“But you need a boyfriend, someone to dream about when you are in that horrible, smelly Berlin. Erich lives there, too, you know!”
“But I have someone. I have you . . .” And it was out before she could control it.
“You never get my jokes,” he said. “He’s a good friend. I brought him for me, not you!” He looked down, afraid to meet her eyes. She wished she could take back what she had said. Wished that she had said nothing, but it would have been in vain. Her eyes had been saying how she felt for years.
“Let’s go find the others!” said Georg. She sensed his longing to dispense with idle conversation.
“No, I think I’ll stay awhile here.” She felt suddenly awkward and sad. She did not feel like seeing Monique and having her steer their conversations. She did not feel like being insignificant that day.
“No, you won’t!” said Georg, and he picked her up and carried her along the leafy pathway toward the sounds of conversation happening deeper in the wood.
She protested weakly, though liking his arms around her, and she turned her face into his chest to avoid the pine needles whipping her face as he ran. Perhaps he was testing her with what he’d just said. Perhaps he really liked her but couldn’t say it. She modestly pulled down her skirt, which had risen up when he had lifted her.
Georg stopped suddenly several yards back from the riverbank, and she looked up at his face, at the line of his jaw, at the hollow of his throat. She wondered about his sudden intensity and turned then to follow his gaze.
Monique and Erich were sitting close together, dangling their legs off the platform. They talked in hushed tones as if they had known each other for years. Monique had her hand on his shoulder.
Georg gently placed Rosalind down on the ground and turned his focus back on her, giving her a hug.
“It is good to see my Rosa. It is so good to be here.” Though it did not feel genuine to Rosalind, merely a mask to cover whatever it was that disturbed him.
He called out to the couple, who had surely heard them pounding the earth, but they were too interested in their own private conversation.
Monique finally acknowledged them there, and they moved to allow the others room to sit also.
“It feels much colder today,” said Monique, who had wrapped her arms around herself and leaned closer to Erich. “I don’t think I’ll swim today.”
“Since when has the cold ever stopped you?” asked Georg.
Monique picked up a fallen leaf and tickled Georg under his nose as he sat beside her.
“Stop it!” he said suddenly. And she appeared shocked at the sullenness in his tone, which he rarely used.
“I don’t want you to go to join the military, Georgie!” she said suddenly, perhaps recognizing the change, perhaps even guessing the reason. He was jealous of Erich’s attention, something Georg had not prepared for. “Like I told you in the letter I wrote you, I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you.”
One would expect the thought of something bad happening to dampen the mood, but these words lifted Georg again. Rosalind had been watching him each summer for years now, and never had she seen him affected by something as small as Monique’s attention on Erich.
Georg’s face brightened. He picked Monique up and jumped with her into the river.
Rosalind sat a foot away from Erich at the edge of the embankment, her legs dangling, her feet not touching the water. Erich was watching them. And no one was watching her. And things seemed different, and Rosalind suspected something awful would come. Not necessarily the war that would alter all of them, but that her relationship with Georg was diminishing to merely childhood fantasies.
Present-day 1945
Even thin-faced and worn, he is handsome, but his dark eyes under a heavy forehead unsettle her, and more so than the fact he is a man, and that the foreign men she has met are volatile, unpredictable, sometimes callous.
Rosalind looks at the boy, at his joyless face covered in dirt. He needs to be washed and fed. And Stefano came to her aid at least. She owes him something.
“Do you have any food?” She knows there is nothing in the house next door.
“We have some rations,” he says.
She looks down, pinches her top lip again between her teeth. He is also harmless, she thinks, and vulnerable in a strange country. Erich has seen the surrender in Stefano, has been quickly able to see things that others can’t, has been able to smell the air for any traces of betrayal. It is this that probably seals the trust.
“I have some more bread,” she says to Stefano. “Perhaps the boy would like some, too.”
Stefano looks behind him at the child.
“Thank you,” he says. “If you have some to spare. I have money—”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Please come.”
They follow her into the house, and Stefano surveys the room at first before looking upward to the top of the stairs, perhaps to see any sign of Georg.
“My husband is asleep,” she says, filling the kettle from a water jug near the sink and lighting the stove.
“Have you always lived here?”
“Yes, and no. I spent many childhood summers here, but mostly we lived in Berlin.”
“Were you there at the end?”
“Berlin? Yes.”
She walks to the room at the end of the house and quickly returns with a clean bandage.
“You are kind,” he says. “Thank you.” Though there is an undertone, she speculates, of cynicism in the words. She pushes the thought from her head. It is her nature to overanalyze.
She serves them some tea and a piece of rye bread, and Michal eats quickly, afraid it will be snatched away at any moment. They sit at the table, and the light falls across Stefano, illuminating the small, round sunken marks from his youth, like tiny bullet wounds, around his jawline.
Their talk is awkward, sentences stopped short, in case too much is given away.
The clock makes its sound, and the boy startles.
Rosalind asks the boy where he is from, to smother the jarring silence, but he answers only with stares.
“He does not talk much,” says Stefano, who then explains the child’s circumstances, before opening the conversation further to talk about himself. He mentions briefly his mother and sisters, and then his capture by the Germans toward the close of the war, when they no longer knew who or what they were fighting for. That by then he fought for nothing but survival. How he was sent to Sachsenhausen, and after the war, he was kept imprisoned by the Russians, just to make certain he wasn’t a spy. He says that the walk from Berlin has been difficult with the aching in his lower leg worse than it has felt for months. But it matters not the trail behind him, he tells her, it is the destination now that features in his head.
He is different from most. He carries something that her own soldiers in the hospital in those final days no longer carried. Hope.
“Does your leg hurt now?”
“A little. Sometimes there is pain. Yesterday it reminded me the injury was still there. Otherwise I can walk on it. Just not for very long. Your doctors were good. I was treated at a prison hospital, where German doctors were forced to treat foreign casualties, before I was transferred elsewhere. I fared better than most. It just depended on the soldier who caught you, whether you would be captured and transferred, or shot on the spot.”
Stefano looks out of place in the house. Like a piece of furniture too big for the room. He has a warm voice, a smile that never eventuates, that stops itself halfway, and two lines above his eyebrows that don’t ever go away. His accent is strange, the words too elongated and musical, or broken, though the fact he speaks German at all is strangely endearing. He has to repeat some to make her understand.