The afternoon was so beautiful, it didn’t matter that battered buildings were all around me or that shards of glass and splinters of wood and bits of plaster crunched under my shoes. I was thinking to myself that in just twenty-two months I would be eighteen, and I could go where I wanted, live where I wanted. I would be walking different streets then because I had an American passport and an American birth certificate. In twenty-two months I would be strolling the sidewalks of Manhattan and I would be with my best friend and we would have the world at our feet and it would be whatever we made of it. We would no longer be at the mercy of decisions made by other people. I would be wearing perhaps a yellow linen suit and a crisp hat with silk buttercups and netting on the brim and my pumps would be gray and my handbag would match, and I would be wearing pearl earrings and lipstick the color of rubies. Maybe I would get a job at the New York Times with Mariko or maybe I wouldn’t. I didn’t care. It was enough to imagine that I wasn’t where I was and was instead charting my future with the one friend I still had and believed I always would. I did not hear the footsteps until it was too late.
I turned instinctively at the sound of movement behind me and was surprised beyond belief that two men in military uniforms were only inches from me. They might have had brown hair under their berets or black or blond like mine. Tall or short, I don’t recall. What I do remember is the cold gray of their eyes. I saw the anger and loathing and intent in their gaze on me even as, in an instant, one of them grabbed me with one hand and covered my mouth with the other. The second man laughed and said something to the first. I had always thought the French language sounded so beautiful, but I knew these were not beautiful words they were speaking.
Fear as cold as ice gripped me. As I struggled to break free, the first man pulled me into an alley littered with debris of every kind and slammed me into a wall, momentarily stunning me. During those few seconds when all I could see were stars, I was pulled farther into the alley and pushed to the ground. A scream lodged in my throat and I tried to wrench myself away. As I wriggled over sharp edges of garbage that bit into my skin, the hand over my mouth slipped, and the scream half erupted. A fist came down hard on my cheek and more dizzying stars filled my head. I felt my beautiful yellow linen suit being torn off my body. For a second, I forgot that I wasn’t wearing that yellow linen suit, that I had only just been imagining it.
The man on top of me, tearing at my blouse with one hand, spat words of hate, dousing my face with his spittle. He took his hand away from my mouth and the second man knelt to replace it with his own, surely so that the first soldier could have both hands free to now rake his fingers across my abdomen and yank on the waistline of my underwear. Desperate to get away, I squirmed, and he dug his nails into my flesh. But in those seconds when my mouth was uncovered I yelled, “Please don’t! Please don’t hurt me! Let me go! Let me go!” The man atop me backed up a fraction, staring at me hard. In that next moment I realized I had shouted at him in English. In perfect unaccented English.
“I’m an American! I’m an American!” I rasped, tears choking my words. “Please don’t hurt me!”
The second soldier, who had been poised to put his hand across my mouth, stared at me.
“What did you say?” he said, also in English.
He understood me. This French soldier spoke English. I dared to feel a flash of hope.
“I’m an American,” I sputtered. “I’m not German! I’m an American!”
The man who had been ready to violate me first let go of my shirt and sat back on his knees. But only just. He was not convinced. Or perhaps he did not speak English; he only recognized it.
“Why are you here?” demanded the second soldier.
I knew I could not tell him the truth. Because the truth was, I was the daughter of a man and a woman from Germany and I knew what that meant to him. And so I lied.
“I couldn’t get out of the country. I couldn’t get away. I was trapped here. I was trapped! I’m from Iowa. I’m not from here. Please let me go. Please!”
The first man spoke to the soldier who spoke English, who said something in return.
They both looked at me for a moment.
Then they stood.
“Go home,” the English-speaking soldier said. “You shouldn’t be here. The war is over. Go home.”
The men turned from me and left, not bothering to help me up or apologize, but I didn’t care. I just wanted them gone. I turned onto my side as heaving sobs overcame me, and I could do nothing but pull my open blouse to my chest and weep atop the trash and dirt and debris.
The words that had saved me echoed in my ears as I lay there. I’m not German. I’m an American. I’m not German. I’m an American.
