STRETCH

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

A heavy carton packed with our two Bibles, my precious copies of Huckleberry Finn and The Leather Stocking Tales, my two atlases, and my stamp collection was crushing my lap. Hubert, who had barely managed to squeeze in between Mutti and me in the backseat, pressed against my side. He looked like an overstuffed piglet and breathed heavily. Occasionally I poked my elbow into his side and whispered, "Give me some space, will you?" but he would just glare at me and then nervously brush his straight blond hair off of his forehead.

Half an hour earlier our train had chugged slowly into the cavernous main railroad station where my father, without a trace of a smile, had waited for us on the platform. This was our second reunion since the war ended. Our first, two years earlier, had ended abruptly after only ten days with my father's announcement that he was leaving us behind in a refugee camp near the East German border to take a job as a pastry chef in Cologne. In the two years since he had left us, my father had only been in touch through infrequent postcards and even more infrequent transfers of funds. From my perspective, his abandonment had begun long before that. When I was a small child, he had been away at war and rarely came home on leave. Now I knew that, as the war had neared its end and while Mutti, Hubert, and I were trapped in Russian-held territory in the East, my father had been captured by the British and had lived in relative comfort in the West. Then one day, out of the blue, this man, who was a virtual stranger to me, had sent us tickets so that we could join him.

My father had introduced us to Mr. Meyer moments after we stepped down from the train and the five of us walked outside together. Even though they were the same height, the two men could not have been more different. My father strode, stiff and fashionable, in his high-collared suit and heavy overcoat, but his steel gray eyes darted over the three of us anxiously. Mr. Meyer slouched alongside us in a crumpled gray suit. In contrast to my father's bald head and gaunt frame, Mr. Meyer's thick blond hair was combed straight back and his belt was nearly hidden beneath his protruding stomach. Laughter crinkled the corners of his blue eyes and he winked at Hubert and me as he had struggled to fit our belongings into the tiny trunk of his car.

My father sat in the front passenger seat and stared straight ahead. Mutti was seated behind Mr. Meyer and gazed glumly out the window as the car rumbled in the direction of Bergheim, which was twenty-four kilometers away. I couldn't see her face, but I was sure we were sharing the same thoughts. Had we just exchanged a hard life in the Bodenteich refugee camp for something even worse? At least in Bodenteich I could do pretty much as I pleased; I couldn't begin to imagine what it would take to please my father.

Rubble left over from the Allied bombing littered both sides of the road. The houses that were still standing were heavily pockmarked with bullet holes. The windows of some of the buildings had been walled shut with mismatched bricks scavenged from nearby ruins. Why would someone do that, I wondered. Were the owners trying to keep intruders out? Or were the bricked-up windows helping to keep the buildings from collapsing altogether? Had my father been a bit friendlier I would have asked him, but now I didn't dare.

Five long minutes passed without a word being spoken. Finally, Mr. Meyer cleared his throat. "Well, Frau Nitsch," he said, trying to make eye contact with Mutti in the rearview mirror, "what are your first impressions of Cologne?"

"It reminds me of Königsberg and Berlin," Mutti said after a moment's hesitation. "Terrible devastation everywhere you look."

"It's bad, that's for sure, but it's a paradise compared to the way the center of town looked in 1945. You know, around the main train station where we just were? Nearly everything over there was totally flat. It's a miracle the cathedral was spared."

My father turned to Mr. Meyer and said bitterly, "Every time I come through this part of town, I get angry at the British and Americans for what they did here."

"What we did to the Russians wasn't any better," Mutti protested. "The stories the Russians told me about their civilian casualties would make your blood curdle. And don't forget that we started the war."

My father craned his neck around and glared at Mutti. "Now you listen to me! You'd better forget all that Communist propaganda and get on with your life or you'll never fit in here. Germany's different now. We've put all that behind us."

"Well, you may be angry at the British and the Americans," Mr. Meyer said to my father, tactfully ignoring my parents' argument, "but the currency reforms they put through two years ago have really helped us get back on our feet."

"Well, I'll give them credit for that," my father said.

Mutti changed the subject. "I never thought to ask — which of the Allies is in charge in this area?"

"Officially, it's the British zone," Mr. Meyer replied. "But the troops stationed around here are all from Belgium. I'll point out their barracks when we drive past Ichendorf."

We left Cologne, passing through the villages of Königsdorf and Horrem. Up to that point, we had been driving on a rather high plateau, but now, straight ahead of us, lay a vast marshy plain divided into rectangular pastures; some were enclosed by thick hedges, and others, bordered by ruler-straight rows of tall poplar trees. Never in my life had I been able to see so far. To our right, however, the plateau continued. Mr. Meyer nodded in that direction. "There's a big deposit of soft coal over there. See the smokestacks just behind the hills? Those are factories that produce briquettes and electricity."

"Is that how the houses are heated around here? With briquettes?" I asked timidly.

"That's pretty much all we use," Mr. Meyer replied.

"Well then, at least I won't be chopping all that wood for the stove," I blurted out, thinking back to the backbreaking hours I had spent swinging an ax ever since I was barely eight years old.

"You'll have plenty of other chores to do, believe me," my father said sharply. "I'll see to that."

Color had rushed into Mutti's cheeks. She reached across Hubert to place a reassuring hand on my arm, but I could feel her trembling through my sleeve. Grabbing tight to the box of books on my lap, I slumped down in my seat as far as my long legs would let me.

"Now, Willi," she said to my father, measuring every word. "Günter has been looking after us ever since Opa died back in '46. You needn't worry about his carrying his own weight."

"Just so everyone knows who's in charge," my father snapped.

Mutti turned to me. With her...