Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(44)
“How did the two of you meet?”
“It was at the end of the war. I had fallen in with some families who were running from the Soviet soldiers. We knew what they would do to us if they found us, and death was better. There was not enough food. My shoulder blades stuck out like little stunted wings. Some days, I hallucinated from hunger.”
Jenny thought about her mom and the women at the country club skipping meals to be thin. Thinking about Frau Hermann’s hunger, their diets struck Jenny as not just ridiculous but immoral.
“I made it to Berlin after the war. Those were very dark days. Very dark. To be a young woman at the mercy of … well. It was not easy. For anyone. In 1947, I went to work for Herr Hermann and his wife. The wife had had what you might call a nervous breakdown. I looked after her and the house. And him. He said he would provide for me, see to my schooling. Anything would have felt like love to me then. It was enough. I got by.”
Frau Hermann nestled the picture back on the shelf out of reach. Jenny toyed with her pastry, suddenly uncomfortable. She was reading around the margins of Frau Hermann’s murky story. Frau Hermann had been Ernst’s mistress, not wife. And before that, she’d done God knows what to survive. Jenny realized now that she’d invented a whole persona for Frau Hermann—the kindly widowed surrogate grandmother and possible witch who believed in the Bridegroom’s Oak and fairy tales. It was a narrative that fit neatly into Jenny’s need for Frau Hermann to be a moral compass, beyond reproach. But the real Frau Hermann was more complicated than that and made up of inconvenient details that defied easy categorization of right and wrong. Everything Frau Hermann had told her today had left Jenny with the feeling of trying to balance on shifting sand.
“Do you know why we tell children fairy tales?” Frau Hermann said suddenly, stirring her tea. Jenny shook her head. “We tell them to give children the code for survival. Fairy tales tell us how to see the monsters. How to defeat them. How to carry on despite grief and loss and injustice. They teach us how to make meaning from chaos. How to forgive. Sometimes, at Die Eichel, when people cannot talk about their trauma, I give them paper and pen and say, ‘Once upon a time…’ I ask them to write it down like a story or a letter, something that happened to someone else.”
“Why?” Jenny’s attention had genuinely shifted from Sophie and Hanna to Frau Hermann’s work.
“To release the burden of their guilt or shame, anger and sadness. So that they might move on.”
Something stirred deep inside Jenny, making her feel hot and cold at the same time. She pulled a strip of pastry from its flaky shell. “But what if there’s something you are afraid to write down? Something about you that’s not…” She stuffed the bite into her mouth and swallowed too quickly. It was thick and ticklish against her throat going down and she choked.
Frau Hermann offered Jenny a glass of water. “Here.”
Jenny drank until her throat was clear. Her eyes ran. Frau Hermann put a birdlike hand on Jenny’s arm. “One can always write the letter and never show it to anyone.”
The sound of a woman’s braying laugh drifted out of the open upstairs window along with jazz from the stereo.
“I should get back before my mother gets mad.”
Frau Hermann did not remove her hand. “In the end, Liebchen, we must always become ourselves. It is the only way.”
* * *
Jenny slipped back into her family’s apartment. The rooms were hazy with cigar smoke. A loud, alcohol-fueled conversation was taking place.
“We want to develop in Kreuzberg but we’ve had trouble with these squatters,” said a man with a liquor-flushed face. “These punks, they call themselves.”
“Oh, we saw a gathering of them on the drive in,” one of the wives said. “Their clothes! And the hair.”
“A disgrace if you ask me,” Mrs. Prescott said between sips of her martini. “At least the communists are disciplined and clean!”
That brought a round of laughter.
Bourgeois, Jenny whispered to herself. You petty little bourgeois bastards.
Jenny swept past, unnoticed. In the safety of her locked bedroom, she jacked her headphones into the record player. While Johnny Rotten snarled his way through an anthem of discontent, she took out a piece of stationery.
Dear Richard, she began. Frau Hermann says sometimes it helps to write a letter where you can say everything. I don’t really know how to start this, but Lena says there’s only the present tense. So I guess I’ll just start where I am …
She finished the letter.
Then she tore it into tiny pieces and threw it away.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.
SPRING 2020
Miles wakes up with a start on the couch beside an empty Doritos bag. The TV is still on—some cheesy action flick from the ’80s vault, judging from the mullets and oiled biceps. Dazed but awake, he wipes sweat from his neck. It’s 7:17 a.m. but it could be anytime. It’s all porous these days. He was having a dream about a forest and snow. In the dream, a beautiful doe came up to him. He could hear its thoughts. Snow is the souls of the departed falling to earth to say hello.
“No more Doritos before bed for you, pal,” Miles says to himself.
Beside him is the notepad where he’s written the name Rudolf Jaeger beside Nacht und Nebel. Probably just an internet misfire. But if there’s anything he’s learned from true crime podcasts, it’s that you never know what odd thing will put you on the right path. He could email Matthias at the university but he feels weird asking a German about anything Nazi related—Hey, I know we don’t really know each other, but I’d like to ask you about your country’s most notorious war crimes. Have a great day!