When his few things were brought into the bedroom, Herr Bruechner curled up on the bed with his dog in his arms. Mommi asked him several times if she could make him some tea and he thanked her and said no.
Papa came home just before dusk with four army officers and their duffel bags. Two of them took the large apartment on the second floor, one each took the flats on the third and fourth floors. Two looked to be Papa’s age and they seemed friendly enough. The one they called Major Brown told me he had a daughter my age named Lorraine. Another one was also a major, but he didn’t want to engage in any kind of conversation with us. Major Brown told us a few days later that this other officer had lost a brother in the Battle of the Bulge.
The other two Americans were younger, maybe mid-twenties. These younger men looked at us with such quizzical faces. One of them said to me as he started to head up the stairs to the attic room, “Your family actually chose to come back here?”
“I did not choose it,” I quietly answered.
He trudged up the stairs shaking his head.
Before the front door was closed for the night, Major Brown hung an American flag outside the building. It made me want to both smile and cry to see it.
A couple of hours later, as we were making our beds on the living room floor, Max asked how long Herr Bruechner was going to be with us. Papa said he would stay until we could help him find another place to live.
But in the morning, we found the old man dead on the bedroom floor, curled up like a lost child. His little terrier, which we would call Herr Bruechner, was nestled in the crook of his arm, fast asleep.
23
Daily life with the American officers billeted in our building settled us into a new routine that was not altogether unpleasant. For the first time in weeks upon weeks we had electricity and gas for more than just a couple of hours a day. We also had coffee—real coffee—to serve the men, something we’d not had since leaving Crystal City seven months earlier. We even had sugar to stir into it.
Mommi was provided boxes of army C rations from which she would make the Americans breakfast and dinner. She would prepare the prepackaged food, like Beefaroni and chicken potpie, and serve it on real dishes, which the men said made the meals taste more like home.
Major Brown was the nicest of the four officers. His family lived in Ohio—not so very far from Iowa, I suppose. The three younger officers Papa did not fully trust, not around me anyway.
“You are a beautiful young woman,” my father had said when I asked him why I was not allowed in the dining room alone with the Americans.
His answer threw me for several reasons. First, I had begun to finally make it through the day without thinking about that walk I took, but his caution took me right back to that alley even though I knew Papa wasn’t thinking the Americans would attack me there in the dining room. He was concerned about my na?veté, I think—that I might be too easily seduced by their charms. But my mind took me back to the alley nonetheless.
Second, I didn’t think I was beautiful. I wasn’t altogether ugly, I thought, maybe slightly pretty. I had grown a young woman’s body and was as tall as Mommi. My hair had not been cut in more than a year, and it fell in long golden locks down my back if I didn’t braid it. When Papa said this, I wondered half-crazily if those French soldiers who had tried to hurt me had thought I was beautiful, and I’d had to physically shake my head to dispel the ludicrous question. Papa had asked if I was all right and I told him I had been chasing away a sneeze and excused myself to the bathroom.
This idea that a man might think me beautiful—desirable—perplexed me because I’d not yet considered this was true of me. Not only that; I was conflicted about my body and what it hungered for. I hated what those French soldiers had wanted to do to me and yet I still wanted to be wanted. I longed to again imagine what it might be like to have a man touch me, kiss me, pull me to him and whisper to me that he loved me. One of the younger officers, a lieutenant named McDermott who shared the second floor with Major Brown, had a girlfriend back home he was always talking about and writing to, but Papa seemed to think this did not guarantee he would not try to win my affections, or flat-out demand them. Lieutenant McDermott would always leave sticks of Juicy Fruit gum for Max and me on the table after he ate. He also left his copies of the American paper Stars and Stripes, which I devoured, not just for current news—which we’d long been without—but because the papers were written in English and also gave me news from home. I didn’t think for a second Lieutenant McDermott was expecting anything in return for the sticks of gum and the newspapers. He was just being nice. The captain, who had Herr Bruechner’s apartment, and the other lieutenant, in the attic room, didn’t speak to us or leave us treats. Both of them treated me and my family as if we were invisible. Papa trusted the two of them the least because they were impossible to read.
Despite not having a choice about his new job, Papa liked working as a translator with the American military. He was treated with respect and was paid better than what he’d been earning at the water-treatment plant. And I think the Americans liked Papa. Of course they would. How could they not? He was like them in so many ways.
Stuttgart was still utterly ruined, but for the first time since we sailed into Marseille in January I did not feel like we were on the brink of disaster. But the war was still being fought in the Pacific.
One night about a month after the Americans took over the city and our apartment building, Papa came home from the army base to tell us that an atomic bomb had been dropped on a city called Hiroshima in Japan. I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, and I didn’t know where Hiroshima was, but Papa had such a grave look on his face. He explained that this was a kind of bomb that was massive and terrible. It was the kind of bomb he’d nearly been appointed to help Germany create, the kind of bomb that is so powerful, just one of them can obliterate an entire city.
Three days later another atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, on a city called Nagasaki, a place far from Tokyo, like the other one had been.
“Do you think Mariko’s grandparents and aunts and uncles are all right, then?” I’d asked Papa.
“I hope so for her sake, Elise,” he said, but his tone suggested that the war had taken a heavy toll in Japan, just like it had here in Germany.
Major Brown had heard Papa and me talking about this because we kept our flat door open during the day in case the Americans needed something, and he’d been in the common room. He came to our open door and asked who it was that I knew in Japan. Papa explained to him that I had made a good friend in the internment camp in Texas and that this friend had many Japanese relatives living in Tokyo but that I did not know them personally. I was merely concerned for my friend’s extended family.
“It won’t be much longer for them,” the major said to me. “Japan has lost. Mark my words. It’s just a matter of time.”
He was right. Six days later, all the Americans came home, already drunk, with open bottles of champagne in their hands. They threw their arms around Papa.
“Japan has surrendered!” they shouted, and they poured champagne into a coffee cup so that Papa could celebrate with them.
It was over. This horrific contest of wills that had spanned the globe was finished, for everyone. It had begun when I was ten, far away from here in calm, pastoral Iowa: so far away I gave it barely a thought anymore. But now I was sixteen and no longer that same child. I’d been plucked from my home and sent to live in a battleground. I’d been branded the enemy, had hidden in cellars while bombs rained down above, and had dug out the dead from ruined homes. I’d been hungry, scared, mad, and lonely. I’d been witness to unspeakable evil—at the camps via those radio broadcasts and in that alley upon my own body. People could be terrible to one another in war. I’d seen it, felt it, grieved over it.
I wanted to keep believing that we aren’t who we are because of where we are born and raised but rather because of how we think, yet as the champagne sloshed that day, I was overcome with a renewed hunger for home, my home. I wanted to go back to America, not just so that Mariko and I could take up where we left off but because I wanted to be there. I wanted to have its soil under my feet, its sky above my head. The land of my childhood mattered to me, maybe because it was where my life began. I felt a part of that land somehow, just as Papa’s heart was tied to the land of his birth. It was the land he loved, not so much the people, because people can change. People can be good and people can be monsters. Even as I realized this, it seemed the earth gave a shuddering sigh of relief that we humans were done with our fighting.
And now we’d all have to discover what we’d allowed the war to make of us.
Or, for some, what the war had made of us despite what we had wanted.
* * *