The Things We Cherished (21 page)

At least, he consoled himself, the feelings were all one-sided.

One night a few weeks later, after he had retreated to bed, he was awakened by a low rumbling sound. Bombs, he thought. They had started a few months earlier, distant and occasional. But they came with greater frequency now, almost every night. These were closer than anything he remembered, shaking the walls, knocking his books from the desk to the floor.

He should go to the cellar. He groaned inwardly, thinking of the hours that might be spent sitting in the darkness on the cold, damp concrete floor. But Magda went faithfully downstairs with each raid and she shouldn’t have to be alone. Reluctantly, he made his way to the second floor and stopped in front of her bedroom door to see if she was still there. “Magda?” he called through the
opening. “It’s getting rather close. Perhaps we should go down to the cellar?”

His question was met with silence and he wondered if she had already gone. He pushed the door open a crack further. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see that the armoire was pushed away from the wall. He went to the opening behind it. She was huddled in the tiny crawl space, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. “Magda?”

She did not answer, but rocked back and forth, keeping her head low. What was she doing? The space might offer some protection if one needed to hide, but was useless if a bomb should hit. Yet to her it seemed to represent safety against all perils. He dropped to her side. “Come with me.” When she did not move, he put his arms around her and lifted her up. She was shaking, Roger noticed as he straightened with effort. He hesitated, debating whether he should carry her to the cellar. Better to try and calm her here in the familiar surroundings of her own room. She seemed to relax slightly as he carried her to the bed, but when he tried to set her down, she clung to him.

“It’s all right,” he said softly, sitting down himself, still holding her, their faces just inches apart. Something inside him stirred and seemed to break loose from its moorings.

Her eyes darted back and forth, searching his face, trying to decide whether to believe him. Then she blinked, as if awakening from a dream. “What happened?”

He opened his mouth to answer but found that he could not. Instead, he drew closer, as if pulled by an unseen hand. As his lips neared hers, she pulled away. “Roger …” There was a note of warning in her voice.

“Es tut mir leid,”
he apologized, leaping up. He fled the room and
raced back to the third floor, heedless of any danger, the roaring in his ears drowning out the exploding bombs in the distance. He climbed into bed, shaken. What had happened? Magda clung to him only out of fear, surely. And he had taken advantage of the situation, or so it would seem to her. How could he ever face her again after behaving so improperly?

He could not stay here any longer, Roger decided. He would get a room at the university, find a job to pay for it. He didn’t know how he would explain it to Hans, but he would think of something.

The explosions outside grew louder, drawing him from his thoughts and making his stomach jump. Then there came another noise beneath, a scratching from the stairway, lower and more persistent. He walked to the door and, opening it, was surprised to find Magda on the other side of it in her housecoat. She did not speak, but came into his room and slipped into the bed.

He stood in the center of the room uncertainly. He slid into bed beside her, trying to maintain a respectful distance, an almost impossible feat given the narrow space. She trembled beside him in the darkness. He lay frozen, too stunned to move, afraid that the slightest word or gesture would give away his reaction. She’s just here for comfort, he thought, willing himself to be calm. But then she turned to him and her lips were on his, her body pressed close, and everything he had scarcely allowed himself to dream became reality.

In the morning she was gone, her slight frame leaving a sheet so unwrinkled he wondered if he had imagined the encounter. The house was still as he left for the university. That day, as he attempted to work in the library, he could think of little else but the previous night. Desire surged in him as he remembered the lilac scent of her hair, the way she cried out with more force than he’d thought possible. Surely it had been an accident, borne of the
terror of the bombing raid. He returned home late, preferring to linger in his memories rather than face the inevitable return to the status quo he was sure awaited him.

But she came again that night too, even though the bombs no longer rang out. He was still at his desk when she appeared at the door that he’d deliberately left open. Her hair was neatly combed and she wore a blue dressing gown that made her eyes look even more luminous. She lingered in the doorway until he came to her. “We can’t—” she began, but the words caught in her throat as he drew her in by the hand.

