Page 22 of A Map to Paradise

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Eva had somehow known from the first day of working for Louise Geller that this woman would change her life.

She wasn’t normally given to prescient thoughts but there was no mistaking the sensation when she met her that Louise was going to be the person to set her on a new course. Sascha’s mother had done that, too, by fleeing with Eva and Sascha’s sister Tanja to Berlin when the Red Army began its march to reclaim occupied Kyiv. But this relationship with Louise was going to be different. With Irina, Eva had been bound by a promise she’d made to her father to do whatever Sascha’s mother asked of her. She’d been just shy of her sixteenth birthday when she’d made that pledge, and still seen as a dependent child in the eyes of the world.

By the time she met Louise, however, she was twenty-two.

The war had been over for five years and she was alone in yet another Displaced Persons camp, this time in southern Germany. Irina had long since remarried a Hungarian man she’d met in their second DP camp and moved with him and Tanja to Budapest. Though Irina had been her last link to Sascha, they’d lost touch even before the war ended, when Irina and Tanja relocated to a different DP camp so that she could be with the man she was going to marry.

It was after Irina left that Eva learned southern Germany’s new occupiers, the Americans, had been told by Moscow that the Soviet Union wanted its citizens in DP camps repatriated, whether they had a home and family to go back to or not. American camp officials were expected to make that happen.

It had given Eva nightmares thinking what her return to Russia would be like. She’d surely be seen as a conspirator who’d sided with the Reich as its soldiers marched into Kyiv, and a traitor who then worked for the Nazis for nearly two years. Eva knew what the Red Army did to traitors…

When a dorm mate Eva had befriended told her she was going to tell the American forces overseeing the camp that she was Polish and that all of her documentation had been stolen from her during the war, she invited Eva to do the same. They agreed to pretend they were cousins who could corroborate each other’s claims. Living in the camps alongside Polish women for several years had allowed them to pick up just enough of the language to fake it.

“What if the Americans check the camp records?” Eva had asked her as they formulated their plan.

Her friend had replied, “What if they don’t?”

In the end, there had been no camp records to check. At this new monastery turned refugee camp, it was not unheard of for someone to claim his or her few belongings had been stolen from them, been destroyed by warfare, or been lost.

The Americans in charge believed that Eva and her friend were Polish cousins brought by force to Germany to labor for the Reich. They believed it simply because the same was true for hundreds of thousands of other non-Germans who were in Germany at war’s end. The Americans believed Eva’s suitcase had been ransacked and that she’d been robbed of her identification papers. She was given new ones.

Eva had felt a tremendous sense of control that she’d not only managed that deception but that it had held. She had in an instant become someone else.

And now she felt the same was going to happen with Louise; she was embarking on a new life without camp officials and foreign occupiers forcing her hand or erecting limitations. Her new employer was going to be instrumental in helping her forge a new future. She couldn’t explain it, but she could feel it. And she wanted it. She needed it.

Working for Louise hadn’t been her first job following the war. Expats in the DP camps were expected from the beginning to find employment. When the camp’s job assistance clerk asked Eva what her prior work experience had been, she couldn’t say she’d spent nearly two years in a Kyiv government building typing and interpreting for the Nazis. Eva Kruse from Warsaw could not say that. Eva Kruse from Warsaw had never been to Kyiv. She told the woman she had experience cleaning houses and cooking and mending, as those were all tasks she had performed starting at age twelve when Tante Alice passed.

Her first job placement was as a part-time maid at a hotel that housed occupational forces.

When the Americans at last left, the hotel’s German owners didn’t want camp refugees as employees. While Eva was looking for another job, she heard camp rumors of a congressional bill floating around in America that, if passed, would provide relief for a great many of the six hundred thousand refugees still foundering in the world of the camps. Other nations had already made similar overtures of assistance: Belgium, Australia, and several South American countries. But to immigrate to a country whose language she didn’t speak? Eva struggled to understand how a person who did that ever felt like they belonged.

