Sentimental Journey (29 page)

“You are to stop this”—he waved his hand—”lazing about and remember where you are and why. You will clean those weapons every night. You will sleep with them. And when you wake up, you will clean them again.”

They sat there like wooden ducks.

He wondered for a brief moment if they had even heard his order.
“Now.”

They scattered swiftly.

“Understand this . . . ” he added, watching them and their expressions.

The men were annoyed and angry, but looked more alive than a few minutes ago.

“I will not send another man to the field hospital.” He turned and walked straight toward the parked trucks, sidestepping a stack of rocks they used to anchor the tents against capricious desert winds.

He stopped behind the closest lorry and pulled back the canvas flap, checked the contents, then turned to one of his NCOs. “Distribute these cans of vehicle paint to the men. Have them use it on their helmets.”

“Which color paint, Herr Leutnant? There are three colors.”

“The mustard. The same one used on the half-track. While the paint is wet, they are to roll their helmets in sand. That should stop the glare and camouflage their heads in the trenches.”

The man gave a sharp nod and sent five enlisted men to pull the paint cans from the lorry.

“The men have too much time on their hands. Make certain they have plenty to do before sunset.”

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”

Rheinholdt walked over to his tent and went inside, where his personal belongings were sitting on a wooden cot. He began to unpack his canvas rucksack and settle in. He folded flat the empty sack and set it under the cot, then picked up a small shaving mirror and hung it on a wooden tent support.

From the mirror, a filthy, almost unrecognizable face stared back at him. Rings of grimy dirt were around his eyes in the shape of sand goggles, and his lips were swollen, cracked, and blistered. He looked like a badger. His overlong hair was stuck to his scalp in the shape of his field cap and was dusty gray on the ends from sand, dirt, and wind. He scratched his scalp with both hands for a full minute. A few of his men had used their razors to shave their heads—relief from the fleas.

He glanced down at his dull razor for a weak moment. He was filthy and ragged and as much out of uniform as most any soldier in the desert. He had cut the canvas tops of his high boots down to the ankle and allowed his men to do the same. He didn’t wear his tunic daily; he settled for a shirt and shorts.

But he was still an officer. And by example, the leader of his men. He could take the fleas and the dirt and the itchy, scabbed scalp.

With a small cup of salty water from one of his canteens, he brushed his teeth, repeatedly scrubbing the brush against an almost nonexistent block of toothpowder. He rinsed his mouth, then used the same water to wash his face and hands before he dumped what was left into a canister for use in the vehicle radiators. He rewrapped a paper-thin piece of government-issue soap in old crinkled cellophane, then set it aside and sat down, unsnapping the flap on his shirt pocket before he pulled out an envelope.

It used to be ivory. Now it was smudged with dirt and fingerprints and spotted from where he’d spilled tea on it. The paper was torn, frayed from handling and rereading the letter inside every night. He blew into the open end and carefully pulled out the folded pages.

A photograph fell onto his knee.

His wife and children looked back at him as if he were the camera lens.

He picked up the photo and propped it against his mess tin atop an empty supply crate next to his bed. With the torn old envelope still in his hand, he rested his elbows on his knees for a moment and just looked at his family.

Hedwig wore a lace collar on a dark woolen dress with a narrow belt that made her waist look as small as that of his daughter, Marthe, who was only ten. She stood next to her mother with a wistful smile that was so like her mother’s that he felt a wave of pity for the young man who would someday fall in love with his elder daughter. A man couldn’t say no to a smile like that.

Standing on the other side of Heddy was Renate, their five year-old. She had an altogether different smile. She was grinning toothlessly. Inside the envelope was one of her front teeth she had sent him for good luck. He tapped the envelope against his palm and looked at the small ivory tooth. It was one of life’s infamous ironies that a tooth could make him smile whenever he looked at it.

The thing he remembered most about his teeth as a child was that they were always loose. But his father’s and mother’s teeth had been loose, too, from malnourishment. One look at the photograph was enough to see that his own family looked healthy, with rosy cheeks, shining hair, and none of the pallor that hunger had given his own childhood and that of his brother and sister’s.

Life had changed since the aftermath of the First World War, when he was very young and hungry and would dig in the fields with his father, searching for roots to cook because there was no food. After hours of combing their bare hands through dirt roads and barren fields for something—anything—to eat, they would come back to an icy-cold home with a few pieces of wood for a fire and filthy hands they had to wash in melted snow. On fortunate days, stuffed in their pockets were a few flower bulbs and a stub of a tree root for the soup pot.

