1944 (pregnant)

ed note: Spring 1945, the field hospital has moved into Germany. Nurses are garrisoned in town, Mary with a young widow, her son missing in action.

The feeling started not as a feeling at all, not as a thought, not even as a suspicion. Just one day everything looked different. Sound sounded different. The flow of movement, consistent motion, appeared as if somehow removed in the way of knowing your hand is in water but not feeling wet. Winter and summer all in one in the blink of an eye, before the finished memo or the falling of a leaf, feet steady as the standing in a canoe did finger feel upon the pen silent on paper. Of sitting in a theatre watching a movie no one else sees. And the looks. As if you have changed. Words, one thing, all dressed up, wrapped and bowed, but the eyes, the darting, the second looks, the whispers of lash and blink. A drifting, that first push away, of foot on wood, a shove, then the rocking, water lapping, each knowing the path has parted and choices made and what was before can never be again and whether there is sadness or anger or disgust or just confusion is for a later time to untangle. This is how I knew, before any test would confirm, I knew and so did she, my german friend, my landlady, the mother of a son missing somewhere out East, somewhere where letters were lost and what was sent was not returned. She knew. And when she put her hand on my belly, for she was not an old woman, and I felt her warm fingers splay across my circumference, as a hand on a globe might, I wanted something I could not define. I wanted her to keep her hand there, her arm as my umbilical cord, fearful of what, I could not say, but fearful of separation, fearful of losing that touch, her touch and all I imagined it to be. I was pregnant. She knew. I felt seduced that she did.

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Did you hear said Kate. I didn't. Hey, her voice rising as dust, did you hear the news. I was staring at the truck behind us, watching those two blank faces in the cab, bouncing like lightning, a few seconds after us. Well, it appears we are going to be stopping for awhile. Garrisoned in town. Good news, huh. Yeah, I said, not hearing a word and not wanting to hear another.

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We arrived in town, more like a village. Not exactly like France, but not as bad as we imagined. Faces were long, like the war. Toll paid. Full price. For a road to nowhere.

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Her name was Kathrin. Early forties. Recently widowed. Her husband, Walter, had been a major in the Luftwaffe (JG 26), only recently killed in the winter offensive, Unternehmen Bodenplatte. Their entire living room seemed a shrine, of photographs, of memorabilia, mostly pre-war, although it had not always been that way. Handsome, hair parted on the side and slicked to the left revealing a strong sloping forehead and aquiline nose, he was, she said, a man in love with his vocation, at peace above the earth in a way he never seemed to be on it.

They had married young. A dashing couple. Blessed of child within the year. Without irony, she told Mary, she felt the mistress, a compromise accepted from the start. Erich, conceived on the honeymoon, was a gift. As if Walter knew she needed more than he could give; or, she mused, perhaps a diversion. He wanted to fly. Everything else was second. I could live with my place within the marriage. How he treated his son was harder to take.

Erich, sent East and missing since early '43, resembled his father. And there the similarities ended. Luftwaffe to Wehrmacht. Air to ground. Fought like cats and dogs, sometimes to blows. Both were strong-willed, stubborn. The old man cried only once. Briefly. The life of his loins delivered by courier. A few words that said nothing. A matter, Kathrin confided, never spoken of between them. On the day, they sat in the kitchen, the document between them, both staring, he drumming his thumbs. After some time, without a word, he got up, packed his portfolio, and with jacket and cap walked out the door, the sound of his heels echoing long after he was gone. From that day, Kathrin said, she never wore shoes inside the house again. And forbid anyone else from doing so.

No one in Erich's unit had escaped the winter of Stalingrad, the Soviet encirclement. Simply no word one way or the other. An army on the map one day, gone the next. Presumed dead she had been told, fought with honor implied. But words couldn't hide the shame. A national disgrace. Paulus's Sixth Army had not just been defeated, but destroyed. An unmitigated, unprecedented disaster. And her son had been a part of this. This tragedy no one would talk about. Even neighbors withdrew their shoulder.

Over wine, Kathrin confessed, there was some tortured hope he was alive, captured, not killed, tempered somewhat in the thought of russian imprisonment, of the brutality of labor camps, of Siberia imagined. At other times, as reports and gossip and rumor spread, death seemed the more humane option. Either way, she lived alone now. Her face prematurely lined, her eyes holding a pain of the sharpest blue, her bearing stoic with only a hint of the beauty seen on the wall, in those faded photographs, of better times, of another life it seemed. She was a woman, Mary said, who never smiled. Nor, for that matter, frowned.

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Casualties were less than before as the snow became a memory and a few flowers began to bloom giving color to an otherwise pastel landscape of beige and slate, of stone and cobble, of coats wool as sheep and noses still crimson from winter. Each morning, Kathrin prepared tea. Each morning they sat and talked and sipped. Mainly of Mary. Sometimes of Erich. Occasionally of Walter. Then one morning, without indication, Kathrin leaned over her cup and declared, as one declares of a birthday forgotten remembered, You are with child. Do not deny it.

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I stood, lifted my shirt. She looked as if watching for movement, still as a pointer before pheasant, nose slightly to the air, noble, proud, intelligent, the elegant line of her cheek bearing a crescent of morning light. Surveying my belly from left to right, sitting up straight, Kathrin spoke as if the two of us were pregnant, as if this was some sort of joint project. May I.

I nodded and her hand rose slowly. I remember the warmth. Her hands were so warm. Then I remembered how she had palmed her cup of tea and I wondered how long she had sat there, waiting. And I wondered what it meant, to her.