The Things We Cherished (35 page)

The bell above the door tinkled, drawing Johann from his thoughts. A stout man with a thick gray beard walked in. There was something familiar about him, Johann noticed immediately. He ran through in his mind the catalog of regular customers who frequented the shop, but could not find the man among them. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m meant to see the proprietor, Herr Litt, about some of our hardware—” The man stopped in mid-sentence, his gaze rising to the shelf above Johann’s head. It was the clock, Johann knew. For the first two years he had worked in the shop, he had kept the timepiece hidden among his few possessions, bringing it out each night only to polish the glass and run his finger over the fine mechanisms and remember. But then one day, as he prepared to move from the flat upstairs to the small house he and Hannah were to share, he studied it, considering what to do. It would not feel right to bring the clock, his last true memento of Rebecca, into his new house, where he would share a bed with Hannah. The memories were too great. So he dusted it off and put it on the shelf in the
shop. The clock seemed to glow on display, as if glad to see daylight after being hidden for so long. Customers often remarked upon it, asking if it was for sale.

But the man who stood before him was staring at the timepiece even longer than was customary. He pulled at his beard, as though in deep thought. Johann realized then why the man looked familiar—it was the man from Herr Hoffel’s
Gasthaus
, the traveler who had bought the other clock. The passage of time had altered his appearance significantly—his hair was almost entirely white and he seemed to have added a jowl at his chin for each year that had passed.

Johann held his breath. Would the man recognize him? But Johann himself had been of no significance that day so many years ago—it was only the clock that he remembered. “That timepiece,” the traveler said finally, still stroking his beard. “It’s extraordinary. May I?”

Reluctantly, Johann lifted the clock from the shelf and set it down on the counter in front of the man. “It’s not for sale,” he said quickly, his voice more abrupt than he had intended.

“I have one like it,” the traveler replied, as if to clarify his intent. “But I’ve long wanted to find the man who made it to see if more might be commissioned. Do you have any idea where I might find him?”

Johann shook his head. Though he had repaired a number of timepieces in his years at the shop, simple commercial clocks mostly, he had not made a single one. He had tried once, but the gift seemed to be gone. He could no longer remember the techniques his father had shown him and his fingers seemed clumsy and thick. In that way above all others, he had not been able to move on.

It was just as well, he reflected now. To make the anniversary
clock over again would be to cheapen the memory and all it stood for. “No,” he said finally. “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone who could make such a timepiece.”

“It’s a shame really,” the traveler said, and there was a glint in his eye that made Johann wonder if the man recognized him after all. “One could make a fortune with such skill.” Johann considered the notion briefly. He and Hannah could surely use the extra money with a child on the way. “Enough to have anything he ever wanted,” the man added.

And what if, Johann wanted to ask, the very thing one wanted could not be bought? But before he could speak, there was a clattering and Franz appeared to usher the man into the back room. Johann replaced the clock up on the shelf and reached for the sandwich Hannah had brought him.

MUNICH
,
2009

They stood in the waiting area of the prison, not speaking. It was odd, Charlotte mused, being detained here after days of breezing straight into the conference room to see Roger. Strange how she had come to feel at home here in such a short time. Maybe Philadelphia was not the only place she could be comfortable after all.

She looked at Brian, who paced the floor in his usual manner. “Let me go and see about the delay,” Jack had said a few minutes earlier, slipping inside to find out why it was taking so long for them to be brought to Roger. Charlotte, too, found herself unable to sit still, leaping from one of the plastic chairs to a standing position, then back again. Her mind raced. What would Roger say when presented with the daughter he had thought dead for so many years? Would it give him the will to fight for his freedom?

Only Anna (Charlotte could not help thinking of her by her childhood name) did not seem nervous, she noted. The woman stood by the narrow window, clutching the clock. She gazed outside, as she had at the convent, motionless except for an occasional fiddling with her cuffs. She still wore her simple gray dress, but she had removed the headpiece, and her hair, an opulent silver, was tied at the back of her neck in a knot. Earlier, as they arrived, Charlotte
had watched Anna’s face as she took in the massive walled prison, wondering what she was feeling: trepidation at meeting the father she never knew existed, hope that the information she’d found in the clock might help to free him? It was a shame, Charlotte reflected, that they had to meet for the first time in such a setting.

Anna’s eyes darted in Charlotte’s direction and Charlotte looked away hurriedly, embarrassed to have been caught staring. They had spoken little on the ride from Italy and, despite the wealth of information about her past that Anna had revealed at the convent, there were so many things Charlotte wanted to ask her still, about how she had survived, not just the war but the years after. What had made her decide to retreat to a life of solitude, and more importantly, had it given her what she was looking for? And would that change now that she had found Roger and could get some of the answers that had been kept from her these many years?

But Anna had sat close to the door, her body turned away in a manner that did not seem to invite conversation. After a time, she opened a tattered book that Charlotte had not known she was carrying. “What are you reading?” she could not help but ask. Anna held up the book and Charlotte looked over, expecting to see the Bible. “
Gone with the Wind
?” she asked, unable to contain her surprise.

“I’ve always loved it,” Anna had replied simply and Charlotte sensed a story she would likely never hear.

The waiting room door opened now and Jack’s head appeared. “Charley, can you come here for a second?” His face was pinched and pale, she noted as she followed him into the hallway. Her uneasiness rose. She and Jack had not been alone since their conversation in the hotel bar the previous evening; in fact, he seemed to be deliberately avoiding her. Surely he wasn’t trying to address their personal issues here and now.

