One day Liesl’s friend, the cook from the Hartwald Spa, stopped by to tell her that the once-glorious operation had shut down completely. “The whole place is looted,” the cook moaned, wiping her eyes. “People started stealing as soon as the last officer left. They even tore down the chandelier.” The cook shook her head when Liesl offered her a place to
stay. She was heading home to her family on the western outskirts of Berlin. “Some may have no pride left, but I do.”
Liesl had known the spa’s demise was inevitable, but she couldn’t help feeling that her own past had been looted and ruined, stripped of its meaning. Who was that lonely red-haired girl who once huddled by her radio, taking comfort from Hitler’s speeches, who had knitted dozens of wool socks one winter to warm the cold feet of soldiers?
“I was innocent,” she said to Jürgen one day. He grabbed her face and explored it with two wondering hands. “I think I was innocent.” The words choked her.
Liesl emerged once to visit Herr Geiss and tell him that the boys were safe. He greeted her news with curious neutrality. He seemed preoccupied with something else. His eyes kept moving to the windows while she spoke. The dust was no longer thick in his main room, but the walls were still bare and it smelled stale.
“Well,” she said, rising. “Now Ani will get some peace, and Hans will be away from bad influences.”
“Bad influences!” Herr Geiss grunted. “With the Americans driving tanks through Cologne?” He crowded after her until she was out the door. Within minutes, a lorry pulled up and men began unloading tall crates into the Geiss house. They moved cautiously, as if the contents were fragile.
Liesl decided not to wonder what was inside, but the news about Cologne compounded her sadness about the spa’s closure. This was a different kind of blow—not to her own past, but to the country’s. The city’s name had always struck her as one of the most beautiful in Germany: Köln—the sound was shiny and rich, the gold of a bishop’s chalice. The Roman settlement had grown up through medieval times to a grand city with a Gothic cathedral that towered above it all. Throughout the war, constant bombing raids had killed thousands of its citizens and sent the rest fleeing to the countryside, but the shell of
the old Cologne had still belonged to them, to Germany. And now it was just gravel beneath the tanks of the Amis.
She pressed her face into the baby’s neck, grateful for his comfort. Jürgen would be ten months old on Easter. He hadn’t been sick again since that one fever, and his limbs were strong, his eyes alert. He was making distinct sounds now, too. Not words yet, but hard consonants like
g-g-g
and ohs and ahs.
Sometimes he peered past her suspiciously, as if he thought she might be hiding Hans or Ani behind her back. “They’ll be home again soon,” she said. A note in Hans’s hand divulged little except that they’d made it to the farm and Ani was improving in the fresh air.
I just want to find one quiet piece of the world, and stay there and live a humble life
, Liesl wrote back. Uta would laugh. She wanted to be a daisy of the fields again. Uta had not written. Uta was probably living underground. Berlin was under daily assault now.
Several days after Palm Sunday, Liesl buried jars holding the records of Frank’s army draft and their years of working at the spa alongside a parcel with the house’s best silver. She did it in the dark, after Jürgen was sleeping, sinking a spade in the cold wet earth of the garden. She made sure no one was watching, ran upstairs, and brought down Uta’s bracelet, shoving it deep in the ground under the jars, and piling the dirt over them all. The fragrance of the thaw made her knees weak. It reminded her of planting time in the fields of her early childhood, holding her mother’s hand, jumping in the rows left by her uncle’s plow. She cried herself to sleep that night.
The next day, Frau Hefter came to the door to enlist Liesl in a cleanup crew for the rubble in the city center.
“My daughters can watch your little one,” she said. “We need strong arms and backs.” She recounted all the women who had joined the effort, this widow and that widow and that orphaned girl. She asked how Hans and Ani were faring in the country, and then without
really listening to Liesl’s answer, she announced that her husband was missing.
“Still doing his duty, no doubt,” said Frau Hefter. The last she’d heard from him, the Red Army was marching on the POW camp where he was based. “They were breaking down the camp and moving the prisoners west.”
“I’m sorry,” Liesl said. “It’s hard . . . waiting for news.”
