Page 109 of Hell to Pay
Oh, well. Nothing to be done. I ran downstairs again, half expecting Joe to have left, but there he was, smiling at the sight of me as if I’d swept into the room in an evening gown and the emerald parure, ready for the opera. He held the shop door for me as I flipped the sign to Closed, and when we were outside, said, “I’ve managed the most important thing, anyway. I have transportation.”
“A Jeep?” I scanned the street. No Jeep.
He laughed. “Nothing so impressive. I bought a bicycle, though, in Nuremberg. I’m going to be stationed in the Zirndorf barracks, about three miles from here, so you see—I needed a way to get to you when I can’t get a vehicle.” Thebicycle was an old black one, but the tires were new. How had he managed that?
I said, “You’re rather confident, aren’t you, planning your visits to me already?”
“No,” he said, “but I’m hopeful.” And smiled.
“I’ve never flirted before,” I told him, one hand on the handlebars of his bicycle. “Isn’t it astonishing that I seem to know how?”
“You’re a natural,” he agreed. “So. Do you want to hop up on my handlebars and go for a spin?”
“Oh.” I hesitated for a long moment. “I have a—I also have a bicycle, actually.”
His face fell a little, and then he smiled ruefully. “Serves me right. I’ve had this image for days now of you perched up there. I’m not too good at flirting myself, but I’ve definitely had that image.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “Can I ride along with you,” I asked, “and maybe—maybe explain later?”
“Sure,” he said. “You can do that. We don’t have to flirt all the time. Talking to you works for me.”
How satisfying it was riding along with him, not as an errand, but as an outing! I felt like an entirely different person, a person with leisure. And how gold the willows and cypress in the autumn light, reflected in the slow-moving river along with the puffy white clouds in a serene blue sky! If one kept one’s gaze high enough, one could almost believe that war had never touched this place.
Joe seemed to have planned ahead, for he cycled with decision until we reached a particularly large willow overhanging the water, then propped his bicycle against it while I did the same. A green Army blanket came out of the rucksack, and he spread it on the grass and said, “Here we are. One picnic, as promised.”
When I sat on the blanket with my feet tucked demurely toone side, I didn’t feel like Charlie Chaplin anymore, for Joe took out the most wonderful assortment of foods. Cheese—“from Switzerland,” he said, “since it’s hard to come by here, and the American versions are pretty lacking once you’ve tasted this stuff”—and the hard biscuits we’d had before. Corned beef in a can, which nearly made me moan, an orange—heaven!—and the most beautiful yellow pears, which he’d wrapped in one of those khaki shirts. “T-shirts,” the GIs called them. He pulled out a military knife and sliced the pears and the cheese, arranging them on that same shirt, and brought out another bar of chocolate, which he broke into pieces. “I’m a little low on the accoutrements,” he said, “but we’ll pretend this is arranged on a linen napkin.” And then he pulled two bottles of beer from the rucksack.
“How lovely,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’ll get very drunk.”
“I can promise you that I won’t,” he said. “Drink as much as you like, and I’ll manage the rest.”
We didn’t talk for a minute. A faint afternoon breeze came up and rustled the hanging limbs of the willow, and on the water, ducks paddled serenely by. “They’re lucky they haven’t been eaten,” I said after a bit. “I haven’t seen swans here. I wonder if there are swans. They’re not very nice birds on land, but they’re so lovely swimming along.”
“Mm.” Joe piled another biscuit with corned beef and cheese, then handed it to me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen swans, just read about them in books, so I have no opinion. You’re not from here, then? From Fürth?”
“Oh!” I said, getting confused again. “No. I come from Dresden.” Even saying the name brought a pang of homesickness. Parent-sickness. Life-sickness.
“Dresden,” Joe said thoughtfully. “It was bombed pretty badly, I hear.”
“Yes,” I said. “My home was destroyed—well, I think it was destroyed; I wasn’t able to see all of it—and my parents andthe—and the others all killed. All but Dr. Becker and the children and me, for we were in a deeper cellar. They were hiding, you see.”
“Hiding from the Nazis,” Joe said. His eyes had sharpened. “I wondered how you came to be traveling with a Jewish family, when you didn’t seem to be Jewish yourself. That must have been pretty scary until the war ended.”
“Yes,” I said. “For all of us. My parents, my father especially, was very—very disturbed by what happened during the war. Very disturbed by the Nazis. He’d been summoned by the Gestapo the very night of the bombings, in fact. Summoned for the next morning, that is. He died instead.” I had to swallow. “And what am I doing,” I cried, trying to be lighthearted, “bringing up such a terrible subject during this lovely picnic?”
Joe didn’t smile or change the subject. He said, “That must have been a bad night.”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “Yes, it was. Terrible. The worst thing I’ve— There were so many dead bodies in the morning. Parts of bodies, too. The streets were full of them. I’d never seen anything like it, for we were practically untouched until then. And during the night, too, when my father and I went out after the first raid. There was a tower of flame, and a roaring wind. The flame went so high, I couldn’t even see how high. That frightened me very much.”
“It was a firestorm,” Joe said. “A fire tornado. When a fire gets that hot, it creates its own weather system. We have some bad wildfires in California that do that. It happened that way in Hamburg, too.” He was propped on his side, toying with a blade of grass, and now, he looked up. “I’m not sure how to feel about all that, but you’re probably pretty clear about it.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. When we bombed London and Warsaw and Rotterdam and, oh, so many other places, early in the war, it was shown in all the newsreels. Celebrated, certainly. It doesn’t feel right to me, targeting civilians likethat—what have they to do with it?—but both sides did it, didn’t they? The British, the Americans, the Germans …” I shrugged. “The Russians would most certainly have bombed us if they’d had the planes and the bombs to do it. The Great War, too, you know … that was also very bad, and those are the only two wars I’ve known. The nerve gas, especially. Again, that was Germany. Such weapons surely have no place in a civilized world, but we don’t seem to live in a civilized world.”
Oh, what an accomplished hand I was at flirting! It was a wonder I’d never had a boyfriend, with skills like these!
Joe said, “Well, that’s why I’m here, actually. In Nuremberg.”
“What is?” I was confused.
