Read Those Who Save Us Online

Authors: Jenna Blum

Tags: #Historical - General, #War stories, #World War, #German American women, #Holocaust, #Underground movements, #Bildungsromans, #1939-1945, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sagas, #Germany, #Jewish (1939-1945), #Historical, #War & Military, #Young women, #1939-1945 - Underground movements, #General, #Germany - History - 1933-1945, #1939-1945 - Germany, #Fiction - Historical

Those Who Save Us (3 page)

BOOK: Those Who Save Us
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2

CHECK, THE
DOKTOR
SAYS.

Anna frowns at the chessboard, at the constellation of battered pieces on their cream and oak squares. This set, Max has told her, belonged to his father, and his father before him. One of the original black pawns has vanished, replaced by a stub of charcoal, and Anna’s queen is missing her crown. She is also boxed into a corner.

Anna is not a complete novice at the game; she learned its rudiments as a girl, on the knees of her maternal grandfather. But Max’s tutelage during the past four months has enabled her to better understand the logical ways in which the pieces move together, the clever geometric mesh. He has reintroduced her, too, to the keen joy of unadulterated learning, which Anna hasn’t experienced since studying languages at
Gymnasium.
Now, as Anna falls asleep at night, she sees the board tattooed on her eyelids, rearranges the pieces into endless configurations. And she is improving.

But Max is so much better than she! Each match is still an exercise in humiliation. As, Anna is coming to feel, are her clandestine evenings here. Max is more complicated than the games they share. It is true that whenever Anna appears uninvited on his back doorstep, Max seems pleased to see her, invariably exclaiming, Anna, isn’t it funny? I had a feeling you might stop by. And Anna has caught him assessing her with the healthy masculine admiration to which she is accustomed. But Max confines his compliments to sartorial observations, commenting on a new dress Anna is wearing or a silk scarf that brings out the blue of her eyes. His behavior is that of a fond uncle. It is maddening.

He watches her now over the rims of his spectacles, amused.

Are you willing to concede? he asks.

Not yet, Anna tells him.

She studies the board. Her hand hovers over one of her knights. Then she gets up and goes to the stove, which exudes tired whiffs of gas.

May I make more tea? she asks, reaching for the canister on the top shelf. The movement causes her skirt to rise a good three inches above the knee. It is an outdated garment, the Pencil silhouette long since out of fashion, but it is also the shortest she owns.

You’re still in check, Anna, says Max. You wouldn’t by any chance be trying to distract me with that fetching skirt, would you?

Anna glances back at him.

Is it working?

Max laughs.

That reminds me of a joke my father’s rabbi used to tell, he says. Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?

I don’t know, says Anna, busying herself with the tea. Why?

Why not?

Anna makes a face at Max and looks around his kitchen while she waits for the water to boil. Like the rest of his rooms behind the clinic, it is small but neat, each cup hanging from its proper hook, the spices alphabetized in the cupboard, the floor swept. There are even plants on a step-laddered rack against one wall, yearning toward a strange lamp that emits a cold purple-white light. But there are some housekeeping tasks that Max has either neglected or hasn’t spied at all: the diamond-shaped panes in the mullioned windows could use a good cleaning with newspaper and vinegar, and a finger run over the sill would come up furred with dust. Things only a woman would notice; this is definitely a bachelor establishment, Anna thinks, and she smiles fondly at her chipped teacup.

As the teakettle stubbornly refuses to sing, adhering to the maxim about the watched pot, Anna turns her back on the stove and wanders to the plants.

What is this one called? she asks, bending over a dark green leaf.

She hears the scrape of Max’s chair as he comes from the table to stand behind her.

That’s
Monstera deliciosa,
he tells her, the Swiss cheese plant.

Ah. And to think I thought cheese came from dairy farms. And this one?

Max puts a casual hand on Anna’s shoulder as they lean forward together. Anna catches her breath and looks sidelong at it, the long dexterous fingers with their square clipped nails.

An asparagus fern, says Max.
A. densiflorus sprengerii.

Anna stares at a single frond questing toward the light, blind and sensitive and quivering under the onslaught of their mingled breath. When Max takes his hand away she fancies she can still feel its warmth, as though it has left a radiating imprint.

