Jacob's Oath (10 page)

*   *   *

After they finally crossed the bridge, Sarah dozed. Her head slumped against the box
files, it flopped with the craters in the road. A gentle warmth oozed through her,
a sense of comfort and the stirring of elation. I’m going home. She could see the
apple tree in the garden, could smell the Lebkuchen baking in the oven. She smacked
her lips in her sleep. Mutti, on the bed, brushing wisps of black hair from her brow,
smiling down at her and singing a soft song. And Hoppi. Brown curls falling over his
ears. Wise brown eyes like pools of evening light. In the photo, bare-chested, pulling
himself out of the pool, when Jews could still swim there, the sun glinting on his
wet body, laughing into the camera. It was her favorite photo, a young Hoppi, she
had stared at it for hours, for days. Yet now it seemed to lose body … to fade away …
wait!

Sarah’s stomach tensed, a wave of shock tore through her, she woke with a start and
wanted to vomit.

The purse! She tore the blanket off the boxes, kicked the ammunition box aside, clawed
at it, swung her body from side to side, crying, “Oh no, oh no!”

“What is it?” Brodsky said.

She tried to stand, to feel if she was sitting on it, patted between the boxes and
the seat, but, feeling the bile rise, she knew. “My purse!” Sarah shouted. “I forgot
my purse. My photos!”

Brodsky pawed under the seats, searched the front of the vehicle, made the driver
lean forward as he checked under him. He understood. He’d carried his own photos ever
since he went to war. Every soldier did. But there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t
use the radio transmitter for a personal request. And he wouldn’t be back in Berlin
for at least a week. Instinctively he patted his left chest pocket. Felt his photos.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “That’s awful, but don’t worry. I’ll try to find them when
I get back to Berlin.” He smiled in encouragement, turned to the front, and looked
at the road ahead. That’s the last she’s seen of that purse, he thought. They’ll sell
it or burn it for heat.

Sarah couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. She must have left the purse with her
clothes when she put on her new ones after the bath. And then they had called on her
to hurry to get into the staff car. After all she’d been through. To lose them now!

How could she? She stared out of the window, at the passing fields and the farmhouses,
the churches, the clusters of refugees huddled by the side of the road, with their
carts piled high with bedding and all their possessions. Their photo albums?

Oh, the photos: Hoppi pulling himself, his triceps bulging, he was so strong and young
and beautiful. Papi, sitting at the dining room table in his suit and Tyrolean felt
hat with a feather, his stained mustache and a pipe with a lion’s-head bowl, gazing
at the camera as if lost in thought. Papi and Mutti, sitting on a rock by a lake,
her hand in his lap, with big smiles, all teeth and hair and wrinkles. She had spent
days with those photos, and now she had lost them. Just as the war was almost over
and she could look for her family again, she had to lose the photographs. Was that
a good omen? That she no longer needed the photos? Or a bad sign? That all was lost.
How stupid …

Desolate, Sarah stared, trying to fix the pictures into her memory forever. They passed
shattered, splintered trees; gutted cars; burned-out tanks; crushed field guns. They
look how I feel, she thought. In the fields around each smoldering village were yellow-and-black
posters: Beware—Mines. The sky was gray. There was a drizzle and raindrops slid across
the tarp cover.

Her eyelids became heavy, her head drooped. “Where are we now?” she murmured.

“About thirty kilometers to Leipzig,” Brodsky said.

“What time is it?” Sarah’s voice trailed off.

“Eleven fifteen.”

Sarah slipped into sleep again, curled against the piles of papers, in the back of
the Russian GAZ jeep, which hooted and swerved through the narrow country roads, crowded
with exhausted families pushing overladen carts. American drivers waited for the refugees
to pass. The Russians drove straight through them.

*   *   *

Sarah had studied English and could read and write quite well. But she understood
hardly a word the American soldier was saying. He spoke so fast with a whine and seemed
to stress all the wrong syllables and he looked so young, too young to be an officer.
She could pick out some words, though, and it didn’t sound good. She kept hearing
“No.”

She had woken up to see the Red Army officers shaking hands with soldiers in different
uniforms. They wore helmets, not the cloth garrison caps of the Russians. She saw
they were Americans by the Stars and Stripes flying over a circle of vehicles in a
field on the edge of the large town that appeared to have been entirely demolished
by bombs.

