The Oriental Wife

A
lready, in what passed for their childhood, they had banded together: three only children, their fathers away at the war, their mothers variously distracted and harassed. All the maids in the neighborhood had rolled up their hair and absconded to the munitions factories, where the wages were higher. The cooks, being too old for a new life, had remained, but as there was less and less food to be had, they no longer commanded the same respect. They hid themselves in their kitchens, brewing up slimy messes with chicory and turnips. Having been coddled and spied on for all their short lives, the three children had finally achieved the freedom of young slum dwellers.

Otto was the linchpin: Rolf was his best friend from school, Louisa his shy cousin who lived next door. The two boys were feverish with excitement much of the time, partly brought on, though they did not realize this, by hunger. They chased each other, shrieking, around the garden behind Otto’s parents’ house. They rushed at each other with toy guns and fell down writhing. Then Louisa had to play nurse, fetching cups of water from the house and wrapping their heads in old dish towels. But sometimes she turned mischievous, pouring the water on their faces as they lay there.

Rolf would have smacked her for that, or pulled her hair, but Otto would never permit it. Nobody was allowed to hurt
her while he was around; she had a bad enough time of it at home, he said, with her crazy mother, who locked her in wardrobes and beat her with a strap. He, Otto, had pledged always to protect her. Rolf, though he remained skeptical, was impressed by the grave, adult voice in which Otto told him this. Usually Rolf was the commanding one; it was the basis of their friendship.

And sometimes Louisa had a fit of inspiration that redeemed her even in his eyes. When two shops on a nearby street were bombed one night (by mistake—a British Sopwith had flown off course on its way to Munich), it was Louisa’s idea to bring the charred wood from the bomb site and use it to make a fire. Fire-building became their great passion in that last, coldest winter of the war, though it was the two boys who had the job of dragging the planks back to Otto’s garden and making the pyres. Otto said it was because Louisa could not risk soiling her clothes, her mother would beat her, but Rolf thought she was just being a girl.

The streets he traveled to get to Otto’s house were full of the Kaiser’s soldiers returned from the front, men who had marched out as heroes of the Fatherland and come back with wooden legs, or iron noses, or arms made of faded cloth stuffed with rags. There were others, their bodies intact, who staggered and grimaced and argued with themselves out loud. In the beginning Rolf had saluted them, every one, but as their numbers increased, he could not look them in the eye any longer; sometimes he ran away when he saw one approaching, ducking down an alleyway until the man had passed by.

On the night they got the news that his father had been wounded in Russia and might lose his arm, his mother told him, pressing her hands to her cheeks, that really it was
nothing to mourn for, they should be grateful instead: now he would be safe behind the front lines. Then she shut herself into the parlor, and Rolf went into his bedroom and read a whole book for the first time in his life. It was about a fearless young German, with a heart pure as fire, who traveled through America and saved the life of a noble red man he recognized as his spiritual twin. Together, inseparable, they performed many heroic feats among the mountains of the Wild West, overthrowing evil and restoring justice. Rolf fell asleep with the light still on and woke, a few hours later, to the sound of his mother crying in the next room. For a moment he could not place the sound; he lay there in confusion, thinking it must be an animal, or a branch scratching at his window, before he remembered. His father would come back like those cripples he could not look at in the street, and it was his fault, a punishment for all the times he had ducked down an alley to avoid them. His throat constricted, the pressure in his chest was mounting until he thought he might burst.

And then a vision came into his head, of the prairies, and the buffalo, and the sunlit rivers full of trout; a space opened inside him, radiant, cleansed of grief. He picked up the book where it had fallen on the floor and clutched it to him as he drifted off again.

When the war ended, and his father came home with two arms after all, but one of them held stiffly, at all times, by his side; when bands of men were fighting each other in the city; when the police fired shots at the Communists in the Hauptmarkt, and the German Fatherland party attacked the Socialists with truncheons; when the cobbled squares were smeared with blood, and there were more women than ever sobbing in the streets, he shut his eyes and conjured up the wheatfields,
the white foam on the rivers, the iron horse, with its red caboose, crossing the prairie.

