When We Meet Again (29 page)

And that’s when she turned to the man next to her and laughed. Although Peter was a good distance away, he could see that in profile, her face looked exactly like the woman he’d been painting for a decade and a half. He had imagined her older, a woman in her late thirties now, and this is exactly what she would have looked like.

“Margaret!” he called out, startling the people near him, some of whom looked at him suspiciously and moved away. “Margaret?” But his cry was lost in the vacuum of two hundred thousand voices. The only choice was to leave his perch and find her. But to move would mean losing sight of her. What if she was swallowed by the crowd by the time he got to the spot where she’d been? Still, he had no choice. He had to try.

This is crazy,
he told himself as he swam upstream against a rising tide of bodies, all flowing toward the podium.
Margaret is dead.
He knew it wasn’t logical and that he was grasping at straws, but what if Louise had lied? What if Margaret had been banished from Belle Creek and her family had told the townspeople that she had died in childbirth in order to protect their own reputation? What if by the time Peter had arrived in 1950, the lie was so ingrained that it had become like truth?

He moved through the crowd as quickly as he could, abandoning his sketchpad when it became too unwieldy. It took him twenty minutes to reach the general area where he’d seen her, and though he looked wildly around, pushing his way through people, scanning every face, and calling her name, she was gone.

He spent the rest of the day walking in circles, calling for her, searching. Instead of sketching scenes that he would later paint, instead of watching the faces of people as they nodded and cheered, instead of capturing the angles of Dr. King’s movements, Peter simply let himself get lost. By the end of the day, he was in a daze of despair. It felt like he’d had Margaret again for a moment but that he’d somehow lost her. He couldn’t stop turning the image of her over and over and over again in his mind.

When he finally met Maus at their hotel bar late that night, Peter knew he looked as disheveled and dismayed as he felt. Maus reached for him in concern. “Peter, what on earth happened to you? Where’s your sketchpad?”

“I lost it,” Peter said vaguely. “I saw her, Maus. I saw Margaret. I tried to find her, but she was gone.”

Maus found Peter a seat and ordered him a scotch. “Peter, you know very well that Margaret is dead,” he said after Peter had downed the first glass of liquor in a single, long sip. Maus ordered another drink for his friend and put a hand on his shoulder. “She’s been gone a long time, Peter.”

“But she was there. I saw her. She was with a young man, or perhaps he was an older boy. Do you think it could have been my son? Victor?”

“Peter, there
is
no Victor. You know that! Your child died seventeen years ago.”

“What if he didn’t? What if they’re both still alive?”

“Think about what you’re saying. Not only have they risen from the dead, but they’ve chosen to come to Washington at the exact same time you’re here? It makes no sense.”

Peter opened his mouth to protest, but then he felt his shoulders sag. Maus was right, of course. “It wasn’t her,” he said softly. He stared into his refilled glass of scotch before looking up. “It wasn’t her, was it?”

“No, Peter. It couldn’t have been.”

“I know,” Peter admitted. “But it was such a glorious fantasy.”

“You have to let her go, my friend.”

Peter closed his eyes. “I need to find a way to move on, Maus.”

That was the day that Peter decided to change his name. After all, he was no longer his father’s son, no longer his brother’s brother. He hadn’t been for a very long time. Maybe it was time that he had a new identity to reflect his new life. He wasn’t successful like Maus was, so there was no harm in becoming someone new. It was the only way to start over.

W
erner Vogt lived in an assisted living facility three blocks from the ocean in Boca Raton. After downing three cups of coffee the next morning, I drove the three hours south, stopping to use the bathroom twice along the way, and checked in at the front desk. The receptionist directed me to Vogt’s apartment on the eighth floor. “He’ll be so pleased to have a visitor,” she said, smiling at me. “You’ll love him. He’s a charmer.”

I took the elevator up and had to knock three times on Vogt’s door before I finally heard shuffling inside. A moment later, the door opened, and I found myself face-to-face with an old man with gray hair, watery blue eyes, a bulbous nose, and huge plastic hearing aids poking out of his ears. His skin was patchy and pale, but when he smiled at me, his whole face seemed to glow. “A guest!” he exclaimed. “And not just a guest, but a pretty girl! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

His voice was cloaked in a thick, German accent, and as he smiled at me, I couldn’t help but smile back. His enthusiasm was infectious, and I could see what the receptionist downstairs had meant. “Hi, Mr. Vogt,” I said loudly, remembering what Geoff had said about his deafness. “My name is Emily Emerson. Geoff Brock from the Camp Blanding Museum sent me.”