He remembered the dead dogs in the streets and the sticklike bodies of the children who lived nearby, children who seldom played because if you were hungry, your head and belly ached too much to do anything but try to sleep it away. Two of those children, the boys in the next house—one, his friend Rudolph whose father had been killed on a battlefield in
Belgium
—died a few months apart. There had been many nights when Rheinholdt had fallen asleep to the cries of hungry babies and the churning of his own stomach.

Those were the days when
Germany
and her people almost cracked under the stifling inflation that made money in
Germany
worthless, the days of poverty, when they wore clothes made of ersatz cloth so paper-thin that it melted in rain and cracked in the freezing cold. It had been a time of no food or jobs or future, only poverty and despair.

Eventually, when Hitler had turned to propaganda to impress the outside world, most Germans, like Rheinholdt himself, accepted him because their own lives were now better. Things had changed.

His father did not like Adolf Hitler, and said he was only a fool trying to fool the world with his rows of cardboard tanks set up in city squares. In time, those long rows of military tanks made of cardboard and wood became real and were shown worldwide on German government-produced newsreels. Even when there was color in people’s skin again, his father still did not trust the Nazis.

“You cannot join the Army, Frederich. You will be a Nazi.”

“I will join the Wehrmacht, Father, not the Nazis.”

“It is the same thing now.”

“I do not think so. The Wehrmacht is
Germany
’s army. But even if what you believe is true, is the Nazi army so terrible?”

“Ja!”

“It is only politics.”

“You are wrong.”

“But can you not see promise in what they say? We will all have an automobile. The photos—long lines of Volkswagens—we subscribe and we will have cars. Every German. The cars are just waiting.”

“I see no one getting these cars they promise. All I see are photographs of them. Like that nincompoop’s rows of cardboard tanks.”

“But the tanks are now real. And the government gave every German house a radio. You have one over there. Look. See? Soon you will have an automobile, too.”

“I see. I see more than you do. They gave us radios to listen to their talk of power and strength, about their enemies and about their ideals, which are nothing but laws of absolutes. How can this be good for
Germany
? I tell you, you cannot trust these men.”

“You said yourself that the men behind Hitler are the fanatics. They will not last.”

“Nein. This is an ugly thing, Frederich.”

“You were a soldier. It is a noble profession.”

“Noble?” His father’s fist slammed down on the table, and he stood up, looking down at him. “Can you be my son? How can you ignore what is happening? Do you not see the demonstrations? Do you not listen?”

“It is only propaganda . . . for the world to see, not for Germans.”

“You believe this?”

“
Ja
.”

“Your mother and I went to the theater last night. They kept the doors shut and guarded during the newsreels and during the Reich’s films. Why do they lock the doors if this is not for Germans?”

Rheinholdt had only looked at his father.

“And tell me this, are Joseph and his father not Germans? Did the security police not come to the bank last month?”

“They came only to question them about some foreign accounts.”

“And when they left, Joseph and his father were wearing the Jewish Star on their clothes. Joseph cannot remove it. Your friend. Your own sister’s husband must wear this thing. What do you think will happen to her, to his family and their children?”

“Liesel is not Jewish. No one will harm Joseph or his father. The bank is too important to the city. Those foolish stars are only from Goebbels’s bitterness. They mean nothing.”

“You are young. You do not know. War is coming. I know what war is. I have seen it. I have been in a foxhole filled with my comrades’ bodies. I have had the sun come up on a battlefield and looked down to see blood on my hands. War is young men ordered to kill strangers by strangers, for plots of land that matter little to those who kill and are killed. You, my son, will be part of war, perhaps part of creating it.”

His father slumped down in his chair like a puppet with broken strings, which was unlike him. He was a strong, stubborn, and outspoken man. After a minute he covered his face with his hands and said quietly, “You will shame me.”

Rheinholdt did not join.

His father died two years before the German Army invaded
Poland
. Four months before that, Rheinholdt was conscripted into the German Army, after the banking house he’d worked for became part of the government.

The army took him away from home, away from his daughters and wife. All he wanted, in truth, was for this war to be done and to go home alive. He also felt it was his own responsibility to see that his men went home to their families alive.

He put Renate’s tooth back inside the envelope and set it near the photograph. For a few minutes he sat there, his elbows resting on his knees as he tried to remember what home looked like.

“Herr Leutnant?” The corporal was standing outside his tent. Come in.

“Here is the information you wanted for Fusilier Hoffman. He was from
Bavaria
, the town of
Altomunster
.”

Rheinholdt took the address. “Thank you, Gefreiter.”

The corporal left and Rheinholdt pulled his paybook from his back pocket and balanced it on his knees. He flipped it open and pulled some folded sheets of writing paper from the side pocket, then spread the paper out on a footlocker and took out a pen.

He had only written one other letter of condolence, before he came to
North Africa
. He rolled the pen in his fingers. The words seemed too difficult to find.