We lay together afterward, with me curled into him like a snail curling into its shell, feeling exactly that sated and safe, until he pulled back the covers and tucked me up with him again beneath them.
I’d been alone for a long, long six months, in the same tiny flat where I’d lived before we married, for we hadn’t been able to find better in the wreckage that was Nuremberg, and anyway, being together had been all we could wish for. I’d worked at the bakery during the day, exactly as I had before, but spent the evenings reading most of the English books that Dr. Müller had on his shelves, and many of the French and German ones, too, furthering my education, whatever Joe’s mother said. I’d tried not to let him know how lonely for him I was, and I’d tried not to let myself dwell on it, either. I only realized how hard it had been now that it was over.
Joe’s hand had been stroking over my hair, as soothing as a warm bath on a cold winter night, but he must have felt something, because he said, “Hey.” Gently, the way he nearly always talked to me. “Are you crying?”
I turned my head to kiss his chest and said, “Maybe.”
“Homesick?” he asked.
I laughed, propped my hands on his chest and my chin in my hands, smiled up at him, and said, “No. Quite the reverse. I feel … I don’t know how to say this well in English. I feel … completed with you. Is this correct?”
His hand on my cheek now, his brown eyes full of tenderness. “It is to me.”
“The Rilke poem,” I said, as I’d been too shy, somehow, to ever tell him before. “That you wrote down for me after the wedding night. This is how I feel. That you are at the heart of me, and deeper. In my bones. In my very blood.” I tried to laugh. “Although my blood is, as you know, not all it should be.”
He didn’t just say, “I love you too,” as another man might have. He said, “I reread another poem of his recently, and it struck me more than it had before, because it’s for marriage, I think, for our separateness and our togetherness. It’s a dance, isn’t it, and a mystery, how we can be one, and also two? Twinned, yet still belonging to ourselves? It’s calledLiebeslied—Love Song—and seems to me to express how beautiful it is, and how frightening, too, to love like this. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
So he recited it to me, there in the darkening afternoon, the familiar German syllables rolling off his tongue as his love coursed through my body. Outside, it had begun to rain, slanting streaks of silver on the windows and wisps of vapor drifting by, for the hotel was tall enough that we were becoming enveloped in cloud. In our bed, though, we wrapped ourselves around each other and were warm. Safe. Complete. Twined around each other, yet still ourselves. Seen. Held. Loved.
He said, “I put it into English, too, since we’ll be doing our living in English now. It’s not as beautiful, possibly a bit clumsy, in fact, but …”
“Please,” I said, “tell me.”
So he did.
“How can I keep my soul within me, so that
it doesn’t stir against yours? How can I raise
it above you far enough to undertake other journeys?
Oh, that I could shelter it among the hidden
and long-lost things, in some remote and silent place
that will not resonate when your depths are sounded!
And yet everything that touches us, you and me,
takes us together like the cello’s bow
that draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two stirred like this?
And what musician has us in his hand?
O sweet song!”
How can any woman not love a man like Joe?
5
FULLY EQUIPPED
“What would you like to do today?” Joe asked when we rose the next morning. We’d had a rather stilted and uncomfortable dinner with his parents the evening before, and although the food served in the hotel’s dining room was truly astonishing after years of wartime privation—more plentiful and more elegantly presented than anything I’d seen for years, almost like the dinners Frau Heffinger had served when I was a child, and I’d been a princess!—I wasn’t much looking forward to spending the day under Mrs. Stark’s disapproving eye. I still hadn’t figured out how to respond to what she’d said yesterday, but I knew I must. Perhaps it would come to me, or more likely, I’d feel my way with as much delicacy as I possessed. Which wasn’t always very much.