She’d never seen an American soldier before. After ten minutes of introductions, talking,
more soldiers joining them, back-slapping, laughter followed by deep discussions,
most of the Russians and the Americans disappeared into a big green field tent. Outside,
two American soldiers stood guard. The Russian drivers sat by a truck, smoking.

Isak walked back to the jeep, where Sarah stretched in the backseat, her leg hanging
over the side. She shook her hair, wishing she had a mirror. Isak looked grim.

“Where are we?” she asked when he reached her.

“The brigade headquarters of the American Sixty-ninth Infantry, they’re with the Ninth
Armored Division. And I have good news and bad news. The good news is they have a
jeep going to Frankfurt right now.”

Sarah beamed. Her luck was holding. “And they have room for me?”

“Yes, they have room. But they won’t take you. I’ve tried. All they care about are
their orders.” He tried to joke. “What do they think? They’re in the army?” Not the
Russian army, he thought. I’d have slipped him a ham or a bottle of vodka and she’d
be halfway home by now.

“But why not?” Sarah said.

“No papers. You don’t have any papers. You need some travel documents, a laissez-passer,
something. Nobody’s allowed to travel without a permit.”

“But that’s ridiculous. We’ve passed thousands of refugees on the road. Everyone’s
going somewhere.”

“Millions. They say ten million people are on the move in Europe, probably many more,
and wait till the war’s over, that’ll double. But they’re walking, if they come across
a roadblock they just walk around it, through the fields. Don’t do that, though. People
are getting blown up by land mines. They won’t take you in their jeep.”

The young American officer appeared over Brodsky’s shoulder. He looked clean and fit
but his eyes showed exhaustion. He had a fresh white bandage around his neck. “I’m
sorry, those are the orders,” he said, leaning down and peering into the jeep. “I’m
sorry, miss,” he said. “Tovarich Lieutenant Brodsky told me about you.” Brodsky couldn’t
help but smile. The American had even learned the correct form of address for a junior
Red Army officer: Comrade Lieutenant.

Another American soldier, just as young, stopped by the jeep to eye up the girl inside.
The first officer was saying, “… and then there’s the no-fraternization order, can’t
talk to Germans…”

The last bit Sarah understood. “But I’m Jewish…”

The second soldier said, “All Fritz to us, sweetheart, Jewish, not Jewish, all the
same.”

“But I’m not one of them. Look at what happened. What they did to us.”

“Those are the orders, miss,” the first soldier said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t make them
up.”

Tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes.

The second American interrupted again. “Come on, John, that ain’t fair. You heard
what General Patton said? It ain’t fraternization if you don’t stay for breakfast.”
He winked at Sarah and laughed and walked away.

“I’d like to help, really,” the American said. “But we have orders. No travel papers,
no travel.”

And then it dawned on Brodsky. “Wait a minute, Lieutenant,” he said. “Don’t look now.”

He went to his front seat and took out a blank sheet of headed notepaper from his
intelligence file. Head down, he quickly wrote a few lines, breathed onto a stamp,
which he pressed into its ink pad and with a flourish banged down across his own signature.
He took another stamp, with the insignia of a hammer and sickle within a five-pointed
red star, and stamped the paper in two places, at the top across the Red Army division
letterhead and at the bottom partly covering the first stamp and his signature. He
stamped it twice more, for good measure, and signed it again.

He handed the document to Lieutenant Reid Gould from Montclair, New Jersey, whose
first encounter this was with Russian military bureaucracy.

“There,” Brodsky announced. “Signed and approved in the name of Colonel General Nikolai
Berzarin, Soviet commander of Berlin, who I have the honor, along with my colleagues,
of representing in all matters pertaining to coordination with our esteemed American
allies.” He handed Sarah’s new travel document to the surprised American, who read
it slowly, shaking his head in wonder. “Especially travel,” Brodsky added.

There were a few lines in Russian that Gould couldn’t read and below, in English,
the words,

To Whom It May Concern

This is to introduce Miss Sarah Kaufman, and to request all and each cooperation in
the field of transportation, nourishment, accommodations, and medical care befitting
a Jewish victim of National Socialism.

Signed, Lieutenant Isak Brodsky and on behalf of Colonel General Nikolai Berzarin,
Order of Lenin, Commander, Soviet Army, Berlin.

