“My God!” he cried at the sight of Hildegaard.
Ernestine held her hands open desperately. “We have been walking for hours all over Berlin. It is cold. We have no place to go. She is sick. Please help us ...”
Ulrich stood at the door of the bedroom watching Ernestine at her sister’s bedside. She was like an angel, speaking softly, giving warmth.
Hilde’s cheekbone had been fractured and several ribs broken. Her face was puffed and discolored, but the pain was now blocked by a wall of drugs.
“Ernestine. You are so good! I love you. Oh, Ernestine ... you are all that is left of us that is decent...”
“Please rest ...”
“You tried to tell me what a fool I am...”
“Don’t go back there ... ever!”
“Russian officers are in back of Stumpf ... Hippold ... they may kill me.”
“I’ll get you out of Berlin, I swear it.”
“Oh, God, Erna ... I’d give anything . .. anything . ..”
Hilde’s eyelids became heavy and she passed into sleep begging her sister not to leave her. Ernestine held her hand for an hour, and at last Ulrich took her back to his study.
She painfully told her uncle the story of Hilde’s downfall and of Gerd and her parents.
“I am the worst of them all,” she said. “I did not help her. But I wonder, Uncle ... do we deserve better?” And then Ernestine began to cry softly. “I have turned on my own father.”
She felt Ulrich’s hand on her shoulder. “It is high time some German sons and daughters do that.”
“There is good in Hilde. I swear I’ll do anything if she is given another chance.”
“First, she must mend. And then she will leave Berlin. There are friends in the Western Zones who will take her.”
It had been a long, long time since Ernestine felt the warmth of another human being. She knelt before her uncle’s chair and laid her head on his lap and let herself be comforted. “You are so kind,” she said.
“And you, my child, what of you? You cannot go back there.”
“I don’t know.”
“This is a lonesome place for an old man,” he said.
She looked up at the scholarly, slovenly room filled with books he had not been able to read and music he had not heard.
“Would you share this place with me, Ernestine?”
Perhaps, she thought, I can help him too. We do need each other. I will take care of him.
“You will stay?”
“I love you, Uncle Ulrich ... and I have been so cold for so long ...”
Chapter Twenty-four
BLESSING COVERED THE DOOR opening with his hulk, leaned against the frame, and chewed on a strip of beef jerky, which Lil always sent in the packages. Bo Bolinski finished packing, wordlessly.
Bo lay the last three khaki shirts in a battered canvas officer’s bag, buckled it shut, set it alongside his foot locker, and looked about the room.
“I guess that’s everything,” he said, looking at his watch. Two hours to traintime. Bo sat on the locker and lit a cigarette. His unhappiness was apparent. “We’ve been together a long time, Bless. The major and you and me. London, France, Rombaden.”
“We’re all that’s left of the team,” Bless said.
The captains and the kings depart.”
Bo had received an excellent opportunity from a large and important law firm in Chicago. Its attorneys and most of its clients were Polish-Americans. At the end of the war the firm became flooded by those trying to re-establish contact with lost relatives or claim lost fortunes.
It was a natural situation for Bolinski. He was a good lawyer, experienced in displaced persons work, spoke fluent Polish and English, was an expert on indemnification and restitutions, and had built up contacts. It was the time and place for a young man to go far.
Bo sent Major O’Sullivan his request to resign from the Army. In a few months he would have been eligible for discharge, anyway, and Sean pushed it through.
Somehow the return to the States did not bring him the expected exaltation ... not leaving Berlin or even the anticipation of the reunion with his wife and children. He had convinced himself he had done enough and was entitled to leave. Yet ...
“It’s going to be a funny feeling to see a city not wrecked by bombs ... and look at people who aren’t hungry.”
“I reckon so.”
“What about you, Bless?”
“My discharge should be coming up in three or four months.”
“I’ll be glad when you get out of here. This city is like standing over a trap door waiting for the Russians to pull the lever.”
“We all want to go home,” Bless said. “That’s our national anthem.”
“We can’t all be made like the major.”
“Reckon not. The Lord put his finger on certain people to do the dirty work for the rest of us.”
“Don’t be so sure it’s out of love. He hates the Germans enough to stay here for a century so long as they’re suffering.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Bo.”
“Anyhow, it’s time to go in and say good-by to him.”
Shenandoah Blessing watched Bo’s train disappear from sight and hearing. He wheeled his jeep from trackside and drove back toward Headquarters. Bo felt guilty, but no one could blame him for wanting home, Blessing thought. Hell, everyone who could was pulling out these days.
They had offered him captain’s bars to remain in Berlin two more years. Small compensation for the losing battle being fought. Lil and his kids hungered for him and he for them.
Bless knew he was pushing forty-five. The law of the land said that Hook County had to reinstate him as sheriff. His first deputy, Charlie Durkin, had held the office for five years now. Charlie knew his way around and was a good officer. No doubt he had built his own political connections and had become entrenched. Blessing would have to face him in an election.
Had he returned at the end of the war, he would have won any election, hands down. But the days of returning heroes were gone. The war was over for nearly two years and wanted only to be forgotten by Americans. There would be resentment against him now. Soldiers in uniform were big people when there was a fight to be won, but these were the days when soldiers in outposts were forgotten.
A month after Bolinski left for the States, Captain Shenandoah Blessing stood at dockside at the American enclave of Bremerhaven in the British Zone as the first shipload of American wives and children arrived through a North Sea’s mist.
There was much weeping and embracing on the dock. Lil and the two kids dragged down the gangplank as did most of them, weary from the voyage. They stood and looked at each other.
“Hi, Bless,” she said.
“Hi, Lil.”
He scooped up his sons and they hugged him and said hello daddy and he said, my God, they’ve grown and the four of them walked slowly and tightly together for the shed.
Later a heavily armed train chugged through the unfriendly German countryside toward Berlin. After a barrage of questions the boys fell off to sleep and Lil curled up in his arms, poked his belly, and said she was glad he hadn’t gotten skinny.
“Honey,” he said, “I was never able to put into words why I thought I should stay here and I swear, I don’t think I ever can.”
“Bless, you don’t have to. Well make out. We always have. I know you’re doing the right thing. “
Chapter Twenty-five
AT THE END OF 1946 THE lead story around the world for the day told that Andrew Jackson Hansen had been named a full general and assumed the position of military governor of Germany.
Shrewd observers like Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury felt it came just in time, for the situation was degenerating badly.
In a quiet and efficient way Hansen had built a dazzling record. As first deputy he had sat as a member of the Supreme German Council for several months. At the end of the war he moved in on cartels, froze German assets, and broke the backs of a number of those evil industrial combines. He spearheaded the de-Nazification of two million Germans in the American Zone through the questions of the Fragebogen. A hundred thousand criminal Nazis were in American stockades, and an additional 300,000 were allowed to work only at common labor.