When We Meet Again (12 page)

The voices outside were getting closer, and Margaret pulled away. “I love you, Peter Dahler,” she whispered.

He stared at her in disbelief. How was it possible that she would love a man like him? “I love you too,” he said. “And when this war is over, I will come back for you, Margaret. I know they will send me home to Germany, but I will come back and take you away from this place. I will protect you. I will build a life with you.”

“And I will wait, Peter. As long as you are alive, I will wait for your return.”

There was a knock on the door, and as she stepped away from him to answer it, Peter already felt like he was losing her. As he watched the doctor rush to Jeremiah’s side, dread and love in equal measure flooded Peter’s heart.

I
drove back across the sprawling sugarcane fields and pulled into a small gas station, the first business I came upon along the main road leading out of town. I put my car in Park and gently extracted one of the letters from its yellowed envelope. It was dated July 1946.

Dearest Margaret,
it read in neat script.

I am writing again from the camp in England in the fervent desire that this letter will reach you. I must admit, the long silence from you has frightened me. I am hoping there is merely a complication with the mail delivery, but I fear the worst, and I lie awake at night wondering if something terrible has happened.

The days here are bleak and dreary, even in the summer. Often, the sun shines for hours on end, but the earth is charred and broken, streaked with rubble from the bombs Germany dropped on the innocent countryside. I work each day until my fingers are raw and bloodied, atoning for the sins of my countrymen. How could we not have seen, when Hitler marched us into battle so long ago, that this would be the end result? Sometimes, I find shoes and spectacles and hats that no longer have owners, and I wonder what happened to the people who once inhabited them. I wonder if they are dead, and I feel that guilt too. The towns can be rebuilt, but there is no way to replace the lives that have been stolen.

I do not know when I will be sent home, and I dare not ask. There are too many people on this shattered isle who have lost sons and fathers and brothers in the war. The fact that I am alive is enough for now.

I dream of the day when I will see you again, and I pray that it will be soon. In the interim, you live in my heart always, and I find solace in my memories of you. I will love you forever, Margaret, and I pray I will hold you in my arms again soon.

Yours always in love, Peter

I read the letter twice before folding it and slipping it back into the envelope. My confusion had deepened. Where had Peter Dahler been writing from? Some sort of prison camp in England? It certainly sounded like he was being forced to stay there, but who was doing the forcing? It seemed as if prisoners of war would have been returned to their home countries after the fighting was over. But in July 1946, more than a year after hostilities had ceased in Europe, somehow Peter still hadn’t made it home.

And yet he’d been thinking about Margaret. Unless he was lying, he still loved her deeply and was still planning to come back for her. So what had changed? Had he eventually gotten frustrated by her lack of response? But if that was the case, how had he not guessed that her family was keeping his letters from her?

The other two letters, dated October 1946 and January 1947, were shorter. The first one read:

Dearest Margaret,

It has been more than a year now since I last held you in my arms, and I fear I am beginning to forget the feel of your body against mine. I try to hold on to those memories when I close my eyes, but as time passes and I do not hear from you, I begin to wonder if you were merely a dream. It would be fitting, would it not? After all, this war has been a nightmare, a terrible vision from which I cannot seem to find my way out. Perhaps you were the sweet interlude, the salvation in all that darkness. But I must believe that you are real, that our love is real, that one day I will hold you again. When that day comes, dear Margaret, I will never let you go.

Yours always in love, Peter

The final letter was even briefer, and I could feel myself tearing up as I read it. Peter had written:

Dearest Margaret,

The new year has arrived in darkness, for you are not with me, and I have not heard from you in more than a year and a half. If you are gone from my world, I no longer believe that the spring will come, that the flowers will bloom, that the world will once again give birth to new life. For you, sweet Margaret, are my reason for existence. You are the light in the blackness, but each day, I can feel that light growing dimmer. I wait for you, dear Margaret, and I carry my love for you forever in my heart.

