This Shared Dream (25 page)

“We’ve all been concerned about you. You left the minute the committee congratulated you as a new doctor.”

She certainly had. That day, so soon after getting out of St. E’s, she was in no shape for anything beyond the scope of her presentation, and especially did not want to tangle with Koslov.

“I’m glad to see that you’re back at work. The store has been … haphazard, without you.” He usually came by once or twice a month, as did many professors. “So, everything is all right now?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Fine.”

“You left very quickly that other day too, after your last class. I’m afraid that I upset you.”

“Oh, no, not a bit. I was just doing too much. Not eating right. That kind of thing.”

“That’s a relief to hear. We were talking about your alternate history, if you recall.”

“Like I said, I was pretty tired.”

“Sorry you missed graduation.”

“Oh, those ceremonies are so boring.” She bent down and straightened some books.

“Indeed.” He reached into a shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed to her.

She brightened, despite her interest in sweeping Dr. Nosy out of the store. “A list. Good.” All the professors had their lists, and she often stocked their suggestions. Koslov’s lists were always of foreign, translated books, many of which she had never heard of. They generally turned out to be interesting.

“Your husband refused to order these.”

“He was afraid they wouldn’t sell.”

“I explained to him that I suggest them to my students, and that they aren’t carried by the university bookstore.”

She smoothed the list on the countertop. “Yes, I’ve seen some reviews of this … Oh, good, I’d like to read this one myself. We should have them in ten days or so. The Fleiger will take longer.”

Koslov pointed at one title. “This is a book of poetry. I translated it. The translation has won an award, by the way.”

“Congratulations. The original was Russian?”

“Yes. The author’s name is Rosa Hadntz. Have you ever heard of her?”

He was watching her face very closely. She was puzzled. “No. Ought I have?”

“Oh, no. She died long ago, in a German concentration camp, and her poems were only found lately, in Stalingrad. She had been sending them to her relatives there.”

Jill sighed. “That’s a sad story. I will certainly order a copy.”

“Maybe two?” he suggested.

She smiled. “By the way, I’m having a party at my home for the Fourth of July. I sent the invitations yesterday, so you and a few other people in the department will be getting them soon.”

He tilted his big, shaggy head. “I hear you’ve moved. You’re getting a divorce?”

Nosy old fart. Well, they probably all knew. “Yes. It’s the house I grew up in.”

“Very good,” he said, and nodded thoughtfully.

Five or six people walked in. The after-dinner rush was starting.

“I’m getting busy,” she said.

“Let me just pay for this, then.” He did so, and walked out onto M Street. Good riddance. She’d only invited him to the party because she’d asked everyone else in the department, practically. He made her nervous, and he’d never done so before. Before, it had been invigorating to spar with him. Something had changed, but she wasn’t sure what. Her, probably.

She turned her attention back to her domain.

It was good to be back in the store. Orienting. Like breathing. Nothing new, and that was comforting. Elmore was right; he hadn’t ordered a damn thing, and not a single sales lunch was on the calendar. He complained that she was too old-fashioned and that she ought to do everything by computer. He was probably right.

She started yet another list, and tried to keep an eye on the man wearing an old, shapeless fedora, pulled low, and a long raincoat, browsing in the mystery section. Students, and street people, had a way of walking out with those little paperbacks. But she was soon too busy to pay close attention, and when the rush was over, and she got back to her stool behind the counter and her cold cup of coffee, he was gone.

When she locked up, though, she felt marvelously successful. A whole evening back at the store.

She was Jill again.

Wilhelm Anderson

THE WEREWOLVES

May 22

W
ILHELM—BILL—ANDERSON
sat in the Bank cafeteria sipping coffee and eating meatloaf and boiled potatoes, alone, while around him congenial chatter filled the air. Most colleagues expressed incredulity at his affection for this meal (with boiled green beans on the side) but it reminded him of home. He ate it whenever it was offered, and kept away from their teasing. After all, they didn’t know the meal meant something important to him.

