Brothers

Lewie hunches over his boxy camera in one of the photo booths that have been gouged into the courtroom walls at Nuremberg. Peering through the rear screen of his Speed Graphic, he focuses on the American prosecutor’s hairline—the point of his widow’s peak, the lobes of bare scalp to either side, those graceful arcs glowing under the floodlights that have been hung from the arched ceiling. Poised at the prosecutor’s stand, Robert Jackson straightens the pages of his opening statement at what is being hyped as “The Trial of the Century.” This egghead must have been sent by central casting. The rimless spectacles, the morning coat, the starched hankie in the breast pocket. From the looks of him, he’ll speak deliberately, with a clipped, blue-blood authority, that much seems a sure bet. And Lewie, with his premature bald spot, drab Signal Corps duds and bulldog’s snarl can’t help but feel that he, too, will bask in Jackson’s measured determination, his undisturbed faith in the power of fair trials.

Having snagged the primo camera booth, Lewie has sightlines to the prosecutors and defense attorneys, to the dock of subdued Nazi defendants surrounded by helmeted guards, to the interpreters in their glassed-in cubicles, and to the packed observers’ galleries, one for press and one for visitors. There must be five-hundred souls, maybe more, sandwiched into this retrofitted courtroom, the smells of fresh paint and sawdust rising under the glaring floodlights. The indictments have been read, the defendants have pleaded innocent, and now the show will begin in earnest. Lewie will shoot the whole shebang, show the whole world the pomp and glory of this grand comeuppance. Sometimes, maybe, life isn’t a complete pile of shit.

Straightening up, Lewie stretches his back and scans the visitors’ gallery, looking for Meir. That kid with the ragged eyelid, the chipped front tooth, the jangly frame that no amount of chow seems to fatten up. What had possessed him to take on this quiet puzzle, this waif with a mountain range of scars across his shoulder blades. Yeah, he agreed to give him a lift from his displaced persons camp to Nuremberg, but having him move into his billet was not part of the deal. He spots Meir, who’s nearly hidden, slumped in a seat in the farthest corner of the visitors’ gallery. His gaze is aimed at the courtroom guards, their shoulders squared, their eyes riveted on the Nazi captives. Lewie’s aware that Meir’s brother, Elias Beckman, stands among the white-belted guards, chin up, billy club clasped behind his back, like the rest. But which one? He couldn’t say. In their evening chats, always in Yiddish, Meir lets him know that Elias was the favored son. The one sent to gymnasium, under an assumed Aryan name. The one ferried out of Europe just in time. The one who spent most of the war years tending peach trees on his uncle’s farm near the shores of Lake Michigan. And the one, Meir’s heard, who’s pouring over survivor lists and placing personal ads in DP camp newspapers, desperate to know whether Meir survived the war years, whether he’s grown from a wispy ten-year-old to an unrecognizable young man, one of the rangy survivors scrounging through Europe, eyes darting within their wizened faces.

When begging a ride to Nuremberg, Meir had professed a desperate need to reunite with Elias. His sunken eyes swam in their sockets, almost spilling over. But that was weeks ago, and still Meir is dragging his feet, hiding out at Lewie’s place, always cadging a little more time before making his approach. Lewie doesn’t get it, but he plays along, finding Meir a dishwashing job in the courthouse kitchen, scrounging winter clothes for him, and even finagling a guest pass for the court proceedings so he can catch a glimpse of his brother. Lewie doesn’t have it in him to say no. Not to Meir. Not after marching into Dachau with the Allied Forces last spring.

From his observer’s perch in the courtroom wall, Lewie scans the stoic faces of the Third Reich defendants, translation headsets clamped over their ears. Dapper in their suitcoats or uniforms stripped of ribbons and medals, their hair neatly trimmed, hands folded in their laps, these twenty-one men—Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, the whole stinking bunch—each one would look right at home at a cabinet-level conference table. And Lewie hasn’t a clue how to capture their warped minds, all the monstrous scheming that gave birth to slave labor, mobile death squads, torture cells and gas chambers. How to get beneath the facade, to rip away the glazed surface, the composure. Gnawing at a thumbnail, Lewie glances at the visitors’ gallery. Meir’s rocking in the theater seat, his earphones askew, his jaw working a wad of chewing gum, likely filched from Lewie’s duffle. Just then, the justices from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union enter the courtroom and stride toward their elongated bench, robes flowing. Lewie snaps to and stoops behind his camera, sweat beading at his hairline. His shirt will be drenched by the time this afternoon session adjourns.