Frau Hefter didn’t even blink. Her blue eyes shone. “And my Georg has joined the Volkssturm.”
Georg Hefter was just a few years older than Hans, a skinny teenager who rode his bike too fast around town.
“Oh,” was all Liesl could say. She reached out and squeezed Frau Hefter’s arm.
Frau Hefter clicked her tongue against her teeth. Then she thrust her chart at Liesl, showing her what time slots were open. “We won’t win the war by giving up now!” she shouted as she departed.
The next morning Liesl left Jürgen with the Hefter brood and their nanny and headed to the town center to join a small horde of women who were clearing it with wheelbarrows. A dense cluster of buildings there had been burned to walls and empty arches. Taken together they appeared not to rise from the earth, but hung from the sky like cages. A single wall jutted, holding nothing at all. Its innards puffed out: yellowed mortar, mold, ancient newspaper. Drifts of rubble rose around it, clogging thoroughfares with broken concrete, brick, roof tile, cinders, and worst, fragments of cloth and black spots that could have been spilled oil or blood. People had started to pack down trails over and through the drifts, but their web of paths made the landscape look permanently altered, as if it might never be level again.
Now that it was daylight, Liesl saw that such ruins scattered like oases throughout the town, near strategic targets. The Americans had not destroyed Hannesburg, merely jabbed wounds in it everywhere. This wound was the biggest. Three lines of women worked the rubble. One searched for whole bricks; one stacked the bricks neatly in piles; one shoveled useless debris into carts. Scarves shrouded their hair and faces. They wore heavy aprons and housedresses, and dust streaked their stockings and skirts. They had the preoccupied air of ants after their mound has been disturbed. Liesl searched for Frau Hefter, for any familiar face, but if any of these women had been at the Frauenschaft meeting, she didn’t recognize them now. She had the desolate sense that all those hopeful, panicked wives were gone now, vanished, burned up in the night of the raid. These women knew the war was over. The Americans were coming. There were no men left to fight, no weapons left to aim but pride. They were cleaning up.
The closer Liesl got, the more the air stank of rotting flesh, and she paused to knot her handkerchief around her mouth like the others. It was hard to breathe through the cloth, but the fabric dulled the sharpness of the scent. Bend, lift, straighten—her back remembered the old aches of the harvest. Her hands remembered the scratches and scrapes of plucking and digging. When she finally found a perfect brick she carried it down to the women making stacks.
It was then that she spotted Frau Hefter. Her back was to Liesl, her blond hair bound up in two thick braids and pinned behind her head. Frau Hefter was muttering to herself as she stacked the bricks, her hands deft, the picture of effort.
“I finally found one that wasn’t broken,” Liesl said, holding out her brick.
Frau Hefter made a startled noise and turned. As soon as Liesl saw her face, she realized her mistake. It wasn’t Frau Hefter; but another woman with similar coloring but with uglier, fleshier features, masked
by a scarf. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. They settled on Liesl without recognition.
“Just set it on down, with the others,” the woman said. She had a coarse accent. “Right there.” She pointed at a pile.
Liesl didn’t move, still confused by her error.
With a grunt of impatience, the woman grabbed the brick and set it on her stack.
“Liesl, over here.”
Liesl saw someone waving from half a block away. It took her a few moments to identify the slender figure, the doll-like face. Berte Geiss. Thank heavens there was someone she recognized. Liesl walked over the loose rubble with her hands held out, to stop herself if she fell.
“It’s better here,” said Berte. “The RLB already cleared the worst of it.”
Liesl sucked lightly through the scarf. She could still taste the rotten gases and she shook her head. “I’m not much help,” she said.
“Chin up,” said Berte, and handed her a shovel. “Help me fill this cart. It’s just dust left here now.”
They worked together in silence, falling into an alternating rhythm.
“You seem so much older than when I first met you,” said Liesl.
“Do I?” Berte shrugged. Her eyebrows rose behind her scarf, as if she were smiling. “Have I gotten all wrinkled already?”
“No, I didn’t mean that,” Liesl said seriously. “I mean that you seem so capable.”
