The Puzzle King (14 page)

“Are you sure you can get home by yourself? I can have one of the other children walk with you.”

Fräulein Huffman’s voice came in and out like the wind.

Edith heard herself answer, “I do this every day.” She tried to smile again.

A more observant teacher might have seen the strain in Edith’s face or the glassiness in her eyes. But Fräulein Huffman was young and eager to please the headmaster of the school. She wanted to be seen as mature and steady under fire, not as someone who would panic just because a child had a cough. “Would you like some hot tea before you go?” she asked.

“No thanks,” said Edith. “No hot tea.”

“Okay then. Walk slowly and stay as warm as you can.”

Edith followed the same path she took every day. It was exactly a mile and a half and took her through the forest and past a pond, nearly frozen now, that was part of the Schultz farm. After the pond, all she’d have to do was cut through the Frau Schultz’s front yard, and within a few minutes, she would be home. There was an old evergreen on the property that was rumored to be over one hundred years old. Even on this cold January morning, its generous limbs were raised toward heaven. Covered with snow, the tree looked embracing, and Edith thought that if she could lie down in it for only a minute or so, she would surely have the energy to make it the rest of the way.

She curled up in a ball, her head resting on one of the branches. Snow fell onto her cheek. It was cool against her hot skin, just like Fräulein Huffman’s hand. Maybe it was Fräulein Huffman’s hand.

That was the last thought she had before she fell asleep. She lay in the snow for nearly an hour. When Frau Schultz found her, she
thought her young neighbor had frozen to death. She shook her, but Edith wouldn’t budge. Her face had a blue cast to it; only the tip of her nose was red. There was no one around to help lift her, so Frau Schultz ran to the house and grabbed a woolen blanket. She wrapped Edith up, and when she still wouldn’t move, Frau Schultz used the blanket as a sled and dragged her to the front of her house. There, Edith opened her eyes and looked around. “Come child,” said Frau Schultz, placing her arms around her waist. “You must try and get up now. We’ll do it together.” Edith started coughing and sat up. The cough brought color to her cheeks. She spat up tiny flecks of blood that looked beautiful against the white snow. All she wanted to do was go back to sleep, but she managed to stay awake just long enough for Frau Schultz to half drag her to the bed.

Frau Schultz covered her with a quilt and left her there long enough to run across the yard and fetch Margot. “She’s at my house, asleep now. I’m afraid she’s not very well,” she said, deciding not to mention the blood. “I’m sure once she gets some rest, she’ll be fine. So let’s go to my house and bring her back here together, shall we?”

Margot tried to stay calm but all she could see in front of her was the face of a stillborn girl. She grabbed her wrap off the brass hook and followed Frau Schultz out the door. It wasn’t until she ran past the fence separating the two properties that she realized how snow was sloshing between her toes and her feet were becoming numb. She’d forgotten to change out of her slippers. God could take her feet, both of them, for all she cared. He could take her hands, her arms: she could bear that. She could not bear losing another child.

Frau Schultz had rushed out forgetting to close her door and
Margot could see Edith’s silhouette before she even reached the house. She was so still. As she came closer, she could see her face, drained of color. Margot left her slippers by the door, knelt by the bed, and took Edith’s cold hand into her own. There was life in the hand. She placed her fingers on the pulse in her neck and felt its tentative beat. Frau Schultz put some water on the fire while Margot stroked Edith’s brow. “I put some schnapps in the tea,” she said handing Margot a cup. “It would be good if she could drink this.”

As she sat at her daughter’s bedside, Margot’s eyes sank into her pale skin. Strands of her hair escaped her bun, floating like ribbons against the late morning sun. “Here, my
Liebchen
, drink this.” She pulled Edith up by her shoulders and held the cup to her lips. “Come on, just a little.” Margot was not the sort to bargain with God—theirs had been an uneasy relationship. But at that moment, she gave herself over to the possibility of mercy and miracles. “Let her live,” she offered, “and I will let Gilda’s memory rest in peace.”

Edith opened her eyes and sipped the drink. When she had drained the cup, her mother asked if she felt strong enough to go home. Edith said that she did, and with the help of Frau Schultz, Margot swaddled her in the blanket.

