When We Meet Again (18 page)

“Ah, you are American,” the man said in a thick German accent. “And your father says you don’t speak German? I can speak some English,
ja
? I will try.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “You’re Franz Dahler?”

“
Ja,
” he said. “Come.” He beckoned for us to follow him into his apartment. Inside, the lighting was dim, and the place was austere, with no photographs or artwork on the walls. It looked like it was barely lived in, and yet the furniture and carpets were obviously old and worn. There was a small table with two stiff chairs pressed up against the wall beside the dated kitchen, and in the living room, I saw a single, worn sofa, a coffee table with a small pad of paper and a pen, and another hard-backed chair. That’s where he led us now, gesturing to the sofa as he settled stiffly into the chair.

“So what can I do for you?” he asked as we sat, his speech pattern slow and deliberate.

“Mr. Dahler, we’re looking for information about a man named Peter Dahler, and we believe he’s your brother,” I began. “Are we right?”

A shadow passed across Franz’s face. “Peter?” He paused and looked at the ceiling for a minute, as if trying to gather himself. “Peter
was
my brother. He is long gone.”

“He’s dead?” I asked, my heart sinking. It was irrational to be holding out hope that a man in his nineties would still be out there when I knew the odds were against it. But still, I’d believed there was a chance.

“Dead?” Franz Dahler asked. “How would I know? I haven’t spoken to him since 1947.”

I took a deep breath. It meant that there was a chance Peter Dahler was still alive. But the way Franz Dahler was frowning at me made me feel uneasy. “Why?” I asked.

“He was imprisoned in America during the war,” he replied. My father and I exchanged looks. “And he fell in love with an American girl.”

“My mother,” my father murmured.

“What?” Franz asked.

“Margaret. Was the girl’s name Margaret? She lived in Florida?”

Franz blinked rapidly, and his face turned a little pink. “Yes. But how do you know that?”

My father gestured to me. “This is her granddaughter. And I’m her son.”

Franz stared at my father first and then at me. “
Mein Gott,
” he murmured. “I see it now. You have Peter’s eyes, both of you. It is unmistakable. But how is this possible?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. We didn’t even know he existed until last week.”

Franz looked confused. “I do not understand. Surely he came back to America to find the girl he loved?”

“No. I don’t think he did,” I said.

“That is a tragedy.” Franz looked tremendously sad. “And I believe it is perhaps a tragedy that began here.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Instead of replying, Franz excused himself and walked into another room of the apartment. I glanced at my father, and he shrugged. A moment later, Franz returned carrying a yellowed photograph.

“I do not keep this out,” he said. “There are many things I wish not to be reminded of. But you will see Peter here when he was young, before he went off to war.”

I took the photograph and stared, my heart in my throat. It was a bit blurry and had clearly been taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s. A solemn-faced middle-aged man with a Clark Gable mustache and wispy dark hair stood in the middle of the image, his arm around a small, light-haired, middle-aged woman who was so pale and thin it looked as if she might disappear. To the woman’s right was a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, with short, spiky brown hair; he was wearing shorts, suspenders, and kneesocks. The only person smiling in the photo was the blond young man to the left of the man with the mustache. He looked like he was seventeen or eighteen, and he was wearing an ill-fitting dark suit. I ran a finger over his foggy image.

“That is Peter,” Franz said, watching me closely. “My brother. This was the day of his school graduation. Of course that’s me in the suspenders. And those are our parents.”

My great-grandparents,
I thought, studying them and then looking long and hard at Peter. The man who was probably my grandfather. He was handsome and kind-looking, and Franz was right; the shape of his eyes looked a lot like mine. I handed the photo to my father, who examined it and gave it back to me.

“The photo was taken in 1939,” Franz said after a moment. “The last year we were all together. You see, soon after, Peter went off to the RAD to do his compulsory time.”

“The RAD?” I asked.