“I thrive in a crisis,” Berte said. “I’ve been through this total war before, remember? It’s old hat. Besides, I gotta get out of the house. The lovebirds are driving me batty.”
Liesl breathed again. The handkerchief tasted of her own sour spit. “Is it that bad?”
“She even makes eyes at him when she dusts,” Berte said, and imitated Frau Dillman’s jiggling chest.
Liesl laughed aloud at the imitation, but then was struck by a sudden sadness. She had never reconciled with Frau Dillman. She threw herself into shoveling.
You can marry that old man
, she thought, spiking her spade into the ground.
But you’ll always be his Putzfrau
.
They filled five wheelbarrows and dumped them, then moved on to a new location, on the rim of the R
athaus
, and began shoveling ash. The cinders made a higher, softer sound against the shovels, almost a music.
“How are the boys?” Berte asked.
“They like the farm life,” Liesl said truthfully. “I knew they would.” After a moment’s hesitation, she queried Berte about the crates that her father-in-law had moved into the house.
“Oh, those,” Berte said. “He’s been storing some of my mother-in-law’s paintings somewhere and he thought he better bring them home.”
Frau Geiss must have done a lot of paintings
, Liesl thought. “Did you know her?” she asked. She had been curious about the elder Frau Geiss since she’d cleaned her house. She remembered the artist’s tenderness in her portrait of Ani and Susi.
“Uli’s mother? Met her twice before she died,” said Berte. “She didn’t approve of our marriage. Said I shouldn’t get married so young.” She thunked a heavy shovelful of earth into the wheelbarrow. “I guess she did, and she regretted it.”
Liesl and Berte were washing their faces and hands at the city pump when they heard the shelling begin. It had come, distant as thunder, several times in the past week, but this shelling was loud and near. Full of whistles and shrieks. A boy climbed up on a roof and looked east. He shouted that he could see a dark line moving on the roads. His mother begged him to come down.
By the time the boy scrambled to the ground, the women had emptied their last loads and were piling the shovels. They spoke in whispers, as if the approaching Americans could already hear them. The metal dropped with loud clatters. The wooden handles clanked together, a drumbeat of
common purpose.
Get home. Get home now
. Liesl felt the displaced sensation again, as if she were some other mother hearing the news. She glanced up at the pale dome above. What if more planes came tonight? What if the American soldiers took their revenge on women and children?
Beside her Berte looked strangely serene.
“You seem happy,” Liesl said, an edge in her voice.
“It’s almost over.”
But Berte plodded on the walk home, and Liesl had to keep slowing her pace to let her catch up. “Please,” she said, breathless. “I need to get Jürgen.”
“They won’t reach here until tomorrow,” Berte said. “I think we can make it home before tomorrow.”
“I just want to get him,” said Liesl, her mind flashing with terrible images of Frank, Hans, and Ani hiding in a hayloft while tanks rolled through the fields below. What if Jürgen was the only one she had left?
“And I just want to see these streets as German for one last time,” said Berte. “Don’t you? Tomorrow it’ll all belong to someone else.” She waved a hand at a house’s brown-painted shutters and the cracked glass window of the bakery, at the white tower that rose over the town. “And we’ll belong to someone else, too.”
Liesl burst into the apartment with Jürgen, already mentally sorting and packing what else to bury in the yard. The china. Anything with a swastika on it. She wondered what could be burned.
She heard something thump across the floor and stood still, heart pounding.
She was reaching to turn on a lamp when a male voice said from across the room, “Don’t be angry about the rabbits. Hans and I will build them a hutch for the balcony tonight.”
Liesl switched the lamp on, and Frank’s body sprang out of the darkness. He looked too thin and had grown a beard, and he was wearing a ridiculous hodgepodge of clothes—pants too short in the legs and a shirt too short in the sleeves and a giant, poorly knitted shawl thrown over it all. His eyes fastened on her, then Jürgen. She stared back, unable to believe it was him. She didn’t recognize the expression on his face. He looked so hungry, but his mouth curled as if he had tasted something bitter.