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Here's A Preview from AAMIE'S WAR
Prologue: FAIRY TALES - September 1943
Life and death are but fairy tales of the gods. . .
We were in a hurry. Sigmund reached for my hand, pulling me along as he strode down the dingy, second floor hallway to the Berens’ apartment. He was my big brother. We had come to give his friend, Karl, a turn with the math book the two boys shared at school. We had to be back for our Mittagessen - lunch - Mutti was preparing for us in our own apartment up the street; nobody kept Mutti waiting. I was always running to keep up with them.
Sigmund knocked on their kitchen door - solid, white and indestructable - German.
I liked Frau Berens. She was jollier than the other women in our neighborhood. Whenever Sigmund brought me along to see Karl, she flung her arms wide open to greet me with a belly full of laughter.
No answer. He swung the heavy door open.
Frau Berens was sitting at the table with Karl curled up on her lap. Sigmund smirked.
She was rocking back and forth, paying us no heed, her glazed eyes frozen on her son. When I closed the kitchen door behind us, I saw that it had covered a jagged hole in the wall, apparently blown out by one of the errant bombs which must have been intended for an industrial military target.
Otherwise, the kitchen looked like it always did, large and sparse, but cozy. The old stone sink and wash-board drain counter, set on a shiny, white metal base, the only cabinet in the room, huddled beside a gaping crack in the worn blue linoleum floor. Sauerkraut and potato fumes rising from a pot on the black coal stove in the corner pierced my nostrils and burnt my eyes. An eerie silence hammered in my ears, like the evening curfew that spread like a pall over our street and into my bed before the sirens cut in to summon us to action.
The large window at the opposite end of the room was blown out; a nice, clean view down to the back yard, where their gnarled old apple-tree had been decapitated. Suddenly my teeth chattered. A damp chill blew into the room. I pressed my face into Sigmund, ducking into the crook above his waist.
From the safety of Sigmund’s arms, I snuck a look at Frau Berens and Karl sitting together on that painted chair in the middle of their big kitchen. She was cuddling her little boy, who was already taller than she was ever going to be. One hand clutched the neck of his light brown Deutsche Jungvolk - pre Hitler Youth - shirt while her other arm reached around his back to hold him close to her. When I looked up at Sigmund's face, his brow was pinched beneath his carefully combed mop of blond hair. His smirk had given way to straight lips, drawn tight.
He brushed me aside and rushed toward his friend. I stuck so close to Sigmund that I almost fell over his feet when he stopped short and dropped to his knees in front of Karl and his mother, just shy of a rapidly swelling pool of blood. It oozed everywhere, seeping fresh and bright out of Karl's side onto his mother's grey apron, changing color as it rose up her flannel house-dress, spreading swiftly like spilt ink on blotting paper. Frau Berens’ head turned slowly toward us, like a windmill running out of air. Her wide, vacant eyes came to rest on Sigmund as she reached down Karl's back for a better grip, trying to hold him tighter, to get him just a little closer.
Sigmund pushed both hands under his friend’s rear end and lifted the limp, slippery body up toward his mother. When he pulled out his hands, they were soaked with blood. He stared at them, glancing back and forth between mother, son and his hands, before his head started to shake like a drenched dog. As he turned to look at me, I could see straight into his deep chestnut eyes. They were floating loose in their sockets. His lower lip was clenched beneath his teeth.
“What is it, Sigmund?”
I tugged on his bloody sleeve, hoping he'd tell me that Karl just had to be taken to the hospital. It never occurred to me that Karl was never going to get up and poke me in the tummy, just to get a rise out of me. It's not that I hadn't seen people die before. I knew that fire-bombs and artillery shells destroyed whole houses, burying the people in them. I knew because it had happened to three houses on our street. I knew we would die, buried in our nothing-more-than-a-root-cellar basement shelter, if a bomb were to drop directly on our roof. I'd even seen a man cut down like a sheaf of wheat in his wide open field at the edge of the city when a low-flying fighter plane strafed him.
