When We Meet Again (6 page)

I looked down at the envelope, noting a return address from someplace called Holzkirchen, Germany. Slowly, I removed the single yellowed sheet of paper and unfolded it. Sadness surged through me as I read the short note, which was dated December 1945 and written in elegant cursive.

Dear Margaret,

I have received your letters and would like to request that you stop writing. I am many miles away from you now. There is no future for a German boy and an American girl. I will always remember our days together, but this has to cease.

I am sorry to hear that you are with child. But there is nothing I can do. It was a mistake, all of it. I am sorry for any trouble I have caused you.

I will wed my old girlfriend, Gerda, in a month’s time, and I wish not to trouble her with the reality of my life in your country. It is best that she does not know.

This will be my last letter to you. I wish you a good life.

Sincerely,

Peter A. Dahler

Holzkirchen, Germany

“That’s horrible,” I said, looking up after I’d finished reading it. “He knew she was pregnant, and he basically just told her to deal with it because he was marrying someone else?”

Jeremiah nodded slowly. “To this day, I do not understand. He seemed to be a very different kind of man.”

“But who’s to say that Peter Dahler actually wrote it?”

“That was Margaret’s argument for a long time too, I think. But if he didn’t write it, who could have forged his handwriting so accurately? Margaret grew sure it was his. And where was he? He had promised to return, and he never did. Years later, in the sixties, Margaret swore she saw him in a big crowd in Washington. But he looked right at her and turned away. I never believed that it was actually him, Emily. What would he have been doing in the United States? And at Dr. King’s March on Washington, of all places? It just didn’t make sense. But for your grandmother, it was the final straw. If there was any hope that the letter wasn’t real, it was dashed entirely that day. She said he just looked at her like she was a ghost, like she meant nothing to him. She tried to make it across the crowd to the spot where he’d been, but he was gone, as if he had seen her and fled.”

“But you don’t think it was him?”

He shrugged. “Truthfully, I think Peter Dahler probably made a life for himself in Germany and never thought of Margaret again. I think that theirs was a wartime romance, something forbidden, and though the feelings might have seemed real to her at the time, it was never meant to last. And I also think we misjudged Peter Dahler, your grandmother and I. He may not have been a Nazi, but that didn’t make him a good man either. Perhaps the two of us saw merely what we wanted to see.”

I sat in silence for a moment. “She never spoke of him, you know. Not to me, and not to my father. We only knew that the man she’d loved had left her behind.”

“I always felt that keeping it a secret was a mistake.”

“You knew she didn’t tell us about him?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“So why are you telling me now?” I stopped abruptly and shook my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m so glad that you’re sharing this with me. But if she didn’t want us to know . . .”

He smiled. “In the end, she realized she’d been wrong, I think. I spoke with her about a month before she passed, and she told me that as she neared the end of her life—for of course she knew she was dying—she had come to terms with what had happened. She had forgiven him. And she had forgiven her family for disowning her. But she couldn’t forgive herself for keeping the truth from you and your father. ‘They have a right to know,’ she told me. ‘But I don’t know how to tell them. Not after all this time. I can’t bring myself to speak of him.’ I asked if I could help in any way, and she thought about it for a long time. Finally, she said, ‘Tell them if they ever come looking.’ And here you are.”

“Why didn’t she just write us a letter or something?” I asked. “Something we could open after she died, if she wanted us to know?”

“Because she wasn’t sure that telling you was the right thing,” he replied. “Do you understand? You had to seek the truth out on your own. I imagine she had a bit of a sense that you’d do just that one day. She was always telling me that you were a girl full of questions and that you always searched for the answers.”

I was silent for a moment as I imagined my grandmother in her final weeks, filled with regret but not knowing how to make things right. I swallowed hard. “How come I’ve never met you before?” I asked. “If you were so close to my grandmother?” I regretted immediately how rude the words sounded, but the journalist in me needed to know.

