Max ran to me when we stepped inside, afraid perhaps that I’d found a way to leave here. Oma came to me, too, her eyes puffy with tears. Mommi stood in between the living room and kitchen, staring at me glassy-eyed, her expression too difficult to read. I figured out many, many months later that she felt deserving of every terrible thing I’d yelled, but in that moment, I thought she was mad at me. I went to her with tentative steps and told her, in German, that I was very sorry for what I had said. She, like me, could not bear the piercing beauty of love extended to you when you think you don’t merit it, and she would not look at me. She turned her head, and fresh tears began to trail down her cheeks.
Ashamed at what I had done, I put my arms around her and begged her to forgive me. She stroked my hair with a shaking hand.
“Nothing to forgive, Elise. Please let us speak of this no more.” She peeled herself away from me and went into the little bedroom and closed the door.
I turned to Papa, frightened by Mommi’s behavior. His eyes now glistened afresh, too. “She is sad we didn’t know it was going to be like this. That is all,” he said, in English, perhaps so Oma wouldn’t have to hear it. “She knows how hard this has been for you and Max. She is so frightened for your safety. It is hard for her to watch you suffer.”
His arms were around me again, and so were Max’s. We stood that way, in a triad of love and hurt, until our tears stopped. Oma coaxed us into the kitchen for the promised tea.
Mommi came out of the room a little later and told Papa she’d be right back. She put on her coat and gloves and said she needed to go out for a bit. When she returned an hour and half later, she came to where I was seated on the sofa. Oma was teaching me how to crochet with a ball of yarn she’d found in the flat’s linen closet. In Mommi’s hand were a tablet of writing paper and two new sharpened pencils. She’d walked twenty blocks to find a store that could sell them to her.
“Perhaps you can rewrite the letters to Mariko?” Mommi extended the paper and pencils to me. Her gaze was on what she held, not on me. “I’m so sorry they’re gone. If I could rewrite them for you, I would. If I could have saved them from the house, I would have. If I could have . . .”
She didn’t finish the thought. I suppose there were just too many things she wished she could do for me and couldn’t. I took the tablet and pencils from her and nodded, not trusting myself to speak more than the words “Thank you.” Mommi raised her gaze to meet mine for just a second, and then she went into the kitchen and began to cut the few carrots and potatoes we had for our supper that night.
As it turned out, rewriting the letters to Mariko was the most therapeutic thing I could have done. Over the next few days I filled all the pages in the tablet, front and back, with all that had transpired around me and to me and inside me since we’d been parted. It was late when I finished the last page; everyone but Papa and me had gone to bed. When I closed the tablet, he got out the puzzle he’d uncovered in the rubble of Oma’s house, even though it was nearing ten o’clock, he had work in the morning, and Max was asleep behind us on the little sofa.
“Are you done?” he said, nodding to the tablet. “Did you say everything you wanted to?”
“For now,” I replied. “I’ll need another tablet.” It was my way of saying I knew we weren’t done with anything.
He nodded. “We’ll get you one.”
He dumped the pieces out onto the table. The cover on the box showed a pristine alpine scene with deer and birds and glistening snow and verdant pines. He set the box top up on its side, so we could look at it while we worked. The picture was so beautiful and peaceful.
“Oh, Elise,” Papa said wearily as he gazed at the pile of pieces, which looked like bits of a broken world lying on the table like that. Thinking back on it now, it was as if he’d really said, “How in the world did we end up here?”
But at the time, when he’d said my name, I had replied, “Yes, Papa?” as I poked the puzzle bits for a corner piece, because my father had taught me long ago that is how you begin to solve a puzzle.
And that is when Papa told me those five things he would have done differently, if only he could have.
* * *
? ? ?
Max began classes at a partially standing grammar school four blocks away at the beginning of our second week back in Stuttgart. Mommi found hourly work at a tailor shop that miraculously still had clientele; there were apparently plenty of people still living in Stuttgart who needed their clothes mended or taken in after six years of war. Oma taught me German on mornings she and I weren’t waiting in long lines for our food rations. In the afternoons, we volunteered at an orphanage, holding babies and toddlers whom the war had made parentless. I knew just enough German to shush and soothe a crying baby, and those young infants were daily reminders that life was still looking for a way to hold on despite the war.
