Those Who Save Us (4 page)

But you’re only thirty-seven, Anna says.

Max hands her the hat, one of its flowers crumpled on its silk stem. Then he lowers his glasses and gives Anna a serious look.

That’s enough, young lady, he tells her. You know that’s not the real reason why this is impossible. For your own good, you really must not come back.

Over Anna’s protests, he pushes her gently through the door and shuts it behind her.

Anna stands on the top step, her hand between her breasts where Max’s was not a minute ago. She is too nonplussed by the speed of the encounter and what he has said afterward to rejoice over it. She stares into the garden while she waits for her pulse to resume its normal rhythm, watching fat flakes of snow filter so languidly through the air that they appear suspended.

Naturally, Max is quite right. These evenings should come to an end before either of them get further involved, though the real obstacle—as Max has implied—is not that he is twice her age. The problem, not addressed head-on until tonight, is that Jews are a race apart. And even if Max is not observant, the new laws forbid more than Aryans visiting Jewish physicians: sexual congress between Jews and pure-blooded
Deustche
is now a crime.
Rassenschande,
the Nazis call it. Race defilement. It is like the poem Max read to Anna last week—how do the lines run? Something about a dark plain on which armies clash by night. She and Max are pawns on opposing squares, on a board whose edges stretch into infinite darkness, manipulated by giant unseen hands.

But if Anna can’t recollect the poem in its entirety, she remembers how Max read it, with exaggerated self-mockery, pausing to glance ironically at her between stanzas; his little half-smile; the glint of mischief flashing like light off his spectacles. Anna laughs and runs her tongue out to catch the snow as she descends the steps toward the gate. Of course she will come back.

3

ONE MORNING IN MARCH 1940, ANNA WAKES WHEN HER father pounds on her bedroom door. She lies blinking and dis-oriented: What time is it? Has she overslept? Gerhard is never up and about before her. She turns her head to the nightstand clock, and when she sees that it is but an hour after dawn, she leaps from the bed, snatches the robe from the door, and runs into the hall. Gerhard is now nowhere to be seen, but Anna hears him crashing about downstairs.

Vati? Anna calls, following the noise to the kitchen. What is it? Is something wrong?

Gerhard is snatching plates from the china cabinet, holding each up for inspection before dropping it to the table.

This, he says, waving a saucer at Anna, this is what’s wrong. Why is so much of the china chipped?

Anna clutches her dressing gown closed at the throat.

I’m sorry, Vati, I don’t know. I have been very careful, but it is so old and fragile—Gerhard tosses the dish next to its companions.

Gerhard tosses the dish next to its companions.

Nothing to be done, nothing to be done, he mutters.

He yanks open the icebox and thrusts his head inside, strands of silver hair hanging over his forehead.

Leftovers, he says. Carrots and potatoes. Half a bottle of milk. Half a loaf of bread— Is this all there is?

Why, yes, Vati, I haven’t yet gone to the market today, it’s far too early, so—

Gerhard slams the door closed.

There is nothing in this house fit for a chambermaid to eat, let alone decent company, he says. You must go immediately. Get meat. Veal or venison if they have any. Vegetables. Dessert! You must spare no expense.

Yes, of course, Vati, but what—

Gerhard charges from the room, leaving Anna staring after him. She has been an unwilling student of her father’s erratic behavior her whole life, alert as a fawn, calibrating her every response to his whims. But nothing in Gerhard’s mercurial moods has prepared Anna for his invasion of her territory, the kitchen; if asked prior to this, Anna would have said that Gerhard might not know even where the icebox is.

Anna!

Coming, Vati.

Anna hurries into the house and finds Gerhard standing in the downstairs WC.

Why are there no fresh handtowels? he demands, shaking a fistful of linens at her.

I’m sorry, Vati. I laundered those just last Sunday—

This is appalling, Gerhard says. They must be done again. Starched. And ironed.

He throws the towels at Anna’s feet.

Yes, Vati, she says, stooping to collect them. I’ll do it as soon as I get back from the—And where is my best suit?

In your closet, Vati.

Pressed? Brushed?

Yes—

My good shoes? Are they shined?

Yes, Vati, they’re upstairs as well.

Humph, says Gerhard.

He comes out into the hallway and glowers about, hands on hips, at the entrances to the library, the drawing room, the dining room, at the chandelier overhead.

After you go to the market, you must ensure that everything in this house is spotless. Spotless, do you understand? No pushing dirt under the rugs, Miss.

Why, Vati, I would never—

Gerhard rakes a hand through his thinning hair. In his atypical
dishabille
—he is still in pajamas—he reminds Anna of a big bear disgruntled at being awakened too soon.

Where is my breakfast? he demands.

I’ll get it right away, Vati.