He looked surprised for a split second, but then he nodded, as if he’d expected the question. “We lost track of each other for a long time. When she left Belle Creek, I went with her, but only for a few years. Your father had just been born. I was only fourteen, and she was nineteen, almost twenty. She was scared and alone. We traveled separately until we got to the North—to Philadelphia—where I got a job at the Italian market on Ninth Street and she worked as a seamstress. I used to watch your daddy sometimes when she worked. I owed her everything. But then, just after your daddy turned four years old, I received a telegram saying that my father had lost his arm in a farming accident. I had to move home to care for him; there was no one else. I lost touch with Margaret after that because she didn’t want to be found, and she certainly wanted no connection to Belle Creek. She changed her name, totally reinvented herself.”

“She changed her name? Why?”

“I think she just wanted to be someone else,” he said. “Someone who didn’t come from a family that had turned their back on her, someone who hadn’t been rejected by the man she had believed so strongly in. She used to be Margaret Mae Evans, you know. But she was running from the past, and running is easier when no one can find you. It wasn’t until 1963 that I heard from her again. She was living in Atlanta then, and her son, your daddy, had just turned seventeen. She had just gotten back from the March on Washington, and like I said, she was sure she’d seen Peter there. She called me here in Belle Creek to ask if he’d come back looking for her. Of course he hadn’t. I hated to tell her that, because I knew how much it would hurt. But it was the truth. He never returned.”

“And after that? You stayed in touch?”

He shrugged. “Here and there, Christmas cards, the occasional call. I had children of my own by then, you understand, and my life was very busy. I owned my own farm, and we were struggling to stay afloat. And Margaret made me promise not to tell anyone that I knew where she was. She didn’t want to have anything to do with her sister.”

“She had a sister?”

“Yes. Louise. Her parents were dead by then, but I think that they’d been dead to Margaret long before that. After your father was born, they said they wouldn’t have the son of a Nazi living in their house, never mind a Nazi lover. Her sister was in complete agreement; she had totally turned on Margaret too. It hurt Margaret deeply, and she never forgot it.”

“What happened to all of them?”

“Her parents died in the late forties, and Louise inherited the family farm. I saw her many times over the years, but she never mentioned Margaret again. It was like she had never existed.” He paused. “Until last month. Louise died last month, and I got the strangest visit from her about a week before she passed. She said she was sorry for everything she’d done to her sister, and she wanted to know if Margaret was okay, if I still heard from her. I told her Margaret had died in February, and Louise seemed devastated. After a while, she gathered herself and asked, ‘Did the German come back before she died?’ I told her no, of course not. It was clear that Louise was still holding on to a grievance that was seventy years old. She just closed her eyes, murmured, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and walked away from my front door. She was dead a week later.” He looked up at me. “Her granddaughter still lives here in Belle Creek, you know. Maybe you should go see her.”

“For what?” I asked. “After all, it sounds like Louise went out of her way to make my grandmother’s life miserable.”

“But she was still your family,” he said. “Besides, maybe her granddaughter knows something I don’t.”

“Sounds like you were much closer to my grandmother than Louise ever was.”

“Yes, of course that’s true.” He paused. “But I’ve always wondered if there was more to the story of Peter Dahler than Margaret and I understood. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

I nodded slowly. Of course he was right; as a journalist, I always followed up on every available lead, and this time shouldn’t be any different. “Do you have contact information for the granddaughter?”

He nodded and jotted something down on a piece of paper. “Julie Candless. She’s a little younger than you. She lives over on Harper Road, on the other side of this cane field. It’s the same house your grandma grew up in, as a matter of fact. Might interest you to see it.”

I took the address and number from Jeremiah and then stood to shake his hand. “I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve told me,” I said.

“I owe Margaret far more than this, believe me. But may I ask a favor of you?”

“Of course.”

“The painting you mentioned. The one that arrived with the note. May I see it sometime?”

I pulled out my phone. “I actually took a photo of it this morning. Will this do?” I scrolled through until I found the image. I handed it to him and watched as his eyes widened and then filled with tears.

“It’s her,” he whispered. “It’s exactly how she looked that day.”

“What day?”

He looked up at me. “The day she first met Peter in the fields.”

My heartbeat quickened. It was exactly what my father had said. “Is it possible that he painted this? Was Peter a painter?”