They made an odd duo on that frosty December morning: Margot in her slippered feet shuffling across the snow with her arms around her daughter, who was wrapped, ghostlike, in a brown woolen blanket.

I
T WAS PLEURISY
that caused the cough and fever. Dr. Mueller told Margot and Frederick that Edith would have to go to the hospital. She lay in the hospital bed for a week, her fever
getting higher and the cough deeper. The doctor prescribed morphine for the pain in her ribs. “Morphine for a young girl,” said Frederick, who had seen plenty of suffering in the war. “It doesn’t seem right.” Dr. Mueller was slumped and skinny and, except for his black mustache, looked like a man trying to disappear. When he called Margot and Frederick into his office at the end of the week, he spoke with the deliberation of someone used to giving bad news. “It is urgent that we operate as soon as possible,” he said. “She is filled with infection and if we don’t go in and clean it out, she will surely die.”

Frederick grabbed Margot’s elbow. Margot pulled her arm away. “If an operation will save her life, then of course that’s what we’ll do,” she said.

During the eight hours that it took for the doctor to clean up the pus and infection in Edith’s ribs, Margot and Frederick sat on a backless bench outside the operating room. Frederick had brought a leather bag filled with bread, a few pieces of cheese, wurst, and flasks of coffee. In this dark place, where the sounds of rolling gurneys echoed off the walls and the narrow windows caged the noon light, Margot found comfort in the familiar packages with their garlicky offerings. They passed the time talking about their daughter’s future—she would learn to play piano, take the baths at Baden-Baden, swim in the lake—and built a wall around the possibility of anything but a positive outcome. By the time Dr. Mueller emerged from the operating room, in their minds’ eye, their daughter was the picture of health. Dr. Mueller pulled a cotton mask from around his mouth. His eyes sagged and his voice was more dolorous than ever. “Well, she made it,” he said. Edith and Frederick rose to their feet at the same time, waiting for the inevitable “but.”

“But we had to remove one of her ribs. It was rotten with infection. Don’t be overly concerned, she’s got twenty-three of them left.”

Frederick and Margot exchanged looks. A rib? They had never considered something might happen to one of Edith’s ribs. They’d worried about her lungs, naturally, even her heart and her liver, as these parts were indispensable. But a rib? There were two dozen.

One less egg in the box, thought Margot.

Frederick had seen plenty of ribs in his time. A cow without a rib, or a pig without a rib, he could imagine that. They would lean heavy to one side. “Will she be misshapen?” he asked the doctor.

Dr. Mueller rubbed his eyes. “Ah, I wouldn’t call it misshapen. She will, without proper attention, become slightly stooped the way we old folks are. There will be a significant scar on her back, but there is no infection left in her body, and she will be healthy.”

E
DITH’S SCAR WAS SIGNIFICANT
. It was on the left side of her back where the second rib would be. It looked like a mouth sucking in its lower lip—an upside-down smile. Edith missed three months of school. While she was gone, the local Catholic church sent her a basket of yellow daisies. Tucked inside was a small cross made from twigs. It was such a simple and pretty design that Edith kept it by her bedside. Some of Frederick’s co-workers took up a collection and bought her a quilt from a lady in the next town. The children in her class made cards for her with pictures of butterflies and chocolate cake and girls with smiling faces. Underneath their drawings, they wrote messages about her bravery and how they yearned for her to come back.
But none of them came to visit her, because their parents worried that maybe Edith’s pleurisy was contagious. On her first day back, she wore the same blue woolen coat she’d worn on the morning she’d fallen sick, only now her arms dangled from the coat’s sleeves and her knees jutted out inches below its hem. Even in the classroom, she kept her coat wrapped around her shoulders. The weight she’d lost during her illness gave her nose and jaw a hawklike prominence.

The other kids regarded her with curiosity and kept their distance. She smelled different, had the pallor of someone who’d been locked away in a hospital. She’d had surgery and nearly died. What she knew and they didn’t accounted for most of what frightened them about her. Also, it was the second week in April, and no one was wearing winter coats anymore.

Fräulein Huffman had stood up when Edith entered the classroom and had given a little bow. “So you have decided to rejoin us. We are very happy to have you back.”

