The Lost Family
Page 41
That’s my father’s doing, Anna tells him. He is constantly slipping the dog scraps from the table.
Now Herr Doktor Stern does give her another, longer look.
Your father—that’s Herr Brandt, yes?
That’s right.
Ah, says the Doktor, and lifts Spaetzle from the examining table. He settles the dog in Anna’s arms. The dachshund’s eyes are glazed; limp, he seems to weigh as much as a paving stone.
A mild sedative, the Doktor explains, and muscle relaxant. So I could extract the . . . In any case, he’ll be up to his old tricks in no time, provided you keep him away from sweets and other, shall we say, indigestibles?
He lowers his spectacles and smiles at Anna, who stands returning it longer than she should. Then she remembers herself and shifts the dog to fumble awkwardly in her coat pocket for her money purse.
How much do I owe you? she asks.
The Doktor waves a hand.
No charge, he says. It is the least I can do, considering my last ill-fated interaction with your family.
He turns away, and Anna thinks, Of course. Now she knows where she has seen him before. He attended Anna’s mother in the final days of her illness, the only physician in Weimar who would come to the house. Anna recalls Herr Doktor Stern hurrying past her in the upstairs hallway, vials clinking in his bag; that, upon spying the woebegone Anna in a corner, he stopped and chucked her under the chin and said, It’ll be all right, little one. She recalls, too, that Gerhard’s first reaction to his wife’s death was to rant, It’s all his fault she didn’t recover. What else can one expect from a Jew? I should never have let him touch her.
You used to have a beard, Anna says now, a red beard.
The Doktor scrapes a hand over his jaw, producing a small rasping sound.
Ah, yes, so I did, he says. I shaved it off last year in an attempt to look younger. Vain in both senses of the word.
Anna smiles again. How old is he? No more than his mid-thirties, she is sure. He wears no wedding ring.
He opens the door for her with a polite little flourish. Anna remains near the apothecary cabinet, fishing about for something else to ask him, wondering whether she can possibly pretend interest in the jars of medicines and tongue depressors or the skeleton propped in one corner of the room, wearing a fedora. But the Doktor has an air of impatience now, so Anna gives a small sigh and takes a firmer grasp on the dog.
Thank you very much, Herr Doktor, she murmurs as she brushes past him, noticing, beneath the odor of disinfectant, the smell of spiced soap on his skin.
My pleasure, Fräulein.
The Doktor flashes Anna a distracted half-smile and calls into the waiting room: Maizel!
A small boy with long curls bobbing over his ears scurries toward Anna, his arm in a sling. He is followed by an older Jewish man in a threadbare black coat. Their forelocks remind Anna of wood shavings. She presses herself against the wall to let the pair pass.
As she emerges into the chilly night, Anna casts a wistful look back at the clinic. Then, with unease, she remembers her father. It is late, and Gerhard will be furious that his dinner has been delayed; he insists his meals be served with military precision. On sudden impulse, Anna turns and hastens toward the bakery a few streets away. A Sachertorte, Gerhard’s favorite dessert, will provide an excuse as to why Anna has been out at this hour—she is certainly not going to tell him about the debacle with the dog—and may act as a sop to his temper.
Like everything else in this forlorn neighborhood, the bakery is nothing to look at. It does not even have a name. Anna wonders why its owner, Frau Staudt, doesn’t choose to relocate outside the Jewish Quarter, since she is as Aryan as Anna herself. No matter; however run-down the shop, its pastries are the best Weimar has to offer. Anna arrives just as the baker is flipping the sign from Open to Closed. Anna taps on the window and makes a desperate face, and Frau Staudt, whose substantial girth is trussed as tightly as a turkey into her apron, throws up her hands.
She unlocks the door, grumbling in her waspish little voice, And what is it you want now? A Linzertorte? The moon?
A Sachertorte? says Anna, trying her most winning smile.
A Sachertorte! Sachertorte, the princess wants . . . I don’t suppose you have the proper ration coupons, either.
Well . . .
I thought not.
But the widowed and childless baker has long adopted a maternal attitude toward the motherless Anna, and there is indeed a precious Sachertorte in the back, and Anna manages, by looking suitably pitiable, to beg half of it on credit.
This accomplished, she returns home as quickly as she is able, given that she is holding the pastry box under one arm and the dachshund, who is starting to squirm, in the other. And again Anna is in luck: when she sneaks in through the maid’s entrance, she hears a rising Wagnerian chorus from her father’s study. Gerhard is in a decent mood, then. Perhaps he has not noticed what time it is. Anna deposits the dog in his basket and frowns at the sideboard. The Rouladen, left out of the icebox this long, has probably spoiled. Anna will have to concoct an Eintopffrom last night’s dinner instead.
As she hastily assembles the ingredients for the casserole, she pinches bits from the cake and eats them. The cold night air has given her an appetite. It has done wonders for Spaetzle too, apparently, for he makes the quick recovery the Doktor has promised. He waddles from his bed to lurk underfoot; he stares with beady interest at Anna’s hand, following the progress of Sachertorte from box to mouth. As Anna does not appear to be about to offer him any, he lets out a volley of yaps.
Quiet, Anna says.
She cuts herself a sliver of cake and eats it slowly, savoring the bitter Swiss chocolate and sieving her memory for more details of Herr Doktor Stern’s house call five years earlier. She recalls that the red beard made him look like the Dutch painter van Gogh, whose self-portraits were once exhibited in Weimar’s Schlossmuseum. Even now without it, the resemblance is striking, Anna reflects: the narrow face, the sad blue brilliance of the eyes, the weary lines etched about the mouth, not without humor. The artist in his final tortured days.
Anna sighs. In the time before the Reich, she would have been able to revisit the Doktor with some conjured malady. She might even, with careful planning, have encountered him socially. But now? Anna has no excuse whatever to visit a Jewish physician; in fact it is, as the Doktor himself has reminded her, forbidden. Not that Anna has ever paid much attention to such things.
She takes a disheartened bite of cake, and Spaetzle barks again.
Shut up, Anna tells him absently.
Then she looks down at the dog. Encouraged by Anna’s thoughtful expression, he begins to wriggle and whine. Anna smiles at him and slices another piece off the cake, somewhat larger this time. She hesitates for a moment, the chocolate softening in her palm. Then she says, Here, boy, and drops it to the floor.
About the Author
Jenna Blum is the New York Times and number one international bestselling author of the novels Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers. She was also voted one of the favorite contemporary women writers by Oprah.com readers. Jenna is based in Boston, where she earned her MA from Boston University and has taught fiction and novel workshops for Grub Street Writers for twenty years.
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Also by Jenna Blum
The Lucky One in Grand Central
The Stormchasers
Those Who Save Us
Copyright
the lost family. Copyright © 2018 by Jenna Blum. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical
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first edition
Cover design by Adalis Martinez
Cover photograph © Chaloner Woods / Stringer / Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274218-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274216-2
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