“No. He was just a chemist who worked at an agricultural company.”
Ralph was visibly perplexed by what I was telling him, and I was itching to explain what had happened to us. I looked round the coffee shop, saw that Herr Bloch was in a deep conversation with a fellow German and that Margaret was waiting on a table across the room. I slid into the chair across from Ralph and quietly told him everything. From the FBI agents ransacking our house, to Crystal City’s barbed wire and armed guards, to meeting Mariko, to boarding the Swiss ocean liner in New Jersey, to the view of a bombed Marseille, to the ID tags around our necks and the bombing of Pforzheim and why we were back in Stuttgart. I even told him the five things Papa told me he would have done differently if he could turn back time.
Oh God, how good it felt to say it all out loud. What had happened to my family and me had been real. Being unable to talk about it with anyone had started to make it seem like I’d imagined that I used to have another life. I wanted to cry with relief, except a slender rivulet of fear was now traveling through me because I’d told a man I barely knew everything Papa had asked me to keep secret.
“Your father is innocent of any crime, then,” Ralph said when I was finished.
“Yes.”
Ralph shook his head. “I can’t believe the U.S. government did that to you. Your father lost his job, his house, everything? And after you were imprisoned, you were all traded like baseball cards?”
He hadn’t said that last part very loud, but it still made me startle in my chair. “You can’t talk about that with anyone. It’s supposed to be secret.”
“Yeah, I can see why.”
I didn’t know what to say then. I said nothing. But I liked it that he seemed indignant on our behalf.
“So, is your father planning to take you all back to America?” Ralph asked a moment later. He asked it as if it wasn’t a forgone conclusion that we would return to where we belonged.
“My parents have to apply to reimmigrate,” I replied. “And my father says the process won’t be quick or easy. But I’m going back.”
“Really?” Ralph tipped his head in interest.
“Yes,” I told him confidently. “My friend Mariko and I have it all planned out. It won’t be hard for us. She and I are both American citizens. As soon as we’re eighteen and can do what we want, we’re going back. We’re going to meet in Manhattan and get jobs and share an apartment.”
My words sounded juvenile as I heard them coming out of my mouth, but Ralph didn’t laugh or roll his eyes. I could see he was taking me very seriously. “So you want to go back.” He didn’t phrase it like a question.
“Of course I do,” I said. “This place isn’t home to me. I don’t have any friends here.”
He leaned back in his chair a little bit. “Not one?”
“Who would want to be my friend here? I’m an American. I was the enemy.”
Ralph regarded me for a moment, and I could see that he was picking apart my answer. “So you haven’t tried to make a friend. That’s what you’re saying, right?” He shrugged and then added, “Just being honest.”
I hadn’t made much of an effort, true, but neither had I been in situations where friend making would have been easy. And then there was Brigitte.
“I did try. Once,” I said.
“And? What happened? She found out you were an American and bailed on you?”
“She was killed in that bombing raid on Pforzheim. I saw her body. I helped clear away the debris so rescuers could get to her. But she was already dead.”
Ralph swallowed hard but his gaze never left me. “I’m sorry,” he said a second later.
I nodded, and there was silence for a few moments as the sting of the words I’d said ebbed.
“Well, I’ll be your friend here, Elise,” Ralph said kindly, and without a hint of impropriety. But still. Being friends with Ralph Dove was probably an impossible scenario.
“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think my father would like it if we were friends.”
“He wouldn’t like it?” Ralph laughed lightly. “You mean me. He wouldn’t like me; that’s what you’re saying. Even though I haven’t done anything good or bad to him or to you?” His grin intensified, and I could see the irony in my words, that my father, who had been so cruelly judged by people who didn’t know him, would do the same thing to someone else.
“You know what I mean,” I said, my face coloring a bit.
At that precise moment my father walked into the café to walk me home. I sprang from my seat, but not quick enough. Papa had seen me sitting at Ralph’s table.
I practically tripped over my feet to hurry and clock out.
Papa stood by the door, waiting, with an unreadable look on his face. I didn’t dare look back to Ralph as I made my way to the door to leave.
“Guten Abend, Herr Bloch,” I called out to my employer.
The door had barely closed behind us when Papa spoke.
“Who was that you were talking to just now?” he asked calmly.
“Oh,” I said nonchalantly. “Just a customer.”
“You were sitting at his table.”
“The shop wasn’t busy. We struck up a conversation. That’s all, Papa. Don’t make more of it than what it is.”
He paused a moment. “And what is it?”
“It’s nothing.”
But I knew it wasn’t nothing. I wasn’t in love with Ralph Dove. But I was intrigued by him. I liked him. He made me feel alive.
25
By the beginning of September, I was looking forward to seeing Ralph with all the expectation of a child waiting for Christmas. I had been so starved for a friend that having one again was balm to my soul.
I think he knew this. Ralph’s sympathy for my predicament bordered on pity, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I needed his friendship more than he needed mine. He told me he liked talking with me because I wasn’t like all the other German girls wanting his attention purely for what he could give them.
And perhaps he did enjoy my company almost as much as I enjoyed his. From the get-go, Ralph wanted to meet my parents, and he thought my caution in that regard was excessive. But I wasn’t ready for Papa and Mommi to meet Ralph. I’d convinced myself they would think I was infatuated with him and that Ralph just wanted to get me into his bed. Neither of these things was true; at least Ralph did not hint that he was playing at friendship so that he could lure me into an affair. But I was seventeen and I didn’t think my parents understood me or would believe me if I told them Ralph was just a friend.
So our meetings outside the café were secret. I had the mornings to myself in the flat, as Mommi and Papa were both at work and Max was at school. I would leave a little early on the days Ralph and I would meet, abandoning my self-schooling lessons for that day so we could meet outside a candy store several blocks away from Herr Bloch’s shop. We would stroll the rubble-filled streets and talk. Sometimes he would bring treats from packages his mother sent him. One day he brought two Twinkies and I cried a little when I saw them. I told him they were Mariko’s favorite.
On our walks we talked about our lives back home. He already knew much about mine, but I didn’t know anything about his. He told me he was twenty-three, the youngest of three children, that he had a brother named Hugh and a sister, the middle child, named Irene.
Hugh had wanted to serve in the army from the very beginning but was denied an officer’s commission because of health issues. He’d been born with a weak heart that made strenuous exercise not only difficult but dangerous. Ralph told me Hugh was very smart but far too serious, that he was thirty years old and still single and likely always would be because he never dated. Hugh had worked for their father, Errol Dove, but Errol had died the summer Ralph graduated from high school and now Hugh ran the family business.
Their sister Irene was twenty-six, married, and had two little children, a girl and a boy whom, Ralph said, she hardly ever saw because she was always out socializing with her Bel Air friends or playing tennis or shopping for clothes she didn’t need or sleeping with other men.
“You mean she sleeps with men besides her husband?” I asked, incredulous.
“I’d bet any amount of money that she does,” Ralph replied. “Irene and responsibility have never mixed well.”