“Jack, what is it? What’s wrong?”

He leaned into her so unexpectedly she almost fell beneath the weight, his entire body seeming to crumple. “Roger’s dead.”

Forty minutes later they stood in the prison infirmary, two on either side of the narrow bed. “When?” Charlotte asked Jack in a low voice.

“They found him about an hour before we arrived. The guard said he thought Roger was just napping. Could have been his heart.”

Or not, Charlotte thought. She had seen Roger’s medical records when she’d reviewed the case files. He had been as healthy as a man thirty years younger, no trace of heart disease or any other ailment. To her, a less clinical explanation seemed likely: Roger had been at such a point of despair when they left him yesterday, he had simply given up.

If only you’d managed to hang on for one more day, she wanted to tell him. But his face was calmer than she had ever seen it, all signs of the anguish he’d shown yesterday gone. No, this was what he wanted. The corners of his lips were even pressed upward in a faint smile, and she knew then that he had been thinking of Magda when he died.

We know now, she communicated with him silently. We found the telegram. You were telling the truth. You didn’t mean to do it after all.

She studied Roger, trying to place the emotion she was feeling. Not grief, exactly; she hadn’t known him well enough for that. But there was a kind of sadness in not having been able to help him before it was too late, like the kids back home who slipped through the cracks despite her best efforts to save them. With Roger, though, it was something more, a sense of a kindred spirit who had spent
years caught in a past life he couldn’t quite shed. Only now he had finally been set free.

Charlotte looked up then at the daughter whom Roger had not known was alive all these years, confronted now with the reality of his death. She expected to see anger on Anna’s face at being denied a reunion with the father she had only just found, at missing her one chance to say farewell by just hours. But the woman’s expression was beatific, filled with peace and love.

You and your mother were everything to him, Charlotte wanted to tell Anna. But it was not her place. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet your father,” she offered instead.

“Me too,” Anna replied. “But I’m glad I found him.” It was more than the fact that she was a nun, Charlotte realized, that gave her this sense of calm. The woman had simply known so much pain and loss that she accepted the unexpected twists and turns in her life as they came.

“We should give you a minute,” Charlotte said, nudging Jack and Brian into the hallway. Through the glass she could see Anna, bending to kiss Roger’s cheek. “So what now?”

“Well, the case will be dropped, obviously,” Jack said. “I’ll take the telegram and make sure the record gets corrected so that Roger’s name is cleared posthumously.”

Charlotte nodded. The vindication was not as good as it would have been while Roger was alive, but it would have to do. Glancing through the window, she could see the clock by Roger’s bedside. The one treasure he had been seeking now seemed almost irrelevant.

There was a vibrating sound from Jack’s pocket. “Excuse me,” he said, pulling out his phone and stepping around the corner.

“Acquittal after he’s gone,” Brian remarked dryly. “It just feels so unsatisfactory.”

“Not to me,” Charlotte interjected.

He turned to her. “That’s considered a win in your line of work?”

“I suppose. Sometimes just being able to walk away is enough. To me a win is not seeing the same kids back in court. It’s a hollow kind of victory—not like in the movies when the kid gets a second chance, turns his life around, and graduates at the head of his class from Princeton. It doesn’t work that way—most of my clients are lucky to finish high school, or get to community college.” She was babbling, she realized now, as she watched Brian’s eyes glaze over. He didn’t understand, never would. But she didn’t care. “So many of them disappear into the void, though, and I don’t hear from them again—I don’t know if they turned their lives around or wound up pregnant or dead.”

“Pregnant or dead?” Brian’s mouth twisted. “Are those equivalent?”

“That’s not what I meant. But pregnant at sixteen—yeah, I think your life is over.”

He did not reply and she knew he was thinking of Danielle, her ambivalence about having a family, and the baby that was coming regardless.

Anna stepped into the hall then and Charlotte walked toward her, grateful for the interruption. “Thank you,” the older woman said, and whether she meant for the moment of privacy or bringing her here, or something altogether different, Charlotte didn’t know. Anna turned to Jack as he reappeared. “I’d like to make arrangements, that is, for his burial.”

Where, Charlotte wondered, would he go? Roger had spent the past sixty-plus years alone. And there was no grave for Magda, or even Hans, to bury him beside.

“There’s a family plot in Wadowice,” Jack offered. “I believe his parents are buried there.”

“Or perhaps I could take him back to the graveyard at the convent,” Anna proposed tentatively. “It would be nice to have him close.” So despite the answers that finding her father had brought, the older woman would be returning to her life of solitude. Perhaps, Charlotte thought uncomfortably, some habits, such as retreat, became so entrenched in a person that no amount of closure can change them.

The next morning, Brian and Charlotte stood at the gate in the Munich airport. Charlotte shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. Their departure had been a hasty one, Brian announcing as they left the prison that he had to get back to New York to prepare for a big hearing the following week. When he’d offered to book Charlotte a direct flight to Philadelphia at the same time, she’d hesitated, looking toward Jack. After all of the time they’d spent working together in recent days, her departure seemed so abrupt. But Jack had turned away, not meeting her eyes, still embarrassed, perhaps, by their conversation the other night at the bar. Or maybe he had just moved on mentally to his next project, already returning to his insular lifestyle, as Anna had done after making arrangements for Roger’s burial. No, the case was over and there was no reason for her to stay any longer.