LETTERS FROM OMI: Thomas, the hopeless romantic

Dearest grandchildren,

Your great grandfather Thomas was a hopeless romantic!

I hadn’t realized when I first read his book, The Rim of the Volcano, how much sappy (sorry, Dad!) romance he wrote about. Surely that’s because I skipped over all those parts back then! But I can’t skip over them now because I promised Dad I would tell the whole story, and that means reading and editing all the schmaltz!

So here you go.

Warm days and peace were back in Germany. In Adelsberg at the Buddeckes’ house, nine people squeezed into a house designed for three, but it was a house, undamaged by bombs or shells. No matter what hardships would await us, peace was the pervading reality now, and summer added some luster. As the realization that we really had escaped alive took hold, timid smiles returned to the gray and fallen faces of people who had worried and cried and feared too much. No other feeling on earth could quite match the elation of knowing that the war was over and peace had arrived. There would be no more bombs and hope could take hold again.

The meter-thick brick wall outside the windows of the basement bomb shelter needed to be dismantled, and Onkel Heinz had no trouble finding volunteers. The whole family worked together. Onkel Heinz and I chiseled the bricks from the wall, and Tante Gert, Ulli, and Gaby hammered and chipped off the old mortar and stacked the newly reclaimed bricks for a later use. Perhaps they could even be bartered for bacon, or a pair of shoes, or bicycle tires.

The basement was returned to its civilian use. No longer would a basement shelter need to serve as a livable space during air raids or, if the house were not habitable, a semi-permanent “home.” Like a groundhog peeking out of its burrow, Germany came out of its basement, “by the skin of our teeth.” Beds, blankets, and candleholders were carried back upstairs, and the fire buckets were returned to the basement, where they belonged.

During the war, a hole had been broken into the firewall between the Buddecke’s basement the Werner’s basement next door to create an emergency exit for each family. Now it was time to rebuild the firewall. I was assigned the job of filling up the hole with bricks — there was no mortar.

What if Gisela, my love from what now felt like so long ago (before I knew of the real love I had discovered with Nora) happened to go to the basement while I was working there? I knew I would have had to tell her about Nora, but I wasn’t ready to face her. Not yet. My own thoughts shocked and even angered me. How could I regard Gisela, who had so recently meant so much to me, in such sober terms?

To my relief Gisela did not show up that day. But it wasn’t possible to avoid her for long. The next morning I saw her in the garden. Although I had no idea of what I would say to her, I called out to her, and we met on the path behind our gardens.

There was no embrace, only a handshake and an awkward exchange of meaningless questions that required no answers. I found out that Gisela had already heard (from Ulli and Gaby, no doubt) enough about Nora to draw some painful conclusions, and all I had to do was confirm what she already knew.

“It’s all so different,” was all I could say by way of explanation or apology. Gisela said she understood.

Or did she? Did she pretend? She, who was so innocent, what did she know of carnal desires? I was so convinced that I now really knew what love meant. The summer of 1944 had been ours, Gisela’s and mine, our very own. It wasn’t without a certain amount of bragging that I now could speak of it in a condescending tone designed to show Gisela how much I had grown beyond that kind of thing.

We walked slowly down the path, being careful not to touch each other and saying very little. Oh yes, Gisela was as lovely as ever, I thought, but what a sweet, innocent child!

Suddenly she stopped and turned. She looked me straight in the eye, and shot out the one question that included all previous questions and precluded all future ones: “And what about the 8th of August?”

I had feared she would ask that. The 8th of August. Almost a year ago now — Augustusburg — the smell of summer and the closeness of Gisela’s hair… the broken shade of the birch tree… her blue summer dress… the blades of grass and wildflowers on both sides of her fresh face… her eyes darting back and forth between my eyes… her hand in my hair… sounds of bees and a distant train. It was so long ago. It was childhood, I thought. We had no right then to promise to wait for each other.

I did not answer Gisela’s question. I never answered it that day, nor all that summer, nor the next summer. I did not answer her, nor did I answer myself. The question sank to the bottom of my consciousness, was forgotten, neglected, pushed back down into the dark whenever it gently reminded me that it needed to be answered. For two years it lay hidden, alive, wounded but growing stronger all the time, until the spring of 1947 when ...

But that’s the story of another year.