Jeremiah shook his head. “He wasn’t artistic at all, as far as I know. But he had a friend who was always sketching things in the dirt.” He smiled. “The man even used charcoal to draw on the sides of barns whenever the prisoners would be working on farmland. He was quite good.”

“What was the friend’s name? Do you remember?”

He was silent for a moment. “Maus, I think. Something Maus. I can’t recall his first name. I realize it’s not much to go on.”

“Still, maybe I’ll be able to find old POW records. Maybe I can find him.”

“May be a dead end, but it’s worth a try. If there’s anything I can do to help, anything else I can answer for you, feel free to call, Emily.”

I shook his hand again and he walked me to the door. “I really appreciate it, sir.”

He surprised me by pulling me into a hug. “I wouldn’t be here today without your grandmother. I owe her my life.”

He stood in the doorway, waving, until I’d pulled out of his driveway and was headed back across the vast expanse of sugarcane fields.

OCTOBER 1944

T
he soft thwacks of the cane knives flowed together in an endless rhythm, reminding Peter of rushing water. He was ankle-deep in muck, sweat pouring from his brow, his deeply tanned skin turning even browner in the beating sun. It was blazingly hot, the same temperature one might find on a sunny July day in Germany. But here, it was October, the month when at home, leaves fell, temperatures dropped, and the people of Munich were just finishing up their Oktoberfest celebration. Would there be an Oktoberfest this year? Peter doubted it. The festival hadn’t been held since 1938, and Peter wondered if it would ever happen again. Perhaps Germany would be defeated, wiped off the map, all its traditions erased. The thought made him sad. He didn’t believe in Hitler’s politics, but he believed in Germany. It was a beautiful country with a beautiful history, and to consider that it all might die because of greed and pride ripped Peter’s heart in two.

Peter liked to think about Germany while he worked. It kept his mind off the backbreaking labor, the blood of the men who’d been careless with their knives, the sunstroke that sometimes took one of them down in a dead faint. It kept him from thinking about the things he’d seen on the battlefield—blood, fear, terrible pain, the horror of young lives snuffed out in a senseless instant. And when he let his imagination wander, he could almost pretend that he was working alongside a babbling river—the Kirchseebach, perhaps—side by side with his friend Otto, close to his family, the Bavarian Alps looming in the background. But when a foreman’s voice or the rumbling arrival of an empty pallet truck jarred him back into the present, he was always dejected to find himself here, in the endless, rolling sugarcane fields on the edge of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee.

Every day, he and his fellow prisoners rose with the dawn, ate a hearty breakfast in the camp’s mess hall, and climbed aboard transport trucks that would take them ten kilometers up the road to the fields of Belle Creek. Their camp was on the edge of the wild Everglades, far outside of town, presumably so the residents would feel protected from the intruders at night. Peter knew that many of the people in the nearby towns viewed the prisoners as enemies, and he couldn’t blame them. But the locals who got to know them one on one—the foremen, the guards, the field hands, even the local doctor and priest—seemed to forget after a while that they were so different. And that was the truth of it, wasn’t it? Take a man’s weapons and put him to work, and he’s just a man, regardless of where he comes from. There were a handful of American Negroes working the fields too, and Peter always thought it odd when the foreman spoke to the foreigners with more respect than to his own countrymen.

“It’s your turn,” Maus said in German, nudging Peter’s shoulder and snapping him out of his reverie. Peter blinked at his new friend, whose nickname, German for
mouse,
had come from the amusingly white whiskers that sprouted above his top lip whenever he neglected to shave. They hadn’t known each other in Africa, though they had both served there, but they’d found themselves bunkmates here in the wilds of Florida, and they’d discovered they had much in common. They were both from the outskirts of Munich, and they were both skeptical about Germany’s chances of winning the war. While many of the other men in the prison camp were boisterous and sarcastic, Maus was, like Peter, quiet and pensive much of the time. At night, when the others played cards and told crude jokes, Maus liked to sketch on scraps of paper, and Peter liked to read books in English from the small camp library. They had become fast friends.