“Geoff Brock! Why didn’t you say so? Come on in!” He ushered me inside, where I passed a room full of cuckoo clocks covering every inch of available wall space. “I restore them,” he said in answer to my questioning look. “An old hobby of mine, dear. Come, come, let’s sit out on the porch.”

I followed him to a screened balcony with a beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean. “This is a lovely place you have here, Mr. Vogt,” I said.

“Thank you. And please, please, call me Werner, or you’ll make me feel old.” He chuckled as we sat down. “So why did Geoff send you to me? Not that I’m complaining.”

“I’m looking for some information about a man I think might have been my grandfather, and Geoff thought you might know something.”

“Your grandfather, you say?” He leaned forward and adjusted the hearing aid in his right ear. “Who is your grandfather?”

“I think his name is Peter Dahler,” I said. I watched something change in his face. “He might have been a prisoner of war with you at Camp Belle Creek.”

“Dahler,” he whispered. “My goodness, I haven’t heard that name in seventy years.”

My breath caught in my throat. “You knew him?”

He nodded slowly. “Not very well. I was only at Belle Creek for a month or two. They needed some extra help with the sugarcane harvest, and I was one of the men they sent. Dahler was there already. He’d been there awhile, I think.”

“What was he like?”

He considered this for a moment. “Quiet. Nice, but quiet. There was a group of us, used to get together at night to play cards, but Dahler stuck to himself. Always had his nose buried in a book, and he was always quoting an author he liked. He was always with another guy we called Maus, but I don’t think that was his real name. It means
mouse
in German, and I believe it was a nickname. I don’t think I ever knew his real name, but the two of them, they were tight.”

“Do you remember anything else about him? About Peter Dahler?”

He frowned. “No. I’m afraid I don’t. Maybe your parents can tell you some stories about him, young lady.”

“That’s the thing. I think he’s my father’s father, but my father never knew him. Something happened, and he never made it back to my grandmother.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that. So many stories like that during wartime. Your grandmother was German too, I assume?”

“No. She grew up on a farm in Belle Creek.”

Werner sat up straighter and stared at me. “Your grandmother was a local girl? And she had a baby with a POW?”

“I think so. She never talked about my grandfather, and we all assumed he had just left her. But something happened recently that made us realize there was more to the story.” I told him about the painting, about the trips to Germany and Atlanta, and about how we still hadn’t been able to locate Peter Dahler.

“How extraordinary,” he said when I was finished. “In those days, prisoners didn’t just get involved with locals, you realize. Dahler was risking a lot to be with your grandmother. She was too.”

I nodded. “I’d like to ask you something. The painting I mentioned was apparently sent by the widow of Ralph Gaertner. Is there any chance he was at Camp Belle Creek with you too?”

“The famous painter? Oh, no, I certainly would have remembered that.” He paused and looked off into the distance. “But then again, I didn’t know all the names of the other guys. So many of them just went by nicknames. One guy was called
der Fuss,
which means
the foot
, because he was so good at football. There was
Muttersöhnchen,
which sort of means
mama’s boy
. Poor kid, he would cry in his bunk every night. And there was
die Zwiebel,
the onion
, who used to smell like onions all the time, no matter what we were served for dinner.”

“And Maus,” I said.

“Yes. The mouse.” He shrugged. “I suppose he could be Gaertner. But seems like I would have recognized the name years ago. Gaertner’s been big since what, the fifties?”

“The sixties, I think.”

“Well, I was a much younger man then. Seems I would have remembered if a famous artist had the name of a man I’d once known. But then again, I wasn’t in Belle Creek long.” He paused. “Do you have one of those smartphones? Maybe if you show me a picture of Ralph Gaertner, I’ll recognize him as a fellow POW.”

