The Roses Underneath (8 page)

“I am to go with Captain Cooper to survey some buildings.
I mean, I am to translate. I was told to wait here.”

“You and the architect, huh? Well you’ve got yourself a nice day for it. Where’s your sidekick?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Sidekick, you know, your partner in crime.”

Anna looked puzzled.

“Your daughter, the cutie.” He chuckled.

“Cutie?”

“I mean she’s cute, you know, adorable. She’s a smart one too, but I bet you know that. Anyway, where is she?”

“She is staying with a family up on the hill. They will bring her down this afternoon.”

“You mean that lady who brings kiddies down here every day? What is it, some kind of school?”

“Not really. Just sort of a babysitting service.”

Anna paused. She had left her child with someone she knew nothing about except that she had survived the war, just as Anna had.
What had Frieda done to make it this far?
Everyone who was still standing was suspect to Anna. When Amalia and Anna had arrived at the house that morning, Frieda had greeted them with a smile and taken Amalia to play with some dolls. Two other children—a little boy and his older sister—had already arrived and were happy to be there. It seemed everything was good and proper. But Anna knew appearances were not to be trusted.

“You okay, Fraulein?” Long was smiling again. He rocked on his heels as he took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke straight into the sky.

“Yes, of course,” Anna said. “And it’s Frau. Frau Klein.”

“I see. And where is Herr Klein these days?”

A jeep pulled up and stopped with a screech of its tires, inches away from Anna’s feet. Long straightened and took two steps back.

“Corporal Long, did I just catch you fraternizing with this nice lady?” Cooper jumped out of the driver’s seat and walked around the jeep to the MP. “I believe there’s somewhere else you need to be, am I right?”

Long muttered a “yes sir,” and ambled off across the courtyard. Anna tried to look ready for anything by picking up her bag and throwing it confidently over one shoulder.

Cooper grinned at her. He looked fit and rested and Anna wondered how the
Amis
maintained their continual energetic optimism. It made her tired.

“Good morning, Frau Klein. I see you are ready for our little field trip. Where is the duchess today?” Cooper relaxed as he spoke and turned his attention to digging around in the back seat of the jeep.

“She is well taken care of,” Anna said. “She won’t be coming here again.”

“Well that’s good, but I was just getting to like her.” He smiled. “Maybe there’s a chance she’ll come visit me again. I did promise to show her some of the loot we’ve got coming in next week. Should be a grand day around here. You won’t want to miss it. Anyway, she’s feeling better?”

Anna shook her head to show she hadn’t understood.

“Friday afternoon. You were gone. I asked your friend, that German fellow, the young one you were talking to, where you went. He told me the girl was sick and you had taken her home. I figured you stayed with her.”

Not my friend
, Anna thought. “Yes, she was ill but she’s much better,” she said.

“Too much sun, am I right?” He shook his head. “I told you. Anyway, Frau Obersdorfer came looking for you and I told her you were working with me starting immediately. That did the trick. Here.” He handed her an envelope that Anna recognized as her weekly wages. “But I’m sure she docked you for Friday.” He grinned.

Anna took the envelope and nodded her thanks, embarrassed that he had lied for her and annoyed that she was now beholden to him, if only a little. “Captain, may I ask just what is it that I am to do today?”

“Ah, I was just getting to that. Here, jump in and I’ll give you the full debriefing.” He gestured her toward the passenger side of the jeep.

She climbed inside and felt a strange rush come over her. After seeing all the film reels of American generals driving around in jeeps and liberating the European continent, it felt surreal to be in one herself, as if she had crossed some invisible boundary into another world. The seat was as hard as a church pew and the floor was dirty. This was not at all what she had imagined.

Cooper slid into the driver’s side. “Okay, so here’s the story: You are going to be my navigator, my translator, and my go-between for the locals. I’ll rely on you to explain to me everything they tell you and then to write it down in the report. Is that clear?”

