The Plum Tree (29 page)

“That’s what I’m talking about, making a plan. But we should go soon.”

“I don’t know. I need to think this through. We can’t just go off, on impulse.”

“
Ja,
here’s the plan. You think about it, and I’ll start getting things together.” He shook his head, a weak smile on his face. “I love you,” she said.
“Gute Nacht.”
Then she kissed him long and hard before going downstairs for the night.

When the air raid siren began its high, hollow cry at four-thirty in the morning, Christine thought it was part of her dream. In her mind, she and Isaac were in a sun-drenched orchard, picking the biggest plums she’d ever seen. Bees buzzed lazily in the warm afternoon, landing on the white edelweiss and pink lupine that grew wild along the edge of the grass. The buzz of the bees grew louder and louder, an erratic cycling of high and low in her ears, before it evolved into the braying drone of an air raid siren.

“We have to hide!” she yelled at Isaac in her dream. But he didn’t hear her. He just kept smiling and picking plums.

Then consciousness erased his face and the sunny orchard dissolved, replaced by the dark walls of her bedroom. She saw the familiar slice of moonlight coming in along the edges of the blackout paper on her window, but it took her a minute to realize that the sound of the siren was real. When she finally did, terror tightened in her chest. She was in her bed, it was the middle of the night, the air raid siren was going off, and Isaac was trapped in the attic. She didn’t have time to go all the way up there to let him out. She had to help her brothers. Besides, where would he go?

She leapt out of bed, threw her coat over her clothes, and ran into the hallway. Everyone was already headed for the stairs. She grabbed Karl’s hand and followed Maria and Heinrich down the stairs and out the front door. Mutti helped Oma hurry down the steps, and the four siblings ran hand-in-hand into the night. Christine looked over her shoulder, toward the attic of her house, craning her neck to search the black sky above the roofline.

“What are you doing?” Maria yelled at her. “Come on!
Mach schnell!
”

The high-pitched whistle of the first falling bomb screamed through the night just as they entered the shelter. A full minute later, Oma and Mutti finally ducked into the doorway, the sound of explosions propelling them inside. Herr Weiler secured the entrance, and everyone sat frozen, shoulders hunched, waiting. Christine closed her eyes and said a prayer under her breath.

“
Lieber
Gott,
bitte, bitte.
Don’t let any bombs find our house.”

After a few initial blasts, they heard the growling engines of planes passing over, but no bombs detonated nearby. Over the next hour, they heard sporadic anti-aircraft gunfire and low-flying planes, but the explosions sounded muted and distant, as if the attack was happening on the other end of the valley.

“Does it sound like they’re far away?” Christine asked Maria. “Like they’ve missed us?”

“Ja,”
Maria answered. “It sounds like they missed the air base too.”

After another hour, the all clear sounded, and the villagers emerged from the shelter. A light smell of sulfur filled the air. A fire burned outside the village in the direction of the air base, but the streets were clear. As Christine and her family walked up the hill toward their house, she wondered if every person on earth had only a certain number of prayers that would be answered. If so, she was sure she had almost run out.

C
HAPTER
20

T
he next morning, Christine pulled herself from bed and looked out her bedroom window, her desperate frame of mind mirrored by the cloud-filled sky and heavy rain. The weather looked like it had settled in for the rest of the day. She thought about crawling back under the covers, but knew her restless mind wouldn’t allow her to go back to sleep.

Even the prospect of seeing Isaac couldn’t brighten her mood. Last night, running away with him had seemed like the right thing to do. Escaping together had seemed romantic and adventurous, the two of them sleeping in forests and the haylofts of barns, until they were free in another country. But this morning it felt utterly terrifying, and worse yet, downright foolish. The Nazis hadn’t found him in the attic; maybe he should just stay there. If he and Christine left, who knew what would happen? Where would they get food? What if they were caught? They’d be shot or sent to a camp like the one Isaac had told her about.

Once she got dressed, she felt like she was moving at high speed, her nerves frayed, dried up, and coarse, like the shavings left behind after a person raked their nails across a chalkboard. Panic wound itself around the knot of fear and grief in the pit of her stomach, like something that needed to be thrown up in a toilet.