His mother would cook such a dinner on cold Ohio evenings, as snow lay heavy on the flat streets of the small town and on the flat land surrounding it, and the 5:00
P.M.
gloom outside the kitchen held a just-lit streetlight. By the time they lived in Ohio, his mother’s blond hair no longer fell in graceful, 1940s-style waves around her face, but was pulled back in a severe, colorless bun, and her steps, as she endlessly cleaned their plain frame house and dark furniture, were much heavier than those of the lithe Alpine hiker he had doggedly followed on Sunday afternoon family outings when he was small, and visiting her parents in Bavaria. He was sometimes embarrassed by the black, plain shoes she wore, by her German accent (his father, also from Germany, had none, which did not seem odd until Wilhelm got a little older) and by the way she did not fit in with the other mothers—even though, she often said, their neighbor’s own parents were from Germany and they had German names, so why could they not treat her with more respect? Still, Wilhelm, who was now, always and only, Bill, understood that his father had preferred that she keep to herself. She attended Mass several times a week, and seemed to return refreshed.

Wilhelm was completely forbidden to ever mention that his older brother had died bravely in the Battle of Berlin. And he had not even told his parents that he, Wilhelm, had taken over firing Hans’s machine gun, propped behind sandbags, after his brother died.

It would have been impossible to speak of.

Hans’s death was his fault.

On that day in 1945, Wilhelm had slipped from the apartment cellar where he, his mother, and countless neighbors were hiding as Russian missiles shook plaster and debris onto their heads.

When he emerged from the celler, he stared at the empty crater where the corner butcher shop had stood for his entire life. His breath steamed the cold, smoky air, and then he bent over, coughing and wiping tears from his burning eyes.

He scrambled over a mountain of bricks to see, down the street, fleeing German soldiers raked by machine gun fire fall in their tracks. The apartment where his best friend lived exploded.

Wilhelm crouched, turned, and fled.

He never knew how long it took him to find Hans’s company. It seemed a miracle to spot his brother, from an alley, in the ever-shifting nightmare of broken streets where the dead lay still and injured soldiers cried out. He ran toward Hans, yelling.

Hans turned, shook his head at him, and opened his mouth. That clear, timeless image was Wilhelm’s permanent nightmare. His brother’s head exploded, showering Wilhelm with blood and driving him sideways into the hard sandbags.

His next memory was of his body shaking as he crouched where Hans had been, hugging the machine gun as he had been taught in his brief lesson. Wilhelm fired at men on horses on the cross-street ahead, tanks, and Russians dashing from building to building as they advanced.
Burst! Burst! Burst!
When the soldiers neared him he escaped through roofless buildings, the disintegrating world curiously soundless save for a ringing in his ears, lit by fireworks overhead and blazing buildings before and behind him. After running for a long time, he realized that he held Hans’s heavy knife in his hand and thrust it into his pocket. Thinking to hide in a church, he paused at the doorway after seeing pews full of injured men, but a skinny fräulein, her face streaked with blood and greasy hair straggling from the scarf tied around her head, grabbed him and put him to work changing bandages. At three in the morning, as missiles streaked the sky, he flattened himself into crevices as Soviet tanks passed and made his way back to his mother’s apartment with half a loaf of bread and some cheese. She wept at the news of Hans’s death, and instead of praising him like a good German mother, screamed as his hearing returned.

He had another memory, of his mother being raped by Russian soldiers the next day as he hid beneath the bed, as she had told him to. As he lay still beneath the creaking bed, he almost grabbed the butt of the American gun that one Russian soldier had dropped to the floor with his pants, so that he could kill the soldier. He was still ashamed, so very ashamed, that he had not. Afterward, his mother asked him to never tell his father what had happened, though she did not explain exactly what that was.

And so, there were many things he had grown up not talking about.

He watched Jill Dance across the room, also sitting alone, her back to him, reading as she ate a salad. There were a lot of similarities between them, connections, so many that he sometimes yearned to tell her everything. He knew she would understand. Their parents, for instance—his father, and her mother—had both been spies. And they were both dead. He was not sure if she was like him in other ways. Did she remember a past in which Berlin had been taken by the Russians, rather than the Allies? But that was just one of the many things he longed to discuss with her.