She started working in the laundry room of a hospital, also part-time, the same day in June 1948 that President Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, which, among other things, made provision for the immigration of two hundred thousand DPs to the United States over the next four years. But the news changed nothing for her. Eva knew no one in America; she didn’t know what else to do but continue to wash the worst kind of soiled laundry.

And then one afternoon she heard of another job opening.

There was a woman, American by birth but married to a German man, who was looking for domestic help for her large Munich home. She wanted someone young. Someone who could cook and clean but carry on an intelligent conversation, too, in German or English. Someone she could trust and someone who still knew how to laugh.

“I can do all those things,” Eva said to the woman who’d read off the job description. “I can cook and clean. I can speak German. I can laugh.”

Two days later, Eva returned to the office to see if there’d been any word regarding her application.

The same woman smiled and handed Eva a card with an address on it and a train schedule.

“Frau Geller would like to meet with you on Monday at ten a.m.”

Eva would address this woman as Frau Geller only once, when she met her. Every day thereafter, until the moment Frau Geller put her on a plane to Los Angeles three years later, Eva called her—by request—by her first name.

Louise, tall and auburn haired, was a forty-two-year-old former Bostonian who’d gone to Oxford University for her last two years of college as a literature major. While in England she’d met Ernst Geller, born and raised in Munich, who was also at Oxford, but studying economics. He was from a moneyed Bavarian family, spoke English impeccably, was handsome in a stark way, with ice-blue eyes and sun-blond hair and a near-regal bearing. He was calm, elegant, and methodical, and she’d fallen quickly and deeply in love with him after only three dates. But when he proposed the week of their graduation in May of 1928, her family back home in Massachusetts had been appalled. Her parents had lost an uncle, a cousin, and a neighbor to the kaiser’s armies in the Great War only ten years earlier. They begged her to reconsider wanting to spend the rest of her life with a German man. They would never accept him as their son-in-law, and if she married Ernst, she was turning her back on not only her family but her heritage, her country, and everything she’d been taught was good and right. But Louise was in love. She married Ernst Geller in Munich the summer after her graduation. She’d not heard from her parents in the years since.

After Louise told Eva her story, it occurred to her that Louise hadn’t said Ernst was a man she still loved, only that she had loved him when he’d proposed and when she’d married him.

Eva wondered if Louise was happy in the beautiful house that had survived Allied bombing, with its tapestries and paneled walls and window boxes full of flowers, and whose grounds featured majestic fir trees and a pond and rose garden. It was a grand home to be sure but there were no children living in it nor any evidence that there ever had been. Louise was easy to work for, always had a neat list of tasks for Eva on the Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that she came. And she insisted on paying for Eva for an extra hour or two every day she worked so that Louise could teach her English to better Eva’s chances of getting chosen to emigrate to the U.K., Canada, or America. She was kindhearted, generous, and maternal.

And because of this, it surprised and saddened her that Louise had no children.

Louise would have made such a good mother.

Herr Geller—for that is what he instructed her to call him—displayed no parallel fatherly instincts. She found Ernst Geller impossibly hard to get to know. He had a prominent position in finance and in the newly formed West German economy. The deutsche mark had replaced the occupation currency, and Herr Geller was somehow integral to the leadership of the banking system and worked long hours in a headquarters office in downtown Munich. Eva wasn’t entirely sure what he did. He was almost never at the house when she was there, which Louise almost seemed intentional about.

When he was at home, he was polite around Louise, but not in the way Eva had seen other husbands be gracious to their wives. It was not so much in a kind way as in a mannerly way. He never put his hand on Louise’s or kissed her in front of Eva, though she knew some men were not prone to public displays of affection. Louise had described him as a quiet, calm man, and that’s what he was. But he was something else, too—something that Eva couldn’t quite name. Aloof wasn’t quite the right word. Nor was dispassionate . Nor was calculating . Eva was certain Herr Geller cared about something, was devoted to something, and it was probably his marriage, but only logic told her that. She didn’t see the physical evidence that he cared for Louise, that he loved her, esteemed her.

But neither did she see physical evidence that the opposite was true.