A slow smile spread across Gould’s face. “Looks good to me. That would have taken
two weeks with our guys.” He looked up at Sarah, seeing her properly for the first
time, and couldn’t help nodding in approval. Cute. “Let me take this to the chief,”
he said. “He’ll need to sign off on this.”

Brodsky put his hand on Gould’s arm. “Is that really necessary?” he asked. “Here’s
the travel document, stamped, signed, delivered. She can travel now. Let us not look
for further obstacles like a pig looking for cheese.” Gould looked up sharply. “I
mean…” Brodsky said. He had translated directly from the Russian and realized that
in English it sounded rude. The last thing he wanted. He just didn’t want anyone else
to see the paper—the stamp didn’t match the heading. It should have been his division
stamp, not a generic Red Army one, but it was all he had. To a Russian bureaucrat
it would look like a forgery. On the other hand, so what? With the help of a ham or
a bottle of vodka … “Please,” he said, in a beseeching tone, “can we just try to help
this young lady, after all she has gone through? Can you imagine how she has suffered,
and lost her family, and now all she wants is to go home to Heidelberg…”

The American took his arm back. “I’d like to help, really I would, but we have our
orders. No fraternization with Germans, I don’t care who they are. If my boss okays
these papers, then she’s good to go, but otherwise she’ll have to go back to Berlin
with you. Can’t leave her here alone.”

At the mention of Berlin, Sarah looked startled. Back to Berlin? Impossible. She shook
her head. She’d rather walk to Heidelberg. Everyone else is walking, why not me? The
American lieutenant turned, holding the paper, and began to walk away when he seemed
to freeze. When his world changed in an instant, when years were added onto his life,
when six months of hard slog across the battlefields of Europe, through France and
across the Rhine, where a sniper’s bullet grazed his neck, leaving a burn mark that
still seeped, when what seemed like days of being pinned down by murderous mortar
fire near Kassel, all suddenly passed from a daily mortal threat to a free ticket
home on an ocean liner surrounded by drunken mates. A roar went up among the Americans
and Gould roared too. Officers and their Russian comrades pushed out of the tent,
hugging each other.

It was the loudspeaker, whose bass tone boomed across the vast brigade tent camp.
An excited voice said over and over, “The war has ended. The war has ended. The war
has ended. The war has…”

“It’s over,” Brodsky yelled, and pulled Sarah from the jeep. He looked at his watch
to record the time for posterity. It had stopped. Damn. Shook it. The minute hand
fell off. He laughed. He must get an American watch. But he knew the date: May 8,
1945. He danced and hugged Sarah and pulled in Gould and the trio jumped and laughed.
Gould tried to withdraw but the Russian had him in a bear hug and kissed his cheek
and Brodsky kissed Sarah, too. She looked at Gould, laughed, and grabbed his face
between her hot little hands and kissed him on the nose, and gave his cheek a friendly
tap. For Gould, it was love at first kiss. It was a kiss he would treasure all his
life. The sweetest kiss in the most glorious moment. Now a bottle of vodka appeared.
The Russian drivers, who always had a secret and limitless supply, each had a bottle
to his lips and passed it around to their officers, who gulped from it and handed
it to the Americans. “Oh, no,” one said, “not allowed,” but a Russian poured the vodka
over him, shouting, “Drink! To Marshall Stalin! President Truman!” The American took
a swig and spat it out. “Ugh, what rotgut!” Another Russian grabbed an American’s
steel helmet and threw it into the air and it clattered to the ground. The same Russian
took off his own cap and planted it on the American’s head. Variations of “It’s over”
in Russian and English were yelled across the camp. A Russian call for another toast,
“Commissar Voroshilov! Secretary of War Stimson!” The Americans pulled a face. “Who?”
Through the barbed wire on the street, even the Germans laughed and shouted. They
hardly cared who won the war, their leaders had abandoned them months ago.

Brodsky was relentless. With one hand on his new bosom buddy’s shoulder, he clapped
Gould on the chest with his other. “So when is that jeep taking off for Frankfurt,
Lieutenant?” he shouted. “Come on, the war’s over, she just wants to go home, be generous,
do a good deed and God will reward you. Or Stalin. I will too. I’ll find you a nice
big ham.”