Papa’s meager paycheck at the treatment plant and the few Reichsmarks Mommi was earning kept us fed when food was available to buy. Some days we had food but had to eat it cold because the electricity and gas were off. Some days we had utilities but no food. Occasionally, Mommi would bring home a clothing item that had been left at the tailor shop and never claimed. We went from having only the clothes on our back to owning a few extra sets, all of them used, the wrong size, and in various stages of wear. Oma wanted to cash in some of her gold coins to help replace some of what we had lost in her house, but Papa wouldn’t let her. People were selling their valuables for one-tenth their value just to buy bread. Papa wouldn’t hear of it.
Oma and Papa hadn’t decided what to do about her home in Pforzheim. Papa had been back to the house again to see if he could salvage anything else, and the part that had been still standing had now started to cave in. The entire house would need to be rebuilt if Oma wished to return to Pforzheim. Oma had told him she didn’t know if she could go back there and try to re-create what she and Opa had had together. That seemed impossible, even to me. Pforzheim—the one she and Papa had known—was gone.
Papa had assured her she didn’t need to decide anything right away. They could wait until the future looked clearer, which I think was Papa’s way of saying she could wait to decide until the war was over, which we all wanted to believe was imminent. One of the things Papa brought back to Stuttgart from his last visit to Pforzheim was the portable radio Oma had in her living room. It had been buried under a protective shelter of broken furniture and slabs of plaster and lath. Every Friday evening Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, would speak to the nation to assure the German populace that victory was certain and to stand firm, but on that Friday evening as we huddled around the recovered radio, there was unmistakable desperation in Goebbels’s voice as he tried to convince us Germany would prevail despite the approaching hordes of Allied armies. Even I could sense in his tone that he knew Germany was on the brink of defeat. It was surely only a matter of time. And every day that Papa was not summoned to Berlin this hope was bolstered.
Even so, Oma couldn’t see a future in the wasteland that had been her home all her life. When she received a letter from Werner and Matilde’s daughter Emilie, who lived with her family in Munich and who had invited Oma to come live with them, she opted to go. She showed Papa the letter they’d written her and told him she was going to accept their offer. She didn’t want to be a burden to us anymore and she wanted Papa and Mommi to again be able to share a bed.
We were sitting at the dinner table when she brought out the letter, which had been forwarded to her from the relocated and temporary Pforzheim post office. We’d been in Stuttgart six weeks, it was early April, and word was the Allies had already crossed the Rhine. Dinner that night had been half a small chicken and a pint of sauerkraut for the five of us.
“They have room in their house for me, and they want me to come. I think I should go. I want to go,” Oma said.
Papa had been completely unprepared for such news. For a second or two, he said nothing. “But you belong here with us,” he finally replied. “And you are not a burden.”
“None of us belongs anywhere now, Otto,” she said. “I can’t stay here in this tiny little apartment when it is already too small for you and your family.”
“We don’t care,” my mother said.
“I care, Freda. I care,” Oma said, her eyes filling with tears. “I want to go. Please let me. Emilie lost her parents and sister. She is grieving. Her children are young, much younger than Max and Elise. She needs me.”
“We need you, Mutti!” Mommi said.
Oma reached across the table. “No, you need each other right now. And I can’t stay here. It is too painful for me. Let me go, please?”
I was amazed that I was understanding the conversation, so amazed that I wasn’t fully comprehending that Oma wished to leave us. Staying was too hard. Too hard.
“They have a big house. Emilie’s husband’s family is very well off. And Emilie needs me.”
“It’s not safe there, Mutti!” Papa said, almost angrily.
“And here? Is it safe here, Otto?” Oma replied gently. “The raids have been worse here than there. And Emilie and Lothar don’t live near any factories or military targets. Their house is still in one piece.”