Their encounter this time seemed even more surreal. Once, however forbidden, could be written off to the terror of the bombing raid, to an impulsive need for comfort. There had been an air of intention about this second night, though, that was impossible to deny. Afterward, he could tell from her uneven breathing beside him that she was not asleep either, and he considered asking her why she had come back. But the question seemed too personal, not his to ask.

Her visits became nightly after that and often, once she had slipped from his bed, he would lie awake, adrenaline still racing, marveling at what had transpired between them. But the question nagged: Why did she do it? Boredom, or loneliness, would have been the easy answers. Magda was too principled a woman, though, to betray her marriage on a whim—and the way she clung to him in the brief moments they shared afterward suggested something more. He desperately wanted to know, yet he fought the urge to press for an explanation, fearful that if he shone a light on what was happening it would disintegrate like dust.

It was not for several months, when the weather had given way to early summer, that Roger noticed for the first time the growing roundness of Magda’s belly. He wished he knew how to calculate
such things, to know if the child was conceived during one of Hans’s lengthy absences. Surely, given the infrequency of his brother’s visits, the many nights that he and Magda had shared … Roger was instantly ashamed at his selfishness. A child that was his would be a stigma, yet another secret for Magda to carry when her burden in that regard was already heavy enough.

He did not ask her, of course. He wondered if, given her condition, she would come to him less, but she still climbed the stairs to his room each night, the growing belly pressed unmentioned between them.

The child was born on a cold morning in November. Roger loitered outside the room for what seemed like endless hours, waiting for something to do, and he was almost relieved when the midwife appeared and asked him to send a telegram to Hans that he had a daughter and all was well.

“Would you like to hold her?” Magda asked one afternoon. The child, Anna, as she had been named after one of Magda’s grandmothers, was now three weeks old.

He hesitated. Anna seemed as delicate as a china doll, so tiny and perfect that the faintest wind might shatter her. But then he saw the fatigue in Magda’s eyes and knew she needed the respite. “Certainly,” he said, taking the child with trembling arms. He studied her face. Thankfully there was enough of a resemblance between the brothers that no one would question whether Hans could be the father. Roger could tell, though, that beneath the lips that were so like Magda’s, the chin with the minute dimple was his. He shifted the child to his other arm, struggling to find the right way to hold her strange, delicate shape. But Anna sought out the crevice between his chest and chin and nestled in with a sigh, making sucking noises until she fell asleep there. Magda smiled knowingly,
confirming his speculation about the child’s parentage, and it seemed all was complete.

In the months that had followed, they had fallen into a sort of life, he and Magda and Anna, and it sometimes seemed possible, on those nights when they sat together in the living room, that it was real. Magda would put on some music, singing softly as she rocked the child. He could almost pretend that they were a normal happy family and that all of this was his. But in the cold light of morning when she was gone from his side he was always reminded that it was just a fiction.

How would it end? he wondered now. He dropped his pencil, disarmed by the thought. It had to happen sometime. The conclusion of the school year was looming fast and without a job in the city he would have no excuse to stay here, but rather would be expected to return home to help their mother or to travel elsewhere in search of work. Of course he would be back in the autumn, but the notion of being separated from Magda for days, much less weeks or months, not being able to see her and protect her, was unfathomable.

And even if they could get through the summer, what then? He’d imagined a thousand times asking Magda to leave Hans and run away with him. But even if he could get past the guilt at trying to steal his brother’s family while Hans was off fighting the Nazis, Roger knew it was futile. Magda was, in her own ironic way, fiercely loyal to her husband and too practical to put sentiment above reality. She would not leave him. So at some point, Roger would graduate or the war would end and Hans would be home, and Roger would have to leave. No, things couldn’t go on like this forever, but how and when they would end was something he could not and did not want to see.

