When We Meet Again (7 page)

“Peter, are you listening?” Maus asked now, nudging him again.

“What?”

Maus laughed. “Daydreaming again, are you? It won’t get you home any faster.”

“I know,” Peter muttered. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to go home. Not while Germany was still in the midst of a war. Did that make him a coward? Or simply a realist who didn’t want to fight for a cause he didn’t support?

“It’s your turn,” Maus repeated, pointing to the ground and smiling. “I already got one this week.”

Peter followed Maus’s gaze to a curving, dark line at the base of a pile of freshly cut sugarcane stalks. A water moccasin, more than a meter long, lay still in the grassy underbrush. Peter could feel himself tensing.

“Relax!” Maus said with a laugh, noting Peter’s reaction. “He’s harmless.”

“Hardly,” Peter said. Water moccasins, he knew, were more benign than the deadly eastern diamondbacks, which were also spotted in the fields sometimes. But the venom of one of these shorter, blacker snakes could still render a man helpless. There were snakes in the fields constantly, one of the things that made Peter so uneasy. Although his fellow prisoners often made a game out of killing and skinning them, salt-curing and saving their hides as trophies on the barracks walls, Peter knew the reptiles were no laughing matter.

“Aren’t you going to kill it?” Maus asked.

“No,” Peter said. “I think that if we do not hurt him, he will not hurt us.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth when Dieter, a burly soldier who had served with Peter in Africa, slammed the heel of his work boot down on the head of the snake, killing it instantly. “Got it,” Dieter said, his voice flat and emotionless. “Next time, you have to be quicker, Dahler.”

Peter stared hard at Dieter, who smirked back. More than once, their arguments over politics had turned to fisticuffs, and Peter was tired of the man, who seemed to believe that they were always a hairsbreadth away from returning triumphant to Germany. Dieter didn’t like it much when Peter pointed out that the American newspapers suggested the war was turning in a different direction. In fact, Peter was confident that fighting would be over within the year, and that Germany would not be the victor.

“Just because you can read English, that doesn’t make you smart,” Dieter had snapped at him. “You’re too foolish to realize it’s all just propaganda. The führer will be victorious. You wait and see. You’re a traitor if you don’t believe it.”

As Dieter picked up the dead snake now, slinging it over his shoulders like a neckerchief, Peter turned away.

“You could have had it, you know,” Maus said quietly. “It was your turn.”

“I didn’t want a turn,” Peter replied. He breathed in deeply, though it was impossible to draw relief from the humid air. It was impossible to draw relief anywhere here.

He turned back to the crop and hefted his cane knife over his shoulder before the foreman or one of the guards accused him of
whistling Dixie,
a strange phrase he’d heard more than once. It meant wasting time, and although the slang sounded amusing, it came with unwelcome penalties—usually the most demanding assignment in the field the next day.

Maus began to sing quietly under his breath—Peter thought it was “
Schön ist die Nacht
”—as they sliced their way through the cane. Heft. Swing. Slice. Heft. Swing. Slice. Maus’s lips moved in time to the rhythm he was creating with his cane knife, and without really meaning to, Peter matched his tempo. He could see, in his mind’s eye, his mother sitting at the kitchen table, humming the familiar song along with their crackling radio while she peeled potatoes. He missed her voice, missed the way it felt when she touched his cheek with those warm, worn hands, missed the way she used to comfort him. He was twenty-three; was that too old to miss one’s mother?

Sweat was pouring from Peter’s brow twenty minutes later as he paused to gather an armful of cane stalks. He took them to the first of four wagons hitched to an enormous, faded yellow tractor with tanklike continuous tracks over the wheels to keep the vehicle from sinking in the muck. The workers would labor each day to load the wagons, and then they’d accompany the tractor to the train tracks, where they’d hoist the cane, armload by armload, into train cars bound for the sugar mill.

“I’d give anything for a cool dip in the water right now,” Maus said as Peter returned to cutting. “Anything to escape this heat.”

