“I am not wanted there.”
Something dripped onto the threshold. I looked down at our feet and saw little spatters of blood on the floor between us. And then I noticed Johannes’s hand on the doorknob was bleeding.
“Your hand,” I said.
Johannes looked down at the doorknob. “Oh, that. I was careless with a knife just now, cutting some bread.”
Again his tone didn’t match the moment.
“Maybe you’d let me take care of it for you?”
“I suppose it won’t do to go to work today and bleed on the customers, will it?” He glanced back up at me, and for a second I caught a glimmer of the determined man I used to know. But the look vanished as he let go of the doorknob and stepped back so that I could enter.
The house was the same on the inside and yet not. The furniture was where it had always been, and even Martine’s little touches, like the art on the wall and the decorative pillows on the sofa and the vases on the tables, were the same, but there was no longer any life in the house.
I turned to Johannes. “How about if you take a seat at the kitchen table while I find what I need?”
He said nothing as he went into the kitchen. I made my way to the first-floor bathroom to rummage through cupboards for bandages, tape, and iodine. When I returned to the kitchen, I sat down next to him.
Johannes extended his hand onto the tabletop. On the flat of his palm was a clean slice into his skin at least an inch long.
“It’s a little deep, Johannes. Maybe you should have a doctor stitch it?”
He shook his head. “Just tape it up. I’ll be fine.”
Johannes didn’t wince as I cleaned the wound, nor as I began to wind the gauze around it.
“When were you released?” I asked.
He didn’t seem surprised that I knew he’d been a prisoner of war. Or maybe he didn’t care that I knew.
“Six months ago.”
“You were in England?”
“At a camp near Liverpool. It wasn’t so bad. But you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee to save your life.”
I almost laughed. Almost. We were quiet as I cut the gauze and then reached for the adhesive tape.
“I didn’t think I would see you again after you’d gone back tothe States,” he said. “Especially now. Vienna is a mess. Wieden’s streets are crawling with Communists.”
“I didn’t go back to the States.” I snipped a short length of tape. “I spent the years of the war in Lucerne teaching English at a Catholic primary school.”
He looked up at me in wonder. “This whole time you’ve been in Switzerland? Why? Why didn’t you go back home?”
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to be where I was. And actually, after you let me go, there were things I wanted to do.”
“Like taking in a few last visits to the opera?” He said it cynically, as if a couple of nights at the opera house in Vienna had been all I’d wanted after having lost so much. I knew he wasn’t serious, but it irked me that he said it at all.
“No. Like helping disabled children escape to Switzerland so the Nazis wouldn’t do to them what they did to Brigitta.” I hadn’t meant to say something so callous, but my words were true, and once they were out, I didn’t regret them.
He flinched at my answer but recovered quickly. “You did that?”
“I did. I helped save eleven children. Six boys and five girls. One was just an infant.”
Johannes stared at me, a mix of disbelief and awe on his face. “But how? Switzerland wasn’t accepting refugees.”
“We found a way. And these children were not refugees. They were just little ones who needed a safe place to live for a while. Loving Swiss families were found for all of them. These families fed the children we rescued, clothed them, saw to their schooling and medical needs. The children were a burden to no one, not that they ever had been, and all were returned to their families after the war. Unlike so many other disabled children. Right?” Again my boldness stunned me, but I was finally saying to Johannes Maier what I’d wanted to say for a very long time.
