He is wolfish with sharp canines and black eyes. I study the angular lines of his body, his veins pulsating from pale limbs. He makes a diamond of his hands and dives off the cliff into the Bavarian lake.
When I talk to him after his swim, his eyes trail carelessly over me. His heavy brow lowers as he smacks his gum like the teenage girls in America do. I have been gone from there for so long, it doesn't even feel like home anymore. The War has become my home. Which is probably why the magnetic pull of this murky man is so strong. Danger becomes me now.
“So you were just talking to him?” He accuses, leaning back in the midday glare, “That’s not what I saw, Aleida.”
“Aaron. Please.” I flick my damp braid over my shoulder and break eye contact.
Sergeant Aaron Mandel rises to his feet and perches his hands on his lean hips. He shakes the water from his head, the droplets catching the light to make small prisms. A Star of David gleams on his breastbone, hanging around his neck from a gold chain.
My mouth is dry. I get up and reach for his forearm. He pulls it away, pretending to search for a pack of Lucky Strikes in his field jacket. As he lights the cigarette, I try to remember how we even met in the first place. It was as though Aaron wasn’t then suddenly was in my life, blaring and unavoidable as a car crash. I hate myself for trying again but I do it. I reach out for him.
“I’ll see you tonight.” He ignores me, swings the jacket over his shoulder and saunters towards the Austrian village where we are stationed.
Aaron Mandel and I are an explosive combination when there is alcohol involved. He’s the keg of gun powder and I’m the match. I instigate and he detonates with all the words, spit and fire I wish I could spew. The war has left seeds of hatred in both of us but he expresses his more easily. I like to live vicariously through his fury as I brood nearby.
After my morning nursing at the German POW camp, I am desperate to gain some ground under my feet. Anger makes sense to me. What was awoken in me that morning, I don’t recognize anymore.
“Say, Aleida,” Aaron tips the neck of the bottle of wine towards me, “You sure you aren’t a nice Jewish girl?”
“I’m positive.” I reply curtly for what feels like the tenth time that night.
He scoffs, admiring me openly before taking a swig from the bottle.
“I still don’t like the thought of you patching up those Kraut bastards over there,” He snorts, “You tell me if any of them gives you any trouble.”
My hand itches around the bandage beneath my thumb. I feel a strange pressure there as though my flesh can’t forget the other man’s fingers wrapped around it.
“Most of them ignore me.” I walk away from him at the kitchen table.
“Most of them?” Aaron snarls, “None of them have tried-“
“Don’t be stupid, Aaron.” I snap a little too quickly.
Music drifts in from the party in the other room and I hear the door open. Female voices speaking in German drift into the kitchen. Aaron is bored with me tonight, but I’m too tired to play our usual game. Without another word, he strides into the sitting room where a few guys from his platoon have brought over some local girls. An hour later, I leave alone.
I have a single bedroom for the first time in years. My flat mate is a fellow nurse who has been with me since New York before D-Day. When she stumbles in around midnight with the Captain she’s been seeing, she lets in Aaron. I hear the door to my room creak open and tug the blanket up to my ears.
“Aleida?” He whispers in the dark.
My reserve fails the moment he rests a hand on the concave of my waist. His fingers nimbly pull back the covers and he kisses the indent of bone beneath my ear lobe.
"I'm sorry." He says.
Despite his harshness in the daylight, Aaron is the gentlest of lovers. The man melts like a stick of butter under a broiler and I give in to him every time.
Aaron falls asleep with his ear pressed against my heart as though he’s clinging to the life it gives with every thrum. I thread my fingers through his coffee brown waves and watch shreds of cloud drift past the full moon. I think about how he has said he wants to marry a Jewish girl when he gets home. I think about the snippets of horror he has told me when his company liberated a camp in Germany. I think about the enemy lieutenant sleeping in a cot behind barbed wire not five miles from here.
If Aaron is a wolf, Gerhard is a predatory cat. Golden faced as a sphinx with honey hair and ice for eyes, the Luftwaffe pilot has had his wings clipped. He wanders the camp aimlessly despite his wounded leg. He is lanky as Aaron except with broader shoulders. Gerhard moves with lethal accuracy, his actions calculated and smiles budgeted out to my hungry heart, leaving me aching for more.
I study him from behind the canvas flaps as he tracks circles around the perimeter. He limps but trudges on, his hands clasped at his back. Gerhard senses my gaze and peers over to the hospital. I sink back into the shadows.
I stay busy. A new slew of surrendered soldiers have been hustled into the already packed camps around Zell am See. Allied Officers are nervous about letting any of them leave too soon before they are thoroughly screened. There is always the chance a high ranking Nazi SS officer is masquerading in a Wehrmacht Private or Corporal uniform. The very thought of it shakes me to the bone, as though a bogeyman is hiding among the war weary masses.
Behind one of the few privacy screens in the hospital, I attend a doctor as he treats a soldier with a bad neck wound. One of the other nurses mentions he is seventeen years old. The doctor does his best to remove a piece of shrapnel from the blistering infection. I stick his arm with a morphine syrette. He meets my gaze with a wide eyed pleading glance.
The nurse and doctor bring him to a cot, leaving me to clean up. I am thankful for the moment of solitude to gather myself. I close my eyes and lay a hand flat on my stomach. I breathe deeply, the hot air thick with antiseptic and body odor.
"Aleida?"
My eyes snap open. I pivot to see Gerhard leaning against the rod holding up the screen. I barely acknowledge his presence before busying my hands with the leftover bandages. He has never before sought me out.
I don’t resist as he grasps my elbow and whips me around to face him, his hand gripping my jaw in place as he kisses me. Where Aaron takes his time to love me, Gerhard loves with fire and haste. There is a thrill in the metallic rattling of the medical instruments as he hoists me onto the table. The danger of being caught with him is intoxicating. I give in to Gerhard just as easily as I do with Aaron. The light layer of scruff on his square chin chaffs my neck as he collapses into my shoulder. Gerhard lifts his head and presses his broad lips to my forehead.
“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t-“ His strongly accented voice drops off with a heavy exhale.
“I want to help,” I breathe, “I want you to get home.”
“My mother is on her death bed, the food is scarce-“
“You don’t need to explain,” I lift his face towards mine and press our lips together, “I’ll be there.”
I sneak out of the apartment after midnight. The overcast skies hide the moonlight and I’m thankful for the darkness as I make my way to the woods outside town. I carry a bag of provisions with a set of men's civilian clothes and fake travel papers.
Gerhard uses the pliers I sneaked into the camp a week earlier and manages to shimmy under the camp fence despite his wound. I know his determined stride right away as his dark figure makes its way towards me over the lush hillside.
The clouds part and moonlight serenely washes over the scene, the silhouette of the Alps painted black against a chaos of constellations. Gerhard stops cold in his tracks not twenty feet from me. I hear a click over my shoulder and turn.
"Damn Kraut.” Aaron growls, aiming his pistol at Gerhard.
As he pulls the trigger at his former enemy, I wonder which of the men I had loved was more wrong for me.
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