Under the Same Blue Sky (3 page)

“That’s true,” my father agreed, rubbing out the fork marks my mother so disliked. “Well then, our Hazel will be the finest teacher in—western Pennsylvania. You
will
stay close for now, won’t you?”

“Yes, for now.”

“So,” Uncle Willy said loudly, “it’s settled.” We toasted my future with schnapps and
prinzregententorte,
the chocolate cake that my father claimed could bring back the dead.

“Hazel is restless; it’s in her blood,” Tante Elise observed as my mother poured schnapps. A fork clattered on a plate. Her hand wavered; my father had to chase the stream of schnapps with his shot glass. “I mean,” stammered Tante Elise, “that you both left Heidelberg even though your families wanted you to stay.”

“Exactly,” added Uncle Willy. “Crossing the ocean with a crazy
tinsmith.
” He clapped my father on the back. “Remember what Katarina’s father said? ‘That Johannes wouldn’t keep a roof over her head and he’ll break her heart besides.’ Now there’s a fine store, and twenty years later you still can’t take your eyes off her.” My mother blushed as my father squeezed her thickening waist. Once again he told how he’d first seen Katrina Brandt studying confections in a bakery window, comparing
them to her own. Uncle Willy told how he met Tante Elise at a butcher shop and followed her home, carrying her meat. In years to come, I’d think often of that Sunday dinner when the shock of my revelation rolled into memories of the Old Country, the berry-picking parties and hikes, open-air concerts, and river walks in the long days of summer. That dinner was the last time America let us forget we were hyphenates.

S
IX DAYS LATER
, on June 27, 1914, peace blew out of our world like air from a pinpricked balloon.
Pittsburgh Post
extras blared the news: Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had been shot on a bridge in Sarajevo. I knew Sarajevo from geography class as a staid, minor city in a shrinking empire. Who could have predicted that shots fired on a bridge there would ricochet as far as East Ohio Street?

“What’s one archduke more or less?” I heard the next morning on a streetcar. “Thank God it’s not our problem.”

But that night my father hunched over a map of Europe, making lists of countries that might stand for or against the Austro-Hungarians. “So many enemies,” he said. “We’re trapped in the middle.”

“The middle of
what
?” I demanded. “They caught the assassin, didn’t they? He’ll have a trial. There’ll be another archduke. It’s simple.”

My father ran his hand down my arm. “Hazel, Hazel, you’re so American sometimes.
Nothing’s
that simple in Europe. Watch. You’ll see.”

CHAPTER 2

War Games

W
ithin days, I saw. Germany declared her support of Austria-Hungary against the Serbian rebels. Russia began mobilizing along her western front against possible Austro-Hungarian aggressions. “Ha!” my father snorted. “Russia wants Prussia.
They’ll
be doing the aggression.”

“Let them fight it out. It’s what Europe does best,” Luisa said. “
We
have the Atlantic Ocean.” The
Post
praised America’s happy freedom from entangling alliances. “It’ll be over by Christmas,” my teachers predicted. But each week brought more alliances, outraged diplomatic letters, and another ultimatum refused. Meanwhile local companies jockeyed for munitions contracts; steel mills hired new workers, and every company supplying the mills rejoiced. Our mayor predicted golden times for Pittsburgh, with good jobs for every able-bodied man. Luisa’s father, a master mechanic, was jubilant: “This madness will make us rich!”

I watched in horror as Europe’s war spread to the empty lot by our store. Herman, the tailor’s lisping son, donned a cut-down military jacket and set a troop of neighborhood boys to digging trenches they fortified with wood scraps. At first the sides were Germany and Austria-
Hungary against an equal set of Russians and Serbs. In late afternoons, the belligerents shared nickel sodas and planned the next day’s battle before reverting to familiar games of marbles and mumblety-peg. Peter played Russia, declaring “deathless” loyalty to Tsar Nicholas II. Artie claimed Austria-Hungary. But roles expanded with the war. Max was Serbia and sometimes France. Cheerful, limping Davy played England unless Herman needed him for Germany. Other boys were Ottomans, Italians, Poles, or Belgians, sure that these countries would soon join the fray. Lars, recently arrived from Sweden, predicted his country’s neutrality, so he’d change sides as he pleased. Walking to summer classes, I watched with sickening fascination as boys replayed the archduke’s death with screaming tumbles from a little red wagon followed by wild chases after the assassin.