Very good, says Gerhard.

He pinches Anna’s cheek and strides off in the direction of his study. A moment later Anna hears him burst into song, a snatch of the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Wagner’s
Tannhäuser,
bellowed at the top of his lungs.

Anna sneaks back upstairs and dresses hastily, then returns to the kitchen and adds to the bread a boiled egg and some cheese that has escaped her father’s notice. Putting this on a tray with a pot of tea, she brings it to Gerhard’s office.

Ah, thank you, Anchen, he says, rubbing his hands. That looks lovely. Even as you do this morning, my dear.

Anna sets the food on her father’s desk and retreats to the doorway. She has learned to be wariest of him when he is smiling.

Will there be anything else? she asks, eyes on her shoes.

Gerhard slices the top off the egg and eats it with a mouthful of bread.

We will be having guests for dinner, he says, spraying crumbs onto the blotter in his enthusiasm, very important fellows on whom I must make the best possible impression. Everything, down to the last detail, must be perfect. Do you understand?

Anna nods.

Gerhard flutters his fingers: dismissed. Anna walks from the room as quickly as she can without actually running, leaving Gerhard to hum and mumble as he chews.

Tulips, he calls after her. Tulips are in season, aren’t they? If you get to the market fast enough, you might be able to get a few bunches . . .

Anna patters rapidly down the staircase, pausing only to grab her net shopping bag and coat from the rack near the door. Safely out on the drive, she looks back over her shoulder at the
Elternhaus,
her childhood home: such a respectable-looking place, with its heavy stone foundation and half-timbered upper stories. One would never suspect its owner to be so volatile. Anna glances at the window of Gerhard’s study and hurries down the road before he can throw it open to shout further instruction.

Once the house is out of sight around the bend, Anna repins her hat, which she has crammed onto her head at a crazy angle in her haste, and slows her pace. This is her favorite part of the day, these hours devoted to her errands, the only time she has to herself. During the journey into Weimar and back, Gerhard and his requirements are conspicuously absent, and Anna dawdles along indulging in her own daydreams. Until recently, these have been of the vaguest sort, centering primarily on the day Anna might escape her father’s house to live with whatever husband he has chosen for her. Gerhard has exposed her over the past few years to a variety of candidates, but in Anna’s mind the face of her spouse remains indistinct. Not that she has cared much who he might be or what he will look like, as long as he is quiet and kind. Nor has Anna ever thought of other aspirations, attending University for instance; what for? None of her peers would ever consider such a thing.
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
: children, church, kitchen; this is what all German girls hope for; this is what Anna has been raised to be. Her future is not for her to decide.

But lately her reveries have assumed a different, more concrete form. Given the war—the girls being requisitioned for agricultural
Landwerke,
Anna’s potential suitors commandeered by the
Wehrmacht
and
Luftwaffe
—who knows what might happen? And there is Max. Perhaps, if things continue to worsen as he says, Max will leave after all—and take Anna with him. They could go to a warm place far away from this senseless strife, somewhere he could set up a small practice and they could live simply. Portugal, Greece, Morocco? Anna pictures them walking along a beach in the morning, talking while the fishermen set out their nets. They will linger in a café over lunch. They will eat strange fruit and fried fish.

This pleasant picture evaporates as Anna nears the center of Weimar, where she realizes that Gerhard’s fitful humor seems to have communicated itself to the world at large. The weather itself is nervous, sullen fat-bellied clouds racing across a slaty sky, and in the market in the Rathaus Square, where Anna exchanges ration coupons for venison and vegetables, merchants and customers alike are cross and short-spoken. Nobody, it seems, will meet Anna’s eye. Not that there are many people about; the streets are as quiet as if the city has been evacuated while Anna slept. Has there been bad news of the war? Anna clamps a hand to her hat, which the wind threatens to tug from her head, and recalls Max’s observation that his charges become restless before any change in atmosphere. Perhaps her fellow Weimarians are responding in kind to a drop in the wartime barometer.

Anna ducks beneath the snapping Nazi flag over the doorway of the Reichsbank, taking shelter in the vestibule while she thumbs through her ration booklet. If she and Gerhard forgo sweets for the rest of the week, Anna calculates, she will have just enough to cajole some sufficiently impressive pastry from Frau Staudt for tonight. Anna steps once more into the raw afternoon and hurries back through the Square toward the Jewish Quarter. By now she too is uneasy in her own skin, wanting only to finish her shopping and return to her warm kitchen.

The Quarter also seems deserted—that is, until Anna spots Herr Nussbaum, the town librarian, standing on the sidewalk in front of his house. And this sight is so strange that Anna stops in her tracks, thunderstruck. For the elderly librarian, whose fussy vanity doesn’t permit him to appear in public without the hat that hides his bumpy skull, is stark naked. He wears nothing but a large cardboard sign hung from his neck with a string, pro-claiming: I AM A DIRTY JEW.