As the months of the first year of working for the Gellers ticked by, Eva made it a point to remind herself that while she was fond of Louise and grateful that Louise was teaching her English, she’d not been asked to fix Louise’s problems or to even identify if she had any.

Her goal instead was to learn English and apply for permanent residency somewhere English was spoken. Louise was certain the United States was Eva’s best option, and not just because that’s where she was from. Louise had college chums and high school friends up and down the East Coast and even a few on the faraway West Coast that she was confident would help Eva identify a sponsor, which was the biggest hurdle to getting a DP immigration application approved. If Eva mastered English and had a sponsor willing to arrange for a job and a place to live, she could easily be one of the four hundred thousand DPs America was willing to take. Louise even offered to teach Eva how to drive.

These were the activities Eva concentrated on, and when stray concerns about Louise’s happiness would pop up, she shooed them away as none of her business, even though Louise did seem interested in her happiness.

Eva had tried dating a few men—other refugees on the male side of the camp—at Louise’s suggestion that she have a little fun now and then. There were dances and concerts and cultural celebrations hosted by the different nationalities represented in the camp, and Eva was often asked by young men of the camp to attend one as their date. Aside from the momentary distraction of an evening out, Eva didn’t know how to empty Sascha’s place in her heart so that she could happily date other men. It seemed wrong and unkind to his memory. And it didn’t seem fair to the young men who wanted to court her.

Besides, she was priming herself to go somewhere far away from Sascha’s memory. Like America. Or Canada. Or England. Or Australia. What was the point in beginning a relationship in the camp when she wasn’t planning to stay? There wasn’t.

Late in the following year, when immigration protocols had been formalized, Louise helped Eva with filling out two applications, one for Australia and one for the United States, though the process for immigrating to America was rumored to be slower and more selective.

Louise seemed sad as she helped Eva work through the many questions on the initial forms. Eva realized as she tucked the papers away before leaving the Geller house for the day that she was sad, too. She and Louise had formed a bond over the past two years that had transcended their relationship as employer and employee. Louise had marked Eva’s birthdays with sweets and new clothes. She had spoiled her with Christmas gifts and hair appointments and the best present of all—she’d given her the ability to speak English and drive a car. Louise was the first person since her father who’d genuinely cared for her like a parent would.

“You know,” Louise said, “if neither of these applications is accepted, I could help you stay. I could help you apply for a permanent place to live right here.”

Eva had shared with Louise all that had befallen her—leaving nothing out—and also her desire to put as much distance as she could between herself and those losses. Staying in Germany hadn’t been a consideration until just that moment.

“You mean here with you and Herr Geller?”

“Oh, no!” Louise replied quickly. Too quickly, and Louise seemed to sense it. She just as rapidly reframed her reply. “I mean, you would want your own little place in the city center where there are more after-work activities for young people. I could help you get a nice little flat close to a train station so you could still easily get to the house and all the other people you work for. Or I could help you with training for a different job if you wanted.”

Again, Louise seemed eager to do the things a parent would for an adult child who needed help making their way in the big world.

It was obvious—and touching—that Louise cared for Eva and didn’t want her to go.

She might’ve considered staying if her world hadn’t again been turned upside down, this time by her own hand.

Eva was at the Gellers’ later than usual to help clean up after a dinner party. By ten o’clock the last guests had left and Eva was in the kitchen washing the final round of dishes. Louise was going to be driving her back to the camp when she was done, as the last bus had left for the train station an hour earlier. As she rinsed a serving platter, she could hear Ernst speaking to Louise in the hallway on the other side of the wall. When he raised his voice, she turned off the tap.

Herr Geller was scolding Louise for something she’d said to one of his guests.

“It was not your place to say such a thing,” Ernst said. He’d had much to drink that night and his voice sounded different. Slightly unhinged.

Louise said something in response but her words were muffled by the thickness of the wall. Perhaps it was, “I was only trying to help.”

“You belittled me.”

Louise’s next words were indecipherable except for their tone. She was pleading.

