Читать книгу Sins of the Innocent - Mireille Marokvia - Страница 16

I rarely ventured out alone into the foreign world that Germany still was for me. Abel, who was working sixteen hours a day in order to escape this very world, had no time—and no desire—to take me out.

We visited his kind old mother. When younger brother, cocky in his uniform, would show up, we would leave abruptly and feel bad about it.

The friend who had persuaded Abel to return to Germany was now passing on to him the freelance jobs he did not want. We had to be grateful. Not easy. I disliked the man’s wife as much as I disliked him. Moreover, we now knew that he was a party member. Our rare visits were strained.

I looked forward to the spartan vegetarian dinners at Christine’s house. Christine was friendly and protective. She smiled at my French weaknesses, my pretty, unpractical dresses and shoes. And my waist. My liver had no room, she said. She had often massaged me to correct the defect when I was her patient.

One August evening at Christine’s dinner table, I related that I had seen, pinned up on the wall of my dentist’s office, newspaper clippings representing gruesome photographs of old German men and women who had been tortured by the cruel Poles.

“I bet these are the same newspaper clippings that were shown before we felt obligated to invade Czechoslovakia,” Christine exclaimed.

The maid, we all knew, was listening.

Christine did not care; she loudly predicted future calamities.

The next morning, newspapers and a blaring radio in the center of town announced that the Poles had attacked a German radio station across the German-Polish border. The following day, the first of September, at 4:30 A.M., German tanks rolled into Poland.

Two days later, Abel came home in midmorning.

“Call, call the French consul . . . now,” he said with such urgency that I asked no questions.

We had no phone, but the lawyer who lived on the second floor had let us use his phone before. I rushed downstairs. The housekeeper, her eyes red from weeping, opened the door.

“My mother came from Poland,” she said as she let me in.

The telephone rang long and shrill in the empty shell of the French consulate.

I dialed again and again. An icy clamp tightened around my heart. My country had declared war on my husband’s country, as it had said it would if Germany attacked Poland.