When Meir returns to Lewie’s place after scraping and washing the dinner plates in the courthouse kitchen, he finds the flat to be dim, chilled and empty. What a relief after the clatter and isolation of his shift, where the other workers are all German prisoners of war. He looks at no one, speaks to no one, only to the American boss. Lewie’s likely at the courthouse darkroom obsessing over his shots. As usual. Turning on a wall lamp, Meir settles down, cross-legged, in front of his shelves, which he has painstakingly assembled from charred bricks and splintered boards, all salvaged from the ruins of central Nuremberg.

He pulls a small sack of tools from behind the shelves—polishing rags, shards of wood whittled into cleaning tips, little jars of vinegar and cleaning fluid filched from the courthouse kitchen. He cracks each knuckle before starting to polish and organize all the goods he procures on the streets before his shift begins, bartering with Lewie’s PX cigarettes, ground coffee and chocolate bars. His private bank account. Engraved baby spoons, ceramic Bavarian steins with tooled pewter lids, bell-shaped candle snuffers dangling from silver wands, and stoneware jugs of schnapps that had been hoarded as currency during the war. Blackberry, apple and peppermint. As the evening lengthens, he uncorks the mint and takes slow sips, letting the liquor roll over his tongue and slide down his throat, warm.

  Military jeeps bounce past on the cobblestones below, patrolling the courthouse grounds in lazy loops. The window behind Meir’s shrine-like shelving is cracked open, letting in a damp mist and the occasional whine sirens when the MPs respond to a call, likely public drunkenness. Meir’s mind is elsewhere now. Once again he’s famished, his face smashed into the packed dirt path behind the slave laborers’ barracks, a guard’s laced-up jackboot crushing his neck, closing off his windpipe. His striped prisoner pants are pooled at his ankles and his anus, nearly shredded, throbs. Slime leaks onto the backs of his legs in the pre-dawn murk. The guard lifts his boot, pulls a bread roll from his jacket pocket, spits on it, then bends down and wedges it into Meir’s bloody mouth as he’s gasping for air. “Enjoy, little bitch. Just what you’ve been waiting for.” The guard smooths his trousers and strolls off, his footsteps silent on the sodden path. Meir lies still on the frosted ground, cursing the sun under his breath, praying it won’t rise before a trace of strength seeps back into his trembling legs so he can make it to roll call. The bread softens in his mouth, the crust tasting of sawdust and copper.

Meir hears Lewie coming, whistling as he nears the apartment building, the tune light-hearted and the notes crisp. Meir doesn’t know American music, can’t identify the songs. He only knows that Lewie’s renditions sound clean and sharp, like the geometric pattern cut into the crystal goblet on his top shelf, its ring of triangular spears jutting upward toward the rim.

When the door to the downstairs foyer creaks open, Meir slips into the hallway bathroom to wipe his hands with vinegar, hoping to remove any traces of oil, mud, mold and dust before bed. He brushes his teeth with PX toothpaste, brushing until his gums sting, desperate to clear off the filmy sweetness of the schnapps. As he spits and rinses, and rinses again, he can hear Lewie’s boots thudding on the staircase, a steady trudge. Lewie will sit on the edge of his cot, as he always does. He will unlace and pull off his combat boots, and stretch out. His sighs and groans will carry to the hallway john, where Meir will wait a few more minutes before returning to the flat. He’ll take a few deep breaths, run his fingers through his tangled hair, and square his shoulders, steeling himself against Lewie’s friendly chatter, all the small invasions. Elias will be the same way, only so much worse.  He’ll make assumptions about the little brother he’d cast off after entering gymnasium.  When home on break, Elias took to taunting Meir, something he'd never done before, calling him “Little Feigele” when their mother was out of earshot. For nothing. No reason. Just because he was neat. Organized. And now, Elias would prod and prod if given the chance. Some questions may be left unspoken, but they’ll be there always, poised like a scythe. “How did you make it, Little Feigele? You, of all people?”