“They’re too serious about this,” I reported to my teacher. “I’m afraid for them.” This was overreacting, I was told. War play is a natural human sport. As the great psychologist G. Stanley Hall explained, children are born as savages, to be civilized by education and discipline. When I pointed out that these boys were imitating the brutality of “civilized adults,” it was suggested that we move on to the day’s lessons. But my mind kept flying back to the empty lot. What could we expect if boys played in the shadows of munitions plants?

In late August, Uncle Willy’s nephew wrote from an army hospital: “I was a soldier for one week before I lost my leg. Will Clara want me now?”

Fighting in the Battle of Tannenberg, my father’s youngest brother, Wilhelm, wrote: “Dear Johannes, You can’t imagine what it’s like in the trenches; they destroy all that’s human in a man. We live like rats, burrowed in dirt. When we come over the top, out of the trenches, shells are whizzing like bees all around. Imagine your own men behind you, bayonets fixed, as you run between bomb craters toward great coils of
barbed wire. Enemy guns fire from their trenches. Everywhere explosions and men shrieking. Our first wave cut the wire just before they were slaughtered. I was in the second wave. We almost reached the Russian line before they beat us back. I put a bayonet in a man’s gut. I shot another in the face. Johannes, they looked like us, just in different uniforms. Retreating to our trenches, I ran past comrades screaming in pain. I couldn’t help them. We lost forty-three men in fifteen minutes. All that night, I saw their faces; I heard their screams. The bombs and shells and rain never stopped. How can a man sleep? By dawn we were to our knees in mud and water. The officers said—” Here my father squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them to read aloud: “They made us lay the bodies of our dead at the bottom of the trenches and stand on them to fight. Dear brother, if I live, which I doubt, who will I be? Not the Wilhelm you know.”

My mother gently pulled the letter from his hands, set it on the table, and led him to their bedroom. “Good night, Hazel,” she said softly, closing the door behind her. A week later, “by the grace of God,” my father said, Wilhelm lost an arm and was sent home to Heidelberg.

Germany won the Battle of Tannenberg, devastating the Russian Second Army, but the cost on both sides was staggering: nearly one hundred thousand casualties. In German shops along our street, men and women bent over the newspaper accounts, stunned. Meanwhile, boys played “Tannenberg” with sticks and popguns. “You’re my prisoner!” one voice would cry, then “No, you’re mine.
I’m
Russia now.”

“Hazel,” my father announced one evening, “when you’re teaching mathematics, ask your students to figure how many blocks of East Ohio Street one hundred thousand bodies would fill.”

My mother slammed down a plate of spaetzle. “She’s
not
asking children such questions. And why must we keep talking about war at the table?”

“Because one talks at the table. That’s what tables are
for
.” Silence. My father noted the sag of her mouth, adjusted his fork, and took a deep breath. “You’re right, my dear. Why ruin good spaetzle?” And he launched into a funny tale of how a Swede and a Hungarian who happened to be in the store together helped him puzzle out a Greek customer’s plumbing problem. “He didn’t speak a word of English, and not one of us knew each other’s languages, but you should have heard the Swede imitating plumbing sounds while the Hungarian brought out tools and mimed how to use them. I said we’d make a great vaudeville troupe. We got to laughing our heads off, complete strangers.” My father dug into his spaetzle. “Countries should be like that.
Everything
can be solved if you work together.” No, I thought, kings and ministers should be like Johannes Renner, who treated any man’s need for a washer, screw, or particular length of chain as a sacred trust. In his little world, peace reigned.

My mother beamed. “You see? Good things
are
happening.”

For the next few weeks, as the war churned on, we followed my mother’s new rule: “no war talk at the table.” I brought home teaching ideas from classes; we talked about how children could and couldn’t be educated, and we played word games in German and English. We even briefly discussed closing the store for two weeks and renting a cabin on Lake Erie. Here was the happy warmth I remembered from the time before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot.

