Nightingale by Susan May Warren Page A

the blow of my reality.
    I wanted to reach out, to touch your hand, the one that spent so many hours cheering my darkening heart. And then—
    Your face cracked, and with the look of horror in your eyes, my own horror rose up to choke me.
    Please.
    Then you turned, backed away, your hand pressed to your mouth, as if you might be ill, and although I tried tothink of a thousand words that might convince you to stop, to listen, nothing came to me, except… Please.
    I stood there in the hot dust of the gated cell, watching you disappear—and then rush down the dirt road, the sun running fingers of sweat down my back even as I fled from the pen and out into the yard, only your name in my mind, hoping to stop you. With everything inside me I hated my cruel fate, longing for the first time since my capture to wrestle the Thompson from the guard—a friend, really—and escape the barbed wire suffocating me. I imagined myself running after you, down the road, dropping to my knees. And then, finally, the right words spit out of me. A whisper at first, and then a cry.
    Perhaps you didn’t hear it—gone as you were, over the lip of the sizzling horizon.
    Please, forgive me!
    I stood at the fence, my jaw set against my grief, willing you to return. But as the sun melted into the horizon, the dusk devoured my hope and I knew.
    I am a wretched man.
    Please know I wasn’t trying to deceive you. Not really. I simply avoided mentioning the truth, hoping you might read my clues. I told myself that a tactful omission didn’t constitute lying. I deceived us both in that. But, please know, never did I intend to hurt you.
    I know now what a cruel, desperate sap I was to continue to write to you.
    Please, Esther, can you forgive me?
    I know I cannot possibly retract the trauma of your discovery. I can imagine you were expecting a man with a uniform you could honor. And, while I wish I could be that man, I beg you to understand that I am not the man you might suspect when you look at a German soldier.
    I did not lie to you when I said I grew up in Iowa. My parents moved to America during the reconstruction of Germany after the Great War. I was six years old, and while we had left a grand two-story flat in the beautiful city of Dresden, I fell in love with my uncle’s simple farm. I thrived with hard work under my nails, the sun bronzing my skin, and learned English within a year. And I did play basketball for the Conroy team.
    But while I prospered, my father struggled to put food on our table. My uncle’s farm turned to a fine powder that dissolved in the prairie winds, and he exacted high rent for our home, despite the hours I tended his animals or worked the cornfields. I well remember the day my father returned from a house call with nothing but a doughy turnip for payment. He set it on our bare kitchen table, dirty and white, and my mother stared at it without words, the tears cutting her face. I stood in the doorway, just behind the curtain of my room—no more than a closet, really, and watched as my father walked out of the house, got on our only horse, and rode away. He walked back hours later with a bag of food and train tickets to New York City.
    He paid for our passage back to Dresden the same way he afforded the ones to America—through the kindness ofrelatives. The year was 1934, and President Hindenburg had just died. We had no idea the power that Adolf Hitler would gather over the next four years. My grandparents welcomed us back to their home, where my father set up his practice. What could I do but join them? A seventeen-year-old immigrant, I had nothing but dirt in my pockets, no way to make a life, except with my hands. My father began to teach at university, and it paid my tuition to medical school.
    We had no idea the consequences of our decision. Indeed, I fought conscription into the
Wehrmacht
. My degree allowed me the luxury of postponing my enlistment. I know now that the SS