Monique leaves the room and stands outside, tears falling. She hates seeing him like this. Georg, so capable, so beautiful, so strong yet so tortured these past years. She wipes her face. She is not known to crumble. She does not want to show this side. When the last of the tears are dried, she walks outside.
She can see Stefano across the road, leaning, arms crossed, against the car, a piece of paper gripped in one hand and flapping in the breeze. He still doesn’t smile, not widely like her, but she can tell that he is happy, the expression lighter at the sight of her. She loves him, though she hasn’t yet told him, not since the letter. She doesn’t need to. There has been no announcement, no discussion about their love, only where they will live and where they will raise her Vivi. It is simply that they will be together.
He walks around to the passenger door and opens it for her. It is a car, he told her, that he “borrowed” from Erich. She kisses him on the cheek as she climbs inside, and he touches her back.
They drive past a town that is just charred remains and fields of earth interrupted, waiting for a fresh chance of life that will come.
“What’s that?” says Michal from the back seat. He has been talking more, and he is pointing at some children playing in the rubble. Monique has sent a photo of him to the Red Cross in the hope that they can find something, along with an address where they can reach her if they do. Though she is not hopeful. From the small amount they have taken from Michal, and the stories she has heard of others cast out of villages and towns, it is unlikely he has any family alive, and unlikely that they will claim him. Those children with German fathers are not welcome in their mothers’ countries, and she hates the thought of what it would be like to grow up being hated. She and Stefano decided that they will take him, where he will not feel different, where he will feel only acceptance and love.
“Just some children,” says Monique, “having fun.”
“Broken,” says Vivi, repeating a word she has heard, sitting next to Michal, who clutches his basket on his lap.
“Yes,” Monique says. “The houses are broken.”
It is a simple observation but one that is too layered yet for Vivi to understand.
Vivi’s hair appears almost golden at the tips with the sun through the window behind her, and she looks curiously at the world outside, to a place of wonder, and a future that is vast.
Monique smiles at her, at the innocence, and then turns farther to smile at the person who is holding her daughter’s hand.
Gustav Moulet sits there, the third person in the back. She looks at him. He is a stranger for now. Not so talkative. There is too much that he holds on to that he may never say, but he is looking at Vivi, and the crinkling of his eyes and the gentle hand that holds his granddaughter say enough for now.
EPILOGUE
Owen sits beside the old woman, another one who was recently carried out from the back of an army vehicle, rounded up like a vagrant. She watches him carefully, her mind still sharp, her thoughts hidden behind raw, sagging lids full of rheum, and skin flaking with age and the subhuman conditions she has been forced to endure.
It is difficult to know what to do with these who have no family left. By the time they set up nursing care facilities to cope with the volume, the infection that riddles her body will likely have claimed her.
Outside the window, a patch of dirt that was more recently a playground is patterned with dark heads, colored skirts, and thin, browned limbs. The doctor watches the children making the most of a new day and a clear sky and chasing one another noisily. Children had been found in the woods, some from camps across Europe, and some simply living on the streets, while the Red Cross sought permanent accommodations for them. Some would undoubtedly be sent to Jewish and other orphanages; others, if they were lucky, to homes, and luckier still if living relatives were found.
“What is a young man like you doing in this place?” the old woman says in jest. “You must have drawn the lucky prize.”
“I am lucky,” says Owen in her language. “I came in when the war was nearly over. I volunteered. My brother, however, was not so lucky. A Lancaster pilot killed in ’forty-three.”
The old woman considers him for several seconds before nodding, quietly acknowledging their differences and their sameness.
“I’m happy now to go to God,” she says. “I’m tired.”
“You mustn’t talk like this. We will take good care of you and then place you in a proper facility. You might finally see people you know.”
She looks around her at the beds filled with the old and terminally ill.
“You are young,” she says. “Optimism works best on the young.”
She sounds cold, but Owen knows that patients and others like her here shroud their hearts in rigid practicality: the words a defense against emotions they are too exhausted now to feel. He saw the destruction, a country in pieces, when he first arrived, and was shocked by it, but nothing could compare with the full knowledge of what many of his patients had been through.
He had worked first in a makeshift tent hospital, treating mostly Jewish prisoners, the handful that survived. In his first letter home, he could not put into words the sheer scale of hopelessness that he was met with: people who had lost everything except their human shells. Then after that he was sent to an English POW hospital treating German patients that were nothing like the indestructible force he had heard about abroad. Then finally he was sent to a displacement camp near Hamburg; his time here coming close to an end, his parents wanting him home in England by Christmas.
One of the nurses approaches the bedside. She says there is someone he should meet out front, someone who wishes to volunteer for work here.
Owen smiles warmly at his patient and squeezes her hand in both his own before standing to leave. Her grip tightens briefly before her release, as if she were attempting to catch as much of him as she can.
“I’ll come back and check on you later,” says Owen. And he means it. Each of the people he cares for means something to him.
He leaves the ward and walks the long hallway toward the front of the house. This house that had once been occupied by soldiers is now part of a camp for the lost. Outside there are fields of tents surrounded by more temporary barbed wire: fences erected no longer to keep people in, but rather to keep people out. The medical hut is a target for looters.
A young woman stands facing the front window in the foyer. From the back of her, there is nothing that gives much away. She wears a long skirt, with a wide-sleeve blouse tucked into her tiny waist, and a scarf around her head covering her hair.
She turns as he approaches, and there is blond hair at the edges of the scarf above her forehead. She is young, pretty, with eyes the color of pale topaz.
He puts out his hand, and she looks at it briefly first before she carefully takes the greeting.
“I would like to volunteer here,” she says, hands formally back at her side.
“It is hard work. Doesn’t your family need you at home?”
“There is no family,” she says directly. “I am all that’s left.”
There is an instant understanding of why she is here. He has seen it in others. Others who want to make amends for things they weren’t directly involved with.
“I’m sorry,” he says sincerely.
“I have my life. I’m grateful for that.”
“Can I see your papers?”
“I have none. My name is Rosa, and I was a casualty nurse in Berlin. I have had several years of experience. Everything, my records, too, was destroyed in Berlin. My home is gone.”
These are words he is used to hearing, but there is no self-pity in her voice, something that, to Owen, makes her strangely endearing and fearless. From the moment he stepped on German ground, he told himself that he was not here to judge the common people, but to heal the injured. He has met with many like Rosa, but none that have brought about the intrigue he is suddenly feeling now.
“As you are already aware, there is no money in it for you, I’m afraid, but I can give you a bed and food, and see what your skills are like at least. Until I agree to any permanency.”
She nods.