When We Meet Again Read Online Free Page A

said, his English rolling off his tongue as naturally as if he’d been born with it, albeit with the tendrils of an accent. “I will work. I want to thank you again for bringing me out here this early.”
    “It’s nothing.” Harold turned his attention back to the horizon. Peter wondered if he was thinking about what lay east, across the ocean: the terrible war that neither of them were a part of. Peter had been captured on the battlefield; Harold, some ten years his senior, had been assigned to a military police unit and kept stateside to guard prisoners while his friends shipped off to defend the country. Now, they were both stuck here. “I like mornings like this too,” Harold said after a moment. “Just don’t let the foreman catch you slacking off, you hear?”
    “Right, yes, of course.” Peter smiled another apology and hoisted his cane knife over his shoulder, turning east again. He would work facing the sunrise so that he could watch the sky turning all its brilliant colors. As the sun ascended, the day would get hotter, the mosquitoes would swarm with a constant, gentle buzz, and the humidity would grow thick enough to choke on. But for now, the world was perfect.
    In Holzkirchen, the small Bavarian town where Peter had been raised, it had been the sunsets that sometimes looked like this, although the colors had presented themselves in reverse: first the milky blue, then the violet, then the deeper indigo, and finally cobalt, blackening like oil as they faded into the thin line where the earth met the heavens. It seemed strange to Peter that the colors that had heralded the end of a day in Germany were the same ones that announced the coming of a new one here, across the ocean. His ending had become his beginning.
    Peter easily found the line of demarcation between yesterday’s work and today’s. In a few hours, he’d be elbow to elbow with a dozen other prisoners, so he treasured this time alone, and he appreciated that Harold wasn’t hovering. He let himself imagine for a moment that it was because Harold trusted him, but of course that wasn’t it. As much as Harold showed kindness, he knew well that Peter was still the enemy.
    Peter lowered the cane knife, grasping its wooden handle and feeling the heft of it in his hands. He’d never seen one before arriving in Florida. It resembled a Buschmesser, a machete, but the blade was shorter and thinner, perfect for slashing through the towering sugarcane stalks. The knives had hooked tips, which helped the workers to pick up the felled crop, but still, the men had to bend time and time again to scoop up the cane, hauling it to wagons nearby. At the end of each day, they were all aching and coated in the sticky syrup that oozed all around them.
    The dawn sky grew lighter as Peter fell into the rhythm of his labor. As his knife slashed against the base of stalk after stalk, he began to play a familiar game: calling to mind a memory from home with each swipe of the blade.
    Swoosh: His mother’s hands as she kneaded bread.
    Thwack: His father reading the paper in the morning, his knuckles white around a cup of coffee.
    Swoosh: Franz, trying on Peter’s field cap the day before he left for the front, laughing because it was still too big for his head.
    Thwack: All three of them framed in the doorway, the sun setting behind their small cottage, waving as Peter walked away for the last time.
    There were bad memories too: the way his parents used to scream at each other sometimes when they thought the boys were asleep; the nights when there wasn’t enough food on the table; the way his father’s face darkened when Peter dared speak out against his political beliefs; the morning the Kleinmanns, who ran the butcher shop down the street, were dragged out of their home by the SS and shoved into the back of a truck, never to be seen again.
    But mostly, Peter felt nostalgia for the land he hadn’t seen in four years. And on mornings like this one, with the sky