Lewie’s perched on the edge of his cot when Meir returns, his box of 8 x 10s open on his lap. He’s sifting through his shots of Jackson making his opening statement, reviewing each one before laying it atop the stack of photos shot during the days leading up to the trial.  Meir has seen those early photos, many times. The shot of Reichsmarschall Goering, one-time successor to Hitler and founder of the Gestapo, as he’s hustled off an aircraft, an Allied soldier clasping each arm, a sneer twisting his wet lips. Goering at the rickety table in his prison cell, stirring porridge in a tin plate, his eyebrows peaked in amusement. Goering lounging beneath a woolen blanket on his prison cot, propped up on one elbow, and pretending to read a book. Ever the performer.

“How about this one?” Lewie holds up a photo of Jackson tilting his head toward the justices this morning, his gaze intent, his lips parted just enough to enunciate with restraint.  “Here’s our man, making the case for a fair trial.”

Slipping into English momentarily, Lewie recites, “‘We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.’” Returning to Yiddish, he looks over at Meir. “The guy knows how to string a sentence together.”

“So you say.” Meir rummages in his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, and stumbles to the window to light up. “I couldn’t stay awake.”

‘Dammit, Meir. I asked you not to smoke in here. Not with all my photos nearby.’

“I’m not a child. I won’t spill my fucking milk.”

“This one’s not too bad, right?” He holds up a different photo. “All the rats lined up in the dock.” 

Meir glances at the shot—the composed defendants, arms folded across their chests, translation headsets clamped to their ears, a few wearing sunglasses against the glare of the floodlights. Turning back toward the window, Meir blows smoke rings into the night.

“Must be nice…the private cells, bunks with sheets and blankets, bowls of stew slipped through a slot in the door, toilets in the corner, tables to write on, books to read.”

“It’s prison, for God’s sake. A holding pen. Before the gallows.” Lewie shifts the box of photos to his side, lays the cover on top. “By the way, I saw you watching your brother.”

“You couldn’t have.” Meir flicks his burning cigarette out the window. “He wasn’t there.”

“Don’t lie to me, Meir. At the very least, don’t lie to me.”

Meir weaves his way over to the bureau, takes a balled-up set of flannel pajamas from the bottom drawer. He pulls off his food-stained shirt and his ribbed undershirt, drops them to the floor. Oxblood welts range across his back and shoulder blades, which angle as sharply as bat wings.

Lewie looks away, sliding his box of photos back under the cot. He’d been so moved by Meir’s show of kindness back at the DP camp after the war’s end, by the way he fussed over an orphaned baby named Gertie. Meir had insisted on smoothing her dark hair into a top curl, dabbing drool from her lips, and brushing zwieback crumbs from her checked pinafore before allowing Lewie to snap her picture. The portrait had one aim: to attract adoptive parents for Gertie, who Meir clearly doted on. At the end of the day, after hours spent adjusting collars, patting down cowlicks, coaxing smiles from dozens of children, Lewie returned to his jeep and found Meir hiding on the floor, eyelids swollen and snot smeared across one cheek. He’d pleaded for a lift to Nuremberg, to his brother. And Lewie felt big when he nodded his assent, and lent him his hankie. What a rare chance to do something decent. But how decent is this, really? Hiding Meir, letting him drink himself into a stupor each night.

Lewie had begged off when the other photographers left for a local bierstube earlier that evening, but he hadn’t come straight home. He relishes the silence of the emptied dark room, with its warm red light. He likes the chemical smell, so sharp and astringent, so distinct from the smell of feces, vomit and rotting flesh, all the fumes that choke him in his sleep most nights, suffocating him within the wooden frame of his canvas cot. The lingering stench from the April day when his unit stormed Dachau. In his half-sleep, the stink wafts from his sleeves, his underarms, his groin, his rough sheets until he jolts upright, only to heave into the enameled basin he keeps at bedside. Meir will rise from his blankets on the floor, bring Lewie a glass of water to rinse his mouth and then a bottle of schnapps. They’ll pass it back and forth, their lanky forms just two hunched heaps in the darkness, one on the cot, the other on the floor. In the dawn’s light, the two could be taken for brothers, both of them with pale faces, high cheekbones and deep creases between their eyebrows, but none of that is visible now. After they’ve passed the bottle for a while, Meir will hum a lullaby from his childhood in Leipzig, a soft, seesawing rendition of Shlof Mayn Kind. Lewie doesn’t know the tune, only its narcotic qualities. The pounding in his chest will slow, his hands will stop trembling. He knows better than to thank Meir, or even to lightly pat his shoulder. That would wreck everything.

