A Perfect Madness (45 page)

Erich walked around the side of the
house to where the steps were leading to the cellar door. He
stopped for a moment by a walnut tree, gnarled by time and the
elements and now blackened by the fire. Memories of his childhood
adventures climbing among its branches and limbs were no longer
there to be seen. What he saw, though, no child could ever have
imagined. Pieces of burnt flesh, in all sizes, hung from the limbs
like thin strips of charred tinsel, as if someone had methodically
tried to decorate the tree. A mother and child had sought shelter
there beneath his childhood tree, when a bomb exploded in the
street close by, leaving what was left of their bodies hanging from
the tree. In Erich’s mind, the gruesome scene, perhaps, could be
his mother.

Erich found the thick steel cellar
door badly charred and twisted but still intact. Pushing it open, a
rush of intense heat captured in the cellar swept across his face.
No one, he knew, could live long through such heat.

There was no light except through the
open cellar door and a small hole in the floor above, letting rays
of the sunshine down like a small spotlight into the cellar. Moving
slowly towards the back of the cellar, the soles of his boots
became warm from the heat the concrete floor still held, adding an
eerie feeling to his presence there. They were lying huddled
together when he saw them, his mother and father, a mixture of
ashes and bones with bits of charred flesh still attached. Nothing
was there to tell him who they were except a large brass belt
buckle that he had given his father many Christmases ago and his
mother’s wedding ring. His father loved the power the buckle
expressed, not that it had been a child’s gift to him. Erich picked
up the buckle and ring from their ashes and left the cellar quickly
to inhale fresh air again. Standing in the street, he looked one
last time at the ruins before him. Strangely, he felt little loss
over finding his parents dead, but it was wrong, he believed, the
way his mother had died. Unlike his father, she was a God-fearing
woman who would harm no soul. With the Russians only a few miles
away, Dresden’s war was over. So why would the enemy seek to erase
it from God’s eyes when they could have enjoyed its wonderful
beauty as he had? Erich mused. They seemed no less the beast than
Germany was.

Erich walked away then, without
looking back, leaving his mother and father’s ashes to become a
part of the rubble when it was cleared away by the bulldozers. For
his part, no one knew where he was now, having been swept along
with the mass of refugees filling the roads from the advancing
Russians. Though the official news from the Western Front was
heavily censored, rumors weren’t; and more often than not they
carried enough snippets of truth that one could weave a dismal
picture of what was unfolding there and on the Eastern Front. With
the American army ready to cross the Rhine, hiding out in Mainz
under Maria’s roof would be impossible, Erich knew. So he would
turn south to Triberg and his beloved Black Forest. The small
village held nothing the Americans would want, except maybe to
lounge unhurriedly in the warm springs. The Germans would come,
though, after there was no more fighting, coming just as they did
when the Great War ended, bringing their shrapnel-laced bodies and
half-bodies to soak in nature’s healing grace bubbling in the
ancient springs around the city. They would sit where the waters
flowing across their broken bodies were those that had healed the
German warriors of old. Only their bodies would be healed, not
their minds, and perhaps, Erich believed, he could search for his
own sanity among them by tending to their mental needs.

Yet even then he might have to hide
for years, because he knew the British and the Americans would want
to imprison or hang many of the medical personnel who had been at
Auschwitz. It bothered him some that this might happen, because he
had done nothing terrible like the doctors Mengele or Wirth, who
should be put to death. He had been nothing more than a camp doctor
examining prisoners, doing what doctors do, and had killed no one
there with his own hands. He had sentenced no one to death by his
selections on the ramp. The fact that some did die was by Dr.
Wirth’s orders, not his. What they probably would do, Erich
thought, would be to come after him for what he had done earlier to
the crippled children at Görden, killing them like he did. But even
there he was still being a doctor, acting from compassion, which
all good doctors should do. The great virtue is in their oath, and
surely they would accept that fact.

***

THIRTY-ONE

Anna, Prague, 1992

A
nna placed the box
holding her mother’s ashes on the night table and stretched out on
the hotel bed for a short nap before going to the Old Jewish
Cemetery. The long journey from America to Prague had included two
unexpected side excursions, leaving her exhausted and emotionally
drained from all that had taken place. It was only through the last
of her mother’s stories, told shortly before she died, that the day
as it was, came about.

With the war over, when Julia came to
Angie McFarland’s for Anna, she stayed two weeks waiting for the
last of the spring lambs to be born so Anna could name them as she
had done for the past three years. The days were filled with a
glorious nothingness that Julia could hardly describe, the kind
where only unbounded love exists. They went together as a family,
one last time, to Angie’s old Presbyterian church and listened to
the same minister preach on forgiveness, except he never said who
they were supposed to forgive. The war had been over barely two
weeks and no one had started to heal, least of all those who had
lost someone precious. Julia felt it strange to hear talk of
forgiveness when the world hadn’t had time to stop
hating.

At night, with Anna asleep, Angie
would place before Julia a large stack of notebook paper, penciled
on every line each memorable moment in Anna’s young life that Julia
had missed. Angie would talk of them to Julia through stories, and
Julia would come to know each moment as if it were she who had been
there watching Anna, not Angie. Later, when Anna was older in
years, it would be Julia who would tell her of Angie so she would
know who had cared for her, filling her with a love that had no
end. “She was the purest of the pure,” Julia would always say, when
Anna would ask about Angie.