He points to another specimen with striped leaves.

Now this one, he says, glancing at Anna over the wire rims of his spectacles, is
Zebrina pendula,
otherwise known as a Wandering Jew. A donation from a former patient who is now, I believe, in Canada. Aptly named, don’t you think?

Anna retreats a few steps.

I suppose, she says.

She resumes her position at the chessboard. Is Max smiling as he does the same? Anna moves her rook quickly, without forethought.

Max pushes his spectacles up onto his forehead as though he has another set of eyes there.

That’s done it, he says, sighing. You’ve completely foiled my plan, young lady.

Anna watches him covertly as he canvasses the board, holding his head, hands plunged into his undisciplined light hair. He puts a forefinger on his rook.

Tell me something, he says. Your father. Is he a member of the
Partei
?

He has leanings in that direction, yes, says Anna carefully.

Max rubs his chin.

As I thought, he says. He impressed me as being the sort who would. He’s an—opinionated fellow, yes?

You could say that.

Mmmm. And tell me something else, dear Anna. I’ve been wondering. Has it been very difficult for you, living alone with him these past five years? You seem so very . . . isolated.

The room is quiet enough that Anna can hear the bubble of the water in the pot. Despite the astonishing ease of these evening conversations, which Anna reviews each night as she lies in her childhood bed, this is the first time Max has asked her something this personal. She would like to answer. But her response remains bottled in her throat.

Max strokes the rook.

The death of a parent, he says to it, is a profoundly life-altering experience, isn’t it? When I was a child, I often had this feeling of
God’s in his Heaven: All’s right with the world
—that’s Robert Browning. An English poet. But ever since my father died in the last war, I’ve awakened each morning knowing that I’ll never again feel that absolute security. Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off . . .

As Max talks, Anna is paralyzed by simultaneous realizations, the first being that nobody, since her mother’s death, has ever spoken of it. At first, neighbors came bearing platitudes and platters of food, and there were well-meaning invitations from distant relatives to spend holidays in their homes, summers at their country houses. But nobody has ever had the courage, the simple human kindness, to ask her how she feels in the wake of the loss. To approach the matter directly.

And the accuracy of Max’s comment about her isolation: how can he know this? Anna looks across the table at his narrow face. Although quiet by nature and an object of some envy because of the attention her looks drew from boys, Anna did have girlfriends for a time, school chums with whom she linked arms at recess, acquaintances whose classroom gossip she shared. But the rise of the Reich, coinciding with her mother’s death, soon put an end to this. The activities of the
Bund deutscher Mädel,
which Anna joined with all the other girls, seemed insipid and made her vaguely uncomfortable; during patriotic bonfires in the Ettersberg forest or swimming parties with the boys of the
Hitlerjugend,
Anna would watch the happy singing faces and think of what awaited her at home: the cooking and cleaning, her mother’s dark and empty bed. She began participating less and less, citing housework and her father’s needs as the reason, and eventually her friends stopped coming up the drive to the house, their invitations too dwindling into a puzzled silence.

And so Anna is left with only her father, whose demands, once offered as an excuse, are certainly real enough. She thinks of Gerhard performing his morning toilette, wandering about the house in his dressing gown, clearing his throat into handkerchiefs that he scatters for her to collect and launder. She must trim his silvering beard daily, his hair fortnightly. His sheets, like his shirts, must be starched and ironed. She must prepare his favorite meals with no concern for her own tastes, the consumption of which Anna endures in a fearful stillness punctuated only by the snapping of Gerhard’s newspaper,
Der Stürmer,
and explosive diatribes about the evils of Jews. How Anna wishes he had died instead!

Max pushes his rook across the board.

Check, he says, and looks up.

Oh, Anna. I’m sorry.

Anna shakes her head.

I didn’t mean to upset you, Max says.

You haven’t, Anna reassures him, finally finding her voice. I’m just startled by how well you put it. It’s like being in a sort of club, isn’t it? A bereavement club. You don’t choose to join it; it’s thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren’t in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.

Max tilts his chair back and considers Anna for a long moment, scrubbing his hand over his face and neck.

