Always and Forever Read online

  She walked in silence beside him till they stood before a sheared-off building that had once been his home.

  “That room there,” David told Kathy, his voice strangled, “that was Mama’s music room. She played the piano with almost professional skill.” Only bare, weather-ruined walls stood there now. Looters had taken whatever had remained in the music room. “Let’s get out of here.” His face was taut with anguish.

  David took her to see Unter den Linden—named for the rows of linden trees in the pedestrian island down the middle of the street, 198 feet wide and nearly a mile long. He reached for her hand again as they began to walk.

  “When I left here ten years ago, this was the pride of Berlin,” he told her. “Elegant jewelry shops, fancy restaurants, luxury hotels, salesrooms for custom-made cars.” Now most were no more than shells if not totally destroyed. “There were always crowds of people walking here and expensive cars and limousines driving down the street. The University is farther down, and the State Opera House, and American, French and Soviet embassies. And the fine hotels like the Adlon and the Bristol.” His smile was nostalgic. “We’ll have lunch at the Adlon,” he decided. “If it’s still standing.” The hotel had been badly damaged, though the paved court in the center remained. Entrance was through the back alley earlier used by tradesmen—the front entrance had collapsed. They soon realized that even today the Hotel Adlon was where the fashionable of present-day Berlin met for lunch or afternoon tea.

  After a surprisingly adequate lunch they resumed their walking. They realized that the signs they’d seen in other parts of the city, offering to barter such items as shoes and cigarettes and sugar, were everywhere. The stores were almost empty of stock. The tailors’ sole occupation was to mend or patch.

  Tired from walking, they stopped at a café to sip at watered wine, watched as a crowd of children and three elderly men encircled a man smoking a cigarette.

  “They’re waiting to pounce on the butt,” David said. “Cigarette butts are more desirable than marks.”

  As dusk fell and the restaurants were brightly lit, the destruction seemed to fade away. A man hovered in the doorway of a pawnshop, seeming hopeful of finding customers among the visitors who came into the city. Out of curiosity—because most shop windows were empty—Kathy paused to inspect the few items on display.

  “Oh my God!” David was staring in disbelief at a small brooch, designed in the form of a bow. The setting, the collection of small stones discolored. “Kathy, we’re going inside.”

  The shop owner smiled benignly and gestured for them to enter.

  “The brooch in the window,” David told him. “May I see it, please?”

  “With pleasure, sir.” The man rushed to comply.

  David held the brooch in his hand as though it was precious beyond imagination. After a moment he turned it over, and Kathy saw the initials there. “F.K.” And she saw the tears that glistened in David’s eyes.

  “How much?” he asked.

  The shop owner hesitated, then named a price Kathy was sure was more than he had been asking in the past. The brooch appeared of little worth except, perhaps, for sentimental reasons.

  “Wrap it for me, please.” Without quibbling David reached into his pocket, though they had learned that in Germany today one bargained over everything.

  They walked for almost a block before David explained his purchase.

  “That brooch has been in my family for four generations. My great-grandfather had it designed as a wedding present for my great-grandmother. She gave it to my grandfather when he had to run from St. Petersburg because the new czar was a threat to rebellious university students. She told him to give it to his bride,” David said softly. “But his first love was taken off to America by her family, and he never saw her again.”

  “How sad. But how did you come to know of it?” Kathy asked curiously.

  “On my grandfather’s seventy-fifth birthday—just before I was shipped off to school in America—he gave the brooch to my grandmother. Not telling her how long he’d had it, nor the circumstances. She wore it at my last dinner with the family. That night he told me its history.”

  “How wonderful that you saw it there in the window.” But she knew David agonized over how it came to the pawnshop.

  “I wouldn’t have seen it if you hadn’t stopped to look,” David said and reached into his pocket for the small parcel. “Let me give it to you. Seeing you wear it will be like seeing a bit of home.”

  “But David, I—” A brooch that his grandfather was told to give to his future bride?

