The Search for Joyful (28 page)

“Yes. We're going to win.”

“But,” he protested, “the Third Reich was to last a thousand years. Hitler was to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, restore the Teutonic spirit, Saxon myths, Skaldic poems, the Hanseatic code written on stone in runic rhymes.
Sieg heil!
With his great sword Gram conquers the giants and the dwarves. Ravens dine on the flesh of his enemies, swans pull the chariot of the sun across the sky—Kathy, give me something for the pain, or I will break down and cry like a child.”

I counted my heartbeats. Then I said, clearly, distinctly, and with emphasis, “Which leg is hurting?”

“My left, I—” He stopped.

He knew. Oh, God, he knew.

I listened to the minutes on the wall clock. I'd never been conscious of them before.

“They
had
to take it off, I suppose?”

I was startled to hear him speak so calmly. “Yes, it was practically severed when they brought you in. It had to be done to save your life.”

“I see. To save my life.” He laughed shortly.

The charge nurse tapped me on the arm. “Cot 14 is asking for you.”

I didn't want to leave him like this, but he had withdrawn to his own private hell.

I wasn't able to look in on Erich until the following morning. He seemed deep in thought, but when he saw me smiled deprecatingly, as though too much had passed between us and he was unsure of himself. “It was good of you to come by. Thank you.”

“I wanted to, Erich.”

“I'm afraid I took the news rather badly. It's one of those situations that don't come up often. I didn't know how to handle it. But I'm getting more used to it now. At least I think I am. I can talk about it, at any rate. And there's something I want to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“It's about that British boy, the one who lost his leg. He didn't want to live afterward, did he?”

“No,” I said truthfully, “he didn't.”

“And then later, when he grew accustomed to it, he didn't want to go home. And he got you to write letters for him, saying he was slightly wounded but on the road to recovery?”

“Yes. Yes, he did. Oh, Erich, I'm so sorry. But it won't make as much difference as you think.”

He held up his hand. “I'm not interested in all that. I'm sure they have marvelous prostheses these days. And I know the crutches will only be temporary, until the wound heals. I don't care about that. I'm not interested. I want to know about the British boy. I am interested in him. Did they amputate both legs?”

I shook my head.

“Just one? Which was it? Do you remember?”

“The left.”

“Like me.”

There was a pause before the uncomfortable interrogation resumed. “Where was the leg taken off? Below the knee? That's where they took mine, isn't it?”

“Yes, yes. But what's the use of—”

“A lot of use. A lot. It's very helpful.”

He closed his eyes, and I began to hope he'd drifted off to sleep, when he said, still with his eyes closed, “You wrote letters for him, telling the lies he wanted the family back home to believe.”

“I did, but I never sent them.”

His eyes opened with a queer, bright, penetrating glance. “You didn't send them? Oh, Kathy. You are very much Kathy, aren't you? Or are you sometimes Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter? What's it like to have two names?”

“Why don't you ask me something I can answer?”

“All right. Will you write letters home for me, Kathy? And tell them the same lies?”

“If I don't have to send them.”

“No. You have to send them.”

“But don't you want to know the rest? The British boy changed his mind. He went home, Erich. And he sent me a snapshot, taken at his wedding. It had a happy ending.”

“I'm not interested anymore in the British boy.” And he turned on his side, away from me.

 
WITH THE WAR going strongly in our favor, it seemed an odd time for a prison break. Yet one morning sirens screamed and searchlights crisscrossed a sky which was just lightening. I dressed hastily to hear the news. Sometime in the night five German prisoners cut through the barbed wire and escaped. One was captured almost immediately hiding in the granary, and returned. The hunt was on for the others, with snow-tired vehicles, a ski patrol, and dogs.

Before the day was out the remaining four were recaptured, one of them shot and killed.

The excitement produced a complete dislocation in hospital procedure. But I continued my careful supervision of Erich's progress. He was at a critical stage. Physically he was coming along, making an adequate recovery, but he totally rejected his body. The lack of interest he had expressed in the English boy extended to everything. I also was banished, everyone was, everything, including life itself. I'd been in that place. I knew it well.

However, the escape triggered something in Erich. I didn't realize at first when I found him pale and clammy, that it had anything to do with the breakout. His respiration was so quick and uneven that I was alarmed and decided to send for the resident, but Erich put out a hand and stopped me. “Please tell me,” he said. “Who was killed? Was it Norbert? Norbert Freund?”

“Yes, I think that was the name. Did you know him?”

“He's the reason I'm here, the reason I don't have a leg.”

“I don't understand.”

“There's a clique, among the prisoners, of hard-line Nazis. They were suspicious of me from the first—I didn't give their stiff-armed salute at the mention of the Fuehrer's name, I didn't join in their songs of the Vaterland. So I was ostracized. That suited me fine.

“I judged from the influx of new inmates that the war was going badly for us. And this was confirmed—the arrivals were boys of fifteen and sixteen, called up, taken out of school. Old men were among them, the Volkssturm, who were the home guard, air raid wardens, they also wound up here. You can imagine the anger, despair, frustration at being out of it, while comrades, brothers, sons, fathers are dying.”

“That explains the timing of the escape attempt,” I said, pleased that he was taking me into his confidence again. “Everyone was asking, Why now, when it all seems to be winding down? But that explains it.” I hesitated, then asked something that bothered me. “Do you feel that way, Erich?”

“Of course. My countrymen are being killed and maimed. At the same time I can't help wonder—when it's over, what will Austria's fate be? Will the Allies stick by their promise that the old Social Democratic Party and the constitution be restored? Or will she suffer reparations as a defeated enemy? I don't know. It could go so many ways.”

I pressed him to tell me what led to the knife fight.

