Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,106
had been the last time they’d seen it. Some, undoubtedly, said James Grant, were German citizens fleeing west to escape the Red Army. Many of the refugees were ethnic Germans expelled from the east, where they’d been settled by the Nazis. About these people, the Germans, Natalia didn’t know how to think.
They came to Magdeburg. How many bombs, Natalia wondered, did it take to reduce a city to this state? All but one of the bridges across the Elbe had been destroyed; the traffic had backed up, and the long lines of waiting vehicles and people on foot, pushing or pulling various crude conveyances, began to look to her utterly static and remote, a painted scene from a chaotic, troubled past or a future gone terribly wrong. At one point, when the line began slowly moving, the jeep stalled, and they had to wait for the engine to cool down before James Grant could start it again. They drank the last of the water from their canteens and James unwrapped cheese sandwiches that had been supplied by the kitchen at the hospital.
Once they crossed the bridge, it took only a short time to reach Dahlem, on the outskirts of Berlin. They passed the pretty little train station, which had not been damaged and looked just as it had when she’d lived near Dahlem, she told James Grant. American military personnel strolled in the shade of leafy trees. Everything seemed familiar to her and yet remote.
They stopped at a mansion on Dahlem’s Cäcilienallee that had been requisitioned by the American army. A white villa, with a garage and outbuildings, a stone wall around the garden. A woman in uniform greeted them at the door. Willkommen, she said. Her name was Daphne. She was a British UNRRA welfare officer. In the kitchen she introduced Natalia and James to Gudrun, the cook. Gudrun had set the kitchen table with what she called an English tea: sausage rolls, buns, sliced tomatoes, corned beef sandwiches. Someone was playing a jazzy tune on a piano somewhere. Natalia sat with her little cardboard box at her feet. Later, after she’d had something to eat, Gudrun took her upstairs and showed her the room where she’d sleep. On the bed were a nightgown and a flannel housecoat.
James said she could stay in this house. She would be expected to help Gudrun with the cooking and laundry, and she’d receive a small wage. German women didn’t always get paid for working for the Americans, he said, but here, at least, they were trying to be fair.
“Do you think you can manage the work?” he said. “Do you feel up to it?”
The laundry room, down a short flight of stone steps behind the kitchen, was equipped with a stone sink and an electric washing machine that needed only to be plugged in and filled with water. Gudrun found another dress for Natalia to wear, and Natalia washed the one she’d been given at the camp. When she did the laundry, Natalia wore a bibbed apron that wrapped around her waist and tied in the front. One of the Americans came to the door of the laundry room and talked to her, not that she could understand every word he said. His name was Mike Rose. He was married; his wife’s name was Gloria; they had two kids; he taught music at a high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He played in a band and collected records and sang. She had heard him earlier that morning, in the kitchen, humming and singing. He sang:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey
Sing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.”
One morning she got up too fast from a chair and fainted. An American doctor took her blood pressure and said it was low. He shone a light in her eyes and examined her hands. He didn’t comment on the scars, for which she was grateful. She was anemic, he said, and advised her to eat red meat. Eat lots of everything, he said, and asked her whether the meals were adequate. Yes, more than adequate, she said. At the table the Americans told her to dig in. Obediently, Natalia picked up her fork. Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
James drove her into Berlin.
She saw men returning from the war, many severely injured.