  “You’re very special to me, Kathy. You’ve made these weeks bearable.”

  “I’ll wear it while we’re here in Germany,” she agreed. How did David mean this? His eyes were ardent. He said she was very special to him. But he wasn’t giving the brooch to his prospective bride, she warned herself. She was a close and dear friend. “Then I’ll return it to you.”

  “Wear it now. Please.” He unwrapped the parcel, held the brooch for a poignant moment in one hand, then with unsteady fingers pinned it to her lapel. “Even in her seventies Grandma was a beautiful lady. Like you.”

  “It’s a lovely brooch.”

  She lowered her eyes in fear of betraying her emotions. His own eyes made love to her. But here in Germany, with his grief so close to the surface, he could not bring himself to talk of the future. She could understand that, Kathy told herself.

  If Rhoda or the others noticed the brooch, she’d just say it was a souvenir she’d picked up in a pawnshop. When they left Germany, she’d return it to David. Unless by then he could bring himself to talk about a future together …

  With Thanksgiving just a week away Kathy was conscious of homesickness. It would be a grim holiday here, she thought, though Brian was plotting an American-style dinner. And he never once allowed the others to express despair about the hordes of displaced people in such desperate need.

  “So we’ll have Spam with our canned cranberry sauce instead of turkey,” Brian said as they gathered for another monotonous dinner prepared from their stock of canned goods. “We’re having real American pumpkin pie for dessert.”

  “We’re eating better than most people here in Hamburg,” David reminded them. Kathy knew he was frustrated that so many potato-fed babies were dying despite the efforts of the relief agencies, and that the TB rate was escalating wildly.

  “How do these people go on week after week?” Rhoda asked, but what else could they do? “Sleeping on floors. Six families using one gas stove. I spoke to one woman this morning who gets up at three in the morning so she can cook in peace—what little she has to cook.”

  Everybody at the makeshift table started at the sound of a sharp knock on the door.

  “It can’t be the Gestapo,” Brian said flippantly. “Somebody go answer.” He was busy slicing another chunk of Spam.

  “Hi, is this where David Kohn lives?” an ebullient voice demanded at the front door, its owner not visible from the dining room.

  “Phil?” David leapt to his feet with a brilliant smile. Kathy remembered he’d mentioned a cousin coming over on some photo assignment.

  “Yeah,” the voice confirmed.

  “Hey, you made it!” David charged down the hall. “Did you have dinner yet?”

  “We had dinner aboard ship, such as it was. It wasn’t luxury liner chow, but I could handle it.”

  Kathy looked up from the table to inspect David’s cousin, standing in the doorway now with a camera hanging over one shoulder and a duffel bag over the other. He was a couple of inches taller than David, more sturdily built, with rumpled dark hair and magnetic good looks. A definite family resemblance, Kathy decided, though already she knew their personalities were very different.

  “Come sit down and have tea with us.” David prodded his cousin into the dining room. “If we can find another chair—” Their supply of coffee was rationed, served only at breakfast.

  In a rush of activity another
chair and a chipped mug was found for Phil, and David made the introductions.

  “Maybe it’s like bringing coals to Newcastle,” Phil drawled, “but I dragged a magnum of great burgundy all the way from New York.”

  “Well, bring it out!” Rhoda ordered jubilantly. “What we get here is so watered down you can feed it to a six-month-old!”

  It was amazing how Phil had brought such vitality into their group these past few days, Kathy thought as the women moved about the kitchen preparing their so-called Thanksgiving dinner—served late in the evening because this was another working day in Hamburg. Phil’s magazine had arranged for living quarters for him, but most evenings he found his way to the group’s littered, overcrowded flat.

  “That damp, dark basement isn’t fit for a rotten-tempered dog,” he was complaining in the dining room, “but what the hell, I only sleep there.”

  “How’s the assignment going?” David asked.

  “It’s coming along,” Phil said. “I’m taking a million photographs, and I’ll have to sort out what’s strong enough for the layout.”

