The German Wife(25)

But this was too important. The injustice of the situation was just too great for me to ignore, not even to please my husband.

When I went to check on Henry in his room an hour later, he was lying on the bed, staring at the wall.

“Are you all right?” I asked him tentatively.

“Yeah,” he said. His voice was still hoarse. “Sorry for all that.”

“You’ve seemed so much better lately,” I said quietly. Henry had been flat and irritable at Christmas, but since returning a few weeks ago, even Cal remarked how much calmer he seemed. Henry sighed, shrugging noncommittally. “Is your hand okay?”

He rolled toward me and lifted his fist. The skin on his knuckles was busted and there was a purple bruise forming. I was confused at first. I’d been asking about the burn from the stove, but this was something else.

“How did you do that?”

“Sorry,” he whispered, pointing to the wall beside the door. I turned and saw the four jagged holes he’d punched in the drywall. I swallowed a gasp. “I’ll fix it up when I get my next paycheck.”

“Don’t you even worry about it,” I said, but my voice was strained. For all of Henry’s troubles over the years, that kind of destructive violence was new, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

I patted him gently on the shoulder and rose to leave the room, but as I took my first steps, he said, “Lizzie?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not right,” he said. “Those people coming here after what they did. I sometimes walk past Sauerkraut Hill and there are some real nice houses there. It really worries me that the families in those blocks around them might not realize who their new neighbors really are. And besides, why have those men been given such cushy jobs working with the very Army that lost so many good men defeating them?”

“I know, Henry,” I sighed.

“Why did they come here, anyway?”

“The men didn’t have a choice in the beginning,” I reminded him. “They were brought to America as prisoners. But they do have it pretty good here now. Why would they leave?”

He sighed too and rolled away from me, staring at the wall again.

“It’s just not right,” he murmured. “It’s just not right.”

I agreed, but as I left his apartment, I was only grateful that Henry didn’t know the half of it.



13


Sofie

Berlin, Germany
1933

A few days after the election results were announced, I took the children to visit Jürgen’s great-aunt Adele. As I opened the gate between our courtyards, Laura was on my hip, chewing on her fist and drooling all over my shoulder. Georg ran ahead, stopping to inspect some chamomile blossoming along the edge of a garden bed. He bent to pick a bunch, then, clutching the stems tightly in his chubby fist, toddled along in front of me, making a beeline for the entrance to Adele’s apartment. When we found her setting up morning tea at the eat-in table in her kitchen, Georg ran toward her to show her the flowers.

“Oma!” he greeted her. Georg had seen Adele most every day of his life—but every time we stepped into her house, he seemed surprised to find her there. “Flower. Blue flower.”

“These are white flowers, Georg,” she said. Adele made a great show of taking the makeshift posy and inhaling the scent as if it were a rose. She rested the bouquet on the table, then scooped my daughter from my hip and promptly pressed a hard ginger cookie into her hand. “Chew on that. It’ll help with those sore gums.”

I had no idea how old Adele was. She said it was impolite to ask, and if anyone tried to, she refused to answer. She was Jürgen’s late grandmother’s eldest sister, and he guessed that she was in her late seventies or maybe early eighties. Adele religiously wore a hat outside even in the winter, and her face was surprisingly smooth. Her long white hair was invariably wound into a bun or, for special occasions, elaborate braids.

Like Mayim, she was a part of the circle of our little family. Adele adored Mayim and Jürgen, and she all but worshipped my children. Her feelings for me were obviously more complicated.

“Why Sofie?” I overheard her ask Jürgen when he and I first started dating. “She’s spoiled. Shallow.”

“She’s wonderful,” Jürgen said simply, and although that warmed me, the knowledge that Adele did not approve of our relationship hung over our courtship in the early years.

Jürgen was seven when his family home in Freiburg was bombed in the dying days of the Great War. His parents and infant sister, Ilsa, perished. Adele was in Berlin, on the other side of Germany, grieving the loss of her own family—both of her sons and her beloved husband, Alfred, were all killed at the front. “Three miserable telegrams over three miserable months, and then I was alone,” she told me.

But then a fourth telegram arrived. This one was from a friend of Jürgen’s parents, and it informed Adele that Jürgen had been orphaned and she was the only family they could find who might care for him. Adele’s sister, Jürgen’s grandmother, passed years before, and until that telegram arrived, Adele didn’t realize her nephew had married and had a family of his own.

Still, she had her driver take her to collect Jürgen the next day—ten long hours in a car, traversing the country. She had cared for him ever since. Even now that he was an adult with a family of his own, she still sometimes babied him.