Yes, he says. Yes, it is much like that.

Then his chair legs hit the floor and he stands.

Speaking of your father, he says, smiling, would you like to see how his dog is doing?

Anna gazes sadly at him, disappointed by this return to more superficial conversation. But as Max beckons to her, she obediently gets up and follows him.

After turning down the heat under the teakettle, Max takes Anna’s elbow and leads her to a door at the rear of the house, which Anna expects to open into a garden. Instead, she finds herself in a dark shed smelling mustily of straw and animal. She hears a thick, sleepy bark, and when Max lights a kerosene lantern, Anna sees that he has constructed a makeshift kennel here. Including Spaetzle, there are five dogs in separate cages, and Anna catches the green glitter of a cat’s eyes from the corner, where it presides over a heap of kittens. There is even a canary in a cage, its head tucked under its wing.

Anna walks over to Spaetzle.

Hello, boy, she says.

The dachshund snarls at her. Anna snatches her hand from the wire mesh.

I see his disposition hasn’t improved any, she observes.

Perhaps it might, says Max from behind her, if you’d stop stuffing him with chocolate.

Anna flushes. I told you, that’s my father’s doing—

Ah, yes, of course, says Max. So you’ve said.

Anna turns to see him smiling knowingly at her. Face burning, she stoops to peer at a terrier.

So you are something of a veterinarian after all, she comments.

Max doesn’t answer immediately, and when Anna is certain her color has receded she swings around again to look at him inquiringly. He is standing with his hands in his pockets, regarding the animals with an odd expression, both tender and grim.

I’m more a zookeeper, he says. And not by choice. Not that I don’t love animals; I do, obviously. But these have been abandoned to my care. Left behind.

Left . . . ?

By my friends, by patients who’ve emigrated, to Israel, the Americas, whoever will have them. People I’ve known my entire life—gone,
pfft!
Just like that.

Max snaps his fingers, and the canary lifts its head to blink at him with indignant surprise.

Anna digs a toe into the straw.

Circumstances are truly that bad for—for your people?

Worse than you can imagine. And they are going to get worse still. The things I have heard, have seen . . .

When he doesn’t finish the thought, Anna asks, And you? Why don’t you go as well?

She looks down and holds her breath, praying that he won’t answer in the affirmative. But Max gives only a short, bitter laugh.

What? And leave all this? he says.

Anna glances up. He is watching her, his gaze speculative.

Loneliness is corrosive, he says.

Anna’s eyes film with tears.

Yes, she says. I know.

She thinks that she might be able, in this moment, to go to him and put her arms around him, rest her head on his chest; she wants nothing more than to be able to stay here with Max forever, in this simple dark place smelling of animal warmth and dung. But of course this is impossible, and the thought only serves to remind her of how late it is.

God in heaven, it’s hours past curfew, I have to go, Anna says, darting past Max into the house.

In the kitchen, while Anna fastens her hat, Max holds her coat out like a matador, flapping it at her; then he helps her into it. His hands linger on Anna’s shoulders, however, while she fastens her buttons, and when she is done he spins her around to face him.

Where does your father think you are? he asks. When you come here?

Oh, it doesn’t matter to him, as long as his dinner is served on time, Anna murmurs. He thinks I’m at a meeting of the BdM, I suppose. Sewing armbands and singing praise to the
Vaterland
and learning how to catch a good German husband.

And isn’t that what you want, Anna? Max asks. Aren’t you a good German girl?

Before Anna can reply, he kisses her, much more violently than she would have expected from this gentle man. He drives her back against the wall and pins her there with a hand pressed to her breastbone through the layers of cloth, making a slight whimpering noise like one of his adopted dogs might in sleep. Anna clings to him, raising a tentative hand to his hair.

Then, as abruptly as he initiated the embrace, Max breaks away and bends to retrieve Anna’s hat from the floor. He smiles sheepishly up at her and quirks his brows over the rims of his spectacles. His face has gone bright red.

We can’t do this, he says. A lovely creature like you should be toying heartlessly with fellows her own age, not wasting her time with an old bachelor like me.

BOOK: Those Who Save Us
11.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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