  “What’s your bribery for today?” one of the men asked. Each night he arrived with some item in short supply. He had an uncanny talent for dealing on the black market.

  “Chocolate bars, that’s what,” he said in triumph. “And wait till I make my side trip to Paris,” he gloated. “Am I going to be popular with the women when I get back! Even in wartime, I’ll bet the French kept on making perfumes.”

  Phil was popular with the women here in the flat, Kathy thought while they settled about the dining table—actually two tables shoved together to accommodate the group. They acted as though he was Clark Gable in person. Sometimes he had a way of looking at her that was disconcerting.

  “How did you get chocolate bars?” Rhoda demanded. “Let’s see them.”

  “You don’t believe me, hunh?” Grinning, he pulled a batch of chocolate bars from his pocket. “Eight of ’em. We’ll break—them up in squares and share.”

  Kathy pretended to be unaware of Phil’s thigh pressing against hers under the table. He wasn’t even conscious of it, she told herself, they were just so crowded together.

  “I wish to hell I could be in Paris for that International Women’s Congress,” Claire, their psychiatric social worker, said wistfully. “I hear they’re coming from all over the world.”

  “Women have to make themselves heard.” Kathy was ever conscious of the need for women to stand up for their rights. “Did you know that until a few days ago French women were denied cigarette rations? Only men are allowed to smoke.” Her voice was scathing.

  “You don’t smoke,” David teased.

  “No,” Kathy acknowledged, “but I don’t want some man—in this case Marshal Pétain—saying men can but women can’t.”

  “I have a hankering to make a run to Paris while I’m over here,” Phil said casually. “I was with the American troops that liberated Paris. Wow, did we get a warm welcome!”

  “The international trains are running again,” Brian conceded, “but it’s a long haul these days. From Paris to Nuremberg is thirty hours, sitting up all the way.”

  “I’m trying for a flight,” Phil shrugged. “That’s the only way to go now.”

  “This is not prime flying time,” Brian cautioned. “The weather is bad. Too many mountains and too many mist-producing rivers.”

  “When a plane seat becomes available I’ll take it. How about you, David? Come along with me, just for a couple of days? You’re not afraid of flying in bad weather?”

  “I’m not afraid,” David said quietly. “But I’m needed here. Doctors are in short supply.”

  “If you do go,” Rhoda said, “bring me back a bottle of Chanel No. 5. That may be the closest I’ll ever get to Paris.”

  It was weird, Kathy thought, the way the girls in their group were attracted to Phil and not just because he’d been with the First Army when it liberated Paris. Girls back home must have been throwing themselves at him before the war. David must have had plenty of girls after him, too, she told herself defensively. Yet he had a way of retreating into the background when Phil was around.

  So many times she’d thought David was about to talk about their future, and each time he’d retreated. There were moments when he seemed about to take her into his arms—and she wanted that so much—but each time he backed away. The ghosts of the past had not yet been put to rest.

  Knowing her interest in the International Women’s Congress in Paris, David combed Hamburg for copies of the Paris newspapers. Along with the other girls, she avidly read the reports.

  “How do you like this?” Rhoda said smugly. “This reporter says the Congress had more substance than the Allied male meetings at Yalta, Potsdam, and London. Cornelia Pinchot, wife of the governor of Pennsylvania, was there, and Florence Eldridge—she’s not just a terrific actress who happens to be married to Fredric March—and Vivian Mason, of the National Council of Negro Women, were there!”

  “Irene Curie-Joliet spoke for the French delegation,” Kathy read with pride. “Mme. Curie’s daughter.”

  “It’s strange,” David remarked, his smile whimsical. “People here in Germany have money but no goods. According to the Paris papers, the Paris shops are loaded with all kinds of fancy gifts for Christmas, but few people have money.”

  “David, as a man, how do you feel about the Women’s Congress?” Claire asked.

