of work. It didn’t matter how high it was. She always found time for me.
“Kathy, I’ve been so busy I’ve hardly seen you.”
“Sister, can we save another caterpillar?”
She laughed. “Love to.”
“Well, then.” I sat down and told her my struggle to bring the Austrian amputee to the point where his life seemed worth living again, only to throw him once more to the Nazis.
“Oh, dear.” Egg’s eyebrows shot up in consternation. “But how can we prevent it?”
I’d been waiting for that question. “We’re so short-handed, and he couldn’t escape. He couldn’t very well limp out of here, even if he wanted to. We could use him in a dozen different capacities. So why not make him a trustee?”
Sister’s glasses regarded me keenly. “Well, now,” she said, “let’s see what we can do.”
ERICH WENT TO work for the nuns with a will. He managed his artificial leg with the skill of a skier, and was on his feet for hours taking on the heaviest tasks. Egg in particular was delighted with him. He upended and moved garbage cans, stowed cots, carried the mail sack in, and became our general factotum.
His quarters were an unused storage room, into which he crammed his old cot and a single chair. He added a bookcase, which he built himself out of a couple of bricks and a board he scrounged from somewhere. It was soon stocked with secondhand books the Sisters picked up for him in lieu of wages. I was not surprised to see a copy of Heinrich Heine’s poems. I was surprised at a treatise on elasticity.
“Why would you be surprised? I’m an engineer.”
“You are? I didn’t know that.”
“I have a degree, but the war came and I never made use of it.”
Another volume also puzzled me, The Last of the Mohicans. “Now why would you be reading that?”
“It’s a wonderful book. My favorite when I was thirteen. Did you ever read it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’d remember if you had. It’s on account of this book that I didn’t mind too much winding up in Canada. I always thought I’d like to live in blue sky country.”
“You’d miss the city,” I said, “the libraries, theater, music.”
He laughed and his voice lit with enthusiasm. “I’d live in the forest, but I wouldn’t be a hermit. I’d come in for an evening on the town, as the Americans say.” He bent toward me. I was sitting on the floor and the door was open. This was something the Sisters insisted on. Propriety was in this fashion assured.
“In all this time I haven’t seen you wear the onyx ring. Do you still have it?”
I flushed. “I should have given it back to you before.”
“But why? It’s yours. I gave it to you.”
“I never accepted it. I couldn’t accept it. It’s too valuable.”
“You talk as though it’s a Draupnir, Odin’s self-perpetuating gold ring from which nine new gold rings drop every ninth night. But this is only an ordinary black onyx ring. I would like to see it on your hand.”
“You would?” I asked, suddenly feeling a strange admixture of things.
“You know, Liebchen”—he had taken to calling me that when we were alone—“it might even be possible . . . my boyhood dream of living in the wilderness, fishing, trapping, being close to nature. That kind of life must appeal to you too, it must be in your blood.”
“Yes.” And the few days I had spent with Anne Morning Light obliterated the little storage room. I’d been bathed and purified there, I’d been married. The honeymoon tepee of willow, the soft skins—Crazy Dancer filled my heart and my being. What was I doing here! I stumbled to my feet and without explanation rushed back to my room.
I hardly slept that night. “He’s dead, he’s dead,” I told myself viciously. It was only a year and some months—too soon to allow myself to be involved, even mildly, with anyone. With Erich, sometimes I forgot this. I forgot to hurt. What kind of person did that make me? Was I woman first, and person second? I got out of bed, stood in front of the dresser, and raised my eyes, looking at my reflection in the oval mirror.
I saw a woman. Young, dusky, and yes, attractive. I continued to study my face in the glass. Schön, he’d said, means pretty.
Deliberately I opened my top bureau drawer. I had wrapped the ring in tissue paper. But a gray and white feather lay on top of it. I put the feather with my wolf tail guardian at the bottom of the drawer and unwrapped the ring. Onyx—black, hard, polished, the diamond not large but magical. As I held it, colors shifted in its depths. The movement in its center made it seem almost alive. I put the ring on the second finger of my right hand. The innocuous hand. My left hand was bare. Indians don’t exchange rings.
Crazy Dancer was no longer in the same world with me. I was young and I was “schön,” and someone thought enough of me to give me this beautiful ring.
I was conscious of the ring all morning, although no one noticed it. Or if they did, didn’t comment.
I ran into Erich by the laundry chute. We each had a load of soiled linen to send down to the boiler room where the wash was done. He saw the ring immediately. But he said nothing.
At noon he caught up to me in the cafeteria. “Let’s take our lunch outside,” he said.
I fastened my sweater and followed him into the grounds. We sat on a low stone wall and unwrapped our sandwiches.
