by Pam Jenoff
“Or is this just about rebellion? Because there are easier ways...”
I consider the question. I can see how it might seem that way—a girl from a well-to-do family, rearing back against expectations. Indeed, when Papa and I quarreled my first instinct was to run to Georg. But my feelings for Georg aren’t about that—they are real and I would care as much if Papa approved and he fit neatly into my world.
“It isn’t that. But how can I possibly have feelings for a man I’ve known less than a week?”
She shrugs. “Sometimes you just know,” and her tone suggests the observation is personal. But is she talking about Marcin or the man who came before and gave her Emilie?
“Even if I did, it’s a moot point. He thinks of me as a silly child.”
She dipped her head. “One could get in much trouble for looking at a child like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can see a great deal from the piano bench. Georg watches you with real feeling—and an intensity I’ve seldom seen.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I insist. “There’s no future in it.”
“Because of your fiancé? Engagements can be broken. It isn’t that hard.”
“No, you don’t understand. It’s so much worse.” I pause, and take a deep breath. “Krysia, I’m married!” I bring my hand to my mouth. It is the first time I’ve confessed this to anyone, the secret I’ve pushed so far from my mind these recent months. But spoken aloud now, the words are now real, impossible to deny.
The evening before Stefan was to report for duty we’d gone down to the Unter den Linden. It was a humid August evening and a fine coat of perspiration covered everything. The street was closely packed with revelers, celebrating Germany’s certain quick victory, men and women such as ourselves enjoying a last night together in the cafés and dance halls before the men left for war. Outside the Rathaus, a line had formed. A few of the women clutched makeshift bouquets of flowers or Bibles.
“They’re waiting to get married,” Stefan observed, a note of prompting to his voice. I did not respond. The couples were mostly working class, with their simple dresses and worn coats. Those women sorely needed the benefits that came with being a soldier’s wife—or a soldier’s widow if things went wrong. I was lucky enough to have not just Papa, but the security of Uncle Walter and the family estate to fall back on. I would be sad, but not destitute, if Stefan should fall.
But as Stefan watched the queue inch toward the town hall, there was a light in his eyes like none I had seen before. “Should we...?” He could not bring himself to finish the question and behind the hope, the fear of rejection flickered.
I hesitated. There were a dozen reasons to decline: I wanted a real wedding (the furthest thing from the truth), I could not get married without Papa being there. Seeing Stefan’s face, though, I knew that he needed this if he was to make it through whatever lay ahead. “Let’s.” Hand in hand we walked toward the courthouse to be married.
The line progressed up the steps of the town hall, couples pressed close behind us. In front of us a woman leaned in and rested her head contentedly on her fiancé’s shoulder. Something prickled at me. It was not right. It was all happening too fast. I wanted to tell Stefan that we should wait and do this another time with our families, but he stared straight ahead, shoulders squared, chin lifted with confidence. My palms began to sweat and I wondered if he would notice and ask me what was wrong. He squeezed my hand, oblivious.
Minutes passed, seeming like hours. As we neared the front of the room, a tight grip closed around my chest until I could not breathe. I turned, pulling my hand from Stefan’s and searching for the exit. But it was too late—the registrant was taking down our names on a piece of paper and completing the certificate. I could scarcely hear the question she asked over the buzzing in my ears. “Ja,” I croaked. Then it was over and we were shuffled to the side to make way for the next couple.
“That’s it?” I asked. I had not been a woman who had dreamed of a wedding ceremony, but it was hard to believe that a few words and signatures were the difference between freedom and forever.
“Yes?” His smile dampened. “You don’t mind, do you? We’ll do the rest after.” Armed with our marriage, he could go off to war believing in after. “Unless you want to tell our families?”
“No.” The word came out more firmly than I’d intended. “Papa would be upset not to be here.”
“This should have been so much more,” Stefan lamented as we walked down the steps of the Rathaus. “I’m happy we did it, of course. But you deserve a proper wedding, with a reception after.”
I shook my head. “Nonsense. You know I’ve never cared about that. The marriage is what’s important, being yours.” But a lump grew in my throat as I clutched tighter the piece of paper that bound me to him. Something did not feel right, like a rock caught in one’s shoe, pressing down painfully step after step. It was not the lack of a wedding I minded. Rather, the permanency of what we had just done crashed onto me.
After dinner we returned to our house to find a surprise party, a gathering of family and close friends. “A small celebration,” Papa said.
He knows! I thought with alarm, wondering if he and Stefan discussed a quick wedding, as well as our engagement. “Since there is no time for an engagement party,” he added.
My shoulders slumped with relief. Oh, Papa, I thought as he raised a glass and said a few quiet words about me and Stefan, love and hope. If only you knew. My heart ached to tell him. We never had secrets when I was a child. “You didn’t have to do this,” I said instead. “It is really too kind.”
“These happy moments are rare, and to be rarer still in the months to come,” he replied. There was a darkness behind his eyes that hinted at his true suspicions about the war, that nothing would be as sure and quick as the politicians and journalists were making out. Papa studied war for a living, centuries and centuries of fighting since the Mongols and the Tartars. He knew that if it were really so easy, the war would not have been fought at all but resolved another way.
