The German Wife(71)
“The rockets really are huge flying bombs now, aren’t they?” I whispered.
“They have no intention of a space mission,” he admitted.
“When did you realize that?”
“Around the same time we tried to run away.”
“Oh.”
“A space mission would be the work of visionaries. It is well evident by now that these men are not that.”
“What went wrong today?” I whispered.
“Are you really interested?”
“I am,” I said, throat tight. “I’m sorry. I’ve underestimated your work so badly, Jürgen. I underestimated you.”
I started to cry, and his arm contracted around me.
“Sofie, it’s okay. Truly,” he whispered, his breath hot on my ear. “My love, even Otto underestimates this technology sometimes. We’ve made decades’ worth of progress in just a few short years. It’s okay that you’re not up-to-date with every detail. There is so much secrecy, Sofie. I wouldn’t always tell you even if you asked.”
“I feel like we’re living completely different lives.”
“It can’t be helped.”
“What went wrong today?”
“Technical problems too complex to explain to you when we are both this tired.”
“Can you fix the problems?”
“Yes. It is only a matter of time.”
A sudden vision of that immense crater on the island flashed before my eyes.
“Should you fix them?”
“We’ve spent a fortune on the program but still don’t have a model that can be mass-produced. This series of launches was supposed to show the top brass that we’d turned that around. The pressure is growing.”
“Why would they even want to mass-produce bombs right now?”
“My love, you are smart enough to know the answer to that.”
I found myself suffocating, so I pulled the blankets off our faces and drew in some deep breaths. Jürgen did the same. When my lungs no longer felt as though they were bursting, we returned to the blankets and I whispered, “They want to go to war?”
“A man like Hitler always wants war. He wants power and land, and no one is going to give those things to him. At some point, he’ll try to take them.”
29
Sofie
Huntsville, Alabama
1950
Three weeks had passed since we arrived in America. They were weeks of pure, unexpected bliss, of snuggling on the couch with Jürgen every night, of sleeping in his arms, and of watching him work like crazy to connect with Felix and to support Gisela as she settled in.
Weeks familiarizing myself with a town that seemed wary at best, hostile at worst—of trying to encourage my daughter to be brave, of giving her permission to take her novels to school so she could at least read at recess because none of the German children would speak to her, and none of the American children could.
Weeks of waking up some mornings to find graffiti on our street, sometimes just a day after we painted over the last lot. That black patch of paint on the road was growing so thick, soon we’d feel the bump as we drove over it.
In those weeks, the man in the brown uniform walked past my house several times every day. Since I was checking the mailbox constantly, hoping for mail from Laura, I found myself in the front of the house when he passed sometimes, and I felt the hostility coming off him in waves. Sometimes, he sat under the tree just around the corner from my house and stared into my street, as if he were waiting for something to happen.
And over those weeks, some of the stores added No Germans signs to their front windows, right alongside the Whites Only signs.
It felt a little like the town was trying to beat down my spirit, but I refused to allow it. I was determined to build bridges in Huntsville. Whenever I met any of the locals who seemed even a little receptive to friendly conversation, I went out of my way to connect.
“My daughter is learning English, but it’s going to take some time,” I told the bookstore owner. I’d gone in to see if he could source us some more German-language novels as a treat for Gisela for persisting with school despite the challenges. “She’s a voracious reader.”
“Well, we can’t have a young lady at a loss for reading material,” the man said, his eyes twinkling. “I’ll make some calls.”
“Thank you so much.”
“It’s my pleasure,” he told me brightly. He scribbled down my name and number on a notepad, then asked, “How are you finding things here?”
“It’s challenging at times,” I admitted. “But we’re very honored to be here.”
“I’ve watched this town wither over the last thirty years, Mrs. Rhodes. All of the jobs dried up, so the young people get to a certain age and move away. The way I see it is that if a bunch of clever scientists happen to come to town to set up a world-class rocket program, jobs are sure to follow. Besides, imagine if it’s a rocket designed at Huntsville that gets man into space? To the moon? We’ll be famous the world over. Seems to me that so long as we don’t run you out of town before you can work your magic, your people might just be the salvation of this town. In time, I reckon everyone else will see that too.”
“Thank you,” I said, overcome with emotion. “I truly hope we can do good things for your town. For your country.”