Meir tends to him on those nights, not suspecting Lewie’s failures as an Army photographer at liberation—his aversion to the stinking survivors and their outstretched arms, his inability to frame shots of the barely breathing, his failure to stop shaking and to hold down his K-rations, his dash out of the camp gates to the lawn beyond where he vomited and vomited until nothing more came up. And then, his return to the camp, the tang of bile in his mouth and a dried-up raisin bar in his hand, rummaged from his knapsack. A raisin bar he holds out to a cadaverous young man propped against a barracks wall, his legs splayed in front of him. With a skeletal arm, the prisoner snatches the bar with unexpected force, wolfs it down, only to roll over, spit up and die, his teeth dark with mashed raisins. Meir’s nocturnal ministrations…Lewie doesn’t deserve them, not by any stretch, certainly not from this kid with saw-toothed scars stretching across his back. When the two of them wake in the dawn, with bad breath, bloodshot eyes and shivery jitters, they never speak of the night.

Before leaving the courthouse last night, Lewie had pulled his leftover negatives from clothespins clipped to a drying line in the darkroom, flicked off the red bulbs, and slipped into the next room, to the light table. He pored over his shots one last time, searching for one he may have missed, one that would better reflect prosecutor Jackson’s ominous warning, quoted in all the news reports: “…these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust.” The shots he’s got are okay, Lewie supposes. Nobody else got anything better. Each of the twenty-one defendants declared nicht schuldig, or some variation of that. Not guilty. Every last one, with shoulders braced, necks elongated, starting with Goering. “I declare myself in the sense of the indictment not guilty.” His declaration a needle to the eye…the sharp tone, the clipped delivery, the speed with which he turned his face away and sidled back to his seat in the dock. Lewie hunches over the Goering negatives and examines the reverse images with a magnifying loupe. What he sees is a stout man standing stiffly in a Luftwaffe uniform, his mouth a tight line, his gaze flat and hard. The picture of implacable assurance. These shots aren’t enough. The work never feels like enough as he leaves the courthouse and bends into the November wind to get back to his flat. But on this night, maybe there’s something he can get right. He’ll make a quick stop before returning to his billet, where Meir’s undoubtedly soused again and polishing his stash for the umpteenth time, buffing away invisible grime.

Prosecutor Jackson may have wowed them with his classy opening remarks, but several days in, he’s losing them. Oh, man, is he losing them. The press gallery sits half-empty, while the Palace of Justice corridors are lousy with journalists lounging against the whitewashed walls, doodling in their notepads and spewing cigarette smoke while back in the courtroom, prosecutors read document after document into evidence, ever so slowly to accommodate simultaneous translation into four languages.

When he can tear his gaze away from the opulent legs of the lovely female correspondent in the third row, Lewie shoots a few photos of the slouching Goering, the big cheese whose photos are always in demand by the news services. But, more and more lately, he’s drawn to Rudolph Hess, the supposed amnesiac with the charcoal eyes and caterpillar brows, the nut case who used to be Hitler’s right-hand man until he took it upon himself to fly to Britain with a so-called peace plan. Lands himself in a British POW camp, ditched by the fuehrer. And now he’s trying to save his ass, claiming memory loss. And man, he’s playing the part, acting like he’s seated in the balcony of some German opera house, waiting calmly for the curtains to part. Arms folded across his chest, a hint of bemusement across his lips, he studies the ceiling, as if there were cherubim cavorting on a fresco up there. Oh, to catch him out, to prove him a fraud.

  Lewie steps back from his camera, unfurls his spine and stretches his arms overhead. All week he’s been waiting, expecting Meir’s brother, Elias. Didn’t he get the note? Lewie’s sure he’d slipped it under the right door. Each evening in the darkroom, as he bathes fresh prints in the fixative tray, he keeps an ear open for angry voices in the adjoining workroom. For someone demanding to know where Meir’s been hidden. At night, he tosses about, unable to get comfortable on his cot. Each time the apartment building’s entry door whines open, he freezes, runs his hands along the cot’s frame, and waits for the sound of boots bounding up the stairway. In the chow line at lunch, Lewie grips his metal tray tightly, ready to wield it as a weapon should Elias sneak up, grab him by the collar, and demand to know where he’s been keeping Meir. But nothing happens.