“At least,” Celia said coldly, “if something happens, you would have been engaged.” She was not trying to be cruel, just practical. To her, having had someone who really wanted you, enough to make it official, meant everything. What would she have said if she knew the truth about our already-marriage? She surely would have been embarrassed by the crude nature of our courthouse wedding.
“If only we hadn’t gone to the courthouse that day,” I say, as I finish telling Krysia. “This would have all been so much easier to untangle without the lies. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. But you see now why Georg and I can never be together.”
“Marriage isn’t a death sentence. People end marriages. Perhaps in this situation, where it isn’t publicly known, it might be easier.”
“Stefan would never agree. And even if he did, I couldn’t do that to him now that he is hurt.”
“Is lying to him any better?”
“It won’t be a lie. Once I’m back in Berlin and we have the chance to get to know each other more intimately, I’m certain things will be different.”
“You mean you and Stefan never consummated your marriage?”
I shake my head, feeling the blush creep up my neck. “There wasn’t time.”
Stefan had not come to me that night. I’d lain awake, wondering if he might slip up to my window and find a way for us to be together. We were, after all, married and this one chance to explore the things I’d only read about secretly was perhaps the brightest spot in all of this. “I’ve got to report at five tomorrow,” he’d murmured as he left. “And we should wait until we’re properly married by a rabbi, anyway, rather than sneaking around.”
Krysia gives a soft laugh. “What?” I demand angrily.
“I’m sorry, my dear. I’m not making light of your situation, not in the slightest. But you aren’t married, not in the biblical sense. Even the church might annul a marriage under such
circumstances.”
“To Stefan we are.” And I’ve never heard of an annulment in Judaism, I lament silently.
“Do you really believe you can just go back to the old life and fit in so easily as though none of this ever happened?” She has a point. I’m not the same girl I was four years ago. “Life has a way of reshaping us.” I’m unsure if she is talking about herself or me.
“Anyway, I’m sure you’re wrong.” I wave away the bottle of brandy she’s picked up again, but she ignores me and pours. “Georg isn’t interested in me. I’m a diversion, that’s all.”
“You’re attractive and intelligent and articulate. Why do you discount yourself? It’s a defense mechanism, I think, to protect yourself from rejection,” she says, answering her own question. “Don’t let anyone get close and they won’t leave or be able to hurt you again. Maybe it’s because of your mother.” She is not being unkind, just speaking bluntly. “Death is a kind of abandonment,” she adds.
“Anyway, Georg and Stefan are two separate issues,” she continues, raising her hands in opposite directions. “Your feelings for Stefan changed long before Georg came along.” But even if I had truly been in love with Stefan, I would have noticed Georg—no matter what. Georg did not cause me to stop loving Stefan. But he highlighted the difference between everything and emptiness and made it impossible for me to go back to a place where the latter was enough.
“Did you love Stefan? Ever, I mean?”
I consider the question. “I think so. I mean, I was so lonely and well, being with Stefan was company.”
“There are worse things than being alone.”
“I don’t like Georg,” I protest again. “He’s all wrong for me.”
“Yet you haven’t told him about Stefan?”
I shake my head. “Not exactly.” Why hadn’t I told Georg the truth about Stefan? Now, of course, it would be awkward, a secret kept too long. But back at the very beginning when we were discussing our childhoods and families and lives back home as the newest of acquaintances might, it would have been the most natural thing in the world to mention. It was more than just my guilt over the fact that I am here in Paris while Stefan convalesces in a veteran’s hospital. No, there was something about Georg right from the start that made me want to keep that part of myself hidden.
“Georg isn’t the man for me,” I repeat stubbornly.
“Nor is Stefan,” she adds with a certainty that makes me wonder if she has met him. I look at her, puzzled. “You have no warmth when you speak about him.”
“No,” I admit, unable to lie to her. “It’s not because he’s injured. It’s as though the light has gone out in the furnace inside me with respect to Stefan, and much as I try to blow on it, I can’t make the embers burn. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t seen him in four years.” My eyes begin to water. “I can barely picture his face.”
“Or because you were sixteen when you became engaged, scarcely more than a child.” She’s right. The girl I was before the war was someone I barely remember. “We commit our lives to others when we are still unformed ourselves. I’m glad I met Marcin later—it would not have been the same when we were young. We had to make our mistakes.”
But neither Krysia’s explanation of age nor mine of the passage of time adequately explains my lack of warmth for Stefan. He is wrong for me. The way I feel when I am with Georg has changed my notion of love and made it impossible to go back to the bland feelings I once had for Stefan.
“What am I going to do?” Tears fill my eyes. Krysia reaches out and pulls me close, her arms warmer than I could have imagined, like the mother’s touch I have lacked for so long. I put my head in her lap and weep like a child.
“There, there.” Krysia’s voice is a warm blanket, her advice wise—like a big sister I never had, or the mother I scarcely knew.
A few minutes later, I sit up and wipe my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Emotion is human—and good for us. It shows that we care. It is getting late, though,” Krysia remarks.
I glance at the clock on the mantel. It is almost eleven. “I’m so sorry,” I repeat, standing to leave. I have overstayed my welcome. “I should go.”
