The German Wife(98)

“He’s just doing his job.”

“Isn’t that exactly what half of those bastards at Nuremberg said?” Henry asked. I winced. “Anyway, it doesn’t even matter right now. That’s not what we need to talk about. We need to talk about Bobby.”

“We do?” I asked, surprised. I remembered the friend Henry made in his unit in Europe, even though he’d never told me much about him.

“Yeah,” he said. He stared down at the glow of the cigarette in his hand for a moment, drew on it, then exhaled. “I need you to understand something.”

“Okay,” I said, anxiously.

“That camp we liberated. There was a sign over the gate. One of the guys in the tanks knew a bit of German—he told me it said every man gets what he deserves. They called that camp Buchenwald.”

“Was this in April of ’45?” I asked. Henry wrote me regularly when he was in Europe, but just before the war ended, his letters abruptly stopped. He finished his cigarette and flicked the end onto my grass.

“I knew right away that this was something different from the other awful shit we’d seen already. There were cartloads of bodies stacked outside of the crematorium near the entrance and there was nothing left of those people—just skin and bones.”

“That’s awful, Henry. I’m so sorry.”

“The captain sent us to clear buildings. I was with Bobby and we’re just walking through these buildings looking for Nazis and all we’re finding is dead people and half-dead people. Sometimes their eyes were dead, even if they were still breathing. Bobby opened a storage room and it all happened so fast. In just a few seconds, the Nazi in that little room shot Bobby and I shot the Nazi and they were both dead and I was just standing over my dead best friend and this dead stranger wondering...who won just now? You know what I realized?” His voice cracked, and the anguish on his face nearly broke me. “We all lost, Lizzie. Every single man and woman and child touched by that war lost.”

This was a bad idea. For five years, Henry had been unable to speak about this. Talking about it now—stirring up all this pain—could only lead to more chaos.

“Honey, maybe you should just go to bed—”

“Every man gets what he deserves. Sometimes I see that camp like I’m still there and it makes no damned sense, except maybe if I left some part of myself behind there.”

“Is it getting better as the years pass?” I whispered.

“The first time I went to a hospital was in 1946, not long after I left your place in El Paso. I couldn’t hold down a job. Couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t sleep or eat or stay calm in a thunderstorm. Something had to give, so I rang the VA. They said I’ve got combat fatigue and I just needed to rest. They put me in a hospital and gave me medication to make me sleep all day. I was calm while I was taking it, but coming off it—God, that was the pits. It was clear by then that they were just guessing how to help men like me. Hell, at one point they prescribed a course of ‘flower-picking therapy.’ And I was desperate, so I went with the nurse, and we picked flowers all day.”

“I can’t believe you never told me any of this.” I wasn’t just shocked. I was deeply hurt. Didn’t Henry trust me? Didn’t he understand how much I loved him—how I’d do anything to support him?

“I was ashamed, Lizzie. I still am,” he admitted, sighing heavily as he shook his head. “I just want to be normal again, but it’s like my brain is broken and nothing works to make it the way it was. In January I went up to that VA hospital in Nashville and I told them to do whatever they could to fix me. They said they were having good results from this new therapy. Insulin shock therapy, it’s called.”

“I’ve heard of electric shock therapy but...”

“It’s the same idea,” he muttered. “They use insulin to treat the diabetes too, but for veterans with combat fatigue, they give a huge dose of that medicine every day. Six days a week. Two months.” He glanced at me. “My only day off the treatment was Monday. That’s why, when I called or wrote you, it was a Monday.”

“What does it do?”

“It makes you feel real weird. Sweaty and sleepy and confused and so hungry, and sometimes really restless, like I couldn’t move my legs and arms enough to burn up the energy in my body. That would get worse and worse until—boom—I’d be so relieved when I knew I was about to go unconscious. I’d stay in that coma until they brought me out of it. They said it would jolt my brain back to the way it was.”

“And...has it? Was it worth it?”

“The psychiatrist who discharged me told me it was normal that I’d put on so much weight. Sixty pounds in eight weeks,” he said, his voice low. “He said it was normal that my brain would be damaged from the shock but that would get better. But some days now, I’m so confused, I can’t even follow basic instructions. I can’t remember anything new. I have to write everything down. I can’t even add two and two. So no, sis. I don’t think it was worth it.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“The hatred that drove those Germans wasn’t some tidy thing you can put a period after and move on from. I saw the inside of one camp. Just one out of nearly a thousand of those hellholes, and even five years later my mind is so scarred there’s some moments I don’t even know what continent I’m on. I let those doctors give me brain damage, Lizzie—just in the hopes that I’d feel myself again. And those hospitals are full of veterans just like me, all of us so—” he pointed to his head, shaking his fists beside his head with palpable, painful frustration “—so shaken by what we saw that we might never be the same.”