Meir’s been a bit warmer lately, which gives Lewie the heebie-jeebies. One evening, Meir brings home a bowl of tapioca pudding from the courthouse kitchen. The next evening, he lifts an ivory chess set from his storage shelves, and offers it to Lewie, who refuses to accept it. Still, they set up the board on the floor, and start a match, though Meir keeps interrupting, sharing memories from his childhood in Leipzig, as if it hadn’t all gone to hell…as if he could go back tomorrow for a plate of his mother’s kasha varnishkes, or a tug-of-war with Dudel, their pet beagle, or a rainy afternoon bent over a model airplane kit, each piece in its place. To hear Meir tell it, he had the lightest touch in Leipzig when it came to piecing together the nearly weightless slips of balsa wood and laying on the delicate decals. One day he would learn to fly a plane, he said, leaning back on his elbows and popping smoke rings toward the attic’s pitched ceiling. Lewie let him have his smokes. At this point, why not?

Lewie has to hand it to prosecution team, led by Jackson. They know when to shift gears, get the reporters’ butts back in their seats and blast the boredom off the Nazis’ faces. The defendants may have been amused by transcripts read into the record that morning about Goering’s phone calls orchestrating the takeover of Austria, but they weren’t laughing now. With the courtroom darkened, a projector unspooled footage from the concentration camps onto a screen hung from a courtroom wall—footage that would one day seem almost “stock,” but this day left some of the defendants slumped and gasping, heads bowed, bitter expressions of disbelief slipping from their lips. And some, weeping openly. For Lewie, it was a shit show, the prisoners’ dock too dark to get good shots, the film screen filled with nightmarish scenes, some of which he knew all too well from liberation day at Dachau. The gaping mouths and bulging eyes of stacked corpses; the blackened, ashy remains of bodies burned atop rail beds; the use of bulldozers to shove the bone-thin dead into trenches, the massive shovels sending up a roiling mix of loose dark soil and grotesquely angled elbows, pelvises and shoulders. Bodies upon bodies. When the lights come up, Goering alone seems unmoved, if glum. But, Hess—his face collapses, as if sucked into an internal funnel cloud, before he hunches over and covers it with an outstretched hand. Other defendants sit stock still, and wipe away a stray tear or two or stare into their own laps. Lewie works as fast as he can, cursing how long it takes to pull the film cartridges in and out of his camera. Fucking A. If only he could freeze the moment.

Meir still can’t believe how much food is left uneaten by the courtroom personnel. The leftover dinner rolls, the boiled potatoes and dried-up carrot sticks, the half-eaten slices of pudding pie. While scraping the plates, he’ll toss the best morsels into his mouth or his apron pocket. As he snacks on a few untouched green beans tonight, his back to the center of the kitchen, he hears his name called out. “Meir. I’m looking for Meir Beckman.” That voice. Spitting the chewed-up beans into the trash can, he turns to see Elias, who blanches. Struggling to catch a breath, Elias wavers and drops to his knees on the dank floor, which is slippery with spilled gravy and smashed scrapings. When Meir kneels down to his brother, Elias yanks him close and weeps into the side his neck, all slobbery. Like a child. Like a goddam child. The other workers, all those German prisoners of war, keep to their tasks, pretending to be unaware.

“Get up, Elias,” Meir whispers. “Not here. Not in front of these pricks.”

Meir pushes away. “Stop it,” he hisses, rising up. “Right now.”

He grabs Elias from behind, under his armpits, and pulls him up. “Come on. Quit it.” He brushes the scraps and crumbs from his brother’s guard uniform, and for the one-millionth time, he relives the night when Elias left for the Leipzig train station. Meir had been beside himself, clinging to Elias’ legs, pleading, “Don’t go. Take me, too, Elias. Please. Please. Pleeease.” Their mother pulled them apart, grabbed Meir by the arm, squeezed hard. “You’ll go next, Meir. I promise. But not tonight.” She pressed him into the coat closet and locked the door. “It’s just for an hour, mein baby. One hour.” In the darkness, he pummeled the closed door and screamed, “No!” until he heard the front door slam. Yanking one of Elias’ overcoats from the rack, he curled up beneath it on the floor, enveloped in the smell of mildewed galoshes and mothballs. Digging through the coat’s pockets, he found a peppermint, which he slipped into his mouth. It was sticky and flecked with lint.

