Mommi and Papa wanted to know how Mariko was, and I told them, but I didn’t share the letter with them and they didn’t ask me to.
I wrote to her that same evening. I told her how very glad I was to get her letter, and I chose among all the pages I had written for her in the last ten months a few of the ones that I thought would make her smile. I told her there were more pages like that and I would send them if she got this letter—meaning if her grandmother hadn’t confiscated it.
I told her she was my best friend, too.
When Papa posted the letter for me, I asked him how long he thought it would take for Mariko to get it. He told me he had no idea. A month or more, he thought, but he didn’t know for sure. The world was still such a chaotic place.
Still, I figured if Mariko got the letter in mid-January, she’d surely write to me again right away, which meant I might possibly hear from her in the first part of March. That would be right after her seventeenth birthday, and about a month before I, too, would turn seventeen.
By the time she would get my return letter, the countdown to our reunion would have begun.
24
We spent Christmas 1945 on the quiet outskirts of Munich, with Oma and Uncle Werner’s daughter Emilie and her family. It was obvious as we rolled into the train station that Munich had seen its share of Allied bombing. Hitler had several residences and offices there, and it was considered the birthplace of the Nazi Party. But Emilie and her family lived far enough away from the Allies’ target areas that there were few evidences at their home of the hell out of which we had all emerged. Emilie’s husband, Lothar, was a dentist, and he also came from a wealthy family whose investments had been held in other countries, like Switzerland and Portugal and Spain. Lothar had lost friends and family in the war, but not his business and not the family wealth. He had returned from the field hospital where he had served in the German medical corps with a limp and, according to Emilie, a shock of gray hair.
Their house reminded me very much of Oma’s; it was half-timbered, three stories high, and set against a stunning Bavarian backdrop of pines and diamond-bright snow. Their two boys were young—six and eight—and I suppose they reminded Oma of my father when he’d been those ages. Oma was very happy at a house that was so much like hers had been and with the boys who allowed her to recall better days when her own son had been young. The war could be forgotten at Emilie and Lothar’s house, if you didn’t listen to the radio or read the occasional newspaper or open the pantry to see the sparsely stocked shelves. Oma was happy we came for Christmas, and yet it seemed as if it pained her a little to see us. I think she felt as though she had abandoned us, and it had been easier for her to deal with that knowledge when she didn’t have to see us every minute of the day.
Papa spoke to her about when she might return to us. He was saving money to rebuild the house in Pforzheim. I was probably not meant to hear their conversation. They had been alone in a room that was like a library, full of books and warm wood paneling and comfortable chairs. I was on my way there to look for a novel to pass the long hours of the day after Christmas. Before I reached the open door, I heard him ask Oma when she was coming home, and I heard her tell my father tearfully that she would not be returning to Pforzheim, not when everything that she had loved about it was gone.
“We can rebuild the house,” Papa said.
Oma told him she loved him, but he could not replace what she had lost. She did not want a new house; she wanted the one that had been taken from her, and all that had been inside it, and the family members who had been living in Pforzheim. Papa could not give her those things no matter how much he loved her. I think Papa understood then that Oma’s sorrow was deeper than what he could fix, and he wanted her happy more than anything. Oma had again mentioned to Papa that we could come there to Munich, especially now that the war was over and Papa was not obligated to stay in Stuttgart. There was room for us in the house until we found our own place, and the situation in Munich couldn’t be any worse than in Stuttgart. But my father finally had a good job again, and I don’t think he was ready at that point to give up on rebuilding a house on the site of his childhood home.
Our good-byes on New Year’s Eve felt somewhat permanent.
After the first of the year my father and I came to an agreement about my getting a job. When I turned seventeen in the middle of April, I could look for work.
I spent the first three months of 1946 schooling myself on whatever I could, counting the days to my birthday, and waiting to hear from Mariko. By my calculations, unsubstantiated as they were, I should have heard from her by March, but the letter did not come. I had written her twice, once at Christmas to wish her a merry one, and again in March to wish her a happy birthday, but I hadn’t sent any additional pages from those tablets. I didn’t want them to become kindling for her father’s little fires.
When my birthday finally arrived, it had been almost a year since Germany surrendered and yet Stuttgart was still a shattered city. No birthday greeting arrived for me from Mariko, either, and I began to worry that she had not gotten any of my letters.
The one bright spot in all of this was that I got a job at a bakery and café near the military base frequented mostly by Americans. Papa was moderately happy with this arrangement because he could walk me home since he worked nearby at the U.S. Army’s Stuttgart headquarters. The owner, Herr Bloch, was happy to have me on his waitstaff because I was fluent in English. The café had been damaged during the war, but Herr Bloch had managed the needed repairs by salvaging what he could from the rubble of other shops. He had reopened after the first of the year, after making arrangements with the occupying forces to purchase coffee beans so that he would have coffee to sell in his shop. When we didn’t have coffee, we served tea.
My job was to wait on the little tables, pour the coffee, serve the pastries and Br?tchen, and clean up after the customers when they left. The shop was always busy, always filled with American GIs, and I was always an object of their interest. Papa had told me it was nobody’s business why I was living in Germany. He’d reminded me of the oath that he would not discuss the details of his repatriation, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his job with the U.S. Army. If a GI asked me, “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?”—and I was asked it usually every day—I was to say, “I’m serving coffee. Would you care for some?”
It was thrilling and unsettling to have men flirting with me, eager to get my attention, wanting to know where I lived, asking me to parties and movies, and even to get the occasional whispered invitation to find a quiet place where we could be alone. My experience with romance to that point was watching Cary Grant movies and reading dime-store novels I used to have to hide from my mother. My experience in the alley was something altogether different, and yet when American soldiers flirted with me, I couldn’t dismiss from my thoughts those moments the French soldiers had me pinned. What the French soldiers had wanted to do was hurt me; what the American GIs wanted was affection, distraction, or perhaps just recreation. I knew what all the girls had been whispering about the day Lucy Hobart ran off with the draft dodger. I knew what had happened to all those women and girls when the French troops arrived in Stuttgart and what almost happened to me. But I also knew my parents loved each other and their love had produced Max and me. Somewhere in the mix of all of that—Lucy and the draft dodger, those French soldiers, and my parents’ marriage bed—was something mysterious and powerful. I could feel its wonder in the depths of me, when I sometimes allowed myself to imagine being embraced and kissed and touched by a man.
Papa cautioned me that I was to take none of the GIs up on any kind of invitation to do anything. Not even a walk, he said. Plenty of young German women who wanted chocolate and attention and a young man still in one piece were getting pregnant and then were being abandoned. And since I was reminded of what happened in the alley every time a soldier got too friendly, I didn’t mind Papa’s overzealous caution too much. Part of me still very much wanted the attention, and I even wanted the invitations, because they made me feel pretty and desirable, even after everything I’d been through.
Spring gave way to summer, and still there was no word from Mariko. I had sent her two more letters in the meantime, letting her know I was thinking of her and missing her. Papa knew of my distress over this, but he encouraged me to keep writing because my letters were not being returned to me, which surely meant they were being delivered.