As a child, Wilhelm was only allowed to play alone, in his yard, but once a week the family would drive to another town where a family with a farm held a German club meeting, and while the adults talked in the living room, in their native tongue, their collective children roamed outside. They swung from the barn’s hayloft on a heavy, knotted rope, rode around cornfields on an old knack, or swam in the creek. In the winter, after they tired of playing in the snow, they were sent to the basement, where they could watch
Sky King
and
Fury
and
Rin Tin Tin
. There was one boy he really liked, because he could play chess. Christmases were wonderful, with the enchanting scents of butter cookies, pork roasts, and stollen filling the house. Sinister Krampus—really (he knew by that time) a man dressed up like a demon—came and handed out sticks and coal to bad children; they chased him, screaming in glee, from the doorway into the cold, snowy night. Krampus was always followed by Weihnachtsman—they were supposed to call him Santa Claus—who brought games like Mr. Potato Head and metal cars and, one fine year, a train set.

Having no friends was hard, but he knew he was different. So did the other boys in school, but they had no idea how different he really was. His father always called him Bill, and mildly remonstrated his mother for continuing to call him Wilhelm, but Wilhelm was already fixed in his mind as his true name, anyway.

His father was often gone on long trips, and during those trips Wilhelm slipped into his father’s study. This was strictly forbidden, so it was always when his mother had taken the bus to the butcher shop or the market. The room was full of locked file cabinets, and despite intense and creative searches, he never could find the keys to the cabinets. Sometimes he just sat in his father’s big wooden tilting chair and swirled around, or paged through books that were too hard for him to read, or just stared out the window into his lonely backyard with its single elm. There was an odd, melted artifact his father kept on his desk as a paperweight. He’d always thought of it as a war scrap, something picked up in the street after a bombing raid.

Its weirdness had always fascinated Wilhelm, and by this particular day, November 22, 1963, he had grown into a singularly handsome blond young man, much sought after by girls, though his mother refused to let him date. He sat in the office wondering what to do.

He was home “sick,” his usual stomachache. If his father had been home, he never would have been allowed to stay out of school, but his mother was much more indulgent. She had gone to Schmidt’s for bratwurst, tying on her black headscarf and shrugging on her black overcoat, telling him that if he felt up to it he ought to practice his piano. Before leaving, she said, “Do you want me to turn off the television set?” She kept it on as she ironed to help improve her English.

“It’s okay,” he said.

It was not as much fun in his father’s office as it had been when he was younger. There were no pictures of Hans in the house, as if he had never existed, and he longed for his brother often. He had only one scrap of paper to remember him by, and this he had kept in his shoe when they got on the U.S. military plane in Berlin. It had fallen apart on the creases long ago because of his ceaseless folding and unfolding, and even the tape was old and cracking now. But he remembered it well.

Hans was only seventeen when he died. For weeks, they had prepared for the Russians after a dreary, snow-filled winter of hardship. Wilhelm and his mother waited with fear and nervousness in their once-fine Berlin apartment, now depleted of furniture, which had been burned for firewood, but Wilhelm practiced and drilled with other boys his age in a nearby square every day, led by an elderly farmer who had fought in the Great War, though they had few weapons. They were told to use their wits and to seize weapons. The farmer had managed to find weapons with which to train them from time to time—an old hunting rifle, a hand pistol, and once, to Wilhelm’s pride and delight, his own big brother Hans appeared and let each of them use his machine gun. It was empty of ammunition; for that was too valuable to waste, but Wilhelm learned how to manipulate the gun, theoretically at least.

When the cannons began to boom, low and far off, and they knew that the Russians were almost upon them, Hans was still able to stop in every few days for perhaps an hour, dropping off canned food and usually falling asleep in a chair.

The last time he came home, he handed an envelope to Wilhelm. He said, “You may soon be the man in the family, since we do not know where Father is or whether he will survive the war. These are my thoughts, some things to remember.” When he left, Wilhelm opened it immediately. It was written in his brother’s beautiful hand with its flourishes and one or two scratch-outs, and was about his
Lebensfeier
, his life ceremony, which all Hitler Youth celebrated the year they turned fifteen. Some celebrated it in lieu of a religious confirmation, but not Hans—he had had to attend catechism classes his entire life. Their mother was incensed at the very thought that this war ceremony might stand in for the eternal verities, for her own son or for any German youth, so she had attended in a very bad mood.