Some day, he knew, he would live in America. He told no one of his plan, not even his mother, until the afternoon Louisa came into Otto’s garden—Otto was off gathering kindling for another of their fires—in a blue dress with a lace collar and a matching blue coat, her red hair released from its braids and tumbling over her shoulders. She stood there expectantly, swishing her skirts from side to side.

“Why are you dressed like that?” he asked.

“I’m going to Munich. To visit my aunt. And we’re going to the ballet. Have you ever been to Munich?”

“No,” he said, and then, because she looked so triumphant, “I’m going to live in America when I grow up.”

She stopped moving, though her hands kept their grip on the dress. “What are you going to do there?”

“Be a cowboy,” he said.

She tossed her head. “No, you’re not.”

“I am so. Like Old Shatterhand.”

“Who’s that?”

“A German who went to live with the Indians.”

“A real one? Or someone in a book?”

“In a book. You look stupid in that dress.”

She looked so stricken he wished he could take it back, he almost told her it wasn’t true. But just then Otto appeared, with an armful of branches. “Don’t you look pretty,” he said in his kindly way.

“Rolf says I look stupid.”

“Then it’s Rolf who’s stupid.”

Immediately she was flushed and excited again, telling him breathlessly about the ballet they were going to, with swans
in it, showing him the cameo her grandmother had given her, fishing her kid gloves out of her pocket so he could admire them. As soon as she had gone, Rolf hurled himself at Otto and knocked him to the ground. Twigs went flying everywhere. Otto writhed and bucked with surprising ferocity. Rolf had to sit on his chest to restrain him, and even then Otto went on throwing wild punches. Finally, though, Otto was drained of rage and lay there panting.

“What’s wrong with you today? What was that about?”

“I’m sick of fires,” Rolf said. He stood up, brushing off his clothes, and pulled Otto to his feet. He tried to shake hands, but Otto withheld his. “Don’t be childish,” Rolf said sternly. “I’m going home now. You can build the fire yourself.”

Just when things were normal again—the streets were peaceful, the women had stopped crying and stood in line at the butcher’s for kidneys and offal—Rolf came home from school to find his father striding up and down the library in a rage. The French, it seemed, had marched into the Ruhr on the dubious pretext of some missing reparations. Sigmund’s one good arm swung energetically back and forth as he called them damn swine, greedy duplicitous swine. Meanwhile Rolf’s mother said “Now now now,” in a briskly soothing voice, as though calming a flock of excited chickens. Nevertheless, Sigmund said, glaring, it was mad of the government to permit this talk of a general strike. Rolf sat at the far end of the sofa, where his cat Hansel used to doze in the sun. In the last year of the war, Hansel had gone out the window one day in search of mice and never come back. Sold for food, Rolf’s cousin Hans had told him, when he visited with his mother: “He’ll be all trussed up now, hanging in some butcher’s shop with his thing cut off.”

“And how are they going to pay the strikers’ wages?” Sigmund demanded, wheeling around to face his wife. “Have they even considered that? They are leading us straight into catastrophe.” Doggedly, Rolf tried to picture the waterfalls, the deer racing up a mountain; he shut his eyes and pretended he was talking Apache to himself.

His father was right; within a month, catastrophe had struck. The mark fell and fell—twenty thousand to the dollar, forty thousand, a million, a hundred million. People rushed to the market with all their money as soon as they were paid, trundling the paper notes in wheelbarrows. The headmaster at Rolf’s and Otto’s school, a moist-eyed, wheezing man who had only ever made vague speeches about duty and Fatherland, called an assembly and urged the boys to tell their parents they must buy shares: with any luck, he said, stocks could be counted on to rise at the rate of the mark. It was typical of him that he should be offering this advice long after everyone was buying shares already. The Latin teacher, formerly so punctilious about time—a boy who was one minute late would feel the crack of the ruler on his palm—went rushing out of the classroom at all hours to check with his broker. The baker’s assistant grabbed his paycheck and ran to the stock exchange. Even the seamstress who came to Otto’s house each Thursday morning to replace collars and sew the old sheets sides to middle took the money Otto’s mother gave her and went to buy shares in steel.