“Thank you for making me laugh again.” She knew he couldn’t understand, but it felt good to hear herself say it.
Martha couldn’t quite believe that it had come back to her so easily. She was driving along the road that followed the river, the windows down, breathing in the scent of the pine trees.
“You are doing very well.” Stefan smiled as she glanced sideways. “But watch out for holes.”
She nodded. “The roads are bad; we hit quite a few potholes on the way from France.”
“How did you get from America? By ship?”
“Plane,” she replied. “I’d never flown before; I was quite scared, but it was fine.”
“I have never done that,” he replied. “I went on many ships: to England, Holland, other countries. Where do you live in America?”
“New York. But I grew up in the South—Louisiana.”
“You like New York?”
She hesitated. “I like some things. But it’s not an easy place to live.” She realized as the words came out how flippant that must sound to someone who had spent the past three years as a slave laborer in a German factory. “What I mean is, it’s a good place to be if you have money, but if you don’t . . .”
“It is the same in all the world, I think. In Warsaw, where I live, just the same. But when the Germans came, it made no difference how much money you had.”
Martha tried to picture him as he would have been before the war: a man running an international export business—probably wealthy. What would have happened to that business when the Germans took over? Would there be anything to go back to, if and when DPs were able to return to their homelands? And what about his family? Had there been a wife? Children?
Before she could frame any question that might prompt him to open up about his past, she saw something that made her slam on the brakes. A wagon pulled by a pair of oxen was blocking the way ahead. It was piled high with cabbages, a couple of which had tumbled off and lay in the road. A few yards away, on the riverbank, a man was shouting at a couple of other men, both of whom carried the kind of makeshift wooden fishing rods she’d seen earlier.
“Verdammte Ausl?nder!” The man shook his fist at the fishermen. They were backing away, but with the river behind them, there was nowhere to go.
“What’s going on?” She turned to Stefan. “What’s he saying?”
“He called them dirty foreigners.” Stefan’s hand was on the door. In a moment he was out of the car. Martha watched, alarmed, as he strode right into the middle of the confrontation. He put his arm up, holding the German at bay while he spoke to the fishermen. She saw him jerk his head downriver, in the direction of Seidenmühle. Then he turned to the German. There was a brief exchange before the man climbed back onto the cabbage wagon and urged his oxen forward.
“What did you say?” Martha asked, as he climbed back into the car.
“I told them to go fishing in a different place.”
“And the German—what did you say to him?”
“I told him they won’t take his fish anymore.”
“His fish? Does he own this land?”
“No. He comes from Fürstenfeldbruck.” He shrugged. “Germany is his country. So, his fish, that’s what he says.”
Martha drew in a breath as she put the car in gear again. She wondered how he’d managed to remain so calm, so controlled. He must hate the Germans for what he’d suffered during the war, and for reducing him to the status of a penniless refugee in a foreign land. It was incredible that he hadn’t lashed out at the man.
As if reading her thoughts, he said: “He hates us because Germany lost the war. If he sees people from the camp, it reminds him. But, for now, we must live here. So, it’s not worth making trouble.”
She jabbed the horn as they overtook the cabbage wagon. In the rearview mirror she saw the German raise his arm in an obscene salute.
Martha wondered how she was going to find a way to work with people like him. If the local farmers resented the DPs so much, it was going to be a nightmare of a task to get them to provide enough food to lay in for the winter.
“Not all Germans are bad like him. Some hate what the Nazis did.”
Martha kept her eyes on the road ahead, wondering if he’d say more. In the silence that followed, her mind turned to the girl, Bo?ena, who had been on the verge of selling her baby to a German couple. It was hard to square the resentment she had just witnessed with the idea of local people paying to adopt a DP’s child.