Franz nodded and seemed to be struggling to find the right words. “The
Reichsarbeitsdienst
. The compulsory labor force. Early in the war, young men were required to have six months in the RAD before they were drafted into the
Wehrmacht—
er, the armed forces. Peter did his six months and then he came home for a few days before he left on his military assignment. During that time, there was a large fight that changed everything.”

“A fight?” my father asked. “Between whom?”

“Peter and my father.” Franz gazed off into the distance for a long time, and I had the sense he was reliving whatever had taken place seventy-five years ago. “When Peter was younger, when he lived here still, he was sheltered from the news reports. Of course he heard things, saw things, but my father prohibited the discussion of politics at home. It made my mother very distressed, and she was often ill, often weak. It was to protect her, you see.

“But then, Peter returned from his RAD service, and he was angry,” Franz continued. “My father, he was a Nazi. He was a strong political supporter of Hitler’s regime. And Peter, he was not. When Peter came home, he insisted on discussing politics with my father before he left for the war.” Franz paused and shook his head. “I can still remember him saying, ‘
Ich weigere mich zu kämpfen, ohne den Grund dafür zu verstehen.
’ It means he refused to fight without understanding the cause. He disagreed with my father, and my father was outraged to have a son who didn’t worship the führer.”

“How did you feel?” my father interjected.

Franz sighed. “It was a long time ago, you understand. And Hitler was a magician, a storyteller. He cast many of us under his spell. I admit, I was one of those who were charmed by his words, his promises. I believed that Germany would rise and that somehow, we had the right to do what we were doing.”

My stomach turned, but then Franz looked up and met my eye. “As I said, it was a long time ago. I have great shame over the way I felt then. But my father always believed that Hitler had been right, even long after Hitler was dead and Germany was defeated. He grew old and bitter, blaming everyone he could think of for Germany’s defeat. Including Peter.
Especially
Peter.”

“Peter?” I asked. “How was he responsible for Germany’s defeat?”

“Of course he wasn’t,” Franz said. “But my father always believed that Peter was a coward. When we got word that Peter had been captured on the battlefield in Africa, my father was furious.”

“What was he doing in Africa?”

“He was in the
Afrika Korps
,” Franz explained. “You have heard of
Generalfeldmarschall
Erwin Rommel? The Desert Fox?”

“I think so,” I said while my father nodded.

“General Rommel was the commander of the
Afrika Korps
. And the only time my father felt pride in Peter during the war, I think, was when Peter wrote in a letter to our mother that he actually respected Rommel, despite everything. You see, Peter wrote that Rommel refused orders to kill Jews and civilians. You must realize that elsewhere, the opposite was taking place, yes?”

I nodded.

“Yes, well, Rommel was different. He was humane, perhaps even a good man. Peter hated the war, but he did not mind fighting under Rommel, because he felt that at the least, he would not be asked to do things that went against his conscience. You understand? But by late 1942, Africa was lost to the Germans, and soon after, Rommel returned to Germany. It was not very many months later that Peter, along with many others, was captured by the Allies. When we received notification, my father was very angry, you see. To my father, the only thing worse than someone who didn’t agree with him was someone who was weak enough to fall into enemy hands.”

“Were you in the army too?” my father asked.

“I was three years younger than Peter, so I did my time in the RAD and then joined the
Wehrmacht
in 1943. It was the same year Peter was captured and the same year our mother died.”

“Your mother died during the war?” I looked again at the photo, at the waif of a woman who looked like a ghost even when she was alive.

Franz nodded. “Our father always said that it was news of Peter’s capture that killed her. Of course that wasn’t true at all. She was miserable with my father, you see. He ruled with an iron fist, and she had a tendency toward illness anyhow. But my father lived on blame the way some people live on bread and water. It was his
Nahrung,
his sustenance. And he blamed Peter for our mother’s death.

“I spent most of the war on the eastern front and was fortunate to survive,” Franz continued. “When the war ended, I came home to a hero’s welcome from my father, but he had become a different man by then. While Peter and I had gone to the battlefield, my father had been stuck in Holzkirchen, our hometown, growing more and more distressed at what he called the death of Germany. When I returned in 1945, I found my father cold, hardened, and bitter.”

