Nightingale (31 page)

Peter reached for the burlap bag. “You're the nightingale, Rachel.” He looked over at her, smiled. Wanted to love her.

Wanted to feel anything but the rubble in his chest.

He glanced at the church. “One-thousand-degree heat. That's… unimaginable.” The kind of heat that could bubble a man's skin, turn him to ash, his blackened hands curled to his body. Still, he would have thought the church might have survived. He remembered the few times he'd stood in the cupola overlooking the city, the expanse of so much history—the cobbled streets where Bach strolled in search of a tune, or perhaps Goethe trolling for his muse. The church stood sentry over the
city, pillared their faith. Yet the flames had loosened its foundations, crushed it to dust.

“I'll meet you here tomorrow night,” he said, and she let him go, his hand colder with the loss of hers.

Peter picked up the burlap bag, carried it over his shoulder to his flat, climbing the stairs just as the light winked out from the city. He lit a stump of a candle, trying to decide whether to coax to life the tin can fire or simply abide the chill. Opening the burlap bag, he fished out the CARE boxes—three of them, filled with corned beef, bacon, margarine, lard. Honey, raisins, chocolate, coffee, and bless her, Rachel had found two cans of beer and a carton of cigarettes. Yes, he could barter these for fresh milk. The rest, he'd distribute.

As he put the supplies beneath his bed, he noticed a tiny package, wrapped in brown paper, set in the middle of his blanket. He picked it up, unwrapped it.

Held it to the light.

Creamy white, veins of lime green, and encased in the floppy folds of purple-veined leaves… Someone had left him a turnip.

March 1946

Peter,

I think of you too much when I'm studying late, when the night forces my nose into the crease of my textbook, and I release myself into the ethereal memories of your
smile. I can smell you, sometimes, not the man in the hospital bed, but the one who came to me, the scent of rescue on his skin. I feel your arms enclosing me, the sweetness of your voice in my ear.

God loves you more than you can imagine.

Those words, more than your smell or touch, found the thirsty place inside. It feeds me when I am rising early for my shift, the absence of Sadie's body next to me turning me febrile.

I moved to Milwaukee, as planned, right after Christmas, leaving Sadie with her father and Rosemary, in whom I've discovered an ally.

Rosemary is pregnant with Linus's child, but she has made room in her heart for mine, which seems another miracle. Sadie writes to me daily in Rosemary's loopy scrawl, and sends me pictures. Every three weeks I take the train to Roosevelt and Sadie joins me in Caroline's room at the boardinghouse, although by summer, I will have to find other accommodations. Caroline is finally marrying Teddy. Indeed, we are slowly slipping free of the grip of war.

Our ward is full of evacuated soldiers, but so many more able-bodied GIs return home every week, triumph in their smiles, many bearing souvenirs and pictures of their “tour” in France or Italy. They disembark from the trains, a band greeting their first steps, and banners and speeches and glad scenes of women piling themselves into the arms of their husbands and brothers and sons.

I sometimes walk to the end of the block, watch the
returns, seeing myself in your arms, wishing you might have worn a different uniform.

But you should know, your uniform doesn't matter to me.

I wonder, however, when the lack of you finds its way inside me, if it is wise to linger inside the memory of you, to let your voice pull me from my life, launch me into a place where you and I are together, perhaps strolling along your beautiful Elbe or seated at a picnic on the shores of Lake Michigan. I see us hand in hand there, the lap of waves passing time as we find each other's smiles.

I am a foolish woman, I suspect, but the fool has wooed me, and I am still hoping that one day it will be you off the train, and I rushing to your arms.

Meanwhile, I will take my exams in May, and am considering my future. My old director of the Red Cross wrote to me, after Doctor Sullivan scripted a letter of recommendation. I couldn't believe his kindness, but he told me in confidence before I left for Chicago that he too had a son who was a POW in Germany. He hoped compassion might find him there, care for him as I did you those weeks after your beating. Red Cross Director Wynn invited me back into its ranks, and I am debating my application. Sadie, of course, needs me, especially with Rosemary and Linus beginning their family.

I am at Milwaukee County General Hospital, working a shift on the rehabilitation ward, not unlike convalescent ward in Roosevelt, and I'm living in the nurses' dormitory.
I have always feared the city, the specter of my older sister, Hedy, hovering over the stories of speakeasies and gin joints. Of course, she lived in Chicago, but any city whispers danger to me. I told you she died—but perhaps I failed to mention that Al Capone's men gunned her down in a basement swill called Tony's. I went there not long ago on the train and discovered it boarded up, the candy store above it blackened and gutted, the wind moaning out the sounds of whisky jazz, liquid blues. I will never return.

My roommate, Doris, loves the cinema—she is raving about a new film,
The Best Years of Our Lives
. I suppose—although I'm still wondering, if mine aren't ahead.

Which brings me, inevitably, back into your arms.

Holding on.

I am hoping this letter finds you, that the reason you haven't written has to do with the chaos of repatriation and not…

Well, holding on,

Esther

The Russian patrols—or brute squad, perhaps—Peter couldn't really assign military function to what he recognized as men gluttonous over the spoils of war—food, resources, women—came alive at night, fueled by too-ample shipments of vodka and the taste of dereliction in the air.
The patrols roamed the streets, two and three to a group, after curfew, sometimes finding prey, most of the time simply terrorizing the streets with the mean reality of occupation.

