by Sarah Blake
They watched her.
“When I was not much older than yourselves, a librarian handed me this anchoress’s prayer book,” she said. “It was small, quite worn, the leather cover gone gray from age. The pages were soft, and the words upon them still quite sharp. But on one page, a word had disappeared into the margin.”
“What word?” someone asked.
“God,” she answered.
Even the boy paid attention now.
“How had it?” Evie asked. “And why? Why would a word on the side of the page disappear when all the others had remained?”
They waited.
“I sat there, in the library of the coldest town in England, holding her prayer book, staring at the page, and a picture of this anchoress, this twenty-year-old girl bricked in her cell, began to grow in my mind.
“And suddenly, I understood,” Evie said. “Julianne had rubbed the word away—touching it, like a beat on a drum. Every time she came to the line of prayer. God, God, God. She had come to life. She was alive, there.”
Evie crossed her arms over her chest.
“But,” the boy protested, “how do you know she did that?”
The grin on Professor Milton’s face was electrifying. No matter how savvy students thought themselves, when they first truly understood the complications of backward looking, they arrived here at this gate. If they were good, that is. If they were really thinking. She crossed the room to stand by his chair.
“What’s the difference between history and fiction?”
“Facts.”
“Facts.” She nodded at him. “Very nice.”
The boy looked up, saw she was sincere, and then looked away, flushing.
Evie walked back to her chair and clicked for the image she had waiting there. On the screen hung over the blackboard, two moss-covered headstones, each with the name CROCKETT written in bold, leaned in a grassy plot.
Here lies Louisa, aged 31,
Died August 31, 1840 and her two children,
Stillborn
Henry, b 1846, d 1863
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Far from home.
“Look,” Evie instructed. “What are the facts here?” She was gentle around the word, delicate, as though it had gone off slightly.
“Well,” said a girl who had spoken on the first day of class, “all of it. Everything there happened.”
“Okay,” Evie agreed. “Good. Now, where does the history start?”
Everyone looked at the gravestones again.
“Gettysburg,” a boy with a Medusa’s mop of curls answered.
His neighbor shook her head. “Far from home.”
Evie crossed her arms. “Do you see?”
One by one, they looked at her. She was smiling.
“Here is a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy named Henry, who died at Gettysburg, far from home.” She ticked off the list. “Those are the facts. But you”—she nodded at the boy with the curls—“will write a history of the battle, and it would be tremendous and enveloping, I’m sure.” She was deadly earnest. He almost believed he would write this history; she was not playing around.
“And you”—she shifted to the girl—“might write the history of that era’s displacement, of this movement of boys from North to South, and the effect it had on the late nineteenth century in America. It would show us just what ‘far from home’ entailed. What constitutes home, for instance? Fascinating.”
“Not just the boys,” observed a girl sitting to Evie’s left, whose woven braids were coiled high on her head and bound in a scarf. “There would have been the freed slaves wandering about. And what could home”—the girl’s scorn was palpable—“mean to them? You’d have to take that into account.”
“Exactly.” Professor Milton turned to her. “You are just right. Another history.”
She crossed her arms and appealed to them.
“Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between. In the inexplicable, invisible turns—when someone puts a hand down, pushes open one particular gate, and steps through. A man saying no instead of yes, two hands grasped on a dark street. A twenty-year-old nun in her cell, eyes closed, praying, touching the word God in a book we recover, over and over and over, so that what we have left is the trace of her devotion. In the erasing of that word”—she paused—“is a person. That is history.”
There among the stares of the boys and girls regarding her with a familiar mix of disbelief and incomprehension was dotted a face or two returning her gaze, studying her with a vague frown, a curious worried apprehension that signaled they knew precisely what she said. Knew, without any idea yet what they knew.
She folded her arms and leaned against the classroom wall.
“Below the pattern, the great sweeping pages, the wars drummed out and fought, are the questions: What if? What happened? How? Beware the vast magisterial history unrolling a carpet across time: this followed by this, leading inevitably to that. The march of history, the teleology. Nothing is inevitable; everything is tangential, particular—human.”
They were all listening.
“History is in us. Our history lives in us. Lean low and listen, that’s your job. Not that they had lived,” she pushed on. “But how.”
She smiled at them, walking them forward, hoping they’d come.
“Heroes are the people who are bigger than their times. Most of us”—she smiled at them—“are not. History is sometimes made by heroes, but it is also always made by us. We, the people, who stumble around, who block or help the hero out of loyalty, stubbornness, faith, or fear. Those who wall up—and those who break through walls. The people at the edge of the photographs. The people watching. The crowd. You.”
They were all listening.
“So know yourselves first,” she finished. “Then look back and account.”
The room was still one single instant, then relaxed. No matter how long she had taught, she loved this moment. The class had begun in earnest. She had pushed open the door.
She nodded at them. “See you Wednesday.”
In the quiet after the students had packed up and left, her eye fell on the Crockett Island graves still projected on the wall at the front of the classroom. She had taken the picture in a dense fog, and the cut letters of the graves were thrown into relief by the dull air and the sharp, bright grass on the ground, the familiar gray humps leaning toward each other, like a brother and sister telling secrets, side by side with the Milton granite, the stones her mother turned away from, every morning, in the dream.