Years later when Angie died, which
many in her church said came from a broken heart, Julia and Anna
began lighting the Yahrzeit candles on the day of her death, as
they did for her parents and her brother Hiram and for her sister
Miriam, who died so young. After Julia moved to America with Anna
and became a doctor, graduating from John Hopkins, she would plan
each year to go back to Scotland to visit Angie but never did. Nor
could she persuade Angie to come to America. The healing power of
distance was a wee too fragile to allow her eyes to see Anna’s face
again, she would say. “It’s best I stay in the hills of Scotland,
where the memories will always be fresh.”

So Anna went back this day to Angie’s
small Eden forty-seven years later, to fulfill the first of two new
promises to her mother before making the final stop in the Old
Jewish Cemetery in Prague. Carrying a small spoonful of Julia’s
ashes in a medicinal bottle, Anna climbed once more the long rocky
road leading to Angie’s home from the village below, now grown
quite large. Nothing was really there that she could remember,
except the small barn where the spring lambs were born. When a lamb
died during birth, Angie taught her that it was the hope new life
brings that she should always remember, not the dying. The ancient
stone house, though, strangely held no memories for her and seemed
ready to collapse at any moment. Walking to the hillside she had
run down many times laughing and squealing in the spring, chasing
butterflies with Angie, Anna tossed the spoonful of ashes into the
warm wind rising from the valley below, watching them for several
seconds as they rode the endless breeze across the green hills. No
words were said. That they would come to rest, in this wonderful
place of goodness, was all that was necessary for her. Anna waited
several more minutes before turning to leave, fixing her eyes for
the last time on the stoic beauty that surrounded her. The Scots
got it right a long time ago, living here where the air was as
clean and pure as new falling snow and heaven always seemed a
little closer.

Of her promises to Julia, it was where
Anna would go next that bothered her the most. Martin Drossen was
from Mainz, and the moment Julia shot him, he left behind a young
widow named Maria. They had been married but a few days before his
unit left for the Eastern Front. At the time, killing Martin the
way she did, shooting him in the face with his eyes frozen on her
when he died, left Julia crying inside. It was not the dying that
bothered her so much, but the picture she took from Martin’s body,
of his young bride in Mainz whom he would never see again, nor she
him. Looking at the photograph, with so much love in Maria’s eyes
for Martin, Julia had to believe he was a good German who just
happened to be on the wrong side—that is, if there were such a
thing as sides when it comes to killing. But in the end, it didn’t
make much difference which side you were on in the war; either way
you were dead and gone from this world. It was just Martin’s
generation’s turn to become warriors and go off and fight and die
alone somewhere far away from those they loved.

Julia had kept Maria’s picture all
these years, thinking some day she would go and find her in Mainz
and tell her the full story of Martin’s death. She had killed many
other Germans after Martin, but it was always his face she would
see. So completing Anna’s promise to Julia to bury her ashes beside
Rabbi Loew’s grave would have to wait one more day.

Mainz was a much bigger city now than
it had been in 1939 when the war began, a time when Maria and
Martin were lovers. Finding a Maria Drossen was possible but not
probable; yet in one quick glance in the telephone directory, there
was Maria’s name listed among a page full of Drossens. She would go
to her, not call, in case she was mistaken, or in case Maria cared
not to see her.

Maria’s tiny second floor apartment
had been her mother’s and had been left to Maria along with the
furniture and her clothes and wedding ring a year before the war
ended. The poor area she lived in then was even poorer now. The
shop beneath Maria’s apartment had been rented on and off over the
years, but stood empty now, much like most of the nearby store
buildings. When Anna left the taxi, she asked the driver to wait
for her; it was not the best of places to be left alone where she
knew no one. She had never seen this side of Europe, believing the
slums belonged only to America.

Anna knocked on the door several
times, waiting anxiously, unsure of what she should say, or if she
should even be there. With her knowledge of German very limited,
the best she could hope for was to lift a few words from an
English/German dictionary to help make sense of her mother’s story
of Martin Drossen’s death. When the door opened, Anna faced a
middle-aged woman whose appearance and facial features shocked her.
It was as if she knew the woman from somewhere in the past but had
no way of making the connection. Bent over and leaning heavily on a
walker, the woman studied Anna for a few seconds, then spoke in
broken English, “You are American tourist, yes?”

“
Yes. Thank you for
speaking English. I know very little German,” Anna
replied.

Beckoned by the woman to come in, Anna
followed her as she shuffled along slowly through the living room
to a small kitchen. The woman was greatly deformed. Her spine
twisted and bent and gathered into a large mass to one side, all
resting on legs and feet no bigger than matchsticks. When the woman
reached the kitchen, she sat down in an old wheelchair pushed up
against the wall, then looked up at Anna, waiting for her to
speak.

“
Why do you come here?”
she asked, speaking haltingly.

“
If you are Maria Drossen,
I have an old photograph that my mother said belongs to you. There
is also a story to go with it,” Anna said, handing the picture to
the woman.

Reaching for the picture, Anna noticed
that even the fingers of the woman’s hand were horribly gnarled and
deformed, making it difficult for her to hold the picture steady.
Looking at the picture, the woman smiled sadly.

“
This is of my beautiful
mother, Maria, given to my father before he went to
fight.”

“
Your father was Martin
Drossen?”

“
Oh, yes. I am Elka
Drossen. Now tell me, please, why you have this
picture.”

Anna’s story suddenly came easier for
her. Though eager to learn of her father’s death, Elka had shared
no past with him, and Anna’s words seemed empty of the loss that
had fashioned itself so vividly and for so long in Julia’s mind
through the years. When she finished her narration, Anna waited for
some reaction, or release of emotion from Elka, but none came.
Sensing there was nothing more to say to her, Anna stood to
leave.

“
There must be hundreds of
war stories like your mother’s,” Elka said softly, nodding to Anna
to sit again. “That was a terrible time and both sides did terrible
things to each other, didn’t they?”