“Yes.” Anna tried to look like was she was up for the job but she’d rather have been sitting back on her crate in the typing pool with Frau Obersdorfer looming over her. She was not in the mood for adventure of any kind.

Cooper handed her a map and a folder with blank custody forms and notepaper. Anna stacked the papers on her lap as Cooper reached under the seat and pulled out a paper bag, which he held up. “Since we’ll be out all day I got the canteen to make us sandwiches—I think it’s real cheese. We’ll have ourselves a nice picnic.” He smiled, eyes twinkling. “Are you ready?”

Anna nodded and the jeep lurched forward. As they bumped through the gate, the sentry saluted. Within moments they were cruising south on the Wilhelmstrasse, away from the old city and toward the train station.

So this is how the world looks to Eisenhower
, Anna thought as she watched the people and ruins fly by, removed from their immediacy. Now she was separated from her world, looking in from the outside. Cooper would never understand what it was like to be on the other side. Even when you got out of the jeep and walked around, if you were an
Ami
, you knew you could always get back in and drive away. That was the difference. If it weren’t for Amalia, Anna might have liked to stay in the jeep forever.

Her hair whipped about her head as the jeep sped up. She tried to hold it back with one hand but this meant she had to let go of the papers Cooper had given her. She gave up and pretended not to care. They drove in silence and Anna looked around at her new hometown. When the jeep stopped at an intersection where an MP was directing traffic, a group of young women with children crossed the street in front of them. Two little boys turned and waved at Cooper and flashed the victory sign with their little fingers. Cooper chuckled and returned the gesture. One mother, wearing a faded cotton dress and men’s shoes turned and looked blankly at the two of them. Her eyes locked with Anna’s. The woman was holding a little boy of maybe three years by the hand. The child struggled to keep up and was crying. The woman turned away and Anna looked down at her hands.

“Let’s move it please, Corporal,” Cooper shouted. “We’re not here to get a suntan.” He returned the MPs salute as the jeep passed. Anna turned to watch the group of women.

“So much to do,” said Cooper. “So much to repair.”

“Yes, the bombs really hit hard here,” Anna said.

“No, not that,” said Cooper. “So many lives.”

Anna swallowed hard and said nothing.

“Oh I’m sorry. That was—I shouldn’t have said that.” Cooper shook his head. At the next intersection, he turned onto the Mainzerstrasse and accelerated as the foot traffic and bicycles diminished. He hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and turned to her. “Oh, come on now. It’s a beautiful day. We get to drive out and look at beautiful German architecture. We have cheese sandwiches. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find some missing treasures and bring them back. You never know.” He smiled a big American smile. “You gotta try to see the good that’s left.”

“And where is that? I don’t see it anywhere.” She gestured to the ruins of a bombed building to the right, its skeleton standing among the growing weeds. “Is this it?” Anna spat the words at Cooper but her anger was only there to cover the overwhelming sense of sadness that constantly lapped at her feet. She wanted to curl up on the jeep’s front seat and cry.

Cooper didn’t respond. He drove on, tipping a hand occasionally to a passing soldier, smiling at waving children. Anna felt childish and embarrassed. Why was this so easy for them? She looked at his face with its delta of laugh lines flowing out from under the frames of his sunglasses. She softened a bit.

“You are from Iowa?” she asked. “Where is that? Is it pretty there?”

“In Iowa? Oh sure, it’s pretty if you like your country flat and fields full of corn.
There’s plenty of both.” He looked at her. “My parents have a farm. But I left to become an architect.” He shifted gears as they sped up. “Not to say I don’t like farming. I still go back in the fall to help with the harvest. But I’m not right for the farm life. Chicago’s where I work.”

Anna felt the warm air on her face and tried to imagine a place called Chicago. “You are an architect there? What are you doing here?”

