“Speak for yourself! My father didn’t kill anyone!”
“Don’t strain your voice, your new Ami masters can’t hear you from here.”
“Where were you when he was doing it? At a BDM meeting?”
“Shut your beer trap!” It was Erich shouting this time, his pale cheeks warm with blush just like Gerlinde’s. “Where were you, yourself?”
“I worked for a newspaper—”
“Then you’re a Nazi!” Gerlinde jabbed her finger into someone Tadek couldn’t see, from where he stood. He didn’t realize what he was doing, he just felt his feet back away, further and further away from the bus. “All the press was state-owned! You all worked under Goebbels’s Promi!”
“A Nazi’s daughter calling me a Nazi! Ha! What about your boyfriend? Look at his coat! I haven’t had such a coat even on my best days! He didn’t fare so badly for himself, judging by the looks of it!”
“The coat is from the Red Cross!” Erich was thoroughly enraged now. “And I was fighting in France, you sorry scribbler with a Party card!”
“Was that your SS division that massacred those Amis then? Have you reported it in your Fragebogen or have you forgotten, you dandy with chevrons?”
A policeman’s whistle prevented furious Erich from going after someone on the bus. Tadek never thought he would be so relieved to see the greenish overcoat and the helmet that remained frighteningly unchanged from Hitler’s Germany’s days.
They ran along the snow-bleached streets, breathing heavily through the layers of scarves and tangling themselves in the hems of their coats. Soup kitchens replaced ruins, as ruins turned into tenements with smoke coming out straight from the windows – resourceful people had long since acquired little house stoves in exchange for whatever valuables the occupying forces didn’t liberate from them. Under a poster with a smiling soldier on it, Gerlinde stopped to get her breath and suddenly burst out laughing, her hand still holding her left side. Soon, Erich joined it, his breath transparent-white against the soot-covered wall of the building. Tadek regarded them both in stunned silence. In Gerlinde’s eyes, tears shone. She wiped them subtly and smiled at him.
“I’m sorry. I’m not laughing because it’s funny. It’s the nerves. I didn’t expect it to be so good… to let it all out.”
Next to her, Erich moved his parcel under his arm. “It was good. Liberating. We need to talk about it more. I never understood why Amis make us… Now, I do. We need to talk. We need to shout about it but one thing we can’t do. We can’t be silent. Otherwise, it was all in vain.”
Tadek was terrified once again. Terrified and not even sure why. He knew he had to say something, explain himself to the couple in front of him but his tongue was suddenly heavy as lead.
“You should have told them,” Gerlinde said softly. “You were there. You saw it all…”
She hadn’t even finished yet but Tadek was already shaking his head and backing away from her, his hands held in front of him. “No, I can’t. Can’t talk to anyone about it.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I’m not like them… not like the rest of the survivors.” The words barely found their way out, strangled, disjointed.
Gerlinde blinked at him. Erich scowled, confused.
“I’m not like… I helped the SS. I did their dirty work for them. In some sense, I collaborated with them.”
“Just what rot are you saying?” She was upon him again, eyes gleaming, cheeks – flushed with pink. “You had no choice! They would have killed you had you refused to do what they told you! Just like Erich! He had to fight in the war he hated because deserters met the same end as you lot. You both are victims, not perpetrators!”
“Why do I feel guilty then?” Tadek sobbed out. Wherever the tears came from and why, he had not the faintest idea but one thing she was right about, Gerlinde, it was good to talk about it. It was good to let it all out.
“I don’t know. Why do I? I haven’t done a damnedest thing to anyone,” she shrugged.
“I feel guilty too, if that eases things for you.” Erich’s hand was on top of his shoulder that was shaking with sobs.
“You know what?” Gerlinde removed her gloves and began wiping Tadek’s face with a handkerchief – a typical nurse, always there to help, he grinned through the tears. “Maybe it’s good that we all feel guilty. Maybe, it’ll help us become better people.”
“The trouble is, the truly guilty ones never think themselves to be the guilty party,” Erich said, with a touch of painful finality in his voice.
“No, they don’t. That’s why the world is such a vile place to live in.” Gerlinde’s eyes were staring at the ruins around them.
“Do you think your father feels guilty for what he did?” Tadek didn’t know what possessed him to say it.
It came out rude and unexpected but strangely enough, Gerlinde took no offense. “No. I don’t think he feels guilty at all.”
16
Spring dawns replaced the gloom of winter. Along with the blooming, hope came once again. In place of former flower gardens, neat rows of vegetables lined the sun-warmed earth; they were all over Berlin – around surviving houses and bare skeletons of tenement buildings. In front of Neumann’s estate, as well. Frau Hanke turned Frau Neumann’s entire garden to that very purpose. Who knew when the Amis would pull out and leave them to starve, along with the “Soviet” Berliners?
Perched on the bicycle’s handlebars, Gerlinde thought back to last spring, last April, when the Oder front was still holding; when the optimistic Berliners were learning English and pessimistic ones – Russian; when she, along with other young nurses from the Red Cross, painted slogans “We believe in victory” and “We will never surrender” on countless walls after the