The night before, she’d decided to bake a cake for Edith’s return. She’d told herself that she wasn’t doing it out of guilt. Any teacher would do that for a student who’d been so ill. She imagined that when she presented Edith with the cake she’d be surprised. Maybe it would even make her forget how her teacher had released her into that snowy December day.

Fräulein Huffman waited until the morning had rolled into routine. Then she reached into the clothing closet and pulled out the package. “In honor of Edith’s return to our class and in celebration of her good health, I have baked a cake.” She smiled at Edith, and Edith smiled back. At the moment that Edith’s eye met hers, Fräulein Huffman lowered her eyelids and looked to the floor again.

Pig eyes
, thought Edith, who knew about reading eyes. On a good day, her mother’s hazel-colored eyes were bright and focused and held her gaze. On bad days, her mother’s eyes reminded her of the pig.

Once, Edith had visited her father at work. She’d wandered into the yard where there was a pig lying on the ground, legs trussed, waiting to be slaughtered. The pig’s eyes were half closed and lifeless, as if he had already surrendered. Just then, she could hear her father shout to one of the other workers, “Are you crazy to let the child in here?” In a gentler tone, he said to her: “Come Edith, this is no place for you.”

Now, as she looked at Fräulein Huffman standing before the cake with eyes dull and forfeiting, Edith wanted to say something that would lift the heaviness from them. She took off her coat and stood beside her desk. “Sometimes when I was sick, all I wanted to do was sleep,” she said. “Now I’m so glad to be back in school with everyone.” The children stared back at her.

Edith sat back down and hugged her coat around her shoulders. The children clapped. Until that moment, she’d been so preoccupied with her own behavior that she hadn’t noticed that at least half of the kids in the class had shaved heads. How large their ears looked. Only Fräulein Huffman stood impassive, twiddling a few stray hairs that had escaped her bun.

At recess, Emmy, her best friend in the class, waited for her in the back of the classroom. “Are you really fine?” she asked Edith.

“I’m tired,” said Edith, letting down her guard. “Tired’s okay. Everyone’s tired some of the time. Right?”

Emmy nodded. “Are you in pain or anything? I mean, you’re walking kind of funny.”

Edith straightened her back, aware that she was favoring her left side. “It hurts here,” she said, pointing to where her rib was missing. “It’s kind of like a drawing, empty feeling and it hurts when I straighten up.”

Emmy put her hand on her own ribcage. “I can’t imagine,” she said.

“My father says I’ll be stooped over for the rest of my life unless I fix it now. So every day he has me walking with a cane that I hold behind my back like so.” She picked up the blackboard pointer and put it behind her back, resting it in the crooks of her elbows. She walked in circles around the back of the classroom. “It’ll get better as I heal,” she said.

Edith realized she was talking too much. But it had been ages since she had been able to speak to someone her age. During the three months she’d been ill, all they talked about at home was her health. Sometimes, her father’s boss, Gustave Reinhart, would give him some prized muttonchops at the end of the day. “The marrow is nourishing,” he would say. “Give it to the girl.” At dinner, Margot and Frederick would pick at the meat then pile their bones on Edith’s plate and watch intently as she sucked out the fatty tissue. One of them would comment on how much stronger she was and the other would say, “I can see you getting better already.” Of course she was eager to be back with other ten-year-olds.

She stopped walking and placed the pointer back on its shelf. “God, I’m just babbling on and on, aren’t I?” she said to Emmy. “Tell me what’s new here, what’s new with you. What about the hair?”

Emmy ran her hands through her hair, which was barely a patch of fuzz. “Lice,” she said. “There was a lice scare when you
were gone. We all got checked for them. The headmaster said that Jews get lice more than other people so that all Jewish kids in the class had to get their heads shaved. The eight of us started something called the Baldies Club.”

Edith had noticed the others with the short hair, all of them Jewish. They reminded her of dandelion seeds. “Why would Jews have lice more than other people?” she asked.

“Fräulein Huffman says there’s something about Jewish blood,” said Emmy. “Lice like Jewish blood. She said that there’s research to prove it. Anyway, the Baldies Club is fun. We have a secret handshake and wear gray woolen caps. Sometimes we meet after school and take hikes together or go to somebody’s house. It’s fun.”