The journey from the Children’s Home to Berlin was, for Martin, like a voyage to a foreign land. He had been nowhere and seen nothing in the year that he’d lived in the home. Herr Stulper’s Sunday wanders were infrequent at best and always led the children away from civilization, up into the hills. And like most of the children, Martin had arrived at night by car and never even seen the village.
So the morning they left with Marianne von Lingenfels, Martin and Liesel followed her with wide eyes. Bedraggled white sheets and handkerchiefs hung from windows of homes—left over from the capitulation, Marianne explained. Have you not been to town since the Americans arrived? Martin was suddenly embarrassed. How had they allowed themselves to be so thoroughly locked up?
Other than the sheets on the windows, the village seemed untouched by war. The half-timbered houses stood intact, geraniums growing from their window boxes. An old stone church stood in the small square and beside this a water pump fed into a stone trough. Two American soldiers sat in a jeep, handing out chewing gum. “Would you like to ask for some?” Frau von Lingenfels asked. The idea of asking the soldiers for candy struck Martin as preposterous. The dangers of America had been a great theme for Frau Vortmuller. In America, she warned the children, Germans had to wear swastikas on their lapels. Just like the Jews had to wear stars here. She did not have to elaborate. Obviously this was not a good thing.
The day was warm, and the satchel that held Martin’s belongings (three shirts, an extra pair of trousers, a well-worn Loden jacket Frau Vortmuller had dug up from God knows where) bumped hotly against his back. It was beautiful out, though. Dandelions and morning glories blossomed along the roadside, and the flowering rapeseed fields were a sea of yellow. Frau von Lingenfels, or “Tante Marianne,” as she wished to be called, led the children in silence. Martin listened to the wind whistle in his ears and through the stands of trees between fields.
The next town over, which was bigger, had been bombed, and a church steeple jutted from a massive pile of rubble like a decapitated head. American soldiers and German women worked together scraping up the remains, pushing wheelbarrows, shoveling rocks onto an army transport truck.
When night fell, the moon was huge. Tante Marianne hired a farmer with an empty hay wagon to drive them to a town where she had heard there might still somehow be train service. And on the back of this bumping, clattering vehicle, Martin allowed himself, for the first time, to close his eyes and fall asleep.
When he opened them again, it was dark. People were everywhere, young and old, women and children, soldiers still in their Wehrmacht uniforms . . . all sitting on piles of belongings: suitcases and boxes and dirty sacks. He climbed off the wagon after Tante Marianne and Liesel, stepping around an old woman on a stool, cradling an intricately carved wooden clock.
But he and Tante Marianne and Liesel were not joining the masses on this side of the tracks. They crossed to the other side, in hopes of catching a train going east. The wrong way. Martin thought of Frau Vortmuller’s warnings that the Russians were fierce, animal-like brutes who stuck German soldiers on bayonets and did unspeakable things to women (What? the children always asked, at which she would look aghast). They were going to find his mother. They were going to Berlin.
If his mother was alive, though, Martin wondered why she had not come for him. But he didn’t ask.
“How were they killed?” Liesel asked Tante Marianne when they were seated on the platform, leaning against their bags. He knew who she meant: their fathers.
“That is no question for a child,” Tante Marianne said, her tone sharp.
“But I want to know,” Liesel insisted.
“Know that your father was a brave man. And that he did what he thought was right for his country.”
“Was he shot or hanged?” Liesel persisted in a hard and unfamiliar tone.
Tante Marianne sighed, a long, deep breath, almost worse than any answer. “Hanged,” she said. “They were almost all hanged.”
It was the first time Martin had heard it. He squeezed his eyes shut and pretended to have fallen back to sleep. His neck began to hurt, but he did not stir. It was essential to pretend.
When the train finally arrived, it was huge and violently loud, a freight train. Almost before its wheels ground to a halt, people hurled themselves at it, climbing hand over fist up the spindly ladders, scrabbling to the top of the open coal cars. There were only a few guards, all Americans, and they were busy unhooking the last car. One of them fired a few shots that whistled overhead: It was forbidden to climb aboard the freight trains, especially those hauling coal—it wasn’t yet winter but the predictions were already dire. Coal would soon be as precious as gold.
“It’s only the Americans,” Tante Marianne said. “They don’t mean to shoot anyone—if it were the British, we would have to watch our backs.”
Martin liked her optimism. When the train started, it blew her hair every which way. She looked younger and softer now. An old man passed her a flask, which she refused, but the generous spirit of his gesture was contagious. Another woman offered handfuls of raw oats. Marianne distributed a loaf of bread. The mood was jolly, even exuberant. Above them the stars were so bright and three-dimensional they seemed closer than the dark blots of towns and woods the train trundled past. Bombed church steeples, houses, and highways disappeared into an irrelevant jumble.
“Your father would have loved this,” Marianne said, startling Martin. “He always was a troublemaker.”
Martin was confused. The image of his father was becoming more opaque rather than less.
“When he was a boy,” Marianne continued, “he took up boxing to rebel against his father, who was very stern and very proper. A Fledermann boxing! It was shocking—it would be like”—she groped for an analogy—“like you taking up tap dancing!”
Martin had never heard of tap dancing. It sounded frivolous. Like something a boy should stay away from. Boxing, on the other hand, was manly. He gave up trying to make sense. He could barely hear her voice over the wind. Beside him, Liesel had fallen asleep. He let Marianne’s words wash over him. She had loved his father. This much he understood.