“You mean because I’m so old?” he laughed. “Yeah, well I was too old to serve in the regular army but I volunteered and they gave me a nice desk job. I helped plan barracks and design bases stateside. Not exactly high design but I was doing my part. I heard about the Monuments Men unit when they first formed it and how they were looking for architects and people willing to get shot at while protecting the landmarks of Europe. I applied for a transfer and next thing I knew I was in Tuscany, ducking from snipers and trying to keep some Renaissance church from being flattened. I always wanted to do a grand European tour, but the bombs really made it interesting. Still, it’s a free trip, so I guess you get what you pay for.” He exhaled as if to disperse the memory into the air.

He turned the jeep onto the sidewalk where it lurched to a stop in front of a three-story brick building as big as a city block. Piles of rubble gathered at its base underneath boarded-up windows. Like at the Collecting Point, there was much coming and going of building materials and workers.

“What is this place?” Anna asked as she squinted into the sun.

“State archive,” Cooper said. “The structure took some secondary damage from that.” He shot a thumb toward the nearly flattened train station to the west. “Leaky roof, blown out windows. Nothing major, but it’s not watertight. I’ve already surveyed it and just need to check on the work. Come on.”

Anna followed him inside, and stood by awkwardly as he talked with another American about things that sounded very bureaucratic—orders of glass and deliveries of roof tiles. Cooper stared at a clipboard and signed his name to papers that the other American slid under his pen. The place smelled musty, like an old library. Anna stared at a crate marked
Landgraf Hessen Homburg 1622-1699
that sat next to an open office door. She did the math. Three hundred twenty-three years. What were the last seven years compared to that? A blink of an eye. Pieces of paper documenting the mundane details of feudal life survived three centuries, but human life was as fleeting as a cloud and just as trivial. The wave of hopelessness rose to her ankles and she stamped her foot.

Cooper laughed about something and slapped his colleague on the back. “All right, let’s go, Frau Klein. I’m done here.”

That was easy
, Anna thought and allowed herself to relax just a little. Her stomach rumbled in response.

Back in the jeep she tucked the papers under her thighs and tried to get a handle on her hair. They drove back toward the city but then turned west, following the scarred main artery of the Dotzheimerstrasse in the direction of the once-verdant outskirts. After a while, the city loosened its hold on the buildings and they became more spread out, as if they were trying to escape to greener pastures. A vast compound of barracks appeared, its enormous box-like buildings arranged around an open space so large it made the whole place look like the building blocks of some giant. The jeep took almost a full minute to pass the buildings.

“DP camp,” Cooper said, pointing with his chin.

“I’m sorry?” Anna asked, shouting over the jeep’s engine.

“DP camp. Displaced Persons. I think we’ve got about seven thousand in there. You can thank your lucky stars you didn’t end up there. It’s pretty miserable.”

“Seven thousand? That’s bigger than my town. What kind of displaced persons?”

“Mostly Germans like you. People fleeing the Reds—the Russians—they just keep coming.”

Anna did thank her lucky stars as they drove on toward the rolling hills for several kilometers. Cooper slowed to a stop outside an iron gate that was propped open by a piece of scrap metal. He consulted a map that he pulled from under the seat. They were well and truly in the country now and Anna wondered what could possibly be of interest here.

“Yes, this is it.” Cooper held his arms out as if to present the property to a prospective buyer.

The villa was small and charming, looking content on its little hill. Some damage was visible on the roof but, overall, it was in good condition. The long drive leading up to the main entry was lined with the stumps that remained after the firewood harvest. What looked to have been a charming garden with manicured hedges and pools of flowers was now an empty dustbowl with the odd patch of weeds adding anemic splashes of
green.

“What happens now?” asked Anna.

“We go in, we say hello, we have a look around. See what’s going on. If there’s some people in there, you’ll need to help me talk to them. And, I’ll need you to help me secure the building. Any DPs in there need to move along and any damage must be documented. Anything valuable that can’t be secured we take back with us. We leave a custody receipt, of course. Are you ready?”