My Enemy's Cradle (39 page)

I put the can of peaches down. "What am I going to do now?"

"You're going home to Holland. I'm taking you to the border."

I threw my arms around him. He held me tight while shudders of relief racked my body. I pulled back to look at him. "What about you?"

"I'll say I went looking for you. I'll play the betrayed lover. Beside myself with anger. I've thought it out."

"But—"

"No. You worry about yourself. Not about me." He passed me a thermos of tea. I drank a mouthful then handed it back. "If I drink it, we'll be stopping every twenty minutes. The baby's so big now.... "

"Will you be all right? You'll have to walk for a while."

I nodded. I had to be all right. "Are they looking for me?"

"No. They figure they'll get you when you try to cross the border. Even so, I don't want to leave until it's dark."

"How will I get across?"

Karl hesitated for just a second. "I'll explain when it's time."

"How close do you think you can get me?"

"Close. Don't worry about that part right now." He glanced at the sky. The clouds in the west were beginning to turn gold. "It'll be dark in half an hour. Cyrla ... come and lie down with me. Tonight is the last time—"

"Don't." I pressed my fingertips to his lips. "Don't."

And we lay down and held each other one last time on our bed of straw. We kissed and caressed each other slowly, imprinting the memory of our bodies on our mouths and hands. As if we had all the time in the world. As if we would never see each other again.

Then we lay quietly, stealing the last moments, watching the heedless sky turn red and then deep violet. Karl raised himself beside me. He touched my cheek, then trailed his fingertips down my jaw, my neck, across my collarbone to my shoulder and then slowly down the length of my arm and over my hand. He pressed his palm to mine. "It's time," he said. And he broke our touch.

He got up and helped me to my feet. "Wait." He reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and round wrapped in tissue. "I was going to give it to you when the baby was born."

I opened it. Inside was a wooden sunflower head—the spiraling rows of tiny seeds and the curling petals carved in detail.

"Turn it over."

On the other side was another sunflower face.

We drove into the dark. Karl had a map marked with the checkpoints, and we kept to the small roads where the villages were as black as the forests. It seemed we were hurtling through a tunnel; in the green glow of the dashboard lights, the stubble of Karl's beard glinted like gold dust. When a half-moon rose, it lit everything outside with a thin silvery glow. The Rhine came into view—a shining thread leading to my home. All we had to do was follow it, and then...

But Karl wouldn't talk about that final piece—the way I would cross—except to tell me where. "We'll cut over at Bruggen. The forest is thick there. You'll end up in a small town south of Nijmegen—Beesel. Do you know it?"

"No."

"It's mostly farms. You'll probably have to stay there a few days before you can get to Leona's. You'll need a story for why you're out on foot, without papers, without luggage or money. I could give you some
Reichsmarks,
but that would be suspicious."

"I could say my house was bombed. That's what I was planning to say when I thought I was going to run in April."

"A bombing raid. That's good. That will explain the cuts. They won't find out if it's true or not for a day or two."

"Where should I say it happened?"

"Maybe Nijmegen. You could say you took a train from there. They'll ask about your family, though—they'll expect you to try to reach a relative. You'll have to say you have no one."

"I have no one," I repeated.

"And your husband—"

"I have a husband?"

"You did. He was a soldier. He was killed months ago."

"You're killing off my husband? Just like that?"

Karl shrugged. "He fought bravely."

"He fought bravely."

"But you never loved him."

"But I never loved him. Wait ... what?"

"You couldn't love him because you were always in love with a boatbuilder from Germany. A very handsome man."

"I was, was I?"

"Yes. Stop laughing, it was very serious. Very romantic. You met him in a bakery. It was love at first sight. You felt as if there was a fine light around him, setting him apart for you."

"Love at first sight?"

"Yes. And lust. It was all you could do not to tear your clothes off and throw yourself at him."

"It's strange," I mused. "I don't remember that part."

Karl nodded sagely. "It probably embarrasses you too much."

"That's probably it."

It was good to laugh. Everything real was so grim. I looked across at Karl. His face was so beautiful to me, so precious. "I love you," I told him.