Something then crashed to the floor and broke, and Louise cried out.

On impulse, Eva bolted from the kitchen and rounded the corner to the hallway.

Ernst had Louise against the wall next to a table where seconds earlier a large vase of flowers had been standing. Water, lilies, and big chunks of broken lead crystal were splayed at their feet. In his hand Ernst held a fistful of Louise’s hair.

Eva realized at once that Ernst had forgotten she’d been in the kitchen. The look on his face when he turned and saw her was one of utter amazement. The look on Louise’s was one of utter terror.

“Why are you still here?” he shouted at Eva.

“Louise?” Eva said softly, as though unsure her voice still belonged to her.

Louise smiled but it was the grin of a clown, painted on. Completely fake. “Go back in the kitchen, Eva. Go back. I’ll take you home in a minute.” She reached up a hand to gently ease away the fingers wrapped around half the hair on her head. But even as she did so, Ernst tightened his grasp and Louise cried out in pain.

Eva took a step forward. “Stop! You’re hurting her.” The words came out of her mouth like a command.

Ernst wheeled away from the wall and toward Eva, Louise’s hair still in his fist. Louise cried out again. “How dare you speak to me like that?” he said to Eva. “And in my own house.”

This insult was delivered at near calm. If he hadn’t had hold of his crying wife by her hair, his tone would have suggested everything was fine and he’d just told Eva to bring him a brandy.

When Eva said nothing in response, he took another step toward her.

“Ernst, please!” Louise screamed, both in pain and desperation.

The realization that she and Louise were both in danger hit Eva like a lightning bolt. She suddenly knew exactly why Louise had never wanted her to be at the house when Ernst was home. Why Louise hadn’t wanted her to stay with them when they talked about her remaining in Germany. Why Louise hadn’t ever said that she still loved Ernst. Why sometimes when Eva came to clean the house Louise said she had a migraine and spent the hours Eva was there lying on her bed with a cool compress. Why Louise perhaps never wanted to have children, if this brute of a man would have been their father.

Louise had married a monster who was able to look and act like a gentleman when it suited him. And to be who he really was when it didn’t.

Ernst closed the distance to Eva. It was the nearest to her he’d ever been, and he towered over her. Louise was struggling to free herself and screaming his name, but he held onto her hair as though it was the easiest thing in the world to do.

“I asked you a question,” he said to Eva.

“And I said you’re hurting her.” Eva was unable to recognize from where these brave words came because fear pulsed through her. She was already imagining her own hair in Ernst’s grip when he tossed Louise to the floor and came at her.

Ernst swung the back of his hand like a cudgel. Eva instinctively ducked and his arm swung harmlessly through the air.

He lunged for her and she dodged him again. His face was now contorted in quiet rage, as though no one had dared to challenge his strength and control before. He lunged a second time, but his feet, clad in his expensive leather shoes, slipped on water from the spilled vase, and he went down on his back with a thud.

Eva ran to Louise, who was half sitting, half kneeling on the tile floor, cradling her head.

“Go, Eva! Run! Get out of here!” she wailed.

“You’re coming with me.” Eva had no sooner wrapped her arms around Louise to help her up when her friend screamed Ernst’s name and Eva felt herself being lifted away from the floor as if on puppet strings. Then she was flying. She slammed into the wall and then fell to the floor. Stars burst in her head much like they had when the Red Army soldier smacked her with the butt of his rifle on that long-ago, terrible day.

For several seconds a buzzing blackness filled her mind.

When her vision cleared, she saw Ernst kicking Louise as she lay on the floor at his feet after he’d flung her there, hurling insults at her.

Louise was curled into herself, crying out, begging him to stop, but he did not. Eva knew she had to make him stop. He had to stop. She stood on shaking feet, grabbed the largest piece of the broken vase, the heavy bottom, and swung it hard, cracking the back of Ernst’s head.

He went down next to Louise with a groan, but the next second he grabbed his wife’s wrist as she lay just feet from him. He dug his nails into the soft flesh of Louise’s underarm as he tried to yank her toward him. She cried out in pain.

