The Things We Cherished (16 page)

As they passed the second-floor landing, he counted through the open doors three rooms, a bedroom and a study and another room that seemed in disuse. “The water closet is just here,” she said,
pointing to a fourth, closed door. She continued up the stairs to the third floor, opening the door at the top. “This is yours.”

They started forward at the same time. “Oh!” Magda said, as they jostled against one another in the doorway, which was too small for both to pass. They stood motionless for a second, her arm warm against his side.

“Excuse me,” he said finally, feeling his face go red as he leapt back to let her pass. He berated himself inwardly, certain that she must be appalled by his lack of manners.

But Magda let out a tinkling laugh, as though his misstep was an intentional joke, and her good nature instantly put him at ease. She walked into the room and gestured to the expanse of space beneath a sloping roof. A simple bed, chair, and desk were the only furnishings, giving the space an uncluttered feel that he rather liked. The smell of fresh lemon cleanser filled the air.

“It’s lovely,” he remarked.

Neither spoke for several seconds. “I’ll leave you to get settled,” she said at last. She paused, mouth still open, as though there were something more she wanted to say. Then she turned and vanished down the stairs, leaving a sense of emptiness in her wake.

The next afternoon, Roger stood on the doorstep of the house once more, unsure of whether to knock or walk right in this time. He settled somewhere in between, rapping once lightly, then opening the door a crack without waiting. “Hello,” he called.

Something was different, he sensed immediately as he stepped into the foyer. He had left early that morning without seeing Magda and spent the better part of the day at the university, picking up the required texts, making contact with his tutor about their first meeting. Now, as he started up the steps, juggling an armful of books, he detected an unmistakable energy in the air that had not been present previously.

“Good afternoon.” Magda greeted him hurriedly, not stopping as she passed him on her way down the steps. He stared after her, puzzled at her coolness. Had he done something to offend her? But she had already disappeared into the kitchen. He proceeded upward. As he reached the second-floor landing, he heard a male voice, muffled and deep, through the now-closed door to the study and he knew then the reason for the change: Hans had returned.

As Roger continued on to the third floor, the door to the study below flew open. “My brother!” Hans bounded up the stairs, clapping Roger on the back. “Welcome to my home.” There was a proprietary note in his brother’s voice that was impossible to ignore.

“Thank you,” Roger managed, struggling not to drop the books. Hans had always seemed so confident and self-assured, giving the impression that he was well older than twenty-four. And he had aged in the almost two years since their last meeting. With his broad-shouldered build, he still had a youthful air, but his sandy hair had thinned and there were new lines beneath his hazel eyes.

Hans swept the stack of books from Roger’s arms. “Come, let’s catch up.”

Reluctantly, Roger followed Hans into the study. The desk and floor were covered with papers, and the familiar smell of pipe smoke hung sickly sweet in the air.

“You’ve settled in all right, I take it?” He slipped seamlessly from German into their native Polish. “Found everything you need?”

“Indeed. Magda has been most hospitable.” She entered the room as he spoke, hesitating as though caught off guard by her own name. With shaking hands, she set down two cups of tea between the stacks of paper on the desk. Did her husband make her nervous? She had not seemed this way the day before.

As Magda straightened, Hans caught her hand and their eyes met.
“Danke, Liebchen.”
There was a genuine look of affection that
passed between them, making Roger squirm and filling him with a strange sense of disappointment.

“So,” Hans said, turning back to Roger when Magda had gone. His white shirt was rumpled, the sleeves rolled up, a faint gray line of dirt at the collar. And his jaw, usually clean shaven, had a fine coat of stubble. Where had he been? Roger did not ask, of course, knowing Hans would not say.

Hans’s smile was more disarming, his perfect teeth whiter, than Roger recalled. The Dykmans boys had been blond as children, owing to their Scandinavian roots. But where Roger’s coloring had darkened with adolescence, Hans remained fair. That, along with his crisp, unaccented German, was an asset that enabled him to blend in, causing people to forget the fact that he was a foreigner here.

