Farewell, Amethystine

6

I drove to an address on Orlando Drive, up near Melrose. The entire block was made up of tiny houses. The one I approached was even smaller than the rest and smaller still because it had been subdivided into two discrete units.

There were two front doors on the porch. I was about to knock on the portal to the left when it opened inward, revealing a young woman. She was tall, five ten, with hair that was neither brown nor blond but somehow both colors, supple and in waves. Her skin was pale brown, very pale. And her eyes were the color of melted butter that was just turning dark over a high flame.

Karin Vosges. Young and handsome, between races, and almost perpetually bemused by a world that made no sense to her. She wore a shapeless light-blue peasant dress that had not gone out of style in Bavaria since before there was a German nation.

“Hi,” she greeted, pulling her chin in slightly.

“Hey.”

We stood there, appreciating that private moment like two very old friends at the end of their days, rather than a fifty-year-old man and a young woman half the way through her twenties.

“Is she in?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Something about her delivery threw me back into her prehistory.

It was 1945 and the war was over. By that time I had seen thousands of men, women, and children — dying, mutilated, and dead — and I had killed at least twenty-six of them up close myself. Albert Grimes, corporal first class, came into my tent some minutes before 3:00 a.m. I was asleep, and not asleep, a state that being a participant in war had imparted to me.

“What?” I said to the shadow standing in the open flap.

“Sarge, it’s me, Albert.”

“What’s wrong?” I was fully awake then, sitting up, reaching for the pistol on the trunk next to my cot.

“I need help.”

“Somebody after you?”

With World War II just over, Black soldiers, once again, had to worry about our primary enemies — white Americans. They’d seen us slaughtering white Germans. They knew we were bedding German, French, English, and Italian women. They understood that there might well be a reckoning on the horizon.

“No,” Albert said. “I’m in trouble and I don’t know what to do.”

We were bivouacked on the outskirts of Nuremberg, waiting there in case there was any need to pacify German citizens who thought that Americans belonged in America and Russians in the USSR.

I lit the kerosene lantern next to my bed. Albert hunkered down to face me.

He was the color of a copper penny that hadn’t been shined in a while. Twenty-eight, prematurely bald, and no more than five seven, he was stronger than almost anyone in our squad. He was also very religious — that rare Negro who was more aware of being a Christian than he was of being Black.

“What kinda trouble?”

“Woman trouble.”

“What you do?”

Unable to answer me right off, he fell back on his butt.

“I try and be a good man, Sergeant Rawlins. I do. I don’t drink. I never take satisfaction in another man’s pain. On Sundays, even when we was in battle I tried to read a few verses from my Bible.”

“So, what’s wrong?”

“Penelope Vosges.”

“What you do to her?”

“The worst thing.”

“Killed her?”

“Might as well have.”

“Raped her?”

“She’s pregnant with my child.” The bald soldier wept.

“You sure?”

“Yes. The doctor said so.”

I stood up from the cot and started putting on my fatigues.

“What you doin’, Sarge?”

“We gonna go see the mother of this child.”

Getting out of the camp at night wasn’t much of a problem. I always kept a fifth of bourbon whiskey to trade for favors among the men. The sentry accepted the offering with a smile and a handshake.

In a borrowed jeep, Albert drove me to a run-down rooming house on the south side of Nuremberg. We entered through a side door that led to the basement of the ramshackle structure.

The large cellar was lit by a few dozen candles. It smelled of burning wax. There was a huge bed in a far corner. Upon the bed lay a young, preternaturally thin German woman. When we approached the divan, she sat up.

“Albert,” she said, not necessarily in greeting.

I recognized her immediately. She was one of the camp girls who sold themselves for rations and cigarettes, mostly to the Negro soldiers. Her face was plain and yet distinctive because of the intensity of her eyes. When I’d first seen her, laughing with the men at a beer hall, I thought that those eyes had witnessed more than most.

“Hey, Penelope. This here is Sergeant Rawlins.”

“Why is he here?”

“I told him about our situation. He said that he wanted to come talk to you.”

“You are a doctor?” she asked, telling me with that question everything I needed to know.

“No, ma’am. Albert told me on the way over here that he was afraid of what the Germans would say about you and his child. He’s worried for your safety and wanted me to help get you out of Germany... with him.”

If her question was an essay about the state of her pregnancy, the look on her face when she heard about what the pious corporal wanted was a whole novel of the convergent passions imprinted on the hearts and souls of the survivors of that terrible war. Albert was one of the few innocents I was aware of in that conflagration. For the great majority of us, innocence and goodness were liabilities. Penelope did what she needed to do in order to survive. Anything for a loaf of bread or a few lumps of coal. She would have committed murder to latch onto a man like Albert.