Lewie stands among the crowd gathered on Sunday afternoon in Hauptmarkt Square, feeling the cold air tickle his nostrils. A troupe of acrobats slips carefully along a tightrope strung six stories high, their curved balancing poles quavering like insect antennae. A lilting recording of Schon ist die Nacht muffles the sounds of sniffles and coughs, and the rasping whispers of children. Lewie still can’t believe it, Rudolph Hess “regaining” his memory the day after the atrocity film was shown, claiming he’s fit to stand trial. Maybe he got tired of being the lonely weirdo, the detested oddball and wanted back into the club. Who the hell knows? At least Lewie had a cache of good shots saved up, enough for newspaper photo spreads on the day Hess flipped his story. His commanding officer was pleased, really pleased. And that gave Lewie a bit of hope. Maybe he’ll have a future beyond shaving corned beef and slapping it onto marble rye at his parents’ deli counter in Queens. He’d like to kvell about the compliments. Okay, he’d like to tell Meir, who’s gone. Just a note left on the cot. “I thought you were a mensch.” And bare floor where his shelves of tchotchkes and schnapps used to be. Only dust balls now, drifting from side to side in the draft from the window.

A breeze raises goosebumps along the back of Lewie’s neck as he watches the spectacle, the daring feats, so high above the neatly stacked piles of rubble rimming the square, the lacy building facades that hold up nothing, the square full of Germans in their winter coats, their faces washed and hair groomed, no longer the desperate scavengers hunting for the used coffee grounds or cigarette butts discarded by occupation forces. A rope net sways like a hammock beneath the high wire, a net almost wide enough to break a plunge onto the meticulously swept flagstones.

And there. Near the front row, there he is. Meir, with his brother’s arm draped across his shoulders. Elias leans in close, almost whispering in Meir’s ear. Meir pulls a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and places two between his lips. He lights them with a silver lighter and hands one to Elias. They step apart a bit, each sending up smoke rings that dissipate quickly in the wind. They are competing, and finding this hilarious. Lewie’s eyes well up in the blasted wind. The acrobats blur for a moment as they inch their way across the wire. As they come back into focus, Lewie shoulders his way through the crowd, edging past immoveable matrons and bare-headed men, their upturned faces chapped with cold.

As Lewie approaches the brothers from behind, the crowd erupts into shrieks. One of the female tightrope walkers lost her footing and she’s falling, her arms and legs flailing like an overturned water bug as her balance pole wings after her. She lands on her back, and bounces up just in time to grab the pole and raise her arms in victory. The screams turn to laughter, the crowd clapping with glee. Except for Meir, who vomits onto the paving stones. The nearby spectators leap back, forming a rough circle around the brothers, hands held to their faces against the stench.

“Schmutz.” Uttered in a whisper.

German. Yiddish. The word’s the same. Filth. Lewie spins around, looking for who spoke. Placid faces, that’s all he sees.

A few feet away, Elias puts an arm around Meir, tries to steady him. “The girl’s alright, boychik,” he says, in Yiddish. “It’s just part of the act.” Meir’s still bent from the waist. “Come, now. Come on.” Elias tightens his grip, and shepherds him through the crowd and down a debris-lined side street. Out of view.

Lewie rubs his hands together, blows on them. Stamps his feet to try to get warm. His teeth are chattering, the shivers won’t stop. Feeling short of breath, as he often did while in the field, he pulls his camera from his shoulder. Maybe there’s a good feature shot here. Acrobats amid the ruins. Spectators in the rubble. He lowers his gaze to the viewfinder, breathes deeply and slowly, until his heart stops racing. An old trick from combat days, it still seems to work. Maybe he’ll pay a call tomorrow to Elias’s billet. Introduce himself. Bring a carton of Old Golds, a couple bottles of Coke from the PX and maybe a chocolate bar or two. Maybe that’s the thing to do. If they’ll let him in.

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Kathy Bergen is a fiction writer and journalist based in Chicago. She’s working on short stories set in the post-WWII era. Her work has appeared in Consequence, The McNeese Review and The Briar Cliff Review. As a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, she covered economic issues facing the region. A graduate of the University of Illinois, she was also a fellow in the National Press Foundation’s program on China’s rise, held in Shanghai in 2014.