Evie shivered.
Know yourself? she thought. Ha.
What was not pictured was the lichen-covered railing that ringed the tiny graveyard, under which Evie and her cousins had slid to play among the graves. Nor the path from the graves toward the Big House through the fields, where she had hidden as a girl, where she had sat smoking with her cousins as a teen, where the twenty-year-old had lain in the night, kissing boys from other islands, laughing at the thistles catching her long hair—one of the Miltons of Crockett’s Island, the four hundred acres of spruce that covered one square mile from granite shoreline to granite shoreline, plunging straight down to the sea, the place that held them, the place that belonged to no one else.
What was not pictured was her grandmother Kitty Milton, sitting on the green bench outside the Big House surveying the lawn before her, or her aunt Evelyn on the granite steps at the front of the house, or her mother, Joan, standing between these two, saying—
Evie.
What? Evie thought impatiently. The image of the three of them, silent and facing her, facing down the lawn, rose so clearly in her mind just then it had the force of a specific memory, as if she had stumbled on the reason for the silence that had seemed to live between them like a vow, like a gauntlet thrown down. As if something might happen in that moment. As if something had happened if Evie could only see it.
Patient as a safecracker,
Evie had worked her whole career to coax lives out of diaries, recipes, the epitaphs upon gravestones, taking tiny, inexplicable moments to sketch a fuller portrait of an age, concentrating on the girls at the side of the page, the women who were not heroines, the ones without a plot. That she was one of the best at it was commonly recognized in the field. But these three. Evie could detail the slow turn of her mother’s head, her aunt’s impatient hands snapping peas or packing picnics, her grandmother’s grace getting in and out of a boat; still she could not have told any casual acquaintance what drove any of these three women, save for the Island.
(Nothing, her grandmother used to say, is simple. Unless you are a hero, a coward, or simply simpleminded.)
“Oh, for pity’s sake.” Evie closed the laptop, and the graves and the Island disappeared.
Here she was, standing in her classroom, longing like one of her students for the certainty of a single moment as told by the old histories. That there was a kernel at the bottom of every life, the beginning of every event—the gunshot, Archduke Ferdinand falls, world war—a cause. A seed nestled in the heart from which a life sprouted and could be explained.
But that was fiction, a fantasy. She knew silence often flew in between families and roosted. Slow, inexplicable angers grew without roots. Nothing special, no story. What the study of history had taught her, clearly, after years and years, was that she might pull up the single moments from the darkness where they lay centuries old, she might point to a spot in time, a line in a diary, the particular shredding of a blue ribbon used to tie a shoe, she might string these together and say, Here is what happened.
And history would sit back on her heels and laugh and laugh.
Five
SOUNDLESS, THE YEAR wheeled round on its colors. Summer spun down green to gold to gray, then rested, rested white at the bottom of the year, rocking the dark of winter; rocking, then rolling slowly, wheeling up again through a dun brown, a mouse gray, until one day the green whisper, the lightest green, soft and growing into the next day, then the next until suddenly, impossibly, it was spring again. Above the newspapers printed out and slapped down onto the doormats, above the posters on the streets, the lindens bloomed and horse chestnuts gathered their spiky conkers, hard green ornaments hanging from the great black boughs above Berlin. Hitler marched into the Rhineland, Franco marched on Madrid, and Mussolini bombed Ethiopia, showering it in a poisonous rain, claiming it for Italy.
It was the end of April 1936.
“Yes, I will,” Elsa answered her father, going down the three steps ahead of him while he locked the front door. It was a cold spring day, and the sunlight slanting along the iron gratings held no warmth. She dipped her chin into her scarf.
Across the way, Frau Müller stood in her narrow window, her hand upon the curtain. The woman did not hide the fact that she was watching Elsa and her father on the stoop.
Elsa raised her hand in a wave.
The old lady didn’t move. Bernhard Walser slowly descended the steps to stand beside Elsa in front of their house.
“Frau Müller,” he called. “Guten Morgen.”
The woman nodded and bowed, and drew the curtain shut.
“There.” Walser took Elsa’s arm in his and firmly steered her away. “She must not have seen you wave.”
Elsa squeezed her father. “She saw me.”
He didn’t answer.
“She taught me how to bake crullers,” Elsa reminded him, reaching up to kiss him goodbye. “Every Saturday.”
“She is misguided, poor lady.”
“Tschüss, Papa,” Elsa whispered, and walked swiftly away down Tucholskystrasse. Poor Papa, she thought, glancing at the windows in the houses above and then looking away. A man used to being in charge, a captain of the ship, her father believed in the ship. He believed in the people on the ship, believed they could steer clear of what was wrong. That was the evil these days laid bare, surely—this sustained, precious belief that everyone could see it all clearly, the hope that someone would come to stop it, that there would be people who could stop it, doomed them instead. She crossed over the street and joined the crowds on Friedrichstrasse. The only people who could stop it were themselves.
