Stones From the River (53 page)

A
LEXANDER
S
TURM INSISTED ON BEING PRESENT WHEN HIS WIFE WAS
questioned about her parents. Stunned that his request had been granted, he sat next to her; yet, his one act of assertion had drained him so of his fighting spirit, that he could only listen silently as she denied any knowledge of her parents’ plans to escape. He admired how calmly she lied, how regally she held up her head. She hadn’t looked that composed the night her parents had left in a car they’d bought on the black market. They’d been urging Eva to come with them, south, and across the border into Switzerland, where Eva’s brothers had settled after completing their studies.

“You know I’d go if Alexander came along.…” She was crying, her eyes blurred behind her boyish glasses.

Alexander told her again it was a lot less safe—to drive through Germany like that—than to wait out the war in Burgdorf. “It can’t last much longer,” he said, and he listed all the laws her parents were breaking. “Simply being out at night, not wearing the yellow star, owning valuables…” He felt furious with Eva’s father, who was practically helpless, a burden, yet was prepared to risk his wife’s and
daughter’s lives with his impossible scheme for escape. “You can be stopped. Arrested. Shot.”

And now Eva had to deal with the aftermath.

He was convinced the officer didn’t believe her when she said she’d last seen her parents five days before. No, she had not noticed anything unusual. Her father had been resting in the living room—“he’s an invalid, as you certainly must know”—while she and her mother had made potato pancakes in the kitchen. No, her husband had worked late that evening. No, her parents did not own a car. No …

Several times during the interrogation Alexander sensed Eva glancing at him as if for confirmation, but he felt paralyzed with fear. He’d always been able to count on himself to do the proper thing, to schedule and manage his life as well as his work, to follow the law. He couldn’t believe his stupidity at having demanded to be here with Eva. If both of them were to be arrested, he wouldn’t be able to do anything for her. Or myself, he thought, his palms wet.

He was shocked when he and Eva were allowed to leave. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, the sun on his forehead, he wanted to cry with gratitude. The sky was crisp and blue, and the wind carried the scent of the river meadows and the cooing of pigeons. Eva’s arm locked into his, he hurried her home, all along checking over his shoulder, positive they were being followed. He didn’t answer her until they were inside their locked apartment.

“What is it?” She grasped him by the hands. Behind her glasses her eyes looked magnified.

He slumped against the wall. “We have to hide you. We—”

“Wait. If I wanted to hide, I could have gone with my parents.”

“There’ll be other questions. They’ll come for you again.”

“And I’ll answer them. As I did today.”

“We were lucky today. You heard what they said, that they’ll contact you if they need to know more.”

“Your hands are ice cold.”

He pulled them from her. “Your parents should have thought of this before they—”

“Maybe you should have thought of this before you refused to come with us.”

“I didn’t make you stay behind.”

“Oh, but you did,” she said softly. “I’m still here because of you.”

He drew her close, his chest heaving. “I don’t want to lose you, Eva.” But her body felt stiff in his arms, and she turned her face away from him. “I’m sorry.” He thought of the stories he and Eva had heard and retold to one another to keep up their courage, stories of courage—about the doctor who’d joined a group of his Jewish patients about to be transported to Poland, the young woman who’d accompanied her Jewish husband to the KZ. Until today Alexander had believed that he, too, would make that choice. But today he had tasted the danger, had felt the power of the enemy. He wished he had the courage of the doctor, of the woman, but what he couldn’t stop thinking was,
fools.… Fools.

“We have to hide you, Eva,” he said.

“You need to hide,” Trudi Montag told Eva that evening.

“Did Alexander talk with you?”

“No, I heard it from Jutta Malter. She told me about the interrogation this afternoon. I wanted to come right over, but I thought it would be better to wait until after dark.”

“Alexander is after me to go into hiding. I don’t want to.”

“Of course not. No one wants to hide. But sometimes it’s necessary. At least for a while.” Trudi hoisted herself onto the Danish sofa with the teak armrests.