A foreigner, sort of. Breslau, or Wroclaw as the Poles called it, had been batted back and forth between the Poles and Germans and their neighbors like a ball in a game of table tennis for centuries. Though the city, part of Upper Silesia, was predominantly German now, it maintained a distinctly Polish undercurrent, and signs of the Slavic culture were everywhere—in the shops, the cuisine—even if people did speak the language a bit less and in a softer tone these days.

“So Mother is well?” Hans asked, interrupting Roger’s thoughts. His expression and tone seemed to convey genuine concern, in sharp contrast to the infrequency of his letters and almost nonexistent visits. That was the thing about Hans—despite the fact that he was self-absorbed, he was almost impossible to dislike. He was never arrogant or dismissive, and had a way of winning people to his side while making them think that his ideas were their own. The worst that one could say about him was that his work, whatever that was exactly, consumed him with a kind of passion that made him distracted, unable to ever be entirely present.

Hans’s charisma had translated well into his professional world. He was a diplomat in the truest sense of the word, and he managed to keep the goodwill of the present German administration even as he worked, Roger suspected, covertly against them. In fact, it was likely Hans’s influence that enabled Roger to come to Breslau and study at the university during a time when Poles were less than welcome here.

“I’m sorry to have been gone and not able to greet you,” Hans apologized, not waiting for an answer to his previous question. “The situation right now …” He waved his hand around his head in the direction of the front window. “It’s terribly bad and getting worse, I’m afraid.”

Hans spoke as though Roger knew what he meant, and in some sense he did. Germany had been under control of the Reich for more than seven years. The changes were perhaps less abrupt here than in the countries the Nazis had come to occupy more recently, such as Poland. Roger had been there when they marched into Wadowice, the tanks preposterously large in the narrow town streets, Great Danes in a china shop. Here, he imagined, the shift had been gradual: shops closed one by one, people who had intermingled quietly for decades suddenly forced to wear armbands and associate only with their own.

Roger recalled the previous morning as he arrived at the train station a family with four small children clustered around a pile of luggage. The mother’s face was drawn with exhaustion, her lips pressed tightly together, and she seemed to barely have the strength to thank him as he held the door for them. She carried a sizable toddler who bore his own tiny version of the armband with the Star of David, and Roger noticed then that they had no pram. He did not know how they had gotten to their final destination from the train station since the Jews were banned from streetcars.
At the time, the woman had struck him as just a harried mother traveling with children. But now he wondered if it was something more. Where were they going and was it by choice?

“Well, it’s getting late,” Hans said, standing, and that was Roger’s cue to do the same. As they walked into the hallway, they encountered Magda, returning to clear the cups.

“Dinner at six?” she asked, looking up at Hans, her face bright. “I’ve managed to find some cutlets for schnitzel.”

But Hans shook his head. “I’ll just take a tray.” He turned to Roger. “You’ll forgive me for not joining you,” he said. “I need to leave again first thing in the morning and there’s much to be done before then.” Roger could not help but notice how Magda’s face fell as her husband brushed past her. He held his breath, waiting for her to turn to him and ask him to join her for dinner. But she retreated silently from the study.

Having been dismissed, Roger picked up his books and carried them to the third floor, settling down at the desk to read. He gazed out the window, across the soot-blackened chimneys at the gray late-afternoon sky. His eyes dropped to the courtyard below, which was adjacent to the White Stork Synagogue. The three-story neoclassical structure with its high arched windows stood in sharp contrast to the modest Jewish house of worship in their home town of Wadowice. It was magnificent, or at least it had been, Roger could tell, before the mobs that took to the street on Kristallnacht almost two years earlier ravaged the building, shattering the windows and burning the prayer books within. But it had not been entirely destroyed and was, perhaps, the city’s only still-functioning synagogue.

Today was Friday, the beginning of their Sabbath, and a small group of men had clustered outside the desecrated synagogue, talking. Roger marveled that they could be so nonchalant, as if nothing
had changed and their very presence there might not be putting their lives in danger. But maybe, he reflected, this was the one place where they could feel as if life as they once knew it still existed.