In that moment, every terrible thing Eva had witnessed since the moment her father and brother and Sascha were taken from her, every cruelty she’d seen in Kyiv, every act of anger and aggression at the camps, every moment she wished she could unsee, smashed into her. She had not been able to save her family or Sascha. She’d not been able to save any of the people the Nazis had executed in Kyiv. She’d not been able to save anyone.

Until now.

She would stop Ernst.

Eva raised her arm and brought the base of the vase down on the back of Ernst’s head.

She did it again and again and again until he was still and the vase bottom was red in her hand.

There.

He had stopped.

In the years that followed, Eva would understand completely why June buried Elwood in the backyard. She would understand why a person might decide the best thing to do with a body that needs to disappear is to bury it in a rose garden in the backyard. When one is traumatized and frightened and tired but required nonetheless to address a gigantic problem at that very same moment, one might do an impulsive thing.

No one would believe Ernst might have killed them both, Louise said in those endless minutes after they both realized he was dead. No one was going to believe that Ernst had been violent with Louise since the earliest days of their marriage. No one would believe it because Ernst was an upstanding citizen of fine pedigree and held an important position with the biggest bank in the country. Louise was a nobody American who’d never complained in the past about anything Ernst had done. Ernst’s family had wealth, privilege, and influence. She had nothing. If she called for an ambulance, it was likely Eva would be arrested for murder. Louise probably would be, too, as an accessory.

As they dug his grave in the backyard, Louise decided on the story she would tell Ernst’s family and the authorities. Ernst had already been planning to go the following morning to Starnberger See, a beautiful lake outside Munich where he liked to row his canoe for recreation and exercise. It was how he maintained his strong physique. Louise would report him missing that evening when he failed to come home. After they were done burying the body and while it was still the wee hours, Louise would drive Ernst’s car to the lake’s shore, and Eva would follow behind in Louise’s car. They would push Ernst’s canoe out into the water and let it float away. Then they would return to the house in Louise’s car, leaving Ernst’s at the lake. Louise would bring Eva back to the DP camp in the morning and Eva would tell her roommates she slept over at her employer’s house after working at a dinner party that lasted past camp curfew when the gates were locked.

Eva, numb and in shock, at first said nothing as they dug and Louise spoke their plan into being.

All she could think about was that she had killed a man. A monster of a man but still a man. She’d killed him.

Ernst was dead. Dead. He was dead.

And Louise kept laying out what they would do about it, with tears of fear and perhaps relief slipping down her face as she plunged her shovel into the ground.

When the plan was implemented, Louise was saying, she would play the grieving wife concerned for her missing husband. In a few days’ time it would be determined that Ernst Geller had drowned, for there was no other conceivable explanation. “And this nightmare will be over,” Louise said. Eva would immigrate to the States just like they’d talked about.

At this point in their digging, Eva found her voice. “I only meant to stop him, Louise. I just wanted him to stop. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Louise dropped her shovel and gathered Eva into her arms. “I’ve imagined him dead a hundred different ways, Eva. I’m the sorry one. I should never have asked you to stay late. I’m the one who needs your forgiveness.”

They clung to each other for several long minutes before Louise whispered they had to finish what they’d begun. They needed to finish digging the grave. They needed to drop Ernst into it. They needed to drive to the lake. They needed to get back to the house so that what happened next would be according to her plan.

All might have transpired just as Louise had intended if not for the neighbor’s beagles.

The dogs would not leave the burial site alone. Over the next few days Louise and Eva chased the two dogs away several times. They’d even been digging at it four days after Ernst had disappeared when Louise was sitting in the living room with a police detective, following up on Ernst’s parents’ claim that foul play had to have been involved. She saw through the window the dogs pawing at the ground as she answered the detective’s questions with her heart pounding madly in her chest.

Eva and Louise knew they needed to move the body, and it had to be done quickly and soon. But how and when and where to take it? More people were coming to the house all the time. Family, friends, police.

