When the Warflowers Bloomed

He turned slowly and saw her.  She stood forty feet away.  She wore a ragged black shirt and striped skirt.  Her hands hung at her sides.  A yellow star was sewn at her breast, and her black hair was short and stringy.  Her skirt, misshapen like a sack, hung unevenly around bony legs.  Her eyes were peepholes in deep hollows.  She stood in the sunshine below a blue sky and framed against barbed wire stretched between poles in front of white birch trees.  She shuffled closer, never moving her eyes from him.  Her leg gave way, but she caught herself with a slight turn, a motion of clear but tenuous poise.  Mark’s heart skipped.  A strange attraction to her—pleasant in its sensation—gripped him.  But his mind screamed to go back to the things he understood, his men and the war.  But her presence touched him deeply and flashed an instinct of warmth.  His sorrow for her gradually awakened his long-standing loneliness.

Mark moved toward her as his dog Spitz did around a strange female, cocking his head and angling toward her.  She was awful to look at, the most dirty and haggard woman he had ever seen.  Her complexion was leathery with sunken cheeks; her thin face was parched, and her collarbones poked out.  She wore battered sandals.  She smelled, and neat purple numbers were tattooed on her left forearm.  But he sensed a subtle previous beauty in her.  He had an astonishing desire to touch her.  He edged closer, and her nose came below his chin.  Suddenly, his rage exploded.  “Those filthy Kraut swine.  What did they do to these people?  What did they do to her?”  

He batted his canteen three times and screamed silently.  He glared to the west, above the wire to the green crowns of the trees, to the blue sky, to someplace far from this hell and this poor woman.  When he turned back to her, he still wanted to touch her.  “She was a woman once,” he whispered, and he put his fingers on her cheek.  Tears slipped from his eyes when he touched her, and his loneliness fell away.

#

A clear light struggled through Liese’s mind.  She tried to grasp that this tall soldier was her liberator.  She had believed that at the window.  But he looked at her in disbelief; he was afraid to come near her.  He turned fierce.  He struck his canteen, and he spoke harshly.  Terror gripped her for what this uniformed man might do to her.

Unexpectedly, he looked away to the sky and trees, his lips moving silently.  When he turned back to her, he was changed.  He reached out and gently touched her cheek.  His eyes awed her.  They filled with tears and turned from cool and pale to deep blue.  A light flashed in her mind at that moment.  She was unafraid because she knew when he showed her his tears he would never hurt her.  He was a tall knight, a swaying soldier, and a kind man.  Her throat loosened, and she wept.  A cracked word slipped from her lips.  “Americans?”  She brushed away her tears, raising her hand to her eyes without bowing her head or bending her wrist.  “Americans?” she said again.

“Yes.”  He nodded rapidly.  “We’re American soldiers.  I’m Mark Brayden, Captain in the United States Army.  What is your name?”

“I’m prisoner—” She stopped and looked at him with tears in her eyes.  She raised her left hand; he raised his, and their fingers touched. 

“Liese,” she said in a clear, soft tone.  “My name is Liese Weissman.”

“Liese,” he said with a sad smile.

“Mark,” she replied, and laced her fingers in his.

#

      Mark simmered with warmth as though her touch was an embrace.  He gazed deep into her eyes, and