Soldier Doll by Jennifer Gold Page B

rifles and the desert, wondering if her father’s uniform will protect him. From dust. From the sun. From bullets and shrapnel. Her stomach tightens.
    Dr. McLeod stands again. “Come back in a week. I’ll send it off to the lab. I should have some results for you by next Thursday.” She leads them to the door. “And don’t worry. We’ll take good care of the little guy.”
    She shakes hands with both Elizabeth and her father. “The soldier doll! Imagine.” Dr. McLeod has a faraway look on her face now, as if she has traveled into the silent figure’s past and somehow found herself stuck there. “It’s too bad he can’t talk,” she says, half to herself. “He must have so many stories to tell. I wonder where he’s been.”

Chapter 5
    Berlin, Germany
    1939
    â€œPapa?” Hanna Roth peered around the storeroom door of her father’s Auguststrasse antique shop. “What’s this?” Carefully, she presented her father with the small wooden doll she’d found wrapped in an old blanket and tucked in a dark corner of the back cupboard. Now that she was forbidden from attending school, she often helped her father out with tasks around the shop. Cleaning the back cupboard was a job she’d taken on without being asked—her father was an excellent businessman, but a hopeless housekeeper.
    Franz Roth blinked twice as he looked up from his bookkeeping to stare at the wooden figure before him. It had been years since he’d seen or even thought of the little thing, or the strange circumstances under which he had acquired it. He took off his glasses and placed them on his desk to take a better look.
    â€œAh,” he said. He took the figurine from his daughter and sat back in his chair.
    â€œIt’s strange, is it not, Papa?” Hanna peered over his shoulder. “I’ve never seen such a toy.”
    â€œNo.” Franz nodded. His voice sounded far away. “It is very unusual, indeed.” He set the doll down on his desk and stared at it hard, remembering. He was silent for a few moments.
    â€œPapa?” said Hanna, questioning. “Is everything all right?”
    â€œOf course, Liebchen .” Franz straightened. “I was just thinking about the doll. About how I came to have it.”
    Hanna’s curiosity was piqued. “Is it not just an ordinary toy, then?” She searched her father’s expression. “There is something special about it?”
    â€œYou could say that, yes.” Franz put his glasses back on and sat back in his chair once again. “Sit down, Hanna. I will tell you the story of the little soldier doll.”
    . . .
    It was at Ypres. “What kind of name is Ypres?” he remembers joking with his friend Max. “Never trust a town that starts with a Y .” He and Max had found this enormously funny at the time. He had met Max Reinholz his first day of training, when they were both seventeen, and despite their very different backgrounds—Max was the son of a prominent Christian lawyer; he, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper—they had quickly become inseparable. “There go the Troublesome Twins,” people would joke when they went by. “Troublesome” they earned because they were always engaged in some sort of prank. If a soldier came back to his camp to find his undergarments waving bravely from a pole, he could be sure the Troublesome Twins were behind it. Their commanding officer threatened them daily with everything from disgraceful discharge to a public whipping, but in reality he enjoyed their hijinks as a welcome distraction from the monotony of trench warfare and the hours spent in cold rain in muddy little holes, picking at lice and bargaining with God not to be annihilated by the latest round of shelling.
    It wasn’t raining when he found the doll. He remembers because it was one of the only moments of reprieve from rain in his