Pushing these disturbing thoughts from his mind, Roger looked out the window once more and saw a number of people massing in the synagogue courtyard below. The group had grown to close to a hundred, milling about. His spirits rose. Perhaps the persecution that had been afflicting the Jewish community had somehow waned and the people were returning to their routine. Something was different, though. The crowd was unusually large for the middle of the week and it wasn’t any holiday of which he was aware. And the men and women stood mixed, not separate, as they sat inside, holding their children fast to them.

It was then that he noticed the suitcases, bags at their feet. His stomach tightened. A group holiday of some sort, maybe, to the mountains or the lake. But even as he thought this, he knew with a sinking sensation that they were not here by choice.

He saw then one tall, uniformed Gestapo officer and then another, moving through the crowd, directing the people into lines. Roger was flooded with alarm. He had heard stories, of course, of the deportations of Jews. But those relocations were from the villages to the cities and only whispered about, nothing confirmed. Despite all that had happened, it didn’t seem possible that the Jews of Breslau, cultured merchants and scholars and artisans, were being rounded up before his very eyes, in the heart of the city center in broad daylight.

His thoughts were interrupted by rising voices below. Toward the back of the crowd, he saw a scuffle, a man who had not gotten into line quickly enough being kicked and beaten. One Nazi drew a pistol and Roger braced himself. But the Nazi would not fire a shot that might attract attention on the street. Instead, he used the gun as a blunt weapon, striking the man on the head until he lay motionless.

Roger turned away sickened. There was a scuffling noise behind
him and he turned to see Magda standing at the door, which he had not realized was ajar, fidgeting with her cuffs. He leapt up in front of the window, hoping to shield her from the scene below. But he could tell from her expression that she had already seen it.

“Darling,” he began, stepping forward, forgetting the need for discretion in his desire to comfort her. She turned and fled without responding.

She did not come to sit in the parlor that evening, but made excuses about being tired and put the baby hurriedly to bed. He did not linger downstairs either, finding the space they usually shared unbearable in her absence and instead working late at his desk.

The next morning he looked for Magda but the house was still. As he left for lectures, the sun shone brightly through branches, casting shadows on the cobblestones below. Roger kept his head low, trying to avoid looking up at the wall that separated the synagogue courtyard from the street. It might have been any morning, but for the disturbing scene he had seen from his window. He should have done something more than stand by like a coward—but what? He thought then of Hans. Suddenly he understood his brother’s tireless work, the magnitude of what he was trying to do.

And what about Magda? The Nazis had been taking Jews for several years now, but the scope and swiftness of the deportation he’d witnessed suggested a new level of aggression. Hans’s protection could go only so far. Roger returned to the idea of asking her to leave with him. She wouldn’t do it just because she had feelings for him, but if he could convince her that fleeing was in the best interests of herself and the baby …

Lost in his thoughts, he was almost at the trolley stop when he realized he’d forgotten the paper he was supposed to turn in at his tutorial that day. He paused, considering. Going back for it would
surely make him tardy, but Professor Helm did not suffer late work. He turned and began walking rapidly back toward the house.

Ten minutes later, as he rounded the corner by the synagogue, he stopped. Halfway down the block, in front of Hans and Magda’s house, sat a large black Mercedes, adorned with a swastika flag on either side of the hood. His breathing ceased. Easy, he thought, willing himself to remain upright. The Nazis could be at the synagogue again, following up from the previous day’s raid. But they had parked on the adjacent street then, not this one. No, this was different.

He stood, paralyzed and uncertain. His first instinct was to get help, but even as he thought this, he knew that the notion was laughable. There had been no aid here for years. And Hans was too far away to do anything now.

Steeling himself, he started forward. As he drew nearer, the front door to the house opened. He leapt back, hiding behind a delivery truck. Roger’s panic solidified as three German officers made their way to the sedan. What were they doing here? He could not hear what they were saying, but he could sense their frustration. Whatever they had come for, they had not gotten it.