Peter followed Maus’s eyes to the shallow ditch that bordered the field they were working in. The fields were separated by neat, even canals that weren’t more than a meter and a half across or a meter deep. They were there for the times when the workers had to burn the wilted leaves from the cane; it was always done the day that particular field was to be harvested. The cane itself didn’t burn, because the stalks were more than 70 percent water, so it was efficient to burn the dead brush first, leaving only a charred field of naked sugarcane behind. It was easier to fell the crop quickly after that without underbrush in the way. The canals were there to keep the fire from jumping to another field.

Unfortunately, the narrow waterways were also a ripe breeding ground for alligators, who lurked in the murky shallows. The huge, scaly beasts generally stayed out of the way, but Peter had heard stories of men who had tried to cool off in the water, only to find their limbs in the vise grip of enormous territorial lizards. “Do you want to get eaten, Maus?” Peter asked.

Maus shrugged. “Would it really be worse than having to work in this heat?”

“Yes,” Peter answered immediately. “I am absolutely positive it would be worse.”

Both men laughed and went back to cutting. Peter understood what Maus was saying, but for him, the sweat that poured from his brow was cathartic. When he was young, his mother used to tell him that sweat was your body’s way of getting the bad out. A fever sweat, for example, was the illness seeping from your pores.
The bad things escape,
his mother used to say,
and then you can start over, good as new.

Peter wondered now if the sweat that seeped from his brow each day was serving the same purpose: getting the bad things out. All those terrible things he’d seen on the battlefield, the guilt he carried for living while Otto had died, the shame he felt for firing into faceless masses of oncoming enemy soldiers, the disgrace of fighting for something he didn’t believe in—they were all black stains on his soul. Maybe the grueling work was his atonement. Maybe he’d get to start over one day.

That’s what he was thinking when he looked up, his eye caught by something red flashing in the next field over. It was
her,
he realized with a start, the beautiful girl he’d seen three weeks before. She was wearing the same red dress she’d worn in his dreams each night, and this time, she had her arm around the shoulders of a young Negro boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, who was cradling his right hand and crying.

Without considering the consequences, Peter hurried, cane knife in hand, toward the edge of the canal separating his field from hers. The girl and the boy were walking quickly through the stalks, and they weren’t looking in his direction.

“We just need to clean the wound out,” Peter could hear her explaining to the boy as he drew closer. “Then I’ll bandage it for you, and you’ll be good as new.”

Peter was struck by both the musical lilt to her voice and her gentleness with the injured boy. “I can help!” Peter heard himself call in English. He clapped a hand over his mouth and spun around, afraid one of the guards or the foreman had heard, but they were nowhere to be seen. Maus, however, was staring at Peter. When Peter turned back, he saw that the girl and boy had stopped and were looking right at him. The boy looked scared, but the girl wore a different kind of expression. Her pink cheeks had paled, and her eyes were wide.

“It’s you,” she said, taking a step closer to the canal. Now, they were just three meters from each other, separated only by a shallow strip of water that Peter knew he could jump over easily. But he wouldn’t. Not now. He might scare her. And that was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead, he held her gaze, simply because he couldn’t force himself to look away. As her eyes seared into him in the charged silence, he felt a strange fluttering in his chest.

“Hello,” Peter finally said, and he was disappointed when his single word seemed to snap the girl out of her trance.

She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. I must have thought you were someone else.”

As her gaze returned to his, Peter could feel his own cheeks growing warm, warmer than the sun had already made them. “No, I’m only me,” he said, but he immediately wanted to kick himself. What kind of fool would say such a thing?
I’m only me?

But then the girl surprised him by laughing. “I suppose we all are,” she said. “Only ourselves, that is.”

Peter nodded, still flustered.
“ ‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment,’ ” he blurted out, instantly convinced that reciting an obscure quote was even more foolish.

“You know Ralph Waldo Emerson?” she asked.

Peter could feel his eyes widen. “You know him too?”

“He’s one of my favorites.” She studied him more closely across the ribbon of murky water. “But you are German, aren’t you? How do you know an American writer? How do you know English so well?”

