After the Russian soldiers left, it took several hours for Rosalind’s unsteady legs to find solid ground again. She has heard from some that visits by the military can be volatile. Many people were killed or imprisoned in the months after the war. But more recently, there has been less arbitrary policing and more international monitoring. The world is watching as they dissect Germany and share it among the Allies. But it is still too soon to tell whether it will remain this way: silent, motionless. There is still so much hatred for Germany, its sins too vivid and raw to allow the country yet to move on.
Rosalind turns her attention to the photographs on the living room wall: family photos, several portraits, her grandmother, her parents, a large portrait of Monique, and one in particular she wants to hide away. There are three people in the photograph: Georg, Rosalind, and Monique. Georg’s wide-smiling mouth and chin are his only features visible beneath a large floral hat—borrowed from Rosalind’s grandmother for the purpose of amusement—that shades his face. She wishes it contained only the two of them. She has thought often of cutting Monique out of the photo, but there would of course be consequences.
Georg can do up his shirt buttons, arrange things obsessively; he can remember timetables of trains that no longer exist, and how to set a table. He can’t remember that she is his wife, but he will notice that a photo of Monique is missing. It is not worth the risk. His mind is mysterious to her. With a missing photo, he might speculate, he might rage, or, worse, it might help him remember things she wants buried.
One time Rosalind put the portrait of Monique out of sight, but Georg had seen straightaway, as if the portrait were something he depended on seeing each time he woke. He had punched the wall, the spot where the portrait had hung, and damaged his hand. Rosalind hung it back up again, covering the hole.
The barn doors bang again, this time more aggressively. She crosses the room to peer through the front window toward the blackness of the trees and the barn nearby. Its large doors are open and flapping in the river wind. Her conviction that she latched them is quickly followed by doubt. She has been preoccupied lately.
Rosalind opens the front door, and a cool, damp wind pushes past her, pressing the skirt of her dress flat against her legs. On the earth outside, the rain maps out tiny rivers of water that trickle menacingly toward the lower side of her house.
The two properties are secluded here and spaced a short distance apart. Across the track the shallow woodland separates Rosalind from the river. From the doorway of her cottage, during daylight hours, Rosalind can view the water between the trunks and branches. A light mist hovers across the river and lurks in the shadows of the trees that hang above its edges. To the right the wood becomes thicker for several miles along the edge of the river. It was a place she and Monique and Georg would explore as children.
She shivers, not from the cold. She has seen many boats travel the waterways, but she has seen other objects floating in the river also: pieces of houses, broken things, broken bodies. She feels a sense of dread whenever she spies the riverbank at the bend of the river where items are snagged and whenever she sees something in the water that she can’t identify. In the months after the war, it was not unusual to see bodies floating down the river, and pieces of their lives—tins, suitcases, sodden paper, the remains of books—following after them. Private, treasured things that belonged to the dead were discarded in the river in the cleanup after the war. Those things, now useless, travel far away with the current.
1934
The barefoot youths walked to the sharp bend, then veered off the track to enter a clearing of yellow grasses stretching all the way to the embankment. On either side of the clearing, two stretches of wood ran several miles parallel with the river. The trio, the owls of Elbe as they called themselves, had come from the direction of the two houses nestled among the trees where the track went no farther. An endless ceiling of blue above the clearing, and the reach of water behind them, would have made the trio appear insignificant—specks of color on the landscape—if it weren’t for the bustle and zest they brought with them.
Georg broke from the group, running on long, bony legs and shouting over his shoulder that he would reach the river first. Each summer, he appeared to grow infinitely upward, tall and nimble and seemingly built for soaring through the clouds. He shouted to the others as he ran, marking the start of a race that the girls, who accompanied him, had been unaware of until then. Georg was someone who filled large empty spaces with his confidence. Most who met Georg thought that he was likely to exceed life’s high expectations, but he was unaffected by this, and found the lives of others equally important as his own. He was everything that his peers loved and despised at the same time. He could command the room and divert attention from others, yet make those around him feel greater than what their own abilities would ever allow.
He ran the length of the grass in several easy strides, bare feet crushing the grasses that had barely had enough time to replenish after the last time the group had been there. The embankment eased down to the water, and Georg perched on the edge then to slide down the low wall of brown-gray mud. He wore blue shorts that became stained and slimy by the time he entered the water.
Monique ran toward him, wavy brown hair escaping a bright-orange ribbon, tearing at her clothes that were now a hindrance, and discarding them to the breeze. Her figure was shapely, feminine, though her legs were tanned and muscled like Georg’s, and her laughter that reverberated between the walls of wood had the rich, throaty timbre of a man’s.
Georg was home from a boarding school outside Berlin and he had been craving this time with the girls who spent the summers with their grandmother. The previous year he had forged a close relationship with Monique, based on their shared quest for adventure; their dares were becoming longer, more dangerous, and more exciting. He had dared Monique to climb the tallest tree, jump from the barn roof, dive deeper into the river to catch a sinking pebble, and she would always meet the challenge. It was the thrill of living to every inch of their young lives that drove them closer. At the river there were no homework due dates, no crowded trams to catch to school, no separate sets of rules for boys and girls. There were no barriers to hold them back from living wild and free. Days and nights ran blissfully into one another.
Rosalind watched the others run to the river. She assessed the strength of the current on the water’s surface, decided that it was safe enough, and followed, just not as quickly.
The previous year, Monique had nearly drowned because she was not thoughtful like Rosalind. She did not measure things as well or try to understand the importance of inspection. Monique just did. Rosalind had saved her from being swept away downstream, Monique screeching and resisting any attempts at help as she was dragged from the river, sodden and miserable. Her dismay was more from the fact she had to spend the rest of the day inside with her grandmother. That she could not return to the water until the following day.
Rosalind grabbed the edges of her skirt and bunched it tightly in front of her as she stepped carefully down the slippery incline to feel the water temperature with her toes. By the time she had taken her foot out again, Monique and Georg had already swum to the middle. She hated that they didn’t wait for her.
“Watch the current!” Rosalind called out to them. Though there was little chance Monique would nearly drown again. In the year since her watery near demise, she had grown robust and capable, and as confident in water as a fish. She was everything that Rosalind wasn’t.