Peter pressed himself into the gated shadows behind the grammar school, his gaze on the grizzle-toothed remains of a cigar shop his father once frequented. He hoped that inside waited Spider, a man Peter had heard about after dropping the right tidbits around the city. Spider, Adolf Mueller said, could find anything.

Including milk.

Or penicillin.

Or even tickets to America.

But that would come later. After Peter found his mother.

Hopefully, however, Esther forgot him.

One letter. That's all he needed. Her words etched onto the page, something he could trace with his finger, see her bent over the paper, inking her thoughts.

Why hadn't she written? Even once. The absence of it had the power of a scalpel, separating his memories into pieces. Had she really stood beneath the light pole at the rail station or had his desperate heart only conjured her? Had she really agreed to wait for him? Or had she simply been appeasing him, afraid of his zeal?

One letter, Esther.

He tracked a Russian patrol cavorting its way down the street. Loud, vulgar. Then, as it rounded a corner and disappeared behind a pile of rubble, he slanted out across the road.

No shouts behind him, nothing to yank him around. He made it across the street, tucking himself inside an alcove. The cigar shop door hung off one hinge, barely open. He nudged it with his foot.

The building resembled a tomb rather than a place of business, with the blackened remains of cigar counters hunched in the middle of the room like coffins. “Hello?”

“Here.” The voice emerged from beyond the main room, into the living quarters, and right behind it, a beam flickered in the recess.

He followed the beam, passed behind a curtain, and behind it found a man. The light in Peter's eyes obscured the man's appearance, except for U.S. Army issue boots and the slick gleam of a blade. From the body rose the tangy breath of cigarette smoke.

“Spider?”

“What did you bring?”

Peter untucked the bundle from his jacket. “Cigarettes. Beer.” He held out the burlap bag. Spider swiped it from his grip. Shoved another into his grip.

“Goat's milk, like you asked. What do you need it for?”

“A baby.”

Silence, probably as the swindler considered his words. Then, “Always trying to save the world, aren't you, Doc? Just like your old man.”

Peter stiffened, the guttural chuckle finding his memories, rousing the taste of bile. His eyes adjusted then. “Fritz.”

“Peter.” Fritz lowered his light, something in his eyes that made Peter's gaze flicker to his knife.

Fritz saw it, perhaps, because he put the weapon away, tucking it into his boot. “You made it back. When?”

He hadn't expected the anger, how it suffused his veins, how he saw himself grabbing Fritz by the throat, squeezing. He swallowed it back down to his belly, shuddering against its power. Kept his voice cool. “About three months ago. I came through Saxony.”

“They held me in France. I escaped.” Fritz's face lifted up one side into a smile. “'Course, if the army had known it was me that night we bombed the hospital, I wouldn't have made it back at all. Why did you keep your mouth shut?”

“You—but they only caught Ernst and Hans. Did you go back to camp?”

“I figured that the best place to hide was inside their own stupidity. What kind of country keeps their POWs behind a chicken fence?”

Yes, he would wrap his fingers around Fritz's neck and—

No. He wasn't, couldn't be that man—

“Why didn't you betray me?” Fritz asked again, opening one of the cigarette boxes, opening a pack for himself, drawing out a cigarette.

Indeed, why hadn't he? Peter's silence had burned into his bones, and too often as he'd lain in his bunk in Fort Robinson, or on a ship across the Atlantic, or even in the camp in Sudbury, England, he'd seen himself rising from his chair, screaming out Fritz's name. Finally dousing the ever-present simmer of doubt—except… Well, he hadn't wanted to implicate himself.

Which meant he'd bartered cowardice for freedom. Perhaps he deserved to return home to destruction. “I didn't know for sure.”

“You should have trusted your instincts.” Fritz drew on his cigarette, the ash illuminating his eyes, just for a moment. Shiny black, like charred wood. “Besides, you're not German any more than I'm Greek. You have American blood inside you.” His voice lowered, raking through Peter. “No wonder you saved that American soldier. Too bad he got your girl.”

The cigarette burned in the darkness, a pinprick of hot light.

Of course Peter had known it all along. Of course Linus had healed, had come to his good senses, had realized the gift of Esther in his life.

Probably she married him and Peter became a memory, if that. No wonder she hadn't written.

Peter pushed through the hot band around his chest. “Thanks for the milk. Can you get more?”

“No so fast, Doc.” Fritz edged up to him, the odor of the unwashed thick upon him. “Seems to me that a doctor should be able to get his hands on more of this. Seems as though the Red Cross considers you some sort of hero.”

“I'm not a hero—”

“No. You're useful.” Fritz drew again from the cigarette. “Always were. The minute I saw those Jews sneaking out the back door of your father's house, I knew it.”

Everything inside Peter seized, hard, as if a rock had slammed through him. “What are you talking about?”

“I lived there, above you.” He pinched his cigarette, two fingers to his mouth as he finished off the butt. “Watching you. And then, after you left…” He lifted a shoulder. “They were traitors, just like you. And stupid. Your father brought it on himself, you know. Brought it on your mother, too.”

A roaring filled his head—“What did you do?”—and his voice didn't quite sound like his own.