Our peace didn’t last. At one Sunday dinner, Tante Elise cited H. G. Wells, who had said that this would be the war to end all wars. “You’ll see,” she announced. “Serbia will be punished. Germany will get Alsace again, and the Russians will go back to their farms.”

My father shook his head, slowly spooning beef chunks on egg noodles. “Have you seen what those bombs do to the land? How can it be farmed again? The war is spreading all over the world, like a great
stain.” Yes, that was true. Japan and South Africa had joined the Allies, as if one archduke dead in Sarajevo, thousands of miles away, threatened their peace.

“Any time now,” my father predicted, “America will join. Then
we’ll
be the enemy.”

“President Wilson doesn’t want war and if he’s pushed to it, America will side with Germany. Count on it,” Uncle Willy declared, banging the table so hard that our beer steins jumped. “There are so many of us. In Pittsburgh, New York, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, what language do you hear on the street? German! Remember, Americans fought England in their own revolution.”

“That was a long time ago,” my father countered. “It was a family fight. Americans and English understand each other. They buy German bread and meat; we build their houses, run their shops and brew their beer, but they don’t understand us. Hazel, who did you read in high school, Shakespeare or Friedrich Schiller?”

“Shakespeare.”

“Dickens or Johann von Goethe?”

“Dickens.”

“You see? They don’t care about our culture.”

“If America joins the Allies, will we be safe?” my mother asked nervously. I’d wondered this myself. Would my classmates turn against us? Would worse happen to my parents than a German newspaper pulled from their hands?

“Of course we’ll be safe, Katarina,” Tante Elise declared. “They need us; we’re so useful. Look around. Like Willy said, there are Germans everywhere: in banks, businesses, shops, schools, hospitals, everywhere.” This was true enough, but the history I’d teach was an endless march of wars with intervals of peace, like lulls between waves. In all these wars, useful people had been slaughtered.

“Listen to this,” said Uncle Willy, unfolding a letter from his cousin Oskar: “We’ve made a great killing machine. This war crushes men as boys stamp out ants, never caring who they are or what they could be. Those not killed are lost to madness.” Oskar was right. We would learn of a new kind of insanity called “shell shock” when Davy’s uncle was sent home twitching like a mis-strung marionette. His mother wrote that he screamed and dove under tables at any innocent noise, a pot lid falling or a baby’s cry.

Uncle Willy continued reading: “Rats the size of big cats eat bodies in No Man’s Land between the trenches. Arms and legs hang on trees like fruit. They throw limbs in coffins, enough to make a whole man. Sometimes parts are left over, or the living are buried in rubble. We can’t find them.”

“Please, Willy, stop,” said Tante Elise.

Yes, stop. Stop! Stop!
The bread was a dry lump in my mouth. I saw rats. I saw bodies on trees. My father brought out his map. Already pins marking the shifting front lines had turned whole patches of Germany into paper lace. I excused myself to fetch paper and charcoals. “I’m taking classes at the Carnegie Institute,” I explained. “Rendering shape with shadow.”

“Oh,” said my mother, “well then.” She and Tante Elise took out their mending. I went to the window seat and sketched a splash of light from our hanging lamp on the anxious faces and soft slope of shoulders, Tante Elise’s frown as she studied a seam, and the drape of our tablecloth. But when the fabric folds became trenches and the table was No Man’s Land, I started drawing children at play in a schoolyard far from Pittsburgh.

How could children “play” in this city? We lived in the clanging heart of a killing machine. Under a constant gray sky, the air pulsed with pounding. Factories churned out cannons, armor plate, and thousands
on thousands of shells. Westinghouse built a new munitions plant in twenty-nine days. We made howitzers and casings, locomotive parts for Russia, and grenades for Italy and France. “We’re arming the Allies,” owners said, but one heard of shipments quietly diverted to Germany or middlemen who played to the best offer, sometimes splitting a shipment.

Everyone profited from war, as if our faces were stamped on each howitzer. All able-bodied, willing men had work, and many women. Wages rose; union power grew. Business at our store was brisk. At home we ate more chicken, fruit, and chocolate. My mother bought me a fine wool skirt in coral and cream, a suit with a vaguely military jacket, and kidskin shoes more delicate than any she would have considered before. “It’s the American fashion,” she said, surely thinking
: Dressed so well for the city, why move to the country?