The evening Louise was asked to meet with the Geller family in the city to discuss who might have had reason to harm Ernst, Eva decided she would do what needed to be done while Louise was gone.

The blanket-wrapped body they had buried on a Friday was not the foul-smelling thing Eva dragged to Ernst’s car as soon as night fell on a Wednesday. But she did not think about this.

She did not think about anything as she drove two hours out of the city to a deserted forest road that led to deep woods where there was no trail, and to a ravine where—she hoped—woodland animals and insects would find and devour what was left of Ernst Geller.

When she returned to the Geller home, Louise was waiting for her, near frantic with worry. The police were still of a mind Ernst hadn’t just fallen out of his canoe and drowned as there was no body. Divers and dredgers had searched the lake twice.

“Then it’s good that you don’t know where I’ve taken him,” Eva told her. “You will be able to answer truthfully you have no idea where he is.”

They worked together the rest of that night to hide any evidence that anyone had been digging in the garden. Days passed and the body was not discovered. After three weeks, the police finally ruled out any kind of foul play—Ernst Geller apparently had no enemies. After four weeks, it was determined he had likely died of accidental drowning.

His case was closed.

Not long after his memorial service, Louise asked Eva to sit down with her at the kitchen table. A thick envelope covered with foreign stamps lay on its surface.

“I owe you my life, Eva,” she said when they were both seated. “In more ways than one. I think Ernst would’ve killed me that night. He might’ve harmed you as well. I just wish we didn’t live in a day and age where we had to do what we did. And I wish I would’ve called the police and been believed the first time he was violent with me. I wish I had at the very beginning.”

They were both quiet for a moment, each surely aware that the past is always and will always be just what it is.

“Listen,” Louise finally said. “After what you’ve done for me, I wanted to do something for you.”

Eva thought perhaps Louise was about to ask her to come live with her now that Ernst was gone. Half of her wanted to be Louise Geller’s almost-daughter and make Munich her forever home. But the other half wanted to leave all of Europe behind and never look back.

“I found you a sponsor,” Louise went on. “In Los Angeles, in California. A friend of mine attends a Catholic church there that has decided to sponsor ten Displaced Persons. You can be one of those ten people, Eva. They have already chosen you based on my recommendation.” She patted the envelope. “I’ll go down to the immigration office with you tomorrow and show the American officials all the documentation. You have a job waiting for you and a place to live. You can leave as soon we can get your application finalized.”

Eva was so surprised, she found she could not speak. Louise mistook her silence for fear.

“I know it’s a big step, but I really do think you will be happy there. You can build a new life in America, far from this one. You will love living in the States, Eva. It’s a place of possibilities. Especially California. You need to trust me on this.”

Still Eva could not bring words to her tongue.

“I will never forget you,” Louise continued. “I promise you. And I will be forever grateful to you. But I don’t think we should stay in contact with each other. It would look…strange. And it would be dangerous for both of us for anyone to think they need to look closely at us, at what we mean to each other. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Eva nodded. She did understand.

“But,” Eva said a second later, “what will happen to you if the body is found?”

Louise shrugged. “The police have no reason to suspect me. Nor do my in-laws. If Ernst’s body is ever found, I will act surprised. Because I will be. I need to be done living in fear, Eva. I don’t want you to start living in it. I want you to go to America and be happy. Be free.”

Louise lifted the envelope off the table and extended it toward her.

“I don’t know what to say,” Eva said as she took it. “I won’t forget you, either. And I’m so sorry. I never meant for this to happen.”

Louise’s eyes began to shimmer with tears ready to fall. “I know. But you have given me a new life, Eva. And now I am giving you one. But I want you to do something for me.”

“What is it?”

“Open your heart to love again,” Louise said softly. “Please? Will you do that?”

Eva nodded even though she did not know how to do such a thing.

She knew how to run from the Red Army, how to hop a freight train bound for Kyiv, how to lie, how to survive on crumbs, how to clean toilets and bedding stained with human suffering, how to bury a bad man, and how to dig him up again.

But this other thing—opening her heart to love again?—this she did not know how to do.