The excitement of resistance two years ago, when it had seemed certain the Führer’s inordinate excesses, his purges, his insanities would yield a revolt among his own ranks and knock him out of power, had been flattened into quietude by the steady, unsleeping machinery of the Reich operating in plain sight.
At the U-Bahn station, the glass sheath above the stairs glittered in the cold. Clumps of workers rose into the light.
Gerhard waited in front of the BrotHaus, and she waved and smiled as if they were only two lovers meeting. He smiled back and uncrossed his arms, walking toward her. She could see that today’s lookout was a child, or little more than a child. It was a girl, school age, in a blue serge cap.
He pulled her into his arms, then turned her round, and the two of them started walking in the direction of Wilhelmstrasse, her husband keeping his arm around her shoulder, holding her close. They walked slowly, hips touching, without speaking—as if they were on their way to a nice lunch, and then perhaps to a dark room and a bed.
If the Jews are the syphilis of European peoples, Herr Goebbels, then very well, Gerhard had promised, we will make you sick. We will dirty your walls with the truth. In coal black or chalk white, a single phrase had appeared all over the city in the past month, written by the members of Gerhard’s group, day after day. Big enough to catch attention, to be seen passing by, proliferating on the sides of freshly painted buildings, black needles pricking at the Nazi balloon. Black marks on the white walls all around the Nazi stadium—a white sepulchre of the insanity—the waking beast rising into the skyline in the west of the city. And though each night the words were painted over, each day the group would write them again.
At the end of the short block, Gerhard leaned her against a wall, protected from sight by the corner of another building. She raised her face to his and wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him to her. He pressed himself against her and kissed her. And—for that moment—Elsa could forget what they were doing, she could die here in his arms, it wouldn’t matter, she felt, it was the full sum. He slid his hand around her back, and she arched a little so he had room to write with the bit of chalk, or the piece of coal, depending on the color of the wall.
Gerhard wrote the words, pressing close into her, writing and kissing all the time, gently, intently, his hands as steady as when he pulled the long slow note from the strings with his bow. If anyone passed, they’d see a couple kissing, the woman’s shoulders against the wall, her body arching, her hips pressed into the man. They wouldn’t see the gap left by the curve of her back in which the man could write—
Das Nazi-Paradies ist eine Lüge.
The Nazi Paradise is a lie.
“Getan?” Elsa whispered.
He nodded and took her hand. They walked away without looking back at the words.
* * *
THE MEN KNOCKED later that evening just as they were sitting down to the soup. Her father rose and went to the door. “You will wait,” he said to the men standing there. And though it was clear they did not like it, the men had nodded and remained in the hall. Elsa could see through to where they stood waiting from her seat at the table. One of them had not removed his hat. This frightened her the most. He did not care where he was, whose house he was in. Gerhard had not looked up. He ate without making a sound. Her father poured a glass of wine. Gerhard met her eyes. Eat, his eyes said. Beside her, Willy was concentrating on lifting his spoon to his mouth without spilling. He was very proud to be sitting there with his father and his grandfather. At age six, he had just earned the privilege to sit at the table. She looked down. She picked up her spoon. The spring light had begun its unraveling outside in the lindens.
When he had finished, Gerhard wiped his mouth, pushed back from the table, and stood. Her father looked up at h
im and nodded. Gerhard came around the table, leaned down, and kissed the top of Willy’s head. “Bye-bye, my boy,” he said softly.
“Bye-bye, Papa,” Willy said, still concentrating. She put down her spoon and turned in her chair, rising, but her husband’s hands gripped her shoulders, and she sat back down.
“Elsa,” he said very low, and she raised her face, her eyes holding his.
“Yes,” she said as his mouth met hers and she closed her eyes. My love.
He lifted his kiss, then his hands, and went through the dining room door. He pulled his coat from the closet, his hat from the rack, and his violin case from off the lowboy where it sat. She had not seen him pack the violin. But there it had been, waiting. She gave a violent shudder and had to pull her hands down off the table and under the cloth, so Willy could not see her shaking.
“Elsa,” her father said.
She stilled.
“Where is Papa going?” Willy asked.
She turned to him, her little boy.
“To the symphony,” she answered as the front door closed.
Six
IN NEW YORK, IT was another Wednesday night, and Ogden Milton was sitting in one of the wing chairs at the edge of the reading room at the Harvard Club, where he’d stopped in for a drink and the evening paper, filled that night with the outright disregard for borders, for the rule of law. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s expansions were going on in plain sight. Pay attention, the headlines exhorted. But in the streetcars, in the byways, along the breadlines of this country, the question on men’s lips was What of it? The idea that the country ought to prepare for war in a time of peace seemed nothing but a cheap and dangerous patriotism. Americans wanted none of it. They were weary, they were wary, and Europe was weak. It had gotten itself into the Great War, found itself unable to pay its own debts. Why the hell should America? More neutrality legislation was called for. GIVE US BREAD, the billboards cried along the highways, NOT BULLETS. Europe was a tinderbox, best left alone.