When We Meet Again Read Online Free Page B

awash in beauty, he felt particularly close to home.
    Home. Heimat. That was the word on Peter’s tongue when he first saw her.
    She was walking from the east, the first in a line of four local laborers who emerged from the sugarcane sea onto the main path. She was wearing a red cotton dress, frayed and tattered at the edges, and the way she was bathed in the morning light, set against the purpling dawn, made her look like someone who didn’t belong here: a film star, perhaps, or an angel. Her long, brown hair danced behind her on the morning breeze, and the way she moved was both gentle and strong at the same time. Peter was rendered immobile, his cane knife paused almost comically in the air.
    Perhaps feeling attention upon her, she turned in Peter’s direction, and their eyes met. She didn’t blink, and neither did he. Instead, they held each other’s gaze for a long moment, both of them motionless, as if life had simply frozen in place. Or maybe, Peter would think as he replayed it in his head later, it was his imagination. Maybe she hadn’t stopped at all. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed him.
    But she had. He knew she had. She finally looked away and began walking again, leading the others, who seemed younger than she. He watched her as she paused to let them go ahead of her, into another maze of sugarcane. And then, just when he thought he would lose her forever, she turned, looking over her shoulder for just a moment. Their eyes met again, and it was enough to make Peter feel buoyant and hopeful as she walked on, vanishing into the field.
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    He dreamt of her that night, the girl in the red dress. It was strange, actually—not just the fact that he was seeing her in his dreams, but also the idea that for the first time in almost a year and a half, his slumber was sweet and peaceful rather than restless and troubled. Since that terrible night in the African desert, the night his best friend, Otto, had died in his arms, he hadn’t slept without dreaming fitfully of blood and death.
    Peter had been part of the Afrika Korps , and though he’d heard terrible things about the conditions for Hitler’s armies marching across Europe, he couldn’t imagine things being much worse than they were for him and his fellow soldiers. The sand was everywhere, endless, stinging, vicious, and there were some days when Peter couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a sip of water. They had followed General Rommel there, but then Rommel had returned abruptly to Germany in March of 1943, saying he needed to convince the führer of the severity of the situation on the African front. But he hadn’t returned, and everything had deteriorated. General von Arnim and the Italian, General Messe, had taken over Rommel’s command, and it hadn’t taken long for Peter to understand that the men didn’t know what they were doing.
    Otto had died there, and Peter could never forgive the forces that had conspired to make such a tragedy occur. Otto had grown up just down the lane from Peter’s family, and the two had been like brothers since they were three years old. They’d been just a month apart in age, and even with the German economy collapsing around them, they’d used their imaginations to conjure an embarrassment of riches when they were boys. They were always hunting treasure, imagining themselves to be great adventurers at sea, and they had made a pact when they were ten years old that one day, they would explore the world together. They’d only been eleven when Hitler had begun his rise to power, and they’d been alone in their dislike of the man, whom they both secretly agreed resembled a rodentlike pirate named Ratte from a chapter book they had read the previous summer. But it seemed that all Germany was in love with Hitler, especially the families of both boys, and so they had to escape to their tree house in the woods in order to whisper made-up tales of the dastardly Pirate Ratte who had fooled the country into