The Last Christmas

My darling Rose,

Merry Christmas.

The Germans have us surrounded. It is Christmas Eve, and I am in a foxhole in Belgium, eating a frozen K-ration for my Christmas dinner. The cold is unlike anything I have ever known. It gets into your bones, into your teeth, into the space behind your eyes. I have not taken off my boots in four days. I have not slept more than an hour at a time in a week. But none of that matters, because I am thinking of you, and that keeps me warm.

I have been trying to remember every Christmas we spent together. There were only two — 1941 and 1942, before I shipped out. But I remember them as if they were painted on the inside of my eyelids. The lights on your mother’s tree. The way the tinsel caught the lamplight and threw it around the room like sparks. The smell of her lasagna — tell Mama I said her lasagna was the best in the world, tell her I would trade a thousand K-rations for a single bite of it. And you, Rose. You in that red sweater, the one with the reindeer on it, sitting on the floor by the tree, handing me presents wrapped in newspaper because there was no money for wrapping paper. I still have the scarf you gave me that year. It is wrapped around my neck right now. It smells of you, I think. Or maybe that is just my imagination. Maybe I am imagining so hard that I have conjured you here, in this frozen hole, beside me.

The sky is full of stars tonight. It is strange to say that in the middle of a war — the sky should be full of fire and smoke, but no, it is full of stars. Clear and cold and indifferent. I look at them and think about how you used to lie beside me on the roof of your building in Brooklyn, pointing out constellations you had learned from your father. You knew all their names. You taught me half of them. I have forgotten most of them now, but I remember the way your hand moved as you traced the shapes in the air, and that is enough.

If I die here, Rose — and I might, the fighting is bad and getting worse — I want you to know that I am not afraid. I have your photograph in my breast pocket, over my heart. I can feel it pressing against me when I breathe. It is creased and faded and the corner is torn where I dropped it in the mud in Normandy, but it is you, and that is all that matters. I put it there because I figured: if a bullet is going to get me, it will have to go through you first. And you’re the strongest thing I know. So I figure I’m safe.

Tell my brothers to take care of you. Tell my mother I loved her. Tell my father I tried to be brave. And tell yourself, every day, that you were loved by a man who thought you were the best thing that ever happened to Brooklyn, which is the best place on earth, which means you are the best thing on earth.

I have to stop now. Sergeant Kowalski is passing around a canteen of something that is not quite water and not quite whiskey, and the men are trying to sing carols. They sound terrible. But it is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard, because it means we are still alive, still fighting, still here.

Tell the world we didn’t surrender.

All my love, forever, Bobby

P.S. — If you ever go to Bastogne after the war, stand on the hill outside the town and look east. That’s where I am now. That’s where I’m looking at the stars. The same stars you can see from Brooklyn. The same stars we counted from your roof. I’ll be watching them with you.