“I’ve always admired your language. I love the way Emerson wrote, and as I learned English, I made it a point to study him.” He didn’t mention the fact that he’d kept a book of Emerson’s poems hidden under his bed in Holzkirchen, refusing to take it to the town’s book burning when Hitler had ordered all foreign books destroyed. At night, when he’d read it by candlelight, he’d felt a bit like he was standing up to the rat pirate.

“You learned English in school?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” Peter replied. “But I also studied it at home. My best friend and I talked of coming to America one day.” He thought of Otto and looked down at his work clothes, stamped with the unmistakable letters
POW
. He felt a wave of shame as he added, “Although I didn’t imagine coming like this.”

“He’s a prisoner,” the young boy spoke up. “You ain’t supposed to talk to prisoners.”

“Why don’t you run along to my house?” the girl said to the injured boy. Peter followed her gaze to a wooden house in the near distance, just over the edge of a sugarcane field. He could spot vegetables of some sort growing in neat rows and a small barn toward the back of the property. It was, he realized, a family farm. “I’ll be along in just a minute, Jeremiah. I’ll fix up your hand then.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone with this German,” the boy said, glaring at Peter. “He might try to hurt you.”

“He won’t hurt me,” the girl said. “Please, Jeremiah. Go, and I’ll be there in a moment.”

The boy nodded reluctantly, and giving Peter one last pointed scowl, he turned away and headed to the house the girl had pointed to.

“What happened to him?” Peter asked after a moment.

“He cut his hand on a cane knife. He works on my family’s farm from time to time when sugarcane isn’t in season.”

Peter nodded. “You should put some alcohol on that wound too. To disinfect it.”

The girl smiled. “I know.”

“Peter!” Maus called out from somewhere behind him. Peter jerked around, surprised. He’d nearly forgotten that he wasn’t alone in the world with the girl in the red dress. “Peter, what are you doing? The guard will see you!”

Peter waved him off, and Maus shook his head, stared for a moment at the girl, and turned back around, hoisting his cane knife high.

“I should go,” said the girl, and suddenly, Peter felt a sense of panic.

“Wait!” he cried as she began to walk away.

She stopped and turned expectantly.

“I—” he began, suddenly at a loss. He had no idea what to say or how to make her stay.

But the girl seemed to read his mind. “I’m Margaret,” she said.

Margaret,
he thought. It was the loveliest name he’d ever heard. “Peter,” he managed. “I’m Peter.”

“Peter,” she repeated in her musical voice. No one had ever said Peter’s name as beautifully, as perfectly, as that. But before he could say another word, she was already walking away. He stared after her until he could no longer hear her footfalls in the muck, and then slowly, he sank to his knees, the wind knocked out of him.

“Peter?” Maus was saying his name with concern somewhere in the distance, but Peter couldn’t move. Something had just changed within him, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but he had the strange feeling it had altered the course of everything.

“Peter!” Maus said again, this time much closer to Peter’s ear. Peter turned around and was surprised to see Maus right behind him, his face tense with concern. “Come on! I can hear the guards coming back. What is wrong with you? You’ve never seen a pretty girl before?”

Peter didn’t reply, but he let Maus drag him back to the field, where once again, he began to slice through the stalks of sugarcane. And even though he was surrounded by dozens of his countrymen, even though someone had begun singing the familiar “
Memelwacht
” in the next row of stalks, Peter suddenly felt more alone than ever, lost in a forest of cloying sweetness, a million miles from home.

B
ack at home that evening, I heated up yet another Lean Cuisine, sat down with my laptop on the back porch, and googled
Peter A. Dahler
. Pages of search results appeared instantly, but they all seemed connected to a Danish professor who was obviously too young to be the Peter Dahler I was looking for. There were a few stray results for other Peter Dahlers, but they all led to unused Twitter accounts or family tree projects in which the Peter in question was the wrong age.

I checked the envelope Jeremiah had given me and entered in the barely legible Holzkirchen return address, but that didn’t bring up anything other than a Google map indicating that it was located on a side street near the town center. I tried searching for the address with the last name Dahler, but that didn’t bring up anything meaningful either.