A Short Time to Stay Here by Terry Roberts

Author:Terry Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After Anna passed through the wagon gate to return to Sunnybank, I took myself back the way we’d come, around the flank of the Mountain Park and into Camp A.

I collected Anna’s camera from New Heidelberg and took it with me up to 305-306. Where, stripped to my waist, I did something I had never done before. I tried to look at my rooms as I imagined a woman might, a woman who craved order. And then, in my own offhand way, I set about straightening and cleaning.

After a few hours, I heard Bird’s characteristic rap on the door: the slightest three taps that she used for fear of waking me from sleep. Often, she knocked so quietly that it didn’t fetch me whether I slept or no. This time I answered the door while holding a book, the last of several I was returning to the shelf. She took the book, a slim, forest-green volume, out of my hand and replaced it with a note from Siegfried. While she carried the book into the bedroom, I read his reminder that I had promised to dine with the German officers that night. Thursday, the one night of the week they were allowed a ration of beef. I knew what Siegfried did not; it was to be a stew simmered with potatoes, onions, and carrots in a heavy stock, with for once no cabbage. Easily the best meal of the week. So, despite Bird’s sly, curious bobs and grins at my straightening up, I wasted no time in pushing her out so I could dress for dinner.

* * *

WE SAT, SIEGFRIED as translator and I, at what had been the head table in the hotel dining room. The table was one that had survived from before the war, covered with a heavy cloth to protect it from imagined German atrocities. The chairs, however, had been stored in the basement and replaced by rough benches. The hotel china had been carefully boxed for the duration and replaced as well by thick, white crockery shipped to us by the Department of Labor. The stew was rich and strong. Pauline told me later that she’d sliced some venison into each huge pot for flavor. The conversation ranged from the differences between German and American cooking even to the war itself. Ruser and several of the more senior officers listened gravely, until suddenly, the Commodore interrupted one of his junior officers to address me directly.

“Herr Robbins, do you know what they have done with our ships?” This, again, was his official person, his voice deep and stern.

I must have given him an especially blank look.

“The great luxury liners of the Hamburg-Amerika fleet!” He motioned to the man on his left, a dour old captain, who threw a folded newspaper on the table. “Das Imperator, Das Bismark, and even Das Vaterland—do you know what has happened to them?” I could almost smell the sudden tension; I had forgotten just how afraid most of these men were of Ruser.

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