excerpt

Excerpt

Politics: A Fragment

On a summer day in 1948, Ruth Karstens, a young widow, and Pauli, her five–year–old niece, made their way gingerly down a densely forested mountain somewhere in eastern Germany. Both were hot, muddy, and exhausted. Pauli, holding on to Ruth’s hand, lagged behind more and more, and so it looked as if Ruth were dragging the child down the mountain. A fresh breeze that had stayed behind after a thunderstorm parted the leaves of the trees now and then and gave Ruth a view over the vast, green pastures and barren fields toward where she was headed: a round village at the far horizon out of which stuck a church steeple. In the haze of that humid summer day, the hamlet looked more like a mirage than an actual village, but the image was enough to inspire Ruth to keep going.

In the same dense and silent forest, near the foot of the same mountain, a Russian soldier sat on the ground. He guarded a wide, muddy strip of land, a kind of road that hugged the foot of the mountain. His task was to make sure that no one would cross it. The strip was about fifty yards wide and had been thoroughly cleared of trees and underbrush and, particularly, of the network of brambles of the wild blackberries that used to grow there. The children of the village used to come in the summer to collect the berries in tins and baskets, and their mothers used to make the most delicious jams out of them. But the children did not come that summer. In fact, no one went near the mountain for fear they would be shot.

That day in 1948, the raped tract of land, now looking sad and desolate, didn’t have the least scent of the brutal notoriety that would define it for the next fifty years when it would be called ‘The Iron Curtain.’ By dividing the world into East and West, it would have more power than any other piece of real estate ever. That afternoon, it looked innocent enough. Not far from the soldier, in the part that was called ‘The West’ and that was occupied by the American Armed Forces, a young farmer tilled a field with an ox. Ruth could see him as she came down the mountain. She had the distinct sense that, once she crossed what appeared to her a muddy creek and made it to that farmer, she would be home free.

The soldier, a gun in his lap, fished a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and struck a match. But before the match could make its way to the tip of the cigarette, a twig snapped brightly in the silence of the forest. The soldier froze, holding the lit match between his fingers. All his senses strained as the small sound of leaves crushed by soft steps came haltingly closer from somewhere above him. Without making the least sound, he blew out the match, lifted his gun, and rolled behind a tree. Ruth and the child walked directly and unsuspectingly toward him….

The Sanctuary

In April of 1948, in a dim and Spartan attic room in Wiesbaden, Germany, Ruth Karstens, a young woman of twenty-six, mended a dress. It was the only dress she owned, a wildflower print on a pale yellow background, and it was not the first time she needed to mend it. This time, she had ripped it when she went to a job interview at a small, newly re-opened grocery shop. Walking in the door, she had caught the dress on a nail that ripped a perfectly triangular tear into a cluster of poppies and daisies and summer vines that congregated on the dress. She tried hard to work the stitches in such a way that they would follow the outlines of the flowers and vines. The tear, she figured, would be less obvious that way.

She worked beneath the light of a tall, elegant lamp that was wholly out of place in the room and did nothing to soften its appalling poverty. Its meager furnishings consisted of a table and four chairs that didn’t match, a cot, an elaborately wrought but slightly rusted iron bedstead, some boxes, lined up where the slanted roof of the room met the floor, and an old radio.

The cot was neatly made up with a blanket that had woven in its margins the letters ‘US ARMY’. Beyond the sphere of the lamplight, in the soft shadows, two small children slept in the bed. The small skylight above the bed was like an afterthought in the slanted wall that made up the roof of the nineteenth-century Victorian apartment building where Ruth lived. The skylight was propped open to a mild evening sky filled with stars.

As she sewed, Ruth looked, now and then, at a glass filled with grape hyacinths, wild daffodils, and anemones. She had gone for a walk earlier that day with the children. They had left the city and had walked through a park that, before the war, had been a calm and tranquil refuge from city life with neatly trimmed lawns and benches and quiet paths beneath high old trees. But now the lawns had gone wild and the paths were overgrown with weeds. Not that it mattered to Ruth or to the children. They had collected wildflowers and scouted out the places at the edge of the woods for blackberry vines that had just begun to bloom and would yield a wealth of berries later in the summer.

Ruth made a mental note of just where the blackberries were, because they were food and they were free, and if she could hoard sugar, which might be impossible but she could try, she could make jam.

The battered radio on the floor beside her chair played a lively waltz that was barely audible. Now and then, Ruth hummed softly along with the music without making the least sound and tapped her foot to its rhythm as she sewed. At times, the radio sputtered, which she registered with a frown and fixed by tapping it sharply with her foot.