“When did Peter come home?” I asked.

“You see, the prisoners weren’t released immediately. Peter was sent to a prison camp in Great Britain, where he was compelled to do nearly two years of hard labor before being released.”

“Of course,” I murmured, thinking of the three letters Julie had given me.

“He wrote to us from England, but my father never wrote back,” Franz continued. “The letters from America had begun to arrive by then, and my father was furious.”

“What letters?” my father asked.

Franz sighed. “The letters from the American girl. Your mother, I suppose. Before leaving America, Peter had apparently given her our family address so that she could reach him. But my father opened all the letters addressed to Peter. The first few—in which she talked of missing him and loving him—infuriated my father. He said Peter had no business falling in love with an American woman. He felt she was the enemy and that Peter had betrayed Germany by doing such a thing. But then there was a letter in which she said she had discovered she was with child . . .” Franz’s voice trailed off as I leaned forward, eager to hear what he had to say. “Something changed in my father that day. His anger at Peter turned to cold hatred. It was irrational but complete.”

I sat back in my chair. Beside me, my father gently placed his hand on my shoulder. So my grandmother had written to tell Peter she was pregnant, and instead of creating joy, the news had made my grandfather the target of his father’s fury. “So Peter learned that he was going to be a father when he was in England, then?” I asked.

Franz hesitated. “No. My father burned most of the letters.”

I stared at him. “He deliberately kept the news from Peter that my grandmother was pregnant?”

“Yes. And when Peter finally came home at the end of 1947, my father didn’t tell him right away. No, instead, he began to yell at Peter, to call him a traitor. Imagine that. My brother had come from many years as a prisoner, a free man for the first time, and instead of coming home to a welcome, he came home to an avalanche of wrath. At some point before I arrived at our house, my father told Peter that the American girl he’d loved had been pregnant. I arrived in the middle of it. You could feel the hatred.”

Franz paused, and for the first time, I noticed that his face had reddened and there was sweat on his brow.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “We can stop if you need to take a break.”

“No, I must tell you this.” He took a deep breath. “You see, I took the side of my father. I have regretted it in the years since, you understand. But at the time, I too was still smarting over Germany’s defeat. And I felt the same as my father did. How could Peter have been the prisoner of an enemy nation and somehow fallen in love with a woman there? I thought it unconscionable.”

I opened my mouth to defend him, but Franz waved me off. “I was young at the time. I have realized the error of my ways. You do not have to tell me how wrong I was. In any case, my father thrust the one letter he hadn’t burned at Peter and told him to get out.”

Franz sighed. “I never saw him again. Peter left that night. It was snowing, and I remember watching from the window. As he trudged down the street, it was as if the snowfall swallowed him whole. I always expected him to come back someday, but he never did.” He looked up at me. “This is the first time I’ve spoken of him in seventy years, you see. After that day, my father didn’t permit talk of Peter in the house. Peter was dead to him, he said. He was dead to our family. But he didn’t die, did he?”

It took me a moment to realize he was looking to me for answers. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know,” I told him. “We have no idea what became of him.”

He turned and looked out the window. “So many secrets and lies,” he murmured. “They destroy everything, do they not?”

For an instant, my mind flashed to Nick.
Secrets and lies. They destroy everything.
I shook off the thought. “A few weeks ago, I received a painting in the mail,” I told Franz. “It’s what made us come here. The painting appeared to be of my grandmother standing in a field, maybe a sugarcane field in Florida, and it came with a note. It said,
Your grandfather never stopped loving her. Margaret was the love of his life.
”

Franz looked startled. “And who was the note from?”

“We don’t know. It wasn’t signed. But that’s what led us here. We thought maybe the painting was done by your brother.”

“Peter?” Franz frowned. “No, he did not paint. My father discouraged artistic expression of any kind.”

“Does the name Ralph Gaertner mean anything to you, then?” I ask. “The owner of the gallery that restored the painting thought it resembled his work.”