“Great idea.” I pulled out my phone and googled Gaertner. I pulled up the image on his Wikipedia page, enlarged it, and handed it to Werner. He squinted at it for a few minutes then frowned. “Doesn’t look familiar. But he’s an old man here, isn’t he? Can you find one of him when he was younger?”

I took the phone back and scanned through the images that appeared on Google until I came up with one where Gaertner’s face was still youthful, though it was taken in the 1960s, long after Werner Vogt had been imprisoned in Belle Creek. He was a handsome man who looked a bit like a fair-haired Errol Flynn.

“No,” Werner said after I’d handed him the phone and he’d studied the photo. “No, I don’t think I know the man. But perhaps if Ralph Gaertner knew Dahler, they knew each other from Germany. We were all sent back there after the war, you know.”

I tried to ignore the sinking feeling in my heart. Werner wasn’t going to be able to help me find Peter Dahler or tie him to Ralph Gaertner. Still, he had known my grandfather at one time, which was something. “So if you were sent home to Germany, what made you come back to the States?” I asked.

He looked out at the ocean. “You know, from the moment I first arrived on American soil, I felt very welcome. Isn’t that a strange thing to say? A prisoner isn’t supposed to feel welcome in an enemy nation, is he? When I was captured in Italy and brought to America, I was expecting to be dropped into a country that hated me for being German, the same way we were taught to hate everyone who wasn’t just like us. But it was different here. People didn’t hate us. People were
nice
. And for the most part, it was okay one-on-one. People talked to us, took the time to get to know us. And there were three meals a day, Emily. I’d never had that. There was as much as we wanted. There was food to eat, so we didn’t have to swallow hatred instead of meat and bread.

“The work in the camps was tough sometimes,” Werner continued. “I worked in a cannery for a while, and I did some citrus picking. Belle Creek was probably the toughest assignment, just because the conditions were bad. It was blazingly hot every day, and the humidity was through the roof. Up here”—he gestured toward the ocean—“you get the sea breeze and the views. But when you’re in the middle of the muck in a sugarcane field, sometimes it’s like you can’t breathe. There were snakes and gators and all sorts of wild creatures out there, and we were always a little afraid that we’d get eaten alive. I was glad to be out of there, I’ll tell you. We really pitied the boys who were in Belle Creek year-round.

“But,” he said immediately, “it wasn’t like it was all bad. The camaraderie in the camps was nice. I think most of the boys were relieved not to be getting shot at anymore. The food was good, and would you believe we were paid eighty cents a day? We could buy cigarettes, newspapers, all sorts of things—even beer. Well, what the Americans called beer anyhow; it wasn’t what we were used to, coming from Germany, but it was something. And most of us went home to Germany after the war with some money, thanks to those wages. Helped us to start over. It was pretty decent of the government, if you ask me.”

“What was it like to go home after being a prisoner for so long?” I asked.

“First of all, you know we didn’t go straight home. We had to do hard labor in Britain for a while first. I guess it was to make up for everything the Germans had done to their country. I didn’t make it home until 1946, and I barely recognized the place. I was from Cologne, you see, and it had been bombed straight to hell during the war. It was in ruins, and so were people’s lives for a while. I wanted to stay and help them rebuild, I really did, but my father had died before the war, my brother had died on a battlefield in France, and my mother died in ’49. There just wasn’t anything there for me after that. I was in the middle of all this rubble, and even when we were cleaning it up and starting over, all I could think about was the wide-open expanse of America, all the fields and farms and opportunities. I wanted to come back because it felt more like home than Cologne did. And so I applied for my papers, and I returned in ’51.”

“I think my grandfather may have come back too,” I told him. “I’ve been wondering what that must have been like, to leave his homeland behind and start over. What was it like for you? Did you miss Germany?”

“Sure, all the time. And later in my life, when I had some more money, I started traveling back there once a year or so. It’ll always be a piece of me. But in life, Emily, for every path you decide to walk down, there’s a path you’ve decided to turn away from. Each fork in the road leads us further from where we began. And one cannot look back. Only forward. Otherwise, you’ll get stuck standing in place. It sounds to me like maybe your grandfather knew that. He couldn’t stay in Germany. He had to move forward in life. And yet,” he added, “it is only human to wonder about the road not taken.”