Yours always in love, Peter

I read the last letter a few times, savoring the almost poetic words, before slipping it back into its envelope and placing it back on the passenger seat with the other two notes. I felt strangely breathless as I stared at the envelopes, which had made their way across the Atlantic seventy years ago but had never reached their intended recipient.

Five minutes later, I was still sitting there in silence, studying the letters, when I realized something: Peter was still writing to Margaret in January 1947 from somewhere in England. And yet the letter Jeremiah had given me, the one that told Margaret that Peter wasn’t coming back for her, had been sent in December 1945, more than a year earlier, from Germany. Although the handwriting seemed remarkably similar, there was no way that the rejection letter had come from Peter himself. Someone back in his homeland had written to Margaret to break her heart. In fact, especially given the words in these letters, it seemed he’d never meant to leave her at all.

My heart thudding, I turned the key in the ignition and pulled back onto the main road. Someone had set out to deliberately separate Margaret and Peter, and they’d both seemingly fallen for it. But who? And why? My grandmother’s family had played that role here, hiding the love letters from Peter. Had there been someone similar across the ocean who was concealing Margaret’s letters to him? I was increasingly sure that the answers to my questions lay in Germany, where the painting had originated. But most of the people involved in my grandmother’s story here in the States were dead. Perhaps the same was the case in Germany; after all, these letters had been written seven decades ago.

As I drove away from Belle Creek, I felt further from the truth than I had been when I’d started searching. I had the uneasy feeling that I’d never really known my grandmother at all.

My cell rang just after I got back on the Turnpike at Yeehaw Junction, and I saw Scott’s name on the caller ID.

“Hey,” Scott said when I answered. “I think I found something on your Peter Dahler. Sort of.”

My breath caught in my throat. “You did?”

“Well, a lead, anyhow. I could only find one Peter Dahler with the middle initial ‘A’ in any of the databases, and he’s too old to be your guy. Peter August Dahler, born 1897.”

“Oh.” My heart sank.

“But he was born in Holzkirchen, where that letter was from. I think maybe he’s the father of the guy you’re looking for. This Peter Dahler is listed as the father of two sons. I can’t find names for them, but they were born in 1921 and 1924. What do you want to bet that one of them is the Peter A. Dahler who ended up over here?”

“Well, the ages would fit.” Both men would have been old enough to have fought for Germany during World War II. Old enough to have fallen in love with my grandmother in the mid-1940s. “Did you find anything else?”

“I have a death certificate for the Peter Dahler born in 1897. Looks like he died in the early seventies. And there’s a Franz Dahler currently listed at the last-known address of the elder Peter Dahler, in Munich. I’ve found his license, and it appears he was born in 1924.”

“Munich,” I murmured. “So maybe he’s the brother of the man I’m looking for. Is he still alive? He’d be in his nineties by now, wouldn’t he?”

“I haven’t found a death certificate. And it looks like the son born in 1921 has totally vanished.”

“But that’s a bad sign, isn’t it? If he was in the military, there’d surely be a record of him.”

“Not necessarily,” Scott replied. “I talked to my contact at the London
Times,
and I guess a lot of the German military records from that time period were destroyed.” I could hear keys clicking in the background, and then he added, “Anyhow, Em, I’ve got to go. I hope this helps. I’ll e-mail the address to you, okay? There’s also a phone number, but I tried it myself, and there was no answer. This might be the best we can do from over here. Maybe you can find someone in Germany to help you out.”

“Thanks, Scott. I really appreciate it.”

“You owe me a date.”

I smiled, despite myself. “You bet. My treat.”

He hung up, and I put my cell phone down on top of the letters on the passenger seat, my mind reeling.

All roads seemed to be leading to Munich. Somehow, I had to find a way to get there too.

I barely slept that night, and when I finally got out of bed the next morning at six, the first thing I did was to call the Munich telephone number Scott had given me for Franz Dahler. I let it ring eight times, but not even a machine picked up. I tried again at eight and eleven while I worked on my assignment for
Seventeen,
but by the time I called for the fourth time, at three, which would have been nine in the evening in Munich, I was feeling discouraged. What if Franz Dahler was screening my calls because he didn’t recognize the number? Or what if he didn’t live there anymore? I had no idea how I’d track him down from across an ocean armed only with an address and a phone number.

