Page 71 of Hell to Pay
“You want to stay there,” I said. “Of course you do. It’s home. And yes, I can walk.”
The steps seemed easy today, and my heart was full.
And when we went through the door, there he was. Little Matti.
I pushed open the shop door that day in 1945 with what felt like the last of my strength, and the others followed me, the brass bells jingling merrily at our entrance. The shop was tiny,but so clean. How remarkable to be surprised by that, in Germany! Everywhere we’d been, these past months—everywhere but that week at the Langbeins’—had been blasted and overcrowded and untidy and, yes, dirty, too. How could it not be?
A woman stood behind the counter. “Good day,” she said.
“Good day,” I answered, and dug in my pocket for my coins and ration book as Dr. Becker silently produced his own book. “May I have a loaf, please? And may we trouble you for water?”
She had only one kind of bread, and only two remaining loaves of it, but it was bread, and it looked—well, real, and so delicious. Surely no orphan ever looked through the window of a cake shop as we were all looking at that bread! She gave me the loaf and took my money, using only her right hand. There was possibly something wrong with her left. She looked at me, then at the others, and said, “You’d better sit down. Here, in the back.”
She lifted a hinged section of counter, and we followed her wordlessly into a back room on the right, with a single window looking out onto the narrow cobbled street. On the left, I could see the kitchen, with its bins for flour, its two enormous industrial ovens, its long wooden counter that ran along one entire wall. It was all very clean, but looked a little bare.
She said, “I’ll fetch plates,” and I helped carry glasses, a pitcher of water, a bread knife. Somethingwaswrong with her left arm—it had an odd angle to it at the elbow. She said, “There’s the end of a bit of cheese as well, and some marmalade,” and put them on the table. “One can’t help still wishing for butter.”
I said, “Excuse me, but—would you have a place to wash up?” To tell the truth, I had to relieve myself rather badly. I was having my period, which is not a nice thing to have as arefugee. Only rags to use, and so few places to wash them. Modesty rebelled at the public nature of that washing, but what was one to do? Also, although I didn’t suffer as much as my mother had from my bit of hemophilia, my period had been a painful trial even before we’d left the palace, and now? No nun was going to care, when she was telling you to leave the convent because you’d been there too long, that your entire midsection and back ached terribly. Our journeys had been remarkably free of hot-water bottles, too.
I can still remember what a relief it was to wash my hands and face, to have a chair to sit in and bread and cheese to eat. The woman, whose name was Frau Adelberg, made a pot of tea as well, and we thanked her again and again.
We exchanged stories, as one did in those days. We told ours, which wasn’t very true at all, and she told hers, which probably was. Her husband was fighting somewhere—for once to the west rather than the east—and she’d had no news of him for weeks—“But the Americans and English, one hears, are taking prisoners, and feeding them, too. Not like the Russians, those barbarians.” Dr. Becker and I looked at each other—even from the little we’d heard, the Germans had treated their own Russian prisoners very badly indeed—but it would have been impolite to point that out, especially since she told us with her next breath that her son had been lost “somewhere on the Russian front. The war is too cruel, but it’ll be over soon, and?—”
A voice from the doorway.“Mutti?I’ve finished my lessons.”
“Come in, then, and meet our guests,” she said. “My son Matti.”
Matti was a small fellow—most children were small these days—and, I thought, a little younger than Gerhardt. The two boys looked at each other shyly, and then Matti climbed up on a chair, accepted a piece of bread with much less desperationthan we’d shown, and told Gerhardt, “I have a tin of soldiers in my bedroom. Would you like to see?”
“Yes, please,” Gerhardt said politely.
Matti climbed down again, stuffing the last bite of bread into his mouth, and said, “Come on, then!”
Dr. Becker said, “We shouldn’t—” and Frau Adelberg said, “Oh, let them play. Matti has little enough chance of it now. And with the Americans nearly at our doorstep, he’s likely to have even less chance. A day or two, they’re saying, no more. I need to put out my flag before it’s too late.”
“Your flag?” I asked, even as my heart leaped at those magical words:The Americans.This had to be the end. The Allies had carried all before them for months now. Why would this be any different?
“I’m Swiss,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”
“Oh.” I didn’t say,I thought you had a speech impediment, as if you have potatoes in your mouth, and I don’t understand the Bavarian accent well anyway.“Will the Swiss flag help, then?”
“We’ll soon find out, won’t we?” she said. “And not a moment too soon. When the soldiers come home, I’ll be able to offer good bread again, as long as we can get the flour for it, and it’s anybody’s guess how muchthatwill cost. This arm of mine! It’s meant to get better, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.”
Dr. Becker said, “What happened, if I may ask?” He had his “doctor look”: a sort of quickening of interest, like a carpenter who sees a sagging roofline and longs to put it right.
“Oh,” she said, “I was buying flour—the effort that is now, and bringing it back, too, in a cart chained to the back of my bicycle! The man wouldn’t even deliver it. No petrol, he said, and no horses, either. How one took things for granted before. Well, there I was, out in the open, and there was an air-raid. I couldn’t get to shelter and was struck by a piece of shrapnel. Only my arm was broken, so it could have beenworse. That was on the second of January. They say ninety percent of Nuremberg was destroyed in an hour, did you know? But it was very bad in Dresden too, one hears.Na ja,we’ve all suffered. I lost my bicycle, though—its frame was terribly twisted.Andthe flour, which was almost worse. The use of my arm, too, at least for now. I don’t think that doctor knew what he was doing. I smelledSchnappson him most distinctly.”
“I’m a doctor myself, as it happens,” Dr. Becker said. Brave of him, but perhaps he did feel safer in the anonymity of this place, so far from Dresden and anybody we knew. “If you’ll permit me to examine it?”
Frau Adelberg said, “Of course,” and he washed up again—he was as scrupulous about cleanliness as it was possible to be under our circumstances—stood before her, and felt along her arm, his eyes looking off into the distance as his fingers probed delicately. A great deal of“Hmmm,”and “Do you feel pain when I press here?” until at last he stood back and said, “Yes, badly set and poorly mended. You’ll need another operation, once one can get such things again. Until then, I’m afraid that arm won’t be of much use.”
Frau Adelberg’s good-natured face fell. “Oh. Well, I thought so. A one-armed baker’s about as useful as a one-armed paper hanger! I can steady the dough with it, but as for kneading …” She sighed.
I became bold, then. “I can bake,” I said. “I’ve baked all the bread for my household this past year, and there were nearly twenty of us. Wheat and rye, Brötchen, sourdough from a culture—if one has a culture, of course, but surely one could borrow some? That’s very useful when yeast is hard to come by—and potato bread. I’ve come to despise potatoes in general, but potato dumplings and potato bread are a different matter, aren’t they? I also know Pumpernickel.”
Frau Adelberg said, “I don’t know. There’s little enough toeat for Matti and me, and growing less all the time. On the other hand?—”
“Dr. Becker can help, too,” I said. “He can carry things and, oh, perform so many useful tasks! He can even cook, or so he says. Better than me, at any rate. And use his medical skills, too. People will pay in food if not in cash, if only we can stop somewhere long enough to allow it.” Dr. Becker was staring at me, and with a start of horror, I realized I’d forgotten to use his correct name. How had I been so careless? “I’m sorry. I meant Herr Kolbe. No, I meant—” I stopped in confusion.