“I’m so afraid that something happened to my parents. I wouldn’t even know.… And I can’t imagine hiding in some strange place.”

“It doesn’t have to be a strange place.”

Eva frowned.

“Think of it as … a visit. To a friend. An old school friend.”

“Oh, no. I’m not putting you and your father in danger.”

Trudi thought of Frau Neimann, who never once had shown concern for the risk taken by those who hid her. “That’s all very admirable,” she told Eva, “but not—”

“A few weeks from now they will have forgotten about my parents.”

“Good. Maybe then it’ll be all right for you to surface.”

“In the meantime, they’ll come to your house and find me and arrest you and your father in the process.”

“Come here.” Trudi motioned to the sofa. Her polished leather shoes dangled high above the parquet floor.

Eva sat down next to Trudi, her spine as straight as it had been in
school—an example of good posture. The many tiny pleats of her skirt spread around her. She didn’t look at Trudi but at her stuffed owls and sparrows and robins and swallows, preserved on the tops of the bookshelves in eternal poses of flight.

“They wouldn’t find you,” Trudi said.

“You have a potion that will make me invisible, right?”

“Let’s say—” Trudi hesitated. “Let’s say we’re prepared.”

“My cat lives in a railroad station.”

“What?” Eva blinked, still half asleep. A boy’s face was floating above her, blond hair swinging above his eyebrows. All at once she remembered Trudi bringing her here during the night, showing her a tunnel before she’d made up a bed for her on the kitchen floor near the cellar door.

“My cat lives in a railroad station.”

Eva fumbled for her glasses. The boy was bending over her. Beyond him, a woman slept, curled on her side, her back toward them.

“People feed my cat. Every day.”

“What a lucky cat.”

He nodded. “She doesn’t need much.”

“What’s your name?” Eva linked her arms beneath her neck.

“Konrad.”

She almost said, “Eva Sturm,” but figured it would be better for the boy not to know her last name if he ever were questioned. “You can call me Eva.”

“Do you like to watch cats eat?”

“How do they eat?”

“Tidy. Not like dogs. Dogs slobber all over the place.”

Trudi came into the kitchen with a bucket of coals and opened the front of the stove. “Did you sleep well?”

Eva yawned. “Better than I thought I would.”

“My cat is waiting for me to come back to the railroad station,” the boy said.

“That’s good,” Eva said.

“Do you think she will turn into a magical cat?”

The boy’s mother mumbled something in her sleep and turned on her stomach, her face screened by her hair.

“A magical cat?” Eva whispered.

“Like your father’s cat.”

“The cat that slept on your father’s throat,” Trudi explained quickly. “I told Konrad about the cat you let into your father’s bedroom so that she could cure him.” Her voice implored Eva to go along with her story.

“Ah, that cat,” Eva said, but in her eyes Trudi read the awareness of another cat—the kitten in Hans-Jürgen’s outstretched arms, a living streak of fur—and for a moment they both were there again, girls in that barn, whirling, whirling within that immense church space and the smell of animals and straw, suspended in that ruthless sliver of time before the kitten was relinquished to its death.

“And then …” the boy said, “your father lifted you up.”

“Yes …?” Eva said slowly.

“He got strong enough to lift you up. Before the cat made him well, he couldn’t even lift a cup.”

“… not even a cup.”

“Did you see the cat again?”

She glanced past the boy at Trudi, who was shaking her head. “No,” Eva said, “I never saw the cat again.”

The boy looked disappointed.

“I read about her, though,” Eva said.

Trudi stepped closer.

“I read about her in a magazine,” Eva said. “She became very famous. A doctor—a Frau Doktor—wrote an article about the cat. The Frau Doktor used the cat to … to—”

“To cure those patients she couldn’t help,” Trudi said.

“Right. That’s what she did.”

“My cat has nine lives. Only two of them are used up.”

