Chapter 7 Chapter Six

In the US military dormitory, Mosca's side room lived in a short, stout civilian staff.He was wearing a green uniform, but on the uniform was a small piece of blue and white cloth with the letters AJDC embroidered on it.People rarely saw him, and no one in the dormitory knew him.But in the middle of the night, he could be heard walking around the house, and the radio rang softly.One night, he gave Mosca a ride in his jeep.They went to the underground restaurant together for dinner.His name was Leo, and he worked for the Jewish Relief Organization under the United States Joint Rehabilitation Committee.The initials of these Yu are also printed on his jeep in white Daewoo.

As they drove through the streets, Leo called out to Mosca in a British accent: "Where did I see you! You look familiar." "I happened to be working for the military government right after the war," Mosca replied.He concluded that they had never met. "Ah, ah," said Leo, "you came to Gro with the coal trucks, huh?" "Yes," said Mosca in surprise. "I was living there as a refugee," Leo grinned. "You guys didn't do a good job and we didn't have hot water many weekends." "We had a problem for a while," Mosca said, "and it worked out."

"Yes, I know," Leo smiled, "in a fascist way, but perhaps necessary." They had dinner together.Normally, Leo would have been fatter.He had a hooked nose, a large bony face, and the left side of his cheek twitched convulsively.The movements are tense and quick, but they have the clumsiness of a person who has never participated in any sports, and the movements of the whole body are uncoordinated.He knows nothing about sports. Over coffee, Mosca asked, "What do you guys do?" "This is UNRRA's job," Leo said, "to distribute necessities to Jews in concentration camps waiting to leave Germany. I myself spent eight years in Bukenwald."

Mosca thought that long ago—and that was no longer possible—he had one wish, and one of the reasons he was enlisted: to destroy the concentration camps.But he couldn't go.It was the guy in the picture that did it, Gloria, and the picture of his mother and Alf freaking out.Thinking of this, Mosca felt uncomfortable embarrassment and shame, because now he had almost forgotten this wish. "Yes," Leo said, "I went in when I was thirteen." He rolled up his sleeves, and what appeared to be a six-digit number printed in purple ink on his arm, preceded by a blurred letter. "Father was there with me. The camp was liberated several years after he died."

"You speak English quite well," Mosca said. "No one would think you were German." Leo looked at him, smiled, and said quickly and nervously, "No, no, I'm not German, I'm Jewish." He was silent for a moment, "Of course, I was originally German, but a Jew would no longer be German people." "Why not leave Germany?" asked Mosca. "I have a good job here. I have all the privileges that Americans have, and I make good money. Besides, I haven't made up my mind whether to go to Palestine or to the United States. This decision is not easy to make."

They talked for a long time, Mosca over whiskey, Leo over coffee.Suddenly Mosca found himself trying to explain to Leo the various sports, indeed the sensations of playing them.Because the other party spent his teenage years in concentration camps, opportunities for sports activities were unknowingly missed and irretrievably lost. Mosca tries to explain what it's like to run up to a shot, how he fakes a defense off his position, then pops up to let the ball float into the hoop; how he spins and runs on the wooden floor of the gym, soaking wet , extremely tired, a warm shower afterwards miraculously recovered from fatigue.Then I took a walk along the street with a blue sports bag to relax my whole body.Meet the girl waiting there in the soda shop.In the end, I will have a good sleep peacefully and carefree.

On the way back to the dormitory by car, Leo said: "I'm always ontheway (running east and west), my job takes me to a lot of places. But when the cold season comes, I have more time to stay in the Bremen is here, then we can get to know each other better, huh?" "Then I'll tell you how to play baseball," Mosca said with a smile, and get ready to go to the United States, don't say ontheway, that's Germany People speak English, you should say ontheroad, or travetlirg. " Several evenings afterward Leo came to their room for tea or coffee.Mosca taught him how to play poker, casino and rummy.Leo never mentioned the concentration camp, and he never got depressed, but he never had the patience to stay in one place for a long time, and the peaceful life of Mosca and the others had no influence on him.Leo and Helene became friends, and Leo also said that Helene was the only one who taught him how to dance well.