A beam of sunlight broke through the clouds then, illuminating the jagged remnants of the synagogue’s stained-glass windows. He could see into the women’s section, a raised balcony on the second story, separated from the main sanctuary with a thin lace curtain that had somehow survived unscathed. Tonight the balcony was empty, but he could imagine it coming to life on the holidays, the pews filled with women hugging and talking, children scampering restlessly beneath their feet before being cowed into sitting still.

His thoughts returned to Magda and her disappointed expression. As if on cue, he heard her on the floor below, her presence given away by the quiet scratching of her shoes. He would have eaten with her, if only she had asked. But of course it wouldn’t be proper for him to suggest it. He looked down at his books. He should work through the evening anyway, prepare for the first of his lectures the following day.

That evening a tray appeared outside his door, though he did not hear Magda leave it. The house was eerily still and the Victrola did not play below, as it had the previous night. How odd, he reflected, that a house could be quieter with three people in it than it had been with two.

When his eyes had grown bleary from reading, he carried his tray down to the kitchen. As he started back upstairs, he passed Magda, who had come from the washroom on the second-floor landing. Her face was freshly scrubbed, cheeks flushed. He saw her then as scarcely more than a girl, with an innocence and vulnerability to her that tugged at his heart. He cleared his throat as though there was something he wanted to say, and she looked at him expectantly. But no words came out and a moment later
she opened the door to the bedroom. A thin sliver of the room appeared, the intimacy of the space she and his brother shared somehow an affront. She did not look up again but closed the door with a click, leaving him in the hallway alone.

The next morning he started down the stairs on his way to the university. Roger could tell before he even reached the second-floor landing that Hans was gone by the calm that seemed to have been restored. Indeed, the visit had been so swift it might never have happened at all.

The door to Hans and Magda’s bedroom was ajar and through the opening he could see Magda. He moved nearer, drawn in by her sure, fluid movements. He wondered if her mood had brightened, or if she was even more bereft by her husband’s departure. Impulsively, he walked to the door. “Magda?” He knocked, then pushed the door open slightly. “I’ll take dinner with you this evening, if—”

He stopped short. Magda had pulled a large mahogany armoire from the wall—how she had managed to move such a heavy object he could not fathom—and she was kneeling behind it. Had she lost something? Startled, she jumped to her feet and started to push the armoire back into place.

“Can I help?” he asked, moving closer.

“N-nein, danke,”
she managed, clearly flustered. “I was just trying to dust.” But she held no cloth or other cleaning supplies. He leaned forward, peering over her shoulder. She moved to the side, trying to block his view, but he could see that there was a large, gaping hole in the wall.

“What’s that?” he asked. The question was perhaps too intrusive to be asked of this woman he had only just met. But there was something about her that caused him to feel like they had known each other much longer, a sense that he had met her long before. She did not respond. He walked to the spot beside her and together
they slid the armoire back against the wall. As they did, their fingers brushed and she pulled back quickly. He hoped that he had not offended her. “Magda, what’s behind the wall?” She did not answer and for a second he wondered if she was angry.

“A place,” she said simply. “For hiding things.”

“Things?”

Her face seemed to crumple. “Or people,” she replied reluctantly.

People. His mind whirled. Was she scared that the Nazis might arrest them in retribution for Hans’s work? It had to be something more than that. There were people who hid Jews from the Nazis. Perhaps Magda was somehow involved.

He studied the space behind her once more. It was narrow, just big enough for one person, maybe two if the second was a child. No, the hiding place was too small to be of use to others. It was intended for Magda herself.

The realization hit him in the stomach like a rock. Surely Magda wasn’t … he pictured the Jews as the yarmulke-clad men he had seen lingering outside the White Stork Synagogue, or their shawl-covered wives. “Magda, are you …?” He did not finish the question.

“My father was killed during Kristallnacht,” she said, her voice a monotone. “When the rioting started, he insisted upon going to the shop where he worked to rescue his beloved clock. We begged him not to go out, but he insisted and the next morning we found him in the back room of the shop, murdered.” Her eyes did not meet his. “After that, I managed to leave.”