I clicked over to KAYAK.com, hoping to find a reasonable fare to Munich, but the cheapest option I could find for the next week was a $1,162 round-trip with two stops in each direction on Turkish Airlines, with a total travel time of more than thirty hours each way. Air Berlin offered flights for $1,520, but they were also time-consuming at sixteen hours each way. Both options were out of my price range too, considering that I’d just lost my source of stable income. I’d still need to pay for a hotel in Munich, and I couldn’t afford to drop more than two thousand dollars on a single trip. I extended the search for the next month, but the prices were similar, and besides, I didn’t want to wait much longer to go. Aer Lingus could get me there for $1,064 in a month, but by that time, the trail of the painting might have grown even colder. No, I needed to go now.

I opened my retirement account—the one thing I’d been responsible about as a freelancer—and evaluated my balance. I didn’t want to do it, but if I needed to, I could borrow the money for the ticket from myself. Considering that my grandmother had taken me in during my darkest hour—when I was pregnant, alone, and scared—this felt like the least I could do to repay the favor. Still, it made me uneasy. Spending so much money now would leave me with virtually no cushion, and I had no idea how long I’d be between steady writing gigs.

Conflicted about what to do, I called my father an hour later to update him. He listened silently while I recapped my visit with Julie and what I’d learned from the letters and from Scott.

“So I think Peter Dahler never intended to leave Grandma Margaret,” I concluded. “I think somehow, their letters never reached each other, and they both thought the other person had moved on. Maybe Peter came back, after all, but Grandma Margaret was already gone.”

My father was silent for a moment. “So what do you think we should do next? What’s our next move?”

“
Our
move?” I didn’t mean to sound rude, but the idea that we were working together was almost laughable.

“I want to help,” he said. “She was my mother, Emily. And this is an overwhelming thing for you to be working on alone.”

“Dad, this is the kind of thing I do all the time for my job,” I said stiffly, bristling at his words. “I’m not overwhelmed.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” He took a deep breath. “I just meant that sometimes things are easier when you work as a team.”

“And when, exactly, have you and I ever been a team?”

He hesitated, but only for a second. “When you were a little girl. You and your mom were the best team I ever had.”

His response stunned me into silence for a moment. I didn’t know how to reply, so I finally cleared my throat and said, “I think I need to go to Munich.”

His answer was instant. “I agree. I’ll go with you.”

“What? No. I don’t need you to go.”

“Do you speak German?”

“No.”

“Well, I do. A little, anyhow.”

“Dad—” I began.

“I’ll pay for the trip,” he interrupted. I could hear clicking in the background; he was typing something, and for a second, I was convinced that he was so uninvested in the conversation that he was writing someone an e-mail while we talked. But then he added, “There’s a flight tomorrow afternoon that arrives in Munich the next day. Say yes, and I’ll book it now.”

“No, Dad. I’ll find a way there myself.” I’d never asked my father for a dime, and my pride prevented me from doing so now.

“But you just lost your steady source of income.” There was more clicking in the background, and I tried not to let the words sting. “And we may be running out of time. If Franz Dahler is still alive, who knows how much longer he’ll be around? He’s in his nineties, right? And even if we can’t find him, isn’t it a good idea to track down where the painting came from while it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind?”

“I guess,” I said slowly. “But really, you don’t have to—”

“It’s already done.” My father’s tone as he interrupted my protests was firm. “I’m buying the tickets now. I just need your passport number, and I’ll meet you at the airport tomorrow for a three o’clock flight.”

I hung up five minutes later feeling unsettled—and like I’d lost a battle I hadn’t been prepared to fight. I had the uneasy feeling that although I’d kept my retirement account safe for the time being, I’d just put everything else I’d worked so hard to protect on the line.