But this was different. This was Karl! In the middle of the day. . . in his own kitchen . . . sliced up by shrapnel. Sigmund could have been there with him, explaining the geometry problems Karl couldn’t fathom. Only yesterday, Karl had studied at our kitchen table, tickling my feet whenever he got bored. I realized it could have been Sigmund in our kitchen. It could have been me.
My brother was still kneeling next to me, like an altar boy, before our version of The Pieta. His voice cracked, half man - half boy.
"I have to take my little sister home, Frau Berens, but I'll be right back."
"Don't go! Tell me what Karl said when you rushed home from school after the alarm this morning," Frau Berens pleaded.
Sigmund choked back tears. “He said to come on over after the bombers left.’
She slumped over her son and began to weep. It was as if Sigmund's voice had given her permission to cry.
"He must have come looking for me here in the kitchen,” she sobbed, “instead of going right down to the bomb-shelter." She rocked back and forth, wiping her nose on Karl's shirt. “It’s my reward for being so stubborn, for not following the rules to take refuge in the basement.” She wrapped her arm a little more firmly around his waist, the way she might have soothed his nightmares at a younger age.
Eyes still glued on Karl, Sigmund groped for me with his bloody hand, pulling me backwards, out of the kitchen and then quickly up the street, past the handful of houses we knew as well as our backyard. By the time we reached our front door, our hands were glued together with dried blood.
"Now go inside, Aamie and clean yourself off. But don't you upset Mutti. Just tell her I'm eating at Karl's." He turned on his heel and vanished.
Sigmund knew I’d do everything he said. He was thirteen and big, a little more than seven years older than I. When I saw my friend Karin with her father, I figured Sigmund was the closest thing to the father we didn't have in our family. It was Sigmund who fixed the elastic that held my doll's arms to her body. It was he who gave me half of his own small piece of the pork or chicken we got once a week for Sunday dinner. And it was Sigmund who made me laugh - jumping out to “boo” from behind the front door or twisting his handsome face into a gargoyle. Whatever he said, I believed him even more than Pater Schunk, our priest at the Cathedral. I couldn't imagine liking anyone more than my Sigmund, except for the the doll I got last Christmas, whom I named Frieda, which was my mother’s name - not one I ever got to use for her; she was strictly Mutti to me.
I couldn’t really remember my father. He had enlisted in the Kriegsmarine - Navy - to avoid conscription in the infantry before I was two years old. Whenever I asked why he did that, Mutti responded disdainfully, “better that than canon fodder.” Now he was stationed somewhere in the Northern Germany. There was a picture of him in a crisp grey uniform on my mother’s dresser: JÜRGEN GUTMANN, Gefreiter -- Petty Officer. I knew all about him because he wrote so many letters. My mother read them out loud at the dinner table. His was the fifth chair, empty.
Sigmund and my other big brother, Axel, who was only two years younger but much shorter than he, loved to talk about Papa so much that no meal was complete without some story about him. "He was the only boy in his grade smart enough to go to the Gymnasium -German college prep school. Of course our Mutti was even smarter, but her father wouldn’t let her leave the farm." Mutti would look demurely down at her plate.
School must have been much more important back then, I thought. My brothers often didn’t go if airraids threatened. And I knew that next year when I’d start school, I’d have to skip during times when I had to help my mother on the farm. At the rate I was going, there would be no Gymnasium for me, just like there hadn’t been for Mutti.
The boys knew so many stories, which tumbled out of them like coins from a piggybank. Take the time Axel got to go with Papa for a visit to an insurance client. As a kindness, Papa fixed a kettle for the woman of the house and she invited them to stay for supper. It was so late and dark by the time they left, that they rode the bike right into a patch of broken glass. With the gashed tire swooshing along the pavement, the walking was slow. It was almost light outside before they got home. As my brother glowed in the memory of that nasty night, Mutti rolled her eyes and waved him off with a sweep of her hand, looking only slightly less irritated than she probably had at the time.
To me, their stories were no different than fairy tales - Sleeping Beauty's family waiting for the charming Prince to come and release everybody from the cursed spell, this terrible war. I liked fairytales, they were my only books. But I was a bit worried about this one. Since I was certain that fairytales never came true, I wondered what that meant about my father.
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