Young Karin Vosges stepped out onto the porch and took the two steps to the other front door. She knocked once and then again, cocking her head as if maybe she heard something. At least she thought so, because she used her key on the door and we entered the other unit.

The front room was lit by a dozen candles encased and magnified by hurricane glass lamps. Seated in a huge chair was the near-starving woman I’d first met in 1945. She was now four times the size of that undernourished waif.

“Mama,” Karin said. “It’s Mr. Rawlins.”

The fat woman turned her broad, doughy face toward the sound of her daughter’s voice.

“Guten Abend, Mr. Easy,” the blind woman said.

“Guten Abend, Frau Vosges,” I replied, trying my best to affect the right accent.

“Sit. Sit.”

I sat on a padded wooden chair to her right.

Leaving us to our adult business, Karin went back out.

“You want a drink?” Penelope asked, her face turned in my general direction.

“Not yet. You?”

“Yes, please. You know where it is.”

The small kitchen was illuminated by electric light, with a two-burner stove, a table already set for breakfast the following morning, and a squat Frigidaire refrigerator that was almost as old as I. There were two cabinets. The one on the left contained a brown glass bottle of vodka and the one on the right held two tumblers.

I placed the glass of vodka between Penelope’s gathered hands.

Sitting next to her I was silent, not exactly sure why I was there. She didn’t mind the silence. It gave her time to sip.

“Why you got all these candles, Pen?”

“I’m not completely blind,” she whispered into the drinking glass. “Only mostly. I see shadows and those shadows dance by firelight.”

That room reminded me of the war. The woman did too.

I brought Albert and Penelope to the company chaplain, Ferdinand Blythe. He was a white guy, but, like Albert, he was more interested in Jesus than he was in the color of a man’s skin.

Albert was quiet before the man of God because he felt guilty about what he believed he’d done to Pen. She was quiet too. So, I explained to the military minister the problem the young couple had.

“...they need to be married so that Albert can get furlough and bring her back home,” I was saying.

Blythe studied the young couple.

“Do you love him?” the chaplain asked Penelope.

“Very much.” This probably wasn’t a lie. She’d seen more death than I had and lost more than I could even imagine. If Albert wanted to save her, she was willing to love him.

Albert was crying.

“Why are you here, Easy?” his wife asked me twenty-five years later.

“Maybe I should have that drink,” was my reply.

I went out to the kitchen to escape Penelope’s blind scrutiny. I poured myself a stiff one, took a drink, poured a little more, and then made my way back to the room of dancing shadows.

Albert brought his bride to Los Angeles a few years before I got there. They lived in a walk-up apartment on Florence. There she bore Karin while Albert worked two jobs. Then, one day, at an amusement park in the Valley, two policemen stopped them...

The police said that he reached for a gun. Albert didn’t die right off. Pen cared for him and once again plied the trade she’d learned in Nuremberg.

Karin was eight years old when her father finally passed on. I was godfather.

Later that night I brought the bottle in from the kitchen.

When she was drunk, Penelope told bawdy and sometimes heartbreaking stories. We drank and she sang. We talked war.

Late into the night she told me of the first time she saw a Jew stomped to death on the main street of Nuremberg, in front of his own store.

“I thought I had gotten away from all that until they killed sweet Albert.”

“There’s only one escape,” I said.

“My heart aches for Karin,” Pen lamented. “Albert was so, so loving to her and to me.”

“And what about you?” That was part of the question I had come to ask.

Pen turned to me as if she could see.

“I don’t know if she is his blood,” she said. “But she is his daughter, and I am his wife. Is that what you came to ask me after all these years?”

“I’m not sure, Pen. I mean, I never knew a man who loved like Albert did. His love was so strong.”

“Yes. He could make you into something more than you are. You, you saw that in him. You saw it in that basement.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you came?”

“I guess so. I mean, I was thinking about what somebody might do for love and then I remembered that I hadn’t seen you guys in a while.”

The smile on Penelope’s lips was another part of the answer I’d come for.

The softest of knocks came on the door.

“Kommen,” Pen said, her naturally husky voice an octave higher.

The door opened and Karin came through. She was still wearing the ankle-length blue frock.

“Just seeing how you two are doing,” the dutiful daughter told us.

“We are having a most wonderful time,” Pen said, as if making a public announcement.

“Yeah,” I added.

“Your father’s friend can drink like the people from my mother’s village,” Pen went on. “Back then alcohol was pure, wine tasted like the grape.”

“I better be going,” I said.

I stood up okay, but I had to take a few extra seconds to achieve balance.

“Thank you for a wonderful visit,” Penelope said to me.

“Danke.”

Her smiling teeth were somewhat tarnished, but they were still strong.