“Not really. They need translators.”
“Really? And how is your German?” Rose asked in English. They always spoke in English now. Papi was going to be appalled by how little she remembered, her vocabulary stuck back in grammar school.
“In Ordnung,” he said. Okay. That she remembered. “They are desperate to get things in order,” he said. They were perched side by side at the foot of her bed, balancing cups on their knees. “Little chance of that happening anytime soon. It’s a mess over there. Bloody Jerries. They deserve every last bit of horror that comes their way.” He sipped his tea, took another mouthful of the biscuit with evident pleasure. “These are delicious.”
“They’re stale,” Rose said. “Now I know how they treat you.” She took a sip of her own tea. It was tepid, and she suspected it had never been warm. “Have you found out anything new? Everything is so slow here—I haven’t been able to learn anything.” She stirred her tea as she said this, her eyes fixed on the metal spoon, the way it looked bent beneath the surface of the hot liquid, another trick of the eye. If she couldn’t find Mutti and Papi, maybe she could find someone who knew what had happened. She had started looking for the Fleishmans, the family that had lived with her parents for a time after she and Gerhard had left. She had tried to find Bette too, had written to the last address she had for her in Munich, but nothing. “I know what you said in your letters, but you’ve found nothing on Mutti and Papi since then?”
Gerhard shook his head. “There’s another Jewish lieutenant originally from Freiberg, and we have a system set up to check the DP lists—nothing.” He looked at her steadily. “But I was in Vienna.”
She was sure she hadn’t heard him right. Vienna? Their city? “When?” she finally made out.
He lit a cigarette. “About two, nearly three weeks ago. We had been told that we would be interviewing officials.” Without asking, he lit another and handed it to her. She took it gratefully, and brought over Margaret’s ashtray from the windowsill. “You know, men real close to the top. They needed a team of us, they said. I was boiling over for it, gunning for it—but it wasn’t at all like I thought. They were just small-timers. One was a mayor of a small village called Fiestel, and yessed me about everything—‘Did you know the butcher, a Jewish man called Weiss? Did you work with so-so, who was a Nazi official?’ Yes, yes, yes, he said. It turned out that he had a sick wife. He would have agreed to anything to get back home to her.” Gerhard paused. “I hated him for that too.”
Rose was listening, she was trying to understand, but she didn’t think she did. What did a Nazi’s sick wife have to do with anything? She sucked in smoke. “What did the apartment look like? Is it all right? Did you go inside?”
“I didn’t go to the apartment.”
“You didn’t go to the house?”
“I was there for so little time, and working for all of it. We were quartered outside of town. You don’t understand; it was so strange, being there, like this”—he gestured down to his uniform—“with all the other men. It didn’t feel like a city I knew, let alone where I grew up.”
“But it would have been different if you had gone to our street,” Rose said, as if she could still convince him to change course. How could he be there and not go? What if their parents had been there? What if someone had talked to them?
Gerhard was shaking his head. He jammed the tip of his cigarette into the ashtray. “You don’t know what it was like,” he said. “It is not the same. It’s just another bombed-out city.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is. The opera house burned down. The Burgtheater too, and the roof on St. Stephen’s Cathedral collapsed—damaged by a fire that had been lit by looters, Austrians”—he shook his head—“not our men. It is not the same place. That city is gone.”
“But Mutti and Papi,” Rose willed herself to say, battling the terrible emptiness inside. “They could go back there, somehow.”
“No, Rose.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know. You can’t be sure.” She could barely get the words out, her throat so tight, the pressure behind her eyes spiky hot.
“I do,” Gerhard said with roughness. “I’m afraid that I am. In Minden, where we’re stationed, the town was destroyed—the town hall, the cathedral, all bombed. But people are coming back. One day, we were handing out blankets, and I met these boys, Jewish boys, two brothers, Samuel and Martin, and a friend of theirs, Oskar. They had been in Birkenau together, and they came back because Oskar’s father had owned a house outside of Minden—there had been Jews there since the thirteenth century. They didn’t know where else to go—”
“You see,” Rose said, “that’s what I mean. Of course they went back to where they’re from; that’s what people do—”
He put his hand on hers. “Would you let me finish, please? God, you are like Mutti. Always have to have it your way.”
The mention of their mother, the pressure of his hand, stunned Rose into silence.
“I’m telling you, the way they looked, the stories they told . . .” Gerhard’s voice trailed off. “They’re not coming back,” he finally said.
“You don’t know that,” she cried. All she wanted was for him to be wrong. “You don’t know that at all.”
“I didn’t want to know it. I never wanted to know anything like this. But I do,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re not coming back, Rose.” He stood, walking his cup to the tiny sink, twisting on the water.
“Gerhard, please,” she said, and she grabbed his arm to stop him. Washing up? Now?
He pulled her into a hug. “Mausi, we’re here. We’re still here,” he kept saying into her hair.
That night, she walked. She walked away from Holborn and her room on Catton Street, away from Soho, where she knew Margaret was meeting friends, and Clerkenwell, where Gerhard was staying with Charles. She walked as if she had a purpose, as if she knew where she was heading.
She didn’t bother putting on a jumper beneath her overcoat. Where was she supposed to go? Tonight, next week? Next month? It was unimaginable, the future.
She ended up at the Embankment, at the foot of the Waterloo. The bridge had taken a hit early on in the war, and over the last few years it had been rebuilt—she’d heard that so many women worked on it that it was called the Ladies’ Bridge. Here was yet something else that had been devastated and was rising again, and she hated the bridge as surely as if it had stolen something from her.
She took the steps up. She began walking across. The Thames was a carpet of black. Out in the open, the cold rose. The air whipped across her cheeks, her fingertips grew prickly. Lights necklaced the river; there was Westminister aglow, and St. Paul’s beyond.