No one else was up, and the house was quiet. She thought about looking in her brothers’ schoolbooks for a map, but decided fresh air would do her good. Maybe it would clear her head. Whether escaping seemed like a good idea right now or not, if she was going to run away with Isaac, she needed to be able to think straight.

She grabbed a basket from the kitchen and went out to the henhouse. By the time she opened the latch on the coop, the downpour had let up, reduced to an intermittent ping-ping on the metal roof from water dripping off the trees. It was past sunrise, but even the chickens didn’t want to come out from their dry roosts. When she reached for their eggs, the birds squawked and stood up, ready to defend themselves from the intrusion. An old, skinny hen pecked at her hand, pinching the skin. Just this slight provocation was enough to make her cry—not that it really hurt, but it took only this minor fracture in the shell of her fragile state to spring the leak that allowed every other pain to find its way to the surface and overflow.

She left the coop and sat down on the back stoop, setting the basket of eggs at her feet, and let her pent-up emotions take over. A flood spilled from her eyes, and she sobbed out loud, remembering her father and Opa. She wept for Isaac and his lost family, her nose running as she thought about all the people who were dying because of this war. She was tired of feeling helpless and terrified, tired of the air raid sirens and the black cloth over the windows, tired of seeing confusion and fear in her brothers’ eyes, tired of seeing her mother work so hard just to keep everyone alive. But most of all, she was tired of wondering if any of them would even survive.

After a few minutes of wallowing, she wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. To her relief, the gnawing stress had eased. She could at least function now without feeling as if she were on the edge of a great abyss, waiting to fall and disappear like a pebble dropped in a well on a moonless night.
I need to think about my family and Isaac,
she told herself.
At least he’s safe for now. Oma, my mother, Maria, Karl, and Heinrich are alive. So many others are worse off than I am. The only thing I can do is keep going. If Isaac and I think we can get away safely, so be it. If not, then we’ll wait for things to change. They have to change. For better or worse, they always do.

Only a few early fruit hung low in the plum trees, but she picked one anyway, just for herself. She sat back on the stoop and ate it slowly, letting the juice run down her chin. When she was finished, she walked over to the corner of the fenced backyard, dug a hole in the loamy soil, and buried the pit. After tamping the dirt down, she closed her eyes and made a wish that the plum pit would take root and grow, and that by the time it was a seedling, the war would be over, her father would be home, and she and Isaac would be together.

Feeling less jittery and looking forward to taking breakfast to Isaac, she picked up her half-full basket of eggs, stepped into the house, and wiped her feet on the straw mat. Then she froze. At the other end of the hall, the dark silhouette of a soldier appeared against the red and blue glass of the front entrance. He pounded on the door, making the entire house rattle. The egg basket slipped from Christine’s fingers and fell to the floor. For a second, she didn’t budge, her pulse thumping, the eggs leaking yellow into the wicker at her feet.

“Hallo?”
the soldier hollered.
“Hallo?”

Christine stepped to one side, hiding behind the staircase. Her mind raced in unison with her thundering heart.
Why did the
Gruppenführer
come back? Did I give Isaac away somehow? Did he notice something in the attic? We’re dead!

The soldier knocked and shouted again.
“Hallo?”

The voice sounded familiar, but the solid door made it sound as if he were shouting from inside a thick-walled room, the soldier’s words muffled and low.
My mind must be playing tricks on me,
she thought.
It’s no one I know
. She didn’t dare move, didn’t dare peek around the corner to look.

“Rose?” the soldier shouted, louder this time.

Christine frowned. It couldn’t be him. It was the
Gruppenführer;
she was sure of it. Of course he knew her mother’s first name. He knew everything.

“Let me in!” the soldier shouted. “Rose! Christine! Maria! Anyone?”

And then she knew.

Christine ran to the entrance, hands trembling as she fumbled with the lock. Finally, she pulled open the door, ready to embrace her long-lost father.

All at once, she realized her mistake.

