Salt to the Sea (5 page)

Mornings held the promise of progress, dangling hope with thoughts of the next stop. We all fantasized of more than a barn. The shoe poet talked of grand manors owned by Junkers, wealthy East Prussian aristocrats. The countryside was dotted with their estates and we were bound to come upon one. Poet said he had visited one such manor house prior to the war and thought it was close by. We dreamed the wealthy family would take us in, ladle thick soup into porcelain bowls, and let us warm our frozen toes by the fire.

Poet walked around the barn, tapping the bottoms of people's feet with his walking stick. The wandering boy followed. “Time to rise. Feet are strongest in the morning,” said the shoemaker. He arrived in front of me. “Still in fine shape, those boots. Any blisters?”

“No, Poet.”

I stood up and brushed myself off. “Is everyone ready to go?”

“The German deserter and the runaway Pole are gone,” he announced.

They all thought he was a deserter. My mind flashed to him snapping the identity card and letter from my hand. “I'm surprised he felt well enough to move on so early.”

“His boots were military issue, but modified,” said the shoe
poet. He sighed, shaking his round head of white hair. “This war . . . do you realize that young people are fighting on tiny islands in the Pacific Ocean and marching through the deserts of North Africa? We are freezing and they are dying of heat. So many unfortunate children. The young Polish girl was exhausted. Her feet were swollen, rising like yeast buns in those boots. But sadly, it's probably for the best. We don't want them caught among our group. If my mind still serves as well as my feet, we'll come upon the estate before nightfall. No one will let us in with a deserter and a Pole.”

“Of course it's for the best,” said Eva. “A deserter and a Pole? I'm sorry, but they'll be dead on the road in a day.”

“Oh my, you're a blister, Eva. A sour little blister.” The shoe poet laughed and shook his walking stick at her.

The morning sky draped cold shadows over the dock. Was my beloved Deutschland losing her footing? Was such a thing possible? Lübeck, Köln, Hamburg. Reports said they were all rubble.

The U.S. Army Eighth Air Force had bombed the harbor a few months prior. More than a hundred American planes dropped steel suppositories exploding into Gotenhafen. The ship
Stuttgart
was hit and sunk.

They had bombed before. They would do it again. Three air-raid alerts had been established in a tier of severity. I memorized them:

Rain.

Hail.

Snow.

In the event of attack, I imagined I'd fire back into the air, wildly shaking a fist of ammunition at them. In my mind, I scaled such mountains of combat often.

But in the meantime, I employed my keen powers of observation rather than beastly force. The Führer insisted on meticulous record keeping. I had every intention of proving myself worthy of promotion to documentarian. After all, I
was a watchman. Noting and repeating my observations only sharpened my mental catalog. My recitations seemed to bother my fellow sailors, but could I really blame them for being jealous of my archival facilities?

I had a secret device. To keep track of the Reich's racial, social, and political enemies, I had put the Führer's list to melody. It was easier to remember when I sang it, similar to a child reciting a lesson in song. It was a rather catchy tune:

Communists, Czechoslovaks, Greeks, Gypsies, Handicapped, Homosexuals

—insert breath here—

Jews, Mentally ill, Negroes, Poles, Prostitutes, Russians, Serbs, Socialists

—insert breath here—

Spanish Republicans, Trade Unionists, Ukrainians and

—insert breath for big ending here—

Yu-go-slavs!

The Yu-go-slav finale was my favorite. Three syllabic punches of power. I mentally sang my melody while performing my other duties.

A formal operation was in progress at the port, but specific details had not yet been revealed. Conversations were fraught with nerves and fear. I listened carefully.

“Don't just stand there eavesdropping, Frick, move! You want to be blown up by a Russian plane?”

“Certainly not.” I balanced the stack of blue life jackets and peeked out from the side. “Where am I taking these?” I asked.

The officer pointed to an enormous slate-gray ship that matched the menacing sky.

“That one,” he said. “The
Wilhelm Gustloff
. ”

“Leave! Go away!” I was annoyed. Angry. Why wouldn't she leave? Walking clearly exhausted her.

