Page 133 of Hell to Pay
“No,” I said. “They didn’t. But the wrinkle remained.”
I learned about it the very next day, when Joe came to see me. We met in the Grüner Brauhaus for dinner, not the apartment, because Dr. Müller’s landlady, Frau Wentzl, had stared in shock when I’d said goodbye to Joe outside the door of the apartment the evening before. I hadn’t touched him and he hadn’t touched me, but his being there was already too much. I’d had to explain to her that I hadn’t known of Dr. Müller’s hospitalization—she’d seen Joe departing with him, of course, for she was a most nosey woman—and Joe had merely been bringing me word of it. She’d sniffed suspiciously at that, but fortunately, she knew me from the bakery and hadn’t thrown me out onto the street. Shehadsaid, though, “Whatever Frau Adelberg may have let you get away with, it’s most improper to be alone with a man in your flat, much less an American. Your mother isn’t here to tell you, so I will. And I won’t have my house getting a reputation like that.”
Now, Joe was saying, over weak beer and rather suspect liver dumplings, “I got in to talk to Colonel Forrest today, the CO. Serving soldiers need permission from their COs to marry. Which I knew, but …”
“Oh.” My heart was sinking, because Joe didn’t look happy. “What did he say?”
He took my hand—under the table, for we were being circumspect now—and said, “The Army’s forbidden marriages between GIs and German or Japanese women.”
My vision swam a bit. “Oh,” I said, and swallowed.
“Marguerite.” Joe gripped my hand more tightly. “They’ll have to change their mind at some point. It looks like the Army’s going to be here in Germany a long time, and in Japan, too, and I won’t be the only one wanting to get married. Theyhaveto change their mind.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew better than Joe that governments didn’t have to change their minds. I looked down at my liver dumplings instead and tried to take a bite, but itwouldn’t go down. I chewed and chewed as my eyes filled with tears, and at last, the bite was gone.
“Hey.” That was Joe again. “Hey, now. By the time this trial’s over, they’ve got to have changed the law. I’ll—I’ll write to my Congressmen. They can’t do this to us guys after everything we’ve been through. I have a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. That has to count for something.”
I said, trying for calm, “Perhaps after you’re discharged and are home again, you could send for me. Or does the … the Act apply only to serving soldiers?”
“See, now,” Joe said, “that’s an idea.” He smiled at me, but I could see the frustration and concern beneath.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked. “That I won’t wait?”
“No,” he said, too quickly. “No, of course not.”
“Joe.” I wanted to put my hand on his face, but I couldn’t. “If I didn’t wait, you wouldn’t want to marry me anyway. I wish we could be alone, though. When spring comes, we can have picnics. But if Dr. Müller—” I stopped myself again, not wanting to say the word. We’d taken the books to him tonight, but hadn’t been allowed to see him, and the nurse had been most noncommittal about his prognosis.
“If you can’t afford the apartment,” Joe said, “I’ll pay for it.”
“Of course I can afford it. If I’m allowed to pay the rent, that is. If I’m allowed to stay. It’s the landlady, you see. She’s not a bad sort, but her husband is still in an American camp. I just don’t know.”
“Then,” Joe said, “we’ll find you someplace else.” He squeezed my hand again. “We’re going to do this. It’s going to work. You’ll see.”
“And meanwhile,” I said, “we can take turns reassuring each other. A useful skill in a marriage, I think.”
It was hard to keep believing, though, over the next months. Dr. Müller came home eventually, very thin and tired, but at least he had medicines now. That was so muchbetter, and it also meant Joe could come visit again. “And it’s good we can’t marry yet,” I told Joe one evening, walking home from the music shop, “because I couldn’t possibly leave him. Not like this. Now that you’re bringing so much good food, though, he’ll surely improve.” But he didn’t, and one cold, rainy morning in March, he didn’t rise for breakfast, and when I put a hand on his shoulder, he was stiff and cold. I stood there and cried helpless tears for another friend gone, then dried my eyes and arranged to bury him in the frozen ground.
When Joe and I stood over the cold, dark hole to say goodbye, I told myself he was going to be with his wife, but I couldn’t quite believe it. I still went to Mass every Sunday, but more out of duty and hope now than faith. Hope that I could believe again someday. It was so hard to believe as my parents had, living in a world where such things happened, and God sometimes seemed very far away.