  “I think it’s a fine thing,” he said quietly. “They have a right to say, ‘Look, we’ve been through a terrible war. We have a right to be part of what happens in the future.’ As participants, not just onlookers.”

  Kathy glowed as her eyes met his. David had responded just as she had expected. Women went out to work in defense plants, and they joined up to serve in military uniform; but now that the war was over, most men expected them to go back into the kitchen again and stay there. For a truant instant—just an instant—she thought, I wouldn’t mind staying in the kitchen for David.

  Phil sat with David in a dreary tavern not far from the flat.

  “David, why can’t you take off a couple of days to go with me to Paris?” he argued again. “And don’t give me that crap about how badly doctors are needed. You’ve worked like a dog since you’ve been here. You have a right to a couple of days off.”

  “I’m needed, Phil,” David insisted. “Even on Sundays I go in for a few hours. We haven’t much longer here. Our budget runs out in a few weeks. I want to do as much as I can.”

  “I think you enjoy being a martyr,” Phil taunted. Damn it, he wanted David as a cover when he went digging for those paintings. He couldn’t afford any curiosity. He wasn’t the only ex-GI trying to smuggle museum paintings out of France. The government knew. They just didn’t know who or where. “I’d hate chasing around Paris on my own.”

  “I doubt that,” David laughed. “You’ll find some French mademoiselle delighted to entertain you.”

  “It’ll feel strange going back alone.” Phil tried a fresh tactic. “I told you how it was last time. Chuck and I lived it up like wild, and now he’s dead.”

  “You’ll get along,” David said calmly. “But I’m sorry about your buddy. That was a rotten deal.”

  “I’ll go,” Phil said after a minute. Maybe he’d try to persuade Kathy to go with him. David would be pissed if he did, he thought. It would serve David right. He was mad about Kathy and doing nothing about it except giving her those brooding looks. Kathy was a hot little number, he guessed, if a guy played it right. Maybe she wasn’t Betty Grable, but she was damned pretty. And built, he remembered with a familiar stirring. “Hell, I can’t go back home without one little fling. I’m beginning to feel like a monk here in Hamburg.”

  “Whatever happened to that girl you were so overheated about right after Pearl Harbor?” David asked. “Debbie, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, we split up.” She’d blown a fuse when she discovered she was pregnant. Hell, she always said she knew how
to take care of herself. “That’s when I enlisted.” The timing was right—he knew he’d be drafted in another few weeks anyway. It always got a rise out of women when he pointed out he’d enlisted; he hadn’t waited to be drafted. And the old man paid for the abortion when Debbie went screaming to him.

  “What are you going to do back home?” David asked. He knew this photography bit was a one-shot situation.

  “I’m not sure. The old man keeps trying to shove me into the business. I told him I’ve spent three years in the army. I need some time to figure out where I want to go. I can’t go far on the twenty bucks a week the GI Bill gives me for 52 weeks.”

  “You could go back to school,” David pointed out.

  “Are you kidding? I hated school. I never would have finished high school if you hadn’t been there sharing my room,” he reminded. “All I thought about that last year—when we were together at boarding school—was nookie. And college was a drag.”

  “I have to go,” David said. “I’m working tonight.”

  “You’ll be sorry later that you missed Paris,” Phil warned. “I hear the bars and nightclubs are rolling again. But then,” he drawled, “you never really appreciated the great things in life.”

  To Kathy the approach of Hanukkah was unexpectedly poignant here. For how many years had it been impossible to celebrate Hanukkah in Germany? Over half of the group members were Jewish. Kathy knew they shared her feelings about this first. Hanukkah since the end of the war. Brian, who was not Jewish, discovered a menorah beneath the rubble of what had once been a Hebrew school. David whittled down candles to fit into the holders, and for eight nights they lit the Hanukkah candles. For Christmas they decorated a tiny pine tree with designs cut from colored construction paper. But ever close to the surface of their minds were the terrible shortages—food, coal, clothing—that plagued the city despite all the relief efforts.