Everything that I had just weeks earlier realized was true about people, both good people and bad, was still true, but none of us lived like it was. Those men had believed me to be German and therefore deserving of the worst kind of assault, despite my having done nothing to them. And they changed their minds when I shouted to them that I was an American, as if that alone was the reason not to rape me.
As my tears subsided, I became aware of where I was, and I knew that I needed to get home. I sat up slowly and my head swam for a moment. I ached everywhere: the side of my head from when I’d been slammed against the wall, my right cheek where I’d been hit, my shoulders and back from where I’d hit the pavement, and my thighs where the first soldier had hiked up my skirt and dug his fingernails into my flesh. Little scratches and scrapes peppered my arms and legs from the refuse I’d been tossed onto, and from the force of the men trying to subdue me and my struggling to get free.
I pulled at the sides of my blouse to close it, gulping air as I tried to calm my body. Every button was gone. I frantically looked around me for those buttons. I had to find them. I had to sew them back on before anyone came home. I had to get back to the flat. I had to wash my soiled clothes. I had to concoct a reason for my injuries.
I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened to me. They could never know, not just because I’d disobeyed Papa but because I was so ashamed at what those men had wanted to do to me and what I’d said to make them stop. Fresh tears blinded me as I scrambled about looking for the buttons. I found five of the six and decided that would have to be enough. I rose to my feet on unsteady legs, smoothing down my rumpled, dirty skirt and folding my arms across my chest to keep my blouse closed.
I half ran, half walked back to the flat, keeping my head down. My head throbbed and my limbs protested and I never raised my gaze above the sidewalk in front of me. When I got back to the flat, I took off my clothes, wishing I would never have to wear that skirt and blouse again, but I knew I would. I had so few, and I had to pretend that those two pieces of clothing had no special meaning at all to me.
My hands were still trembling as I plunged my skirt and buttonless blouse into soapy water in the kitchen sink. I began to cry again as I worked to get the stains out, remembering as I struggled to clean the marks how I’d struggled in the alley.
I had to stop thinking about it. Had to. I had to stop crying. I had to come up with an explanation for the swelling on my cheek, my slight limp, the scrapes, and the bruises that were starting to bloom.
I hung up the skirt to dry. Then I sewed the five buttons back onto my wet blouse, skipping the one for the last buttonhole, and hung it up, too. And then because no one else was home yet and because I needed my wet laundry to appear as nothing more than just that, I washed my pajamas and two pairs of socks and hung them up as well.
And as I did so, I practiced saying that I’d been bored and had gone upstairs to see Herr Bruechner and his little dog, but that I’d seen a mouse on the steps and it had startled me. I had fallen down the stairs and hit my head and cheek, and bruised my backside, but I was okay. Silly me. Silly mouse.
I was okay.
Mommi, weary from waiting for four hours for eggs and butter that she didn’t get, believed me. So did Papa and Max when they arrived home a few minutes after her.
Having my family all around me that evening forced me to stay onstage, so to speak, to keep up the ruse that I’d let a little mouse frighten me. But when the lights were turned out and I was curled up atop my blankets on the floor of the living room, it all came crashing down around me and I had to pinch the inside of my wrist to keep from screaming.
“Nothing happened,” I whispered to myself in between pinches.
I was afraid to sleep and dream of those men, so I lay awake for hours.
When I awoke in the morning the inside of my arm was stippled with red marks from where I had pinched the skin the night before, so many times I lost count.
For the next week, every day was like this. I would pretend around my family that I had fallen down the stairs, and at night I would lie in bed and pinch the tender flesh on the inside of my wrist, over and over and over.
I wanted so very much to confide in Mariko. I wished I could tell her about that day so that she could tell me I had been brave. Smart. Quick thinking. That I’d lied because I had to, and those soldiers hadn’t been deserving of the truth anyway.
You are an American, I imagined Mariko saying. You don’t have to feel bad for saying that to them.
But that’s not why they shouldn’t have tried to hurt me, I imagined replying to her. All those German women and girls that have been attacked. There are hundreds of them, Mariko. What about them?
And here is where my mirage of Mariko would disappear, because I couldn’t imagine what she’d say to that.
* * *