There were many burials that year, and when the winter came again, there were more. People were calling it theHungerwinter,or theWeisse Tod—the White Death.The frost came early, freezing vegetables in the ground. The temperature dropped more, staying below zero for days, and chickens froze in their coops as fuel became more and more scarce. Engines froze up in the cold, and goods couldn’t be transported. The electricity was only on now for a few hours a day, and mothers brought their children into bed with them so they wouldn’t freeze to death during the night. Babies cried for lack of milk, and mothers cried for their inability to supply it. Refugees died of cold and hunger in cellars and bombed-out buildings and on the streets, and the living took their coats and blankets for themselves. How many were dying, we didn’t know, for information was as scarce as coal.
The end of the war had been hard, but this peace was even worse. I found myself at times being glad that Dr. Müllerhadn’t lived long enough to experience it. He would have suffered so.
One benefit came of the harsh conditions, though: Frau Wentzl, my landlady, stopped glowering at me. That was, of course, due to Joe. At first, when he’d seen her—for she always seemed to be hovering around the front door when he walked me home after our meager dinners at the brewery or our musical evenings—he’d asked what he could bring her. Canned ham? Toilet paper? Margarine? Chocolate? She’d snapped in response, and he’d stopped asking. One very cold morning, though, when I was in the corridor, wrapping myself in the final layer of scarves for the walk to the bakery—Herr Adelberg had had to ask me for my potato bread recipe, for there was not a scrap of wheat flour to be had—she said, looking past me, “It’s a pity one doesn’t have soup cubes anymore,” as if speaking to herself. “And ham, of course. And, oh, for a bit of sugar!”
It was as if we communicated via code, after that. She would sigh over some longed-for item: cooking oil, tea, or the ever-popular toilet paper, I would tell Joe, Joe would bring the thing at his next visit, and I would knock on Frau Wentzl’s door and say, “I have a small gift for you.” She would act surprised and pretend to accept the gift only grudgingly, but I was allowed to stay in the little apartment, where I slept in Dr. Müller’s bed, read his books, and missed him. He’d educated me, and I tried to repay his gifts by allowing him to educate me more.
I lay there each evening, through that October and November and on into December, with all the blankets and both our coats piled over me and a hot-water bottle on my stomach, and read my way through loneliness, through uncertainty, through sorrow. I read a great deal of Shakespeare—the comedies only, for I couldn’t manage tragedy now—and Goethe, Dickens, and Austen, too. I tried to read Kant, butgave it up—space and time were mere “forms of intuition,” and what we experience mere “appearances?” No, the philosophers were too much for me, or I had the wrong kind of mind for them. Whether intuition or appearances or whatever else, what was before me was my reality, and the only thing I knew how to deal with. I saw Joe as often as he could get away and was never alone with him, we played music together in the little shop, where it was often nearly too cold to perform, and I hugged Matti and talked to him about school and told myself things would get better. But, oh, that little flat was empty and cold, and the future so far away.
Joe had written to his Congressmen, and then he’d written again, “every month like clockwork,” he’d said, but there was no change. We were all paying still for the Nazis’ sins. Perhaps that was right—Heaven knows the Poles, the Ukrainians, and every Jew in Europe had suffered more than this—but can the deaths of children ever be right? I tried to see the larger picture and consider such things as objectively as Dr. Müller would have done, but I’m afraid I often failed and was merely lonely and too often afraid.
In late September, Joe told me he planned to sign on for six months more with the Army. “There are going to be more trials,” he said, looking weary. “Even though the Germans almost wholly disapprove, and none of the other Allies want to be involved. Are we doing any good here, or just fooling ourselves? How is this winning hearts and minds, especially when people are going hungry?” Despondent, the way Joe never was.
“Who will they be trying?” I was startled by the news. He was right—many Germans seemed to feel more victimized than remorseful during these hard days, blaming the English and Americans for their plight at least as much as they blamed Hitler and the others, and the trial had become increasingly unpopular as it had dragged on. The end was drawing near,the German lawyers mounting a passionate defense of their clients, who had merely followed orders, as was the duty of any military man. So the newspapers said, and so many of the customers said in the bakery, too. I found I couldn’t agree—some things, surely, one simply cannot do—but the few times I’d offered my opinion, it was to dark looks and muttering about “her American man.” Women didn’t actually draw their skirts aside as I passed, but I was certainly less popular than I had once been, and at times, it was almost more than my temper could bear.
Joe said, “The next trial will be of doctors,” and looked more tired still.
“Doctors?” I was puzzled.