Autumn comes, leaves fall on the bike lanes that line the street, a bizarre green carpet is spread along the tree-lined avenues, and the fresh air refreshes Mosca and dispels summer laziness.Feeling unable to stay at home, she often ate at the basement restaurant and drank at the officers' club—all of which Helene couldn't enter because she was the enemy.When he returned to the dormitory late at night, he was a little drunk, and drank some thick canned soup that Helian warmed for him on the electric stove, and then spent the night awake and sleeping.Many mornings he awoke at dawn to watch the gray clouds move across the sky, carried by the early October wind.He leaned out of the window to watch the German workers scurrying around a corner to catch a tram bound for the city centre.

One morning, when he was standing by the window, Helene got up too, and was beside him.She put her arms around him in her pajama underwear.So they both looked down at the street below. "Can't you sleep a little longer?" she said sleepily. "You always get up so early." "I think we should start getting out and about more. Indoor life is too much for me." Mosca watched as the russet carpet of rolling leaves along Metzstrasse concealed the dirty bike lane under the trees. Helene leaned against him. "We need a baby, a beautiful baby," she said softly.

"Oh," said Mosca, "the Fuehrer has really been pumping that stupid idea into your heads." "Kids are always cute." She was annoyed that Mosca had teased her for having further thoughts.I know people who think the idea of ​​having kids is silly.In Flack, the Berlin girls used to laugh at us peasants, because we always cared about and talked about children.She pushes him away. "Okay, go to work," she said. Mosca tried to reason with her. "You know, we can't get married until the ban is lifted. Everything we do here is illegal, especially if you live in this dormitory. When the baby is born, we have to move to a German residential area, and It was illegal for me at that time. I had to go through many, many steps to get them to send me back to the United States and try to take you."

She smiled miserably at him. "I know you won't abandon me again." Mosca was surprised and moved, she actually guessed what was going on in his mind.He had already decided that in case of trouble, he would use the forged papers to go undercover. "Ah, Walter," she said, "I don't want to be like the people downstairs: drinking, dancing in clubs, sleeping, tied to us by nothing but ourselves. It's the way we live now." It's not enough." She stood there, her underclothes couldn't cover her buttocks and navel, and she couldn't care about her dignity and shame.Mosca wanted to laugh. "It's not good," he said. "Listen to me. The last time you were engaged, I was so happy that I was going to have a baby. I feel lucky. Because even if you don't come back, there is another person in this world that I can love. You Do you understand that feeling? We were the only two sisters left in our family, and we lived far away. Then you came and went, and I was alone again. Of all these people, there was no one who Someone I'm happy with, someone who can be a part of my life. It's horrible." Downstairs some Americans came out of the building into the cold street, unlocked the safety chains of their jeeps, and heated up the motors.A regular rumbling sound came in through the closed windows slightly. Mosca put his arms around her. "You're not feeling well," he said, looking down at her thin, naked body. "I'm afraid you've got something wrong." When he said this, there was a flash of fear in his heart, fearing that she would leave him for some reason, such as some unforeseen fault accidentally caused by him.He was afraid that on this gray winter morning he would stand alone at the window with the empty room behind him.He suddenly turned around to face her, and said tenderly: "Don't be angry with me, wait a few days." She snuggled into his arms and said softly to him, "You've really lost heart. I think you know it, I've seen how you treat others and I know how you treat me. Everyone thinks you're not enough Friend, then..."—she was looking for a word that wouldn't make him angry—"then Zulu. I know you're not like that, really. I never wanted to find someone better than you Mrs. Meyer and Yerkin would look at each other and smile sometimes when I said something nice for you. Oh, I know what they're thinking. There was a whine in her voice that was The pain of all women in the face of a whole world that doesn't understand why they love. They don't understand." He picked her up, put her on the bed, and pulled the blanket over her. "You're going to catch a cold," he said, leaning in to kiss her before leaving for work. "You'll get what you deserve," he said, and then smiled. "Some things are actually easy. Don't worry about them transferring me, for whatever reason." "I won't," she said with a smile, "I'll be waiting for you tonight."