The sudden, jarring ring of a doorbell beyond the room so startled her that, with an unconscious gesture, she put her hand to her heart. With an intuitive gesture born of fear, she turned the radio off and waited, sitting stiffly, straining to hear the least sound. The bell rang again, loud and insistent. Again there was silence. Finally, a door creaked open somewhere and slow footsteps shuffled along a corridor. Muffled voices came through the door as another closed beyond with a thump, and someone knocked. Ruth put down her sewing. The children lifted their tousled heads.

Ruth turned to the children who, rosy-cheeked and sleepy, sat up now. She put her finger to her lips. The children slipped under the cover so only their eyes showed, fearful and curious, as Ruth cautiously opened the door.

In the dim light of the hallway stood her landlady, Mrs. Garske, wearing a housecoat and curlers—she had obviously been startled out of deep sleep—, grimly holding on to an emaciated, desperately filthy, and utterly exhausted young woman. “Hannah!” Ruth cried out and ripped the door open wide. It slammed against the wall with a bang just as Hannah collapsed at the threshold.

A Wonderful Place

I put the pages down. “And you were one of the children sleeping in that bed?”

“Of course.”

“But what did this do to you?”

“It gave me a good night’s sleep,” Penelope said, feigning ignorance.

“All right, Miss Smart Aleck!”

She grew serious. “I know what you’re asking. But if you expect me to feel sorry for myself, you’ve come to the wrong person.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant, it must have left . . .” I didn’t know what to say. Wounds? Scars? Depression? Anger? What? A very deep and negative impression, to say the least, I would think.

“Actually,” she said, “we were very lucky. Millions of people slept on the floor. Or dug out some kind of shelter in the rubble of bombed houses or office buildings. And we had furniture, even if we dug most of it out of the bombed house next door. And the cot came from the relief center. So.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t all bad. At least not then. I mean, what does a child want? To be loved and to feel safe. I felt loved and I felt safe.”

“I suppose,” I said, hesitating. I didn’t believe her.

Painfully slow, as if it were an object that could break just by touching it, she took a cigarette out of the pack on the table.

“The wonderful thing about kids is that they are quite happy if they don’t know any better. And, I didn’t know any better. I thought that’s the way people all over the world lived. Of course! This was my world. I didn’t know any other. I mean, if you’re born into a bombed world, that’s your world. And if you’re born into a world with little food and few clothes and shoes, you take that for granted. Going to the relief center was a way of life. I didn’t know that there were stores where you could buy clothes. I mean, there weren’t any. They were bombed. I won’t ever forget the day when lollipops first appeared in the grocery store across the street. Of course, lollipops had existed before the war. But I did not know that, or I was too small and had forgotten. I didn’t know what they were, but they looked so cheerful and yummy, I admired them for weeks. Once, when my mother sent me to the store for our weekly ration of milk—a quart, I think—I bought one of these delicacies, and then I lied about the amount of change I returned to her. Of course, she knew I was lying. And she was relentless and I had to confess, finally. She let me keep the lollipop. But that was after she spanked me, for lying and stealing.”

The small, dull pain in my chest was my heart that ripped just a little. In my mind’s eye I saw the pint-size girl in the picture with her hummingbird size bird’s nest on top of her head, the dimples in her cheeks and the desire in her eyes for something so ordinary as a lollipop. They used to hand them out free in the drugstore where I shopped with my mother. Strange thing is that I used to think that I didn’t have a heart. Good, ol’ Alex whose eyes would glide so casually over the homeless sitting on the benches or piling up their boxes in the alleys. But that’s not true. It wasn’t even casual. I did not see them. And when I did, I gave them no thought at all. Theirs was a way of life. Something one could not change. Pointless, even, to try.

I could not look at her after she told me the story of the lollipop. I pretended to be in dire need of some coffee. Was I going to look at her and have her read what I felt that moment? Not on your life.

But she didn’t look at me anyway. She smiled out the window at the memory of that delicious lollipop.

“And you mustn’t forget,” she said, turning to me, “that everyone I knew lived just that way.”

I looked up then, and she must have read the misery in my eyes.

“Hey,” she said. “I’ve had a hundred lollipops since.”

I couldn’t help but shake my head.

“And that bombed house was a wonderful place for us kids. Of course, under penalty of death, we were not to play there.”

“A wonderful place?” I said, dumbly, leaning forward to study her face. Surely, she was kidding.

“Oh, it was Heaven!” she said, dreamily. “We found the whitest chalk there. And books that had refused to burn. And cut crystals from the chandeliers that had crashed . . .”

I must have looked utterly dumbfounded, because she laughed.

“And sometimes even canned food. I thought it was all perfectly normal. Until your dad came along. And what he brought, shook me to the bone.”

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