"I love you," he said.

For the next few hours, we talked of nothing painful or dangerous. We exchanged stories of our childhoods—only the happy memories, as if wrapping ourselves in each other's histories would keep us safe. I asked Karl to tell me more about the trips he and Erika had taken to Italy, and I told him about a vacation my father and mother had taken me on the year before she'd gotten ill.

The hours flew by with the landscape. Not quickly enough. Too quickly.

Around three-thirty, Karl stopped the car by a field; the flat landscape under the moonlight called to me. Familiar. Beyond the field stood a wood of evergreens.

"Karl, look."

Icicles dripped from the branches. Of course it wasn't ice on such a warm night. It looked as if the whole forest had been decorated for Christmas, with millions of silver streamers shimmering in the moonlight. I got out of the car to stare in wonder.

"Tinsel?" I asked, incredulous, as Karl came up beside me. "
Eis-Lametta?
"

"No, it's tinfoil. They drop it from planes to interfere with radio signals."

"Bombing raids?"

"Yes."

"We're close to the border?"

Karl pointed into the forest. My chest tightened. I wasn't prepared. I would never be prepared. "Is it time? Do you want me to go?"

"No. I want you to get into the car."

I reached for the door, relieved.

"No. Get in the back." Karl's voice had changed. I turned to question him. His eyes had changed also. "Get in the backseat and lie down."

"But—"

"Just do it. Trust me."

I lay down on the seat. Karl opened the trunk, pulled out a blanket and threw it over me. Then he got into the car and started the engine and pulled back onto the road.

I sat up and pulled the blanket around me. Our blanket. It smelled of hay and safety, but I didn't feel safe now. "Trust me," he'd said. I did, but in the dashboard lights I had seen the muscles of his neck and jaw harden. He was driving fast now. We passed a sign for Bruggen. And then the sign for the border checkpoint.

"Karl, stop. Those lights—that's the border."

"Get down!"

He didn't stop. The gears strained as we accelerated. I tried to raise myself up again, but Karl sensed it and threw his arm back over me, hard.

"Stay down."

And still he didn't stop. He picked up speed. Harsh light flashed over us, and I heard the splintering of wood and the scrape of metal, then glass smashing as we crashed through the barrier. Still he didn't stop; I pressed myself into the seat now, frozen, as we hurtled into the darkened countryside. Into Holland.

After a few moments I felt the car brake. I sat up. Before I could ask anything, Karl pulled the car to the side of the road and turned around to face me.

"You must run now.
Now.
You have to trust me." He reached to the floor and pulled out a liquor bottle. He opened it and poured some down his throat then spilled the rest over his uniform and the floor, his eyes to the rearview mirror. "Go!
Go!
" His voice was harsh. But in the mirror, I could see his face was streaming with tears.

Behind us, faintly, the wail of a siren. A second one joined it, as if in sympathy.

Karl got out and pulled open my door, dragged me to my feet on the road. "
Go!
" He held me tight, then pushed me away. "Follow this road until you come to a farmhouse that feels safe. Stay behind the trees. Go. Don't turn around. Go now!"

I stumbled away, splitting in two: my legs carrying my child toward safety, my heart bleeding in the road. I made it to the shoulder, then slipped down the bank to a culvert overhung with pines, scrambling to catch my footing and skidding the rest of the way. I felt a rip as if my womb were wrenching away from my spine, and I curled in a heap under the boughs. I wrapped my arms around my baby, trying to hold on to the world.

A light grew along the road from the distance. Sirens screamed closer.
Run to me,
I begged Karl silently, but he only turned his face to the trees where I was hidden, raised his arms, and locked his fingers together. The pieces fit.

And then they were on him. I lay in the muddy ditch and watched as two cars and a jeep skidded to circle him. Soldiers ran from each, shouting, guns and lights drawn. Karl stood calmly at the center of the chaos. He held his arms out straight, giving his wrists up to them. For the briefest second as they bound his hands behind him, in the arcing beam of a flashlight, I thought I saw the faint curve of a smile on his lips. Then they dragged him away, past the headlights, and I couldn't see his face anymore, only his silhouette. With a fine light edging him.