“A couple of weeks ago, during the exercise period, I slipped into one of the small warehouse sheds to write a letter. I was sitting on the floor, my back against a sack, piles of boxes in front of me. A small group of men detached themselves from the others and stole in, one by one. They didn't notice me there. I realize now I should have stood up, made my presence known, and left. Even then it might have been too late. As it was, they began to discuss an escape.”

“They planned the whole thing in front of you? You knew it was going to happen? Why didn't you say something?”

He gave me a long look.

“That was stupid. I'm sorry. Of course you couldn't.”

He continued, assuming a detached tone. “One of them took out a cigarette butt. Another jostled him for it, and it dropped. In retrieving it, they spotted me. That was it. They tried to kill me.”

“But you wouldn't have said anything. You didn't say anything.”

“Because I wasn't a Nazi, they didn't credit me with being a patriot. To them it's the same thing. They don't understand the code that for four hundred years my family has lived by.”

Perhaps they didn't understand, but I did. The nuances he saw, the distinctions he made, were those of a thoughtful man who rejected the fanaticism, yet embraced and loved his country. Even now with the war going against him he saw not only defeat but hope. It was a beginning, and I, who had made so many beginnings, saw that my job was to help him come to terms with his disability.

As far as I knew he had never looked at the amputation, and when I tended it, cleaned it, applied lotion, he looked away. If he could have left his leg in my care he would have.

It was time. I handed him the washcloth. He looked at me inquiringly. “I've already washed.”

“You haven't finished.”

His eyes followed mine, traveling the length of his leg, coming to an abrupt stop below the knee. “No,” he said, “I can't.”

I waited.

“I find it repulsive.”

I waited.

He accepted the washcloth, clenched his hand over it, and, in a single angry gesture, made a pass over the stump. “There. Are you satisfied?”

I took the lotion from the table.

“What's that?”

“It's the lotion I rub you with. You have to start doing these things for yourself, Erich.”

“Why?”

“Because the less scarring, the better success you'll have with the fit of the prosthesis, the more comfortable it will be, and the longer you'll be able to wear it.”

He grit his teeth and, looking at the ceiling, pressed the lotion into his palm, and made a swipe with it across the wound. Most spilled.

“It's a start,” I said. “We'll try again tomorrow.”

The next day when I came, he took the washcloth from me and applied it assiduously to the wound. Then, reaching for the lotion, rubbed that in thoroughly. “Did you know,” he was talking very fast, not letting himself think about what he was doing, “that D minor is Mozart's key of fate? He was composing the string quartet K421/417B while his wife was having a baby in the same room. You can hear her cries in the music, then the sudden forte as the second octave leaps to the minor tenth. An uproar in the thirty-second bar of the andante quiets to piano. The child is born.”

“That's beautiful,” I said. “You can pretend the string quartet is playing while you try the parallel bars.” I got him to his feet and handed him crutches. Having so recently gone through therapy myself, I knew the physical pain, the emotional ups and downs, but I was living proof of its benefits, and I was determined that Erich should be restored to a normal human being in spite of himself.

He swung along beside me down the corridor. When we came to the therapy room, he confronted the bars, let the crutches clatter to the floor, and negotiated the space between bars by hopping and swinging his arms. What a superb athlete he was. Never once did he grab the bars for support.

I was ready with the crutches at the other end. The effort had exhausted him. He was wet with perspiration, and I insisted on a wheelchair for the return trip.

He didn't like me to show concern. If he'd had a bad day, he was sure to cover it up. But I got to know these ploys. He would talk music then, or philosophy or poetry. “Listen,” and he quoted,

“‘You are like a flower, so chaste and pretty and pure. I look at you, and worry strikes me in my heart. It seems to me as if I place my hands on your head, praying that God will keep you so pure and pretty and chaste.'”

He looked at me with a distant smile. “The Nazis burned Heine's poetry, every scrap.”

“Who would want to destroy such a lovely thing?” I asked.

“You are very
schön
yourself, Kathy.”

“
Schön
? Isn't that thank you?”

“Thank you is
danke schön; schön
by itself is pretty, very pretty.”

I gave him his pain medication.

“Why didn't you tell me that while I was in prison you'd seen action?”

“I don't know. It didn't seem relevant.”

“Not relevant to be shipped to Italy, to have gone through Cassino, to have been wounded? Kathy, what happened to you happened to me. What you saw I saw, and the men locked in the psychiatric ward saw. It's relevant, Kathy. Believe me, it's relevant.”

The day Erich stood for the first time with his artificial leg, a change came over him. Once on his feet he said, “I begin to imagine I am a man. I don't imagine I will do snowplow turns again or a downhill schuss, but the world is definitely meant to be grappled with from a standing position.”

I laughed and agreed.

But now the parallel bars were an agonizing obstacle course. He faced them daily and marched along between them, not reaching for them, not even touching them, but, after a step or two, collapsing.

I always caught him. That was my job and I did it. Then one session in the therapy room, it all came together. His strength, his sense of balance—he walked unaided.

He turned to me in triumph. I shared it with him. He didn't want to go back to bed, but sat on the edge of it. “I no longer feel that terrible sense of
Weltschmerz.
” He smiled and translated, “World weariness.”

“I know.”

“Kathy, you fought right alongside me. I wonder why.”

“I'm your nurse,” I said, and went about the thousand and one duties that called me that morning. I had asked myself the same question, but always backed away from it as I did now.

Now that I had gotten him this far along, discharge and prison lay ahead. A man with one leg was vulnerable, and given a second chance would that same fanatical clique of prisoners succeed in killing him?

I went with this problem to Egg.

She looked over a mound of work. It didn't matter how high it was. She always found time for me.