“Not well,” he says. A lie for a lie.
Erich can hear a noise from the house. The slamming of a drawer, something smashing. It is Rosalind. When she is in a mood, she breaks things, like she did in Georg’s house. She is unbalanced. He spotted this early, the first time he visited the river, and Georg put up with her because Georg could. He saw the best in everyone, even Erich for a time. But Erich has seen the worst in Rosalind.
“Yes, Claudine and I attended the same school,” says Erich. “She was active politically. She was anti-Nazi. She used to scratch nasty things about Hitler into her desk.” And Erich would scratch them out, on the desk at home, though he doesn’t tell him this. Stefano would not understand about loyalty.
“She must have followed her parents, no?”
“Perhaps.” He is thinking that his father had never truly been supportive of the Reich’s master-race plan. Horst did not vocalize it, but it was what he didn’t say. And Erich has no doubt that his mother knew his feelings, too.
“My father was an engineer,” Erich says. “A good one. He designed tanks for the war. He would have had a mechanical company now without the war, and I would have worked with him.”
Stefano is staring at him, hanging on every word, and Erich likes this, feels the need to share this. He feels the need to share it with Stefano. He wonders whether they could have been friends before the war. He had picked up signals. Small ones.
Rosalind returns with a medical bag and places it near Stefano.
“What is that?” says Stefano warily.
“It is your end,” she says, attempting to sound spiteful, but Erich detects some nerves, too, that lessen the impact of the words.
“Because of a photo? Of a few words of Russian?” says Stefano.
“Because you are not what you say you are,” she says. “Because you are pretending to be someone else. And you had my husband shot.”
“It isn’t true,” he says. “I want to go home to my sisters and my mother. There is no reason to kill me.”
Erich has been wrong about people before. He was wrong about Monique, about his father, even Stefano briefly. It is unlikely that he is wrong about him now. Stefano had come here to kill him, of that he feels certain.
CHAPTER 28
ROSALIND
Rosalind crouches beside Stefano and from the bag retrieves the vial of liquid that will end his life. It is a lethal drug that Erich had meant for Georg. The fact that she considered giving it to her husband gnaws at her conscience.
“I’m innocent of everything,” Stefano pleads with her softly.
She glances at him, and an odd feeling of doubt surfaces that she must quickly abandon. She must never again trust men like Stefano, those who have lied to her. She reaches inside the bag for a syringe. Georg is dead because of him.
“I’m not who you think. I’m not your enemy.”
With shaking hands she draws the liquid into the syringe while his words echo in her head. She is remembering his kindness toward her and the boy. And she thinks of Michal then, wherever he is, and wonders about his survival without Stefano, without his mother.
“You should trust me,” he whispers.
She is alive because of him.
Rosalind turns to look at him to search for truth. In the moment that she meets his eyes, her vengeance wavering, she feels a sudden jabbing pain in the back of her arm that forces her to drop what she is holding and grip the affected area. She stands, briefly disoriented, and turns to see Erich, just behind her, with eyes that are cold and pale gray, and, more alarmingly, empty. Then as her eyes wander downward to his hand, the situation is made clearer, and the horror of it exposed. Erich holds a syringe, with the remains of dark liquid in its base.
She attempts to run from the barn, but the ground beneath her seems to sway, and she loses her balance and stumbles forward, her hands finding the earth. Then the world is black, then white, lots of flashes in her eyes, and someone moves close, and then she is floating. She is being carried, and then there is nothing. She is once more in darkness.
She can hear voices, and someone laughs as she wakes on the attic bed upstairs. She has to force her eyes to open, and when she does, Georg is there on the side of the bed. He is staring at the empty space beside the bed, as if she doesn’t exist. He can’t see her, and then he can. He is staring at her, through her. He tells her he doesn’t care. That she had this coming; then he is gone and Monique is there in his place. She is asking, “Why?” She says it again, over and over, until Rosalind can’t stand it anymore and covers her ears.
She wants to be sick, but she is too tired, and then there is blackness again.
May 1945
She was filthy, no shoes. Ahead of her she could see the other homeless who had fled the city, scrambling from destruction, from the Russian forces, to walk the open stretch of roads, with nothing but their lives. But there was no desire for companionship among them. It was a race to reach the bodies on the side of the road—civilians caught in the crossfire as they fled the city in previous days, and German soldiers still clinging to their guns in a final futile fight—to search their pockets and belongings for food and water. She was like an animal in the wild that must do everything to survive.
Several trucks lumbered and roared toward her. She was frightened at first, but someone yelled they weren’t Russian. The trucks were open at the back, filled with Allied soldiers in dull-green uniforms. They called out to her in English, but she kept her head down. She was afraid to look them in the eye. One soldier asked her in German whether she was all right. She didn’t look up. The soldiers seemed effusive, celebratory. Several laughed and cheered. They had won, they yelled. The war was over.
The other people on the roads to nowhere in particular were not celebrating. They were like her: desperate, suspicious, and possessive of everything they could find. Compassion had disappeared, replaced by self-preservation. As the night drew near, and the distance between the other travelers grew wider, she stopped to take some shoes off a German soldier who appeared to have shot himself. Sometime after midnight, the moon only half-full, a dog yelped repetitively. She followed the noise and found it tied up outside a house, suggesting that no occupants were inside. She let the dog free to forage like her, then drank from its water bowl as it ran off into the darkness. She scrounged the bin inside the house but found nothing. In the shed there was a sack of dried barley, and she took a handful. It was difficult to swallow, but it was something. Then in a cupboard she found a jar of pickled onions and shoveled them hurriedly into her mouth one after the other. She could not remember the last time she’d had a full meal. In the hospital she had missed many breaks. She was exhausted both mentally and physically.
She slept soundly on the floor of the shed behind the house, then woke with an ache in her stomach and a pain in her chest, and the sound of hanging tins clinking in the breeze. She came out into the midmorning light that was harsh but warm at least. A man carrying pails yelled at her to get off his property. Charity was dead amid a disunited Germany.