“It seems,” he said, “that the American and British are at the Elbe, only sixty miles from Berlin. It’s over, Kathy.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“And I’m not going back. Not like this. Not as a cripple.”
“Erich, no one would imagine that you . . .”
“Not in the fore part of the day. But you know how it is. The damn thing starts to pain me. If I fight it, a sore develops, and the next day I’m a one-legged man on crutches. So, around four in the afternoon I unstrap the prosthesis. My mother generally entertains at that hour—you know, the local dignitaries, perhaps a visiting virtuoso—and I’d be expected to be part of the soiree.”
r /> “You’ve gone through a war, Erich. You have an engineering degree. Get your own apartment, make your own schedule.”
“There speaks the new world. The obligation of centuries doesn’t rest on you. You’re free, independent, young—in a free, independent, young country. Kathy, I want to be part of that.”
“You mean, stay here?”
He reached over and wiped a speck of mustard from my mouth. “Stay here with you,” he corrected.
“But—” Too many what-ifs tumbled about in my mind.
“I want to transfer the ring, that I’m very happy to see you wearing, to the proper finger. In Europe the wedding band goes over the vena amoris on the middle finger of the right hand. That you’re wearing it at all must mean something. Does it mean you feel for me some part of the love I feel for you? That is the question. I’ve loved you from the moment you changed my first damned plasma bag.”
I tried to interrupt, to stop him, but he wouldn’t have it.
“How could I speak? How could I say anything? I was the enemy, a defeated man, a prisoner. But things have changed. It would seem for the worse, but maybe it wasn’t for the worst. I lost my leg. I thought that meant my life as well. I hoped you’d forget the surgical scissors, leave them so I could cut my wrists. But then I took a more philosophical view. I realized that committing suicide isn’t really the first reaction. First you want to kill everyone else.” He laughed.
I had tears at the back of my throat, but he could laugh.
“Don’t you think that’s an amazing insight? I do. I think it’s pretty funny. And of course, once I thought that, killing myself was no longer an option. That’s how a sense of humor saves us sometimes. Still I knew I wouldn’t go home. But that was a negative. Now I see the positive side.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“Staying here. Making a new life in the new world. I want it to be with you, Kathy. The things we joked about could actually be true, couldn’t they? Please,” he said, and put his hand over mine, “make it true. Marry me.”
The next moment I was in his arms and we were both crying. Then I pushed myself away. “We have to think, Erich. Can this possibly work out?”
“Kathy, I’ve done nothing but think about it.”
“But there are things you don’t know. I’m married. I was married.”
“What?”
“Yes, to Crazy Dancer. We were married in the Indian way. It was a blanket ceremony. The Canadian government doesn’t recognize it, of course. But I feel married.”
“But Crazy Dancer’s ship, the troopship that left in the harbor here, was sunk by a U-boat. You told me that. He died at sea.”
“Yes, that’s true. But I still feel married.”
“Of course. I understand. The commander, and Rudolf, one of my shipmates—I can’t think of them as dead. I keep remembering conversations. Questions come up I want to put to them. When they’re gone suddenly like that, you can’t make yourself believe it.”
“That’s how it is,” I said, seeing the plains of Romagna, seeing Nurse Lander, hearing the ping on the wash basin. “You don’t quite believe it.”
Erich watched me with concern, with apprehension. We had gone through the same things—he’d said that.
“When you were in prison, I found that I missed you. . . . And when I came back from Cassino and you were in my care again, it just happened. My mind and heart are still scrambling to make all sorts of adjustments.”
“I’m trying to understand what you’re saying, Kathy. You missed me—that’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Yes . . .”
“That’s enough. It means you have some feeling for me. What? Fondness? Love? Could it be love, Liebchen?”
Gray eyes looking into mine. “Yes, yes, it is love. I love you, Erich.”
His embrace was total, and my starched nurse’s cap fell on the ground between us.
Fourteen
OUR PRIVATE REALITY, the one that from that moment encompassed us, gave way to a public occurrence. April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. The world stood still and tried to absorb what this meant. But if the Germans hoped the shock would paralyze the forward thrust of Allied armies, they were mistaken. The Russians, pushing from the east, were poised to take Berlin. Montgomery on the west was trying to beat them to it. Hitler, it was said, had gone to ground in vaults under the city, while above him in the streets there was hand-to-hand fighting. Another terrible rumor that everyone believed because it was so unbelievable was that Hitler, paranoid, watching everything collapse around him, turned on his own people: Many Berliners sought safety from Allied bombing in the railroad tunnels; it was said Hitler ordered the water sluices and valves opened, and drowned them by the hundreds.