The skeletal, flea-bitten man must have found out their names somehow, and now he was here to steal their food. His uniform was ripped and covered in grease and mud, his shredded boots wrapped in rope and filthy rags. A rifle hung over his back, one scraped and grimy hand holding the strap at his shoulder. Christine grabbed the edge of the door with both hands and started to slam it shut.

“Christine!” the soldier said. “You don’t recognize your own
Vati?
”

She stopped and looked into the man’s sunken eyes, trying to find something familiar behind the patchy beard, the lank hair, the dirt-covered face. Then the soldier took off his cap and smiled. And she knew.

“Vater!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. Her father lifted her off the ground, squeezing her so tight that she thought he’d break her ribs. He kissed her forehead, her nose, her cheeks.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in four years,” he said, leaning back to examine her, tears streaming from his eyes. “You’ve grown into a woman while I was away.”

His hair was grayer than Christine remembered, the circles under his eyes dark as smudged coal. His lips were cracked and dry, his fingernails dirty. His uniform hung loose on his skinny frame, but it was field green, not Nazi black. He was an ordinary German soldier, not part of the SS, and not a Nazi. And now he was here. He was alive. Christine grabbed him by the hand and dragged him into the house.

“Oma!” she shouted, rapping her knuckles on Oma’s bedroom door. “Get up! Vater is home!” She pulled her father up the stairs. “Mutti!” she yelled. “Wake up, everybody! Vater is home!”

Together they ran up the two flights of stairs to her mother’s bedroom, reaching the door just as she was coming out, her red hair hanging in long cascades over her shoulders, free of its tight French twist. Mutti clutched her worn bathrobe over her chest, blinking against the remnants of sleep that made her look aged beyond her years. At first, the shock of seeing a soldier in the hall contorted her face, but then, when she saw Christine holding his hand and beaming, recognition transformed her. Her hands flew over her mouth, and her chin trembled.

“Dietrich?” she said, reaching out to touch him with an unsteady hand, as if he were a ghost. “Is it really you? You’re alive?”

“It’s me,” Vater said. Then he held out his hand and she grabbed it, her knuckles going white, as if she were afraid he’d disappear if she let go. They threw their arms around each other, and Mutti sobbed. Christine’s eyes filled as she tried to swallow the lump in her throat. Mutti thanked God over and over as Vater buried his face in her hair, laughing. Maria, Karl, and Heinrich came out into the hall, eyes wide as they tried to make sense of the early morning commotion. When Vater saw them, he knelt on the floor, set his rifle at his heels, and smiled. Finally, recognizing that their long-lost father had come home, Karl and Heinrich ran into his outstretched arms. Maria put her hands over her mouth.

“I can’t believe how much you’ve grown!” he said to the boys. He stood and caressed Christine and Maria’s pale cheeks. “I have the most beautiful daughters in Germany! I kept thinking of your faces. That’s what kept me going: Christine’s blond hair, Maria’s wide blue eyes, Karl’s freckles, Heinrich’s toothy grin.” He laughed and put his arm around Mutti, kissing her cheek. “And the picture I carried of your mother kept me sane.”

Oma made her way up the steps behind them, a shawl over her nightgown, one bony hand on the railing. Vater met her at the top of the stairs.

“Welcome home, Dietrich,” Oma said, her eyes wet. “What a wonderful surprise. Welcome home.”

He hugged her and led her back toward the family. “And where is Opa?” he asked.

“It’s not good news,” Oma said in a quiet, shaky voice. “He was killed during an air raid.”

“Ach nein,”
Vater said, shoulders dropping. His eyes filled, and he hugged Oma again. “What happened?”

“The barn was on fire,” Mutti said. “He saved our house from burning.”

“I’m so sorry,” Vater said, hugging her. Then he stood back, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers and closing his eyes, as if suddenly developing an excruciating headache. “This damn war. When will enough be enough?”

“Opa wouldn’t want us to be unhappy,” Oma said. “He’d be so glad to know you’re all right, Dietrich. That’s what he prayed for every night, for you to come home, to look after your family.”

For the next few minutes, the hallway filled with tears and laughter, until, as one big, noisy group, they went down to the kitchen together. Mutti lit the woodstove and filled the teakettle with water, while Vater scrubbed his face and hands in the sink.