Berlin, July 1945

This is where we used to live, Grete thought. This is our building. This is Sternplatz. There used to be a bakery here. The baker’s name was also Stern, and on Sundays after church Mother bought apple cookies and raisin bread from his shop. We had butter then, when I was little. Then from the rubble of her former bedroom in those ruins she picked up a doll, her doll with the American name, Miss Sally. This used to be my doll, she thought. This is my doll. This will always be my doll.

Grete’s father had been a banker, had left for work every morning at half past eight, and had signed important documents with the Führer’s silhouette upon them. Now he stood with a camera, ready to take pictures of the place they used to live. He’d purchased the camera from the baker’s brother, who also owned a shop, on Whitsun in the year 1936. The following summer they’d vacationed in the Tyrol, where atop the highest Alpine peaks one could still see snow.

Grete’s mother loved the mountains, how the snow high up seemed to intensify the sunlight that fell down from them. That summer she drank much wine and flirted with a local man who called her gray eyes piercing. Or mesmerizing. Now, as she worked alongside the other bucket bearers—the women who stone by stone were attempting to rid Berlin of the rubble of war—couldn’t remember the man’s name. He had a wispy beard that seemed to smile when his mouth did. Those evenings all the women and men danced beautifully while the children sketched the mountains and ate Donauwelle.

Grete’s sister—too young to understand the seriousness of war and the bitterness of having to begin again—sat on a cinder block and watched a group of American soldiers move proudly down Sternplatz. How clean their uniforms, the child thought, how carelessly they smoke their cigarettes and kick errant stones this way and that. It’s as if they’re playing a game, she thought, and only they know the rules. The next day, the nineteenth, she would have her fifth birthday and she was hoping it wouldn’t rain.

It was a Thursday and it rained. Grete’s father leaned through a window in the basement where they slept, all four together on American Army blankets, gifts, and watched the gray Sternplatz grow grayer with it. Tired and forlorn, he cursed the Führer ardently and went back to his book, a volume of Goethe he’d retrieved from the rubble. His wife was building a fire to make coffee. She was only thirty-four, but already he could see prominent gray strands of hair mingling with the blonde beneath her cap. We will grow old here, he thought. With nothing but ourselves, he thought. But maybe that was necessary. Maybe that was right.

The younger child—the birthday girl who’d feared the rain—found solace in the spiderwebs in each of the basement’s corners. From corner to corner she moved, hopping about in a denim jumper too big for her. She asked her mother why the spiders made them, and her mother frowned, knowing metaphor to be beyond the child’s reach. But they are beautiful, the child thought, like babies’ hair, like a tangle of threads a maid might curse at. There had been a maid, but she was dead. There’d been happy lives inside this rubble once, but they were gone. Everything is gone, the mother thought, but the coffee was growing warm above the fire.

Grete examined Miss Sally. She was missing most of her left arm and both of her brown shoes. Her hair was a mess of blasted shards of Reich cement and iron shavings, but she’d survived. They’d all survived, except the maid, but war was one thing and its aftermath another. Grete knew things would be different now: the Führer was dead and probably Stern the baker, too. For many months and even years, there would be no apple cookies and no raisin bread, and she would have to live without them. In September, when school began again, she would have to learn geometry and the mostly sad angles of her new life.

Geometry will be beautiful, she thought. There’s so much I need to learn, she thought, then Mother called them all for coffee. There was no table in the basement, but they sat as they had before: Mother and Father opposite, Grete near the window, and the little one in shadows. The coffee was poured, a slice of bread was passed around, a tomato, a cucumber, and a peach. Each held a knife, and each ate slowly and in silence. And for twenty minutes on July 19, 1945, a little beauty reigned in Berlin while foreign soldiers walked about, frowning at the devastation.

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Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Adroit Journal. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.