“Eva knows a good trick for people who have to hide,” Trudi said.

“I do?”

“Teach Konrad what to do if he has to sneeze.”

Eva frowned and shook her head.

“The thing with your tongue. Remember?”

“I’d forgotten about that.”

“I used to practice it.”

“Then you show him.”

“No, it came from you.”

Eva sat up and pushed the blanket away. Her pleated skirt was wrinkled. “Watch this.” Bringing her face close to the boy’s, she
opened her mouth wide, touched the tip of her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and wiggled it. “Now you do it.”

The boy tried it and laughed. “It tickles.”

“It’s supposed to tickle, silly.”

“An old Indian trick,” Trudi said. “It keeps you from sneezing if you’re hiding. But if you laugh, it doesn’t do any good.”

“That’s right,” Eva warned. “If you laugh, it—” She stopped and reached for Trudi. “Now I remember what you said that day when I showed you. God—”

Trudi knelt down by Eva’s pillow. “What is it?”

“You said you didn’t know who would want to capture us.”

“Now we know.” Trudi held her.

Eva’s eyes clouded with defeat. “But Konrad won’t let anything happen to us,” she said resolutely. “Konrad will keep very, very quiet because he has things to do after all this is over. Konrad has a cat he needs to get from a railroad station.”

The boy beamed at her.

Frau Neimann regarded Eva’s arrival with alarm, and though Trudi tried to reassure her, she acted as though the new fugitive endangered all of them. But the boy was fascinated by Eva, who let him try on her dark-rimmed glasses; he liked to touch the intricate blue-and-silver pin that Eva’s mother used to wear and had pinned to Eva’s blouse the night they’d fled.

One evening, the third week of Eva’s stay, Trudi braided her friend’s hair in the living room while the others were still in the kitchen. The gathered collar of Eva’s blouse lay below the delicate half ring of bones that linked her shoulder blades and the hollow at the base of her throat, and the fabric was the same shade of ivory as her skin. As Trudi stood behind Eva’s chair and the dark strands of hair glided through her fingers, it was as though the two of them were back at the second-grade spring concert at Fräulein Birnsteig’s mansion. She smelled the cut grass and the lilacs in the formal garden, saw the ivy winding up the white walls, heard the splendid piano music that poured from the open glass doors, and felt Eva’s fingers move through her hair.…

“I miss him,” Eva said.

Trudi recalled the sharp bliss of that concert evening, and her anguish
when the other kids had spurned Eva the next day in school. For an instant there, as she let her fingers weave the hair, she felt as if back then she had tainted Eva with her difference, and that because of it she was responsible for her persecution now; and even though she knew it wasn’t like that at all, it felt as though she personified the difference that made Eva an outcast.

“I wish I could sleep with him tonight.…”

Trudi’s arms felt heavy and cold. She wanted to drop them, but then the braid would come undone.

“People don’t really know Alexander. He doesn’t let them know him—the way he really is. People see him as a hard-working man, quite content with what he does … a bit formal.”

Trudi had heard all that about Alexander, that and how much it mattered to him what the town thought of him. Formal was too mild a description for him. Stuffy was more like it. People like Alexander made her impatient: they focused so much on their manners that they missed the essence of what was going on.

“He took such a risk, coming with me to the police station,” Eva said. “Now I know that even if things get worse, if I get deported—”

“Don’t even think about that.”

“—he would come along. Don’t you see how much comfort that gives me—knowing he would?”

“I want you to take your comfort from knowing you won’t get caught. You hear me?”

Eva had never thought as much about her husband as during those weeks she’d lived in Trudi’s house. She’d only seen him once, when he’d come without warning late one night, sending her and the boy and his mother scurrying into the tunnel.

“I won’t allow this.” Leo Montag admonished Alexander, his voice sterner than Trudi had ever heard it. “The Gestapo know by now that your wife is hiding somewhere. All they need to do is follow you and you’ll lead them right here.”