Page 80 of Hell to Pay
Another man said, “Ask her what he looks like.”
“She could know that from looking at his body,” a third man said.
“He has brown hair,” I said, “and kind brown eyes, and wears spectacles. He comes from California and has one year of university, and he is brave. This is what I know.” My English was failing me a bit now in my agitation. “Come or don’t come, but decide, because I have bread to bake in the morning and must get to bed early.”
“Sounds like the Professor to me,” the leader said. “Let’s go get him.”
“Boy, you were brave,” Ben said.
“Well, I’d saved him, after all,” I said. “I didn’t want him to die after all my hard work. We rode back in a Jeep. I sat in the front, and two men rode in back with their rifles pointed at the houses. I felt extremely conspicuous, especially when they stopped outside the house, and was grateful for the gathering dark. The leader said, ‘You have a Swiss flag,’ and I said, ‘My landlady is Swiss,’ andhesaid, ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ I had no answer for that, so I just took them inside—well, I knocked at the door first, so Frau Adelberg wouldn’t have a heart attack, andthenI took them inside, and they helped Joe down the stairs and put him in the Jeep, and off they went. But first they gave the children another bar of chocolate.”
“I remember that, too,” Matti said. “The second chocolate bar. I remember both of them. The orange, too, but mostly the chocolate.”
“So you didn’t have, like, an emotional goodbye?” Ashleigh asked. From behind her phone, of course, as she was filming again.
“Joe took my hand,” I said, “and told me, ‘Thank you.’”
“And that was all?” Alix said. “Way to waste the moment, Grandpa.”
“Well,” I said, “he was with his friends. Men don’t like to be too emotional in front of their friends. Also, he was feverish.”
“Still,” Ashleigh said. “Lame.” And I laughed.
Life isn’t a movie, after all.
35
AFTERMATH
“So what happened after that?” Alix asked. “Did Grandpa write to you, or what?”
“No,” I said. “How could he? You must understand—he was moving with the Army, and the German post was functioning not very well at all. Life was very—very muddled at that time. The Germans had been defeated in Fürth, and in Nuremberg, too, but not everywhere, not yet. There was a great deal of fighting yet to come, but in the bakery the next day, Frau Adelberg’s customers were queueing for bread again—it was a good thing I knew how to make potato bread, because that was the only way I could produce anything decent, that and the Pumpernickel—and she was taking their ration coupons along with their money, all as usual, but with no idea whether the coupons were still necessary. Who was in charge now? Nobody seemed to know.”
“About two weeks more before the war ended, right?” Sebastian asked.
“And much longer before the order of things became clear,” I said. “I know Dr. Becker regretted having had to tell Frau Adelberg he was Jewish, for she had a wagging tongue,and our customers’ sentiments were decidedly mixed. Andrea helped in the shop instead, but what she heard— Oh, the arguments! One man had always been against Hitler, while another argued that he’d been misled by his advisors, and really, Himmler had been running the country. A woman would have it that the Nazis had merely overreached, that they had wanted too much, and, oh yes, the atrocities—really too bad! But the Führer probably knew nothing about it. And always, there was to be war between the Americans and the Soviets once they met, ‘And then,’ a man said, ‘who knows?’”
“They seriously thought that?” Sebastian said. “That’s some world-class delusion.”
“Or some world-class propaganda,” I said. “Only a few days after Joe left, the front page of the newspaper gave us ‘The Führer’s orders of the day for the Eastern Front.’ The Jewish-Bolshevist enemy had begun his assault ‘for the last time,’ he said. This sounded, of course, like the end, but he went on to tell us once more that we must resist to the death, for the enemy wished only to exterminate us. If we survived, it would be to watch old men and children murdered, women and girls forced into prostitution, and anybody left marched off to Siberia and enslavement. I’m not saying people believed it, exactly, but they didn’tnotbelieve it, either, especially when Hitler specifically told us that soldiers must disobey any order to retreat, no matter from whom it came, but must instead arrest or shoot any officer who ordered such a thing. If an army is not allowed to retreat and is not allowed to surrender … well, what are they to do? But most people, you know, even soldiers, are not so fanatical.”
“Every accusation a confession,” Sebastian said.
“Very good,” Matti said. “You have it correctly. Such men cannot see that others are not as themselves. What they would do, they think others will also do.”
“So you just went back to, like, baking bread?” Ben asked. “You didn’t think, ‘Hey, let’s go get my palace back,’ even when it was all over?”
“No,” I said. “How would I have done so? First, as I’ve told you, it belonged to the state now. Second, the Russians were not yet in Dresden, but they would come soon, and all my family did own personally would surely be confiscated. No, that avenue was closed to me, and my old life was gone.”
“Bummer,” Ben said.
“Wait,” Matti said. “What palace is this?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “you won’t know. I came from Dresden, yes, that was true, and my home was destroyed. But my name wasn’t really Daisy Glücksburg, or that was only part of my name. My name was actually Marguerite von Sachsen, and although, as you will know, all noble titles had been abolished after the Great War, my parents were nominally the King and Queen Consort of Saxony, and our home was theResidenzschlossin Dresden.”
Matti stared. “No. How did I not know that? How did my mother not know that? How thrilled she would have been to know her baker was a—what? A princess? A queen? She was a bit of a snob, you know.”
I laughed. “You know—I actually have no idea of my theoretical title. How many of my father’s relations survived the war? Was there a male heir? I could only have inherited the title had there been no male to do so. But of course there is no real title, so it doesn’t matter. Just as there seemed no point in proclaiming my royal descent, and as my documents were false anyway …” I shrugged. “I was like everybody else. I’d lost everything, but most people had lost everything, or nearly so. We were all starting over, I along with the rest. It was a … a difficult time.”
