The Green Apple Tree

Just the opposite of Cheruskerweg Street, the final stop on a trip that began with a long drive for a round of shots, then continued with a flight to New York and a seemingly endless voyage across the Atlantic that ended with the sight of his father waving from the dock at Le Havre. The ‘49 Lincoln sedan was waiting too―The Colonel had shipped it over as well―and the back seat swallowed Thomas up as it always had. Then the long drive to Wiesbaden and two years of struggling to comprehend it all.
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What happened to all those houses, Dad?
They were bombed in the war, Son.
Who bombed them, Dad?
We did, Son.
They settled into a two-story stone house on Cheruskerweg Street and hired a live-in maid, the widow of a German soldier who brought with her a son. She was Katie and he was Wolfgang, but everybody called him Wolfie, and they moved into the basement and slept on cots distanced from the furnace according to season. And there was Katie’s boyfriend, Fritz, a jocular baker who prepared wonderfully decorated birthday cakes for family occations. Like Katie and Wolfie, he spoke little English, but it didn’t matter, because humor was his language of choice. At their first meeting, he bought his hand up in front of Thomas’s face and teasingly wiggled the stump of a missing finger—lost to shrapnel during the war, according to Katie—and frame it with a wide, silly grin, so Thomas would have to grin too. A wound of war turned tool for laughter.
The house sat at an intersection where five arteries converged, and a traffic lane was cut between two adjoining streets created a wedge of wooded lawn that served as a playground where the neighborhood children would gather. Katie told Thomas’s parents that several of the children on the block, like Wolfie, had been left fatherless by the war, and The Colonel instructed him to report any bullying or abuse, should it happen.
Mostly it was marbles that they played, and at first Thomas could only observe and try to interpret rules and strategy. Occasionally he would be addressed in a querulous manner, usually by one of the older boys, and always in German, and he quickly learned that just saying “American” was usually enough to deflect their attention back to their game. For the most part they would ignore him—the noncomprehending, mute spectator—and except for an occasional bike ride, Thomas came to spend increasingly more of his time behind the stone columns and iron pickets that encircled their home.
There was a green apple tree in the backyard with large, accessible branches, and The Colonel constructed a treehouse into it over the course of a single weekend. Not a house, really―there was no roof or walls―but an open platform of planks and beams wedged between the four major branches that was accessed by a ladder of pine boards affixed to the trunk.
One day as Thomas was climbing to the tree house, he noticed that one of the limbs stretched to a deck fronting his parents’ bedroom on the second floor, and the deck extended under one of his windows as well, the deck and the tree could provide anonymous passage. He was not given to mischief, but the idea of a secret passage gave him a sense of empowerment and he learned to ignore the furtive glances of the two women that would occasionally float to the kitchen window, then quickly fall away.
Eventually Thomas started first grade at the school on the Air Force base and began lessons in German, and this, along with his daily interactions with Katie and Wolfie, granted a fluency that would enable an occasional inclusion in the marble games on the traffic island, at which he proved to be remarkably inept. His playmates generally fell into three categories―disinterested, amused, and grudgingly tolerant―and more and more of his time went to stretching out on the planks high in the green apple tree, his back resting against one of the branches as he ate the fruit plucked he from the swaying boughs. He loved the taste of the green apples, and would eat them even though he knew they would bring a bellyache; eat them as the sun and the laughter of the children faded from the traffic island; eat them down to the core and spit the seeds into the air over his American-made sneakers until his tummy was hard and sore. Then his mother would call and, as if in defeat, he would force himself onto the limb that would deliver him to the deck and his room and his bed, there to continue his desperate struggle to understand how he should feel as the son of a man who would have widowed a maid, taken the fathers from marble-playing boys, and removed the finger of a baker.