“I follow far behind. You don't see me,” she said in her broken German.

“I can't protect you.”

“Maybe I protect you,” she said, her face earnest.

“I don't need protection.”

“Then why you're not taking the road?” She kicked at the snow that had turned to ice overnight. “Road is much faster. More chance of food. Countryside prettier, but takes longer. You don't want to be seen?” She pulled her pink hat farther down over her ears.

What I didn't want was to waste time. I turned from her and resumed walking. I heard her speaking Polish, talking to herself. Eventually she would get tired and have to stop. Her weary body wouldn't carry her far. Thoughts of my younger sister pecked at me, and finally, I turned. As soon as I stopped, she stopped, lingering to rest against a tree. I reached into my pack and retrieved the Russian soldier's gun. I walked back to her.

“Take this. If you need to use it, hold it with two hands when you pull the trigger. Do you understand? Now go away.”

She nodded but I was certain she didn't understand. The gun looked huge in her knitted glove.

I walked away. Was I crazy? Three steps back was a Pole with a Soviet gun, following me—a Prussian carrying enough secrets to blow up the kingdom. My wound cried out and so did my judgment. If I didn't report to a checkpoint soon, it would all be over.

We trudged along the road, the sky gray and heavy. I looked up at the clouds.

“It's going to snow,” said Ingrid, sensing my evaluation.

“You can feel it?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” She nodded, adjusting her grip on the rope tied to the back of the cart. “Tell me about them,” said Ingrid. “The boy and the Polish girl. I have an idea. I want to know if I'm right.”

It was fascinating that Ingrid could feel what people looked like. She told me that she could sense a person's build, demeanor, sometimes even hair color. But it was the internal qualities that came to her first.

“The girl was fearful,” said Ingrid. “Her motions were taut and full of panic. Her breathing was pinched, almost panting. The boy was the opposite. His movement was smooth and lithe, like he was accustomed to moving silently.”

For days he had been moving with shrapnel the size of a bottle cap inside of him. I thought about his wound and wondered if he still had a fever.

“What was her name? The frightened girl,” asked Ingrid.

“Emilia.”

“Yes, that matches,” said Ingrid.

She tripped over a rock in her path and nearly fell. She clung to the rope and scrambled to regain her balance.

I set my hand on her shoulder. This trek was difficult enough for someone with sight. Two weeks ago, amidst mad chaos at a train station, Ingrid became separated from her aunt. The train departed. Ingrid was not on it. She stood alone on the platform for two straight days, shivering, waiting for her aunt to return. The aunt never came back. On the third day Ingrid asked people for help. They ignored her. Her luggage was stolen. A young girl finally noticed Ingrid and brought her to my attention.

“Don't feel sorry for me,” said Ingrid. “I am able to see things. Just not the same things you see. So, the girl, she's blond?”

“Yes, Emilia's fair-haired with braids, blue eyes, and a round face. The young man is fairly tall, has broad shoulders and brown hair that falls in waves. His hair is a bit long. I don't know his name or what city he's from.”

“And his eyes?” asked Ingrid. “What color are they?”

“I don't remember. Maybe brown?”

“I don't think so. I think they're gray,” said Ingrid.

“Gray? No, people don't really have gray eyes.”

“The thief does,” said Ingrid.

I turned to her. “You think he's a thief?”

Ingrid said nothing.

The temperature dropped and the exposed parts of my face began to sting. We had been walking for over six hours. Eva complained incessantly. She hated the trek, she hated the
cold, she hated the Russians, she hated the war. The shoe poet had promised that today we would find the manor house he had known. I doubted him and warned that he shouldn't get people's hopes up, especially the little one. The wandering boy's spirits were already so low.

“Ah, but if I am right,” said Poet, “you will massage my feet by the fire.”

I wasn't sure I wanted to accept that wager.

