So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
– Emily Dickinson
June 21, 1940
Neutral Ireland
Dieter Ott
He’s not nervous until he sees the expression on the pilot’s face looking back toward the rear of the aeroplane. Dieter looks, too. Smoke is rising from the Junker’s starboard engine.
Today marks the midsummer, the ceremonial time halfway between planting and harvest. He’d just been looking out his small, square window and thinking how Ireland reminds him of Germany—the green fields and gray stone houses, the sloping hills and brown rivers. His grandmother’s house outside Hamburg was made of a similar gray stone, with cherry-red shutters and a veranda where they ate breakfast in good weather. He was sent to Oma—“that old witch,” his father called her—for the first time when he was four, the day after his baby sister was accidentally scalded to death in a boiling bath. After that he spent every summer with her, away from his mother’s bruised face and his father’s temper. It was the only place where, as a child, Dieter was happy.
The pilot, Hans Anschuler, nudges the radio operator sitting next to him, cocking his head toward the problem: a rising gray plume wagging in the wind like a tail.
Dieter is sitting alone in the rear double seat. “You must try to land her,” he shouts over the noise.
Anschuler is the same age he is, twenty-two, but seems younger. His face is stiff, all bone and nose. His forehead is bright with sweat.
“Yes, yes,” Anschuler shouts back irritably as the metal frame starts to wobble. He doesn’t like to be told what to do but Dieter is in charge of this operation.
It’s twilight, the time of day when, according to his grandmother, ghosts can be seen walking our world. Technically, civil twilight; Dieter calculates the sun to be only 5 or 6 degrees below the horizon. The moon won’t rise until after midnight. They’d planned on cloud cover to hide them or, failing that, indecision on the part of the Irish. They’ve no anti-aircraft machinery as far as Dieter knows, and an army made up mostly of bicyclists.
Anschuler cranes his neck left and right looking for a suitable place to land while the radio operator sends out a distress signal. The faulty engine coughs and hisses as though someone is applying wire cutters to it, raising sparks. Below them, in the elbow of the river, Dieter can see a block of shops ending in a long, flat field.
“There.”
He’s leaning forward trying to read the altimeter over Anschuler’s shoulder when something through the windscreen makes him blink: one of the shops is displaying a German banner. A trick of the light? But no, there’s the white circle and the Nazi insignia. Even more surprising: a German Panzer truck is parked on the dirt road. But that’s impossible. The German high command has not committed to an invasion of the Irish Free State, as they like to call Ireland. Not yet, at least. What would be like to rule the Irish like the Norse did, and then the English after them? To teach Irish children German, lead competitive games, reward healthy habits and physical bravery? Dieter’s supervisor back in Hamburg declared the Irish unteachable; “subhuman,” he called them. A word cast about in many directions these days.
The plane circles as it descends over the shops. The Nazi banner flaps in the wind. “Do you see that?” Dieter asks.
But Anschuler has begun pulling the nose up to bleed off excessive speed. The plane’s wobble has grown into a violent shaking, and although the field looks to be long enough there’s a ditch and a stand of trees to clear first. The smell of smoke and burning fuel fills the cabin.
Dieter leans forward again. “Stay above 300 hundred feet until the last turn.”
But even as he’s speaking the starboard engine coughs and cuts out.
No more turns. They have to land.
Anschuler pulls at the controls furiously, trying to hold the plane level as it approaches the field. The radio operator—an old man at forty—is clutching his iron cross as the stone farmhouses and green fields zoom in ever closer. In the day’s leftover sunlight Dieter can see the grain glittering as though their tips have been dipped in ice.
Is this how it ends? His stomach tightens but strangely he isn’t afraid. His skin sings with feeling, and he’s awash in a kind of brilliant heat. He can remember every movement his body has ever made. Skating on Herr Graesler’s pond in winter, swimming in the Elbe, dancing on an outdoor platform at a midsummer party in France. Two American girls, sisters, one missing her right hand, watch him foxtrot. He can feel the weight of their gaze. Then the wind wraps itself around the plane and tilts it hard.
“Left rudder!” Dieter shouts. He holds onto his safety belt and grips the knapsack between his knees as the earth rushes up to swallow them.
“The dead watch us,” his Oma used to say, “waiting for their cue to enter.”
~
“We Meet Apart is a heart-pounding story of exile, sisterhood, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Martha Conway at her finest.”
Christina Baker Kline, best-selling author of Orphan Train and The Foursome
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