Rumors piled one on another. A few days later the story was bruited about that Hitler had married his mistress, Eva Braun, and died with her in a suicide pact, after first poisoning his dog and watching the effect. May fourth, German forces in the field surrendered to Montgomery. The formal document of surrender that ended the European war was signed and witnessed May eighth at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, in the presence of French and Russian delegations. Ike, who had just come from viewing the mass graves of Treblinka where men, women, and children were reduced to jutting ribs and pelvic bones, refused to shake hands with the German general. This was no civilized war, and he refused to confer civility on it by a handshake. Americans are great. I love them.
Wild celebration in the streets of Montreal. The great bells of Notre Dame pealed out over the city. The hospital flew the yellow and white flag of the Vatican alongside the Canadian Red Ensign, the Tricoleur, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Patients sat up in bed and blew horns and paper favors that unrolled. Everywhere people joined arms. Strangers kissed and sang. Radios blared “La Marseillaise.” Bars stayed open and there were free drinks. Erich picked me up and twirled me around, and we both ended on the floor. We stayed where we were, laughing and kissing.
“I’m no longer a prisoner,” he said. “I marry you as a free man.”
“Hurray!” I shouted.
But when he had a chance to think about it: “It’s bad the Russians hold Berlin, after what we did to them at Stalingrad and Moscow.”
He cheered considerably as it came out that Berlin would be divided into two zones, and Vienna into four. The Standard ran an interesting article revealing that Roosevelt and Churchill had met here in Quebec Province in August of ’43 and again at the Octagon Conference September 11, 1944, in which a plan was developed to limit Russian spoils. The editorial page predicted that the Americans would mop up the Japanese in short order. The world would be at peace.
“We lived through history,” I said.
“And contributed to it,” he replied bitterly.
But this was not the time for bitterness. The future, which had been on hold, was suddenly here, open, and ready for us. We felt the wonderful hope that filled the air, it spilled into our personal lives. Anything was possible. All the what-ifs could come out of the shadows.
We were happy, so filled with new confidence that I didn’t want the slightest cloud to mar our wedding. “You must write your parents,” I said to Erich. “You must tell them everything, explain your decision, tell them you are getting married to an Indian girl and starting a new life.”
He agreed. He too had enough happiness to share.
Neither of us mentioned our coming marriage at the hospital. Though Erich was no longer a prisoner, he was Austrian, and feeling didn’t die easily. However, Mama Kathy had to know and, if possible, attend. She, and Connie and Jeff, and Georges if he was back. It would be a wonderful reunion. After Papa died, our telephone had been discontinued. We couldn’t afford one. But Mama had moved back home and wrote proudly that a phone line had been installed. It was as though I stepped into a new era.
I felt quite cosmopolitan as I laid out my dimes and placed a call to Alberta. There was no answer from the other end. I was about to
hang up when her voice came through the wire. Unmistakably her voice, yet altered. There was no timbre in it, and before knowing why I was asking, “Mama, are you all right?”
I heard her tell me Georges was dead, but it didn’t register.
“He was killed two days ago, after the surrender. He was moving from his quarters at Bletchley Park, crossing a field on his way to say goodbye to a friend. And, you know, they’re renovating everywhere, trying to clean up the rubble. There was an earth-moving machine working above him. It triggered an unexploded bomb, and the building he was walking by gave way.”
I love you, Mama, I love you. Even that I couldn’t say. My dimes were used up. I continued to sit in the phone booth.
I sat in the public phone booth and tried to make sense of things, collapsing buildings, dying two days after the war ended, never coming home. Thank God Connie was married and had her own life. Still, I know she thought of herself as half a person. I remembered Georges from the time I was very little. I remembered he made shadow pictures for me on the wall, a rabbit whose nose twitched, a long-necked dinosaur that changed into a giraffe when I got scared. I remembered his magician’s hat, and that he had made reality disappear and replaced it with his own. Please, please. Make this reality go away, make it disappear.
I walked back to where Erich waited.
“Well,” he asked, “can they come?”
“No.” I didn’t tell him. I was afraid he would try to comfort me. For things that make no sense there is no comfort.
I DIDN’T WANT to be married in a church. That belonged to another young man, and young woman.
I put on my best dress, and Erich bought a beautiful spring bouquet of jonquils and sweet alyssum, which I carried, trying not to remember the flowers I once found in my shoes.
For the occasion he borrowed the onyx ring. “On our first anniversary you’ll have a gold band,” he promised.
We were married before a justice of the peace in a civil ceremony, one the dominion of Canada recognized. Since we were in Canadian jurisdiction, the ring went on the fourth finger of my left hand.