Setting him apart for me.

I am standing at the doorstep, my knuckles raised, my arm suddenly weak, after circling the block three times trying to prepare myself. So much is at stake. I knock.

It's Erika. I know this at once. Her face is older than I would have thought and more broken, but in it I see his. For a split second, the shadow of fear races across her eyes—it's the same fear I feel every time there's an unexpected knock at my door. Then it passes—
No, it's over.
She stares at me. Behind her, a little girl runs past and then, seeing the open door and the strangers on the step, comes to hide behind her mother's knees.

"Cyrla?" the woman asks. We have never met. But she knows.

Our hands fly to our mouths like twin birds, our eyes fill with tears, and we both stand there, overwhelmed. It's the girls who break the frozen tableau. Lina twists her head around her mother's hip and smiles shyly, flirting with Anneke—the very image of the baby in the photograph I saw five years ago. Anneke holds her arm out straight, offering the stuffed rabbit she always carries. I have never seen her offer it before.

Erika and I gasp at the same time, and she steps out to embrace me. We can't form words and for a moment we don't need to. But only for a moment.

"Is he here?"

She pulls back and shakes her head. "No." Before the word is out of her mouth, I am trying to divine its meaning.

"Come in, Cyrla," she says. "Come in." She smiles and my heart beats again.

We embrace once more in the hallway and then we say all the usual things ... the words that try to express what words can't express. She leads me to a small parlor and tells me to sit down while she makes tea. As I look around the room, I regret my decision to dress up. My feathered hat, Anneke's big lemon-colored bow, make the flat look shabbier. Things have been harder for them here. I stand again and cross to a wall of framed photographs. There he is as a baby, there he is as a boy with a new bicycle, as a young man beside the ribs of a boat. In each—even the baby picture—his twin sister is beside him, looking up at him adoringly. There are none of him in uniform.

All the while I am drinking in his face, I am able to concentrate on only one thing. He's not here ... But she'd smiled.

When she comes back into the room, she apologizes for not having anything to offer me with the tea.

I can't wait. Civility was lost years ago. "Where is he?"

She puts the tray down on the side table and picks up a letter beside it. She hands it to me. I look at the return address, my knees so weak now I wish I were sitting.

And then I smile, too. "So he's all right?"

"Yes, he's all right." Erika's expression changes, becomes unreadable. "No, of course he's not all right. He spent three years in Dachau."

She hands me my tea and we sit together on the single sofa. "No one is all right now," she says. "How could we be?"

We sit for a moment with that unanswerable question. I wait. She sees from my face that I must hear everything.

"They broke his hands so he couldn't build things anymore. Then they worked him nearly to death. I didn't recognize him when he got off the train, he was so thin. I walked right past him, searching the platform, and he had to call out to me. For a long time after, he barely spoke. Our mother died, and I think it was from a broken heart."

Through it all, the girls play at our feet. I hear Lina tell about a dog she had, a very heroic dog. I can tell she never had such a dog, never had a pet. She brings out a box of paper dolls and explains to my daughter the strict rules about how each must be dressed. Somehow Anneke understands, although she doesn't know German, and she allows this bossiness, something she wouldn't do at home. Every now and then, Lina reaches to touch her mother's knee, and once she climbs up onto the sofa, sits for a moment with her head in her mother's lap. It was much worse for them here.

"Does he blame me?"

"Blame you? Oh, no. That's not how he sees it. Karl thinks you saved his life. Without you, his life wouldn't have been worth saving. That's how he puts it."

"And now? What is his life now?"

She tells me and I close my eyes, picturing it. "Is he—"

She glances at my left hand. "Married? No."

I feel my relief burn a blush across my face.

Erika reaches down and strokes Anneke's blond curls. "Karl always worried about her. He's going to be so happy to hear. Where did you have her?"

"I went into labor the next day. The farmhouse I went to that night—it was a good choice, thank God. They took me in without asking any questions. I stayed six months."