There were five things my father wished he had done differently in the years before we were repatriated to Germany. When he told me what these five things were, he and I were sitting at a dinner table—where there had been no dinner—in a tiny apartment in Stuttgart, Germany, on a cold day during the last year of the war. Mommi, Max, and my grandmother had gone to bed. The flat was quiet, and mercifully so were the skies outside. My father’s childhood home was a bombed-out ruin by then. There was no food, the Allies were marching ever east and north toward Berlin, and all Papa’s old friends and acquaintances in his obliterated hometown of nearby Pforzheim were wondering why in the world he had come back.
I hadn’t prior to that moment asked if he had any regrets. Papa and I were just quietly working a jigsaw puzzle that he’d salvaged from the rubble of his mother’s house. A chipped kerosene lamp was burning so low between us that we could hardly make out the pieces. My stomach rumbled, and to my papa, who had always been able to provide for us, I think the sound of my hunger seemed as though it was a question. Is this what you wanted for us, Papa?
That’s when he told me about those five things, although I think he was listing them for himself and not so much for me. First, he told me he wished he’d left his father’s war medals with my grandmother when he returned to Davenport from Opa’s funeral. He almost did leave them with her. Not because he knew Germany would soon be the enemy of the United States. Nobody knew that was going to happen. Not then. It was because my Oma had looked so sad when she’d handed the velvet-lined box to him.
“Your father wanted you to have these,” she’d said, still in her mourning clothes.
Oma had looked like she couldn’t bear to part with the medals, Papa remembered, and so he hadn’t extended his hands to take them. Oma had pushed the black box toward him.
“Take them,” she’d said, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “He wanted them to be yours.”
Papa told me he would’ve said, “But I want you to have them, Mutti,” if he could do it over. The medals meant more to Oma than to him and they always had. They were the emblems of my grandfather’s bravery and loyalty and the proof that he had promised he would come home from the Great War and that he had.
I had seen those medals when Papa brought them home from Germany the same summer Hitler invaded Poland. The ribbons were colorfully striped like long strands of taffy and the medals themselves felt cool and serious in my hand. I saw them only that one time. Papa put the box on his closet shelf, still covered in the chamois cloth that Oma wrapped it in for the voyage to America, and that’s where they had stayed.
Secondly, Papa wished he hadn’t left a copy of Mein Kampf buried in the back of his nightstand, years after he’d read it. He hadn’t even liked the book. It had been recommended to him by a man he used to drink beer and smoke cigars with at the German American club in downtown Davenport. That man had moved away and forgotten to ask for his book back. My father had always meant to look up the fellow and mail the book to him, but it had been a long while and he had forgotten about it. The FBI hadn’t believed the book belonged to someone else when they searched our house and found it.
“What was that book?” I asked as I studied a puzzle piece. I hadn’t yet been made aware that before I was even born Adolf Hitler had written a book. People had stopped discussing it years before and had been discussing the man instead. And that was all people talked about when Hitler’s name came up in conversations that I had overheard: the man and his terrible plan.
“It’s a book I never should have had in our house,” Papa answered. And my empty stomach rumbled again, and he closed his eyes as though his insides had growled in protest, and not mine.
Then Papa told me he wished he’d never told the neighbor’s son that he knew the ingredients needed to make a bomb. All chemists like him did. You learned it in university your first year. That’s how you became a safe chemist who didn’t make terrible mistakes.
When Stevie Winters, who was hands down the most mischievous boy I’ve ever known, and whose father was a policeman, had asked Papa, “Do you know which chemicals explode in a bomb?” my father had said he did, but now he wished he’d lied and said, “No. I don’t.” Stevie Winters would have gone home to terrorize his little sister or cut the fringe off his mother’s sofa pillows or break a window playing ball in the house. He wouldn’t have gone home and told his father that that German man, Mr. Sontag, said he knew how to make a bomb.
Papa told me the fourth thing he wished he hadn’t done was tell a certain coworker that he didn’t think he could raise a gun against a fellow German, so he hoped with all his heart that he’d never be asked to. It was true that Papa didn’t think he could put on an American Army uniform and fight against Germany. But he wished he hadn’t said it to someone.
“You don’t have to say everything you’re thinking, Elise,” he said.
The coworker hadn’t asked Papa if he could kill a fellow German. The two of them had just been talking about the war in Europe and whether America was going to get involved, and Papa had volunteered that information. The coworker had remembered him saying it. Before Papa was arrested, the FBI had talked to this coworker. They had talked to Stevie Winters and his father. They had talked to everyone we knew.
Lastly, Papa told me he wished he had applied for American citizenship sooner. He and Mommi waited until after Hitler marched into France, and by then petitions for citizenship from a pair of German immigrants who’d been in the United States for nearly two decades were fodder for suspicion, not loyalty.
“Why did you wait so long?” the FBI agents had asked him. “You could have become a citizen years ago. Why did you wait?”
Papa hadn’t wanted to say, Because it didn’t seem that important until now. That would’ve sounded like he didn’t love America much, and the truth was, he did. But he loved Germany, too, and he didn’t want to choose between them. He told me it had been like being a child of divorced parents who had to choose the one he loved most when asked which one he wanted to live with. So Papa had said he didn’t know why he’d waited.
These were the five things Papa had done when we all lived in America that, until the day he died, he wished he’d done differently. These were the five things about my papa the FBI didn’t like. The five things that formed the accusations against him. The five reasons he was interned first at a detention camp in North Dakota and then at Crystal City with hundreds of other German, Japanese, and a handful of Italian nationals and their wives and American-born children. The five reasons we were traded in January of 1945 for American civilians and wounded prisoners of war stuck behind enemy lines in Germany. The five reasons he and I had been sitting in that rented flat no bigger than our quarters had been at Crystal City, doing a jigsaw puzzle in the semidarkness.
I would remember that conversation always. If Papa had left the war medals with Oma, given the man back his book, told wicked Stevie Winters to run along home, said nothing to his coworker about the war in Europe, and applied for U.S. citizenship when he and Mommi first came to the States, my life would have been completely different. It scares me to think how different it would be. Would I even be me? Wouldn’t I be some other person entirely?
I wouldn’t have married who I married, wouldn’t have raised the children I have raised.
And I wouldn’t be seated on an airplane bound for San Francisco at this moment because I would never have known Mariko Inoue. My family and I wouldn’t have been sent to Crystal City. Mariko and I never would have met.
All that I am hinges on those five little things my father had always wished he’d done differently.
I can feel Agnes tugging at these thoughts of mine as the jet climbs the sky. She wants them. Like a child who wants handfuls of candy before supper, she wants them. Agnes wants them because they are so old and threaded so deeply within me. She wants that memory of fifteen-year-old me sitting at a borrowed table, in a broken world, working a puzzle with my father in the last year of the war.
She wants to have my ponderings over who I would be if Papa had done those five things a different way. She wants it all. I turn my gaze to the porthole window and I whisper two words to Agnes that are drowned out by the white noise in the plane’s cabin. Not yet.