I busied myself on the walk. I looked at the trees and thought of the big stork's nest I had seen on top of the barn. It made me think of Mama. I thought of the warm sunny days when she would take me to pick mushrooms in the forest. In the forest near Lwów was a beautiful old oak tree with a hollow large enough to sit in. We'd take our baskets to the tree and I'd scramble into the cavity. Mama would sit with her back against the trunk, legs crossed at the ankles beneath her skirt.

“You love stories, Emilia. Well, the trees hold hundreds of years of stories,” she'd tell me, touching the bark. “Think of it, everything these trees have seen and felt. All of the secrets are inside of them.”

“Do you think the trees remember each and every stork?” I'd ask from inside the cool hollow.

“Of course the trees remember. Like I said, they remember everything.”

Just as trees were Mama's favorite, storks were mine. I had them six months of the year. At the end of each summer the storks would leave and fly to Africa, where they'd live in warmth along the Nile for the winter. In March they would return to Poland to the nests they had left. To invite a stork to nest, families would nail a wagon wheel to the top of a tall
pole. We had one in our yard. Every March we would celebrate when our stork returned to the nest. As August faded, the departure of the storks symbolized summer's end.

Six years ago, the day our stork left, Mama left too. She died giving birth to what would have been my younger brother.

• • •

My throat tightened. I swallowed, reminding myself she wasn't really gone. I felt Mama among the trees. I could feel her touch and hear her laughter in the leaves. So I talked to the trees as I walked, hoping their branches would carry messages up to Mama and let her know what I had done, and most of all, that I would try to be brave.

“Why should we believe a cobbler?” lamented Eva. “He's a shoemaker, not a prophet.”

I didn't admit it, but I had begun to lose hope as well. “He said he knew the area,” I told her. “He said when he was young he traveled by the estate with his family.”

“We've been walking too long. If we push much farther the horse will be broken and won't be able to continue tomorrow.”

Eva was right. We had spotted a small barn a few kilometers back. Some left the group to spend the night. We had decided to press on, following the shoe poet and his ambitious walking stick. Only one horse remained. A few days prior we had two carts and three horses but some German soldiers we encountered had taken one of the wagons and two horses, claiming they were needed for the war effort. Since they did not ask for our evacuation orders, we didn't argue.

The German army had taken everything—cars, petrol, radios, animals, food. It was clear that they were sinking under the weight of the Allied forces, but Hitler's regional leader, Gauleiter Koch, refused to allow civilians to evacuate. Rather than fall into the brutal hands of Russian marauders, some people defied the Reich and left without orders, like us.

If Poet's estate did exist, it was sure to be a shell of its
former self, stripped and plundered by the German army. Or worse, German soldiers could be staying in the house themselves. They might question us for not having formal evacuation orders.

“The snow will fall soon,” said Ingrid quietly.

The shoe poet stopped and thumped his stick against the icy road. “Aha! This is it!”

“It” was nothing. We were stopped near the same pine forest we had been trekking alongside for hours.

Poet called to the wandering boy and whispered in his ear, pointing into the woods. The boy took off running. We waited, shivering.

“My dear Eva, if I am right and there is in fact an estate, will you apologize to me?” asked the shoe poet.

“If there's an estate I'll dance with you, old man,” snapped Eva.

“A close dance.” The shoe poet nodded. “A waltz, please.”

The wandering boy suddenly appeared on the road in front of us. His tiny body bounced up and down with excitement and he waved us forward. He stood amidst a small gap in the trees revealing a narrow, overgrown drive.

“Very smart! The noble Junkers have concealed their drive,” said Poet. “Move those large branches away, my boy. We must steer the horse and cart behind the trees.”

The boy did as instructed. We pushed through the small opening and the path widened into a larger mouth. Once we were all inside the brush, the shoe poet and the boy replaced the branches.

“Should we cover our tracks leading into the trees?” I asked.

“Forget about that,” Eva called out. “The snow will cover our tracks. Hurry.”

We plodded down the narrow band, the trees soldiering up around us, dark and tall. We arrived at a clearing. In the distance, perched on a low rise, was an elegant, stately home with long windows and multiple chimneys.

“Well, I'll be damned,” whispered Eva.