Anna would like to look away, but she can’t help gaping at Herr Nussbaum’s poor flabby old man’s buttocks, the white tufts on his back. Before this, the closest she has come to seeing a man unclothed is a childhood glimpse of Gerhard in the bath, his limp and floating penis reminding her of a wurst casing half-stuffed—an observation that, when repeated to her mother, earned Anna a lashing and an hour in the closet. This current spectacle so offends Anna’s sense of the rightful order of things that she cannot believe it is real. She looks wildly about to confirm whether anyone else is seeing it too. There is Frau Beider-man across the street, but the seamstress scuttles in the other direction with a businesslike air. Aside from her, there is only Anna and the naked Herr Nussbaum, standing with his hands cupped over his genitals against a luminous backdrop of shivering cherry trees, like a refugee from a dream.

Cautiously, after looking again this way and that, Anna approaches the librarian.

What’s happening? she asks, voice low. Who has done this to you?

Herr Nussbaum stares resolutely at the house opposite, remaining quite still except to tremble in the sleet that spits like sand from the sky.

Anna drops her net bag of purchases to the pavement and starts to remove her coat.

Here, she says. Put this on.

The librarian ignores her. His long medieval face belongs over a ruff in a portrait, his gaze the sort that would follow the viewer to any corner of the room. Now the severe dark eyes that so frightened Anna as a child are terrified themselves, rheumy and watering from fear and wind.

Go away, he says, without moving his mouth.

What?

Get away from me with that coat, you stupid girl. They’re watching.

Who?

Anna glances over her shoulder. On the ground door of the dwelling across the road, a curtain flutters, then falls back into place.

But you mustn’t mind your neighbors, she whispers. If they had any decency, they’d take you in. You must be freezing—Not them, you idiot, the librarian mutters through his wispy beard. The SS.

SS? Where? I don’t see—

Everywhere. SS and Gestapo. Something has set them off; they’re on a real rampage. Started going through the Quarter this morning looking for something, God knows what. And they haven’t stopped since.

Anna’s stomach turns to water.

Every house? What about the
Doktor
? Herr
Doktor
Stern? Did they—

The librarian gives a small fatalistic shrug: probably, it says.

You’re just making things worse for me, he hisses. Go away!

Anna seizes her bag and runs down the street toward the clinic. It looks as it always does, with its soot-stained stones and bronze nameplate, and for a moment Anna is reassured. Then she touches the door in the center of the six-pointed Star, and it swings wide to reveal the reception area dark and empty behind it.

Max? Anna calls.

Well, perhaps he has no appointments this afternoon. Most of his patients have emigrated anyway, and the remainder will not be seeking medical attention with the SS about. But—

Max?

Anna peers into the examining room. It is in wild disarray, the apothecary jars smashed, cotton wadding soaking up medicine on the tiles. The filing cabinet has been forced open to regurgitate its patient histories on the floor: GOLDSTEIN, JOSEPH ISRAEL, says the one Anna steps on, in Max’s distinctive, all-capitals hand; 3 MARCH 1940, SEVERE HEMA-TOMAS FROM BEATING, COMPLAINT OF PAIN IN THE LEFT ARM
—
Max! Max—In the kitchen, a teacup lies on its side on the table, milky curds clinging to the rim. The plants have been swept from their perch, and there are large bootprints in the soil surrounding the shattered clay pots. Anna races upstairs to Max’s bedroom, a place to which she has never been but often envisioned visiting under very different circumstances. It is small and impersonal and similarly despoiled, the mattress and pillows slit in an explosion of feathers, sheets on the floor. Anna picks one up in icy hands and buries her face in it; it smells of Max, of his hair and sleep. Then she flings it aside and descends the steps on legs that feel both rubbery and too heavy, as they sometimes do just before her time of the month, as though the blood in them is more responsive than usual to the pull of gravity. There is an unpleasant odor in the hall, reminiscent of sheared copper. It grows stronger as Anna follows it to the door of the shed.

The fanlight window over the clinic entrance brightens for a second with weak sunlight as she opens the door, enough to show her the animals before dimming again, and at first Anna thinks they are sleeping. Then her vision adjusts and she realizes they are dead. The dogs must have been shot or stabbed, for blood drips from the cages, the air thick with its metallic stench. The cat’s fate is clearer: its skull has been crushed along with those of its kittens, whose corpses lie in a drift by the wall. Only the terrier, in the cage beneath Spaetzle’s, is still alive. Its paws twitch; one brown eye rolls piteously in Anna’s direction as it whines.