But she shakes her head, pulls me gently back to the settee. “Not at all. You won’t get a taxi this time of night and the trains will have stopped running. Why don’t you just stay here? It’s nothing posh, but you’re most welcome. Marcin is playing an engagement out of the city.”
My shoulders sag with exhaustion. Suddenly staying in Krysia’s warm apartment seems the most inviting thing in the world. “Thank you.”
“Your father won’t be worried? There’s a telephone booth at the corner.”
“Oh.” I would rather not speak with Papa after our quarrel, but I don’t dare to go missing a second night.
“Why don’t I run down and ring him while you freshen up?” she offers, sensing my unease. Gratefully, I scribble down the number on the back of the matchbook she hands me. “The toilet is just down the hall if you need it.”
When I return to the apartment a few minutes later, Krysia has fixed up some blankets and a pillow on the divan. “There.” I burrow under, inhaling the scent of her perfume and looking around the room in the darkness.
“You don’t have a piano to play here,” I say, noticing for the first time, as my eyes grow heavy. Of course not. There would have been no way to get it to the garret and no room for it, anyway. No phonograph or radio, either. It seems the oddest thing for a musician to have no music.
“No. There’s a music store around the corner that lets me play theirs in exchange for giving the occasional lesson.”
“I like quiet,” she says, reading my thoughts. “You shouldn’t be afraid to be alone with your own thoughts.” She dims the lamp, then retreats to the loft bed in the corner of the flat without speaking further, as if to prove a point.
Surrounded by the soft downy bedding and Krysia’s lilac scent, I drift quickly to sleep. I dream that I am running down the street from our apartment to the hotel in Versailles, searching for something, perhaps the missing document. No, not something, I realize as I reach the hotel. Someone. I am late for work and I go into Georg’s hotel room but the bed is made, all of his personal effects gone, and it is as if he was never here at all. I turn and suddenly it is not his hotel room at all but our house back in Berlin and I reach for the doorknob but it will not open. I am trapped.
My eyes fly open. I blink in the darkness, confused. Krysia’s apartment, I remember, hearing her faint snore. I lay awake, shaken and trying to collect fragments of the dream as they scatter.
My thoughts turn to our earlier conversation, my revelation to Krysia that Stefan and I are already wed. What is marriage, anyway? It has been over four years since Stefan and I went to the Rathaus and came out with that piece of paper callings us man and wife, and yet I feel no closer to him than the stranger I pass on the street. Was it supposed to confer some new feeling, or simply recognize what is already there? But if it is no more than acknowledgment of the status quo, then why do we need it at all?
Sometimes it is as if I have two people inside me—the one that knows what is right and the one that does not care and only knows want, desire. She is the one who would cast off these skirts and run wild through the forest, who would hop a freighter for China. My gaze travels to the window and the thin strip of night sky above the roofs of the buildings. I could just leave. I’d head west, I decide, over the rolling hills until I reach the sea and a ship to take me away from it all. How would I survive? I’ve never had a job, do not have any skills, but I could find work as a governess or tutor. Something tells me I can manage hard work, am perhaps even suited to it. And my needs are simple, a place to rest, a bit of food. But I could not leave Papa any more than I could forsake myself.
“There are some doors,” Krysia told me once, “that are not meant to be opened.” At the time she was referring to her own situation, my suggestion that she try to talk to
Emilie. But remembering the day I met her, the words also ring true. What if I had stopped at the gate of the Jardin des Tuileries that December afternoon, heeded my inner warning and not gone through? I would not have gone to the café and spoken carelessly in front of her artist friends and I would not be embroiled in this whole mess with Ignatz. But then I also would not have known Krysia and she is so embedded in my world I can scarcely imagine it without her. No, it is impossible to take one piece of the puzzle away and try to envision the rest whole.
My eyelids grow heavy and I allow myself to be lulled to sleep once more by a gentle breeze through the open window and the sounds of the street below.
Chapter 10
The next morning I awaken on the strange divan, still in my dress from the previous evening. My mouth is sour from the brandy. “Krysia?” The apartment is still, the sound of her snoring gone. On the table beside the couch sits a hastily scrawled note.
Had to run out on an errand. Meet me outside the station in Versailles today at noon.
—K
The note does not give the purpose of our meeting, nor does it contemplate the possibility of my being unavailable on such short notice.
Just before noon I stand at the entranceway to the Gare de Versailles-Chantiers, having returned home briefly to wash and change. The crowd at midday is a mix of locals making their way into the city. Suddenly I feel as if I am being watched. A chill creeps up my spine and I turn, scanning the travelers who move uneventfully from the ticket kiosk to the platform. It is paranoia, brought on by Ignatz and this spying business—the fear of getting caught, that he is somehow monitoring me all of the time.
In the distance, the cathedral clock begins to chime twelve. Perhaps Krysia isn’t going to show. A moment later, I hear the sound of a car engine behind me. Krysia appears, not from the train platform as I thought she might, but through the stillness of the fog, resplendent and surreal, driving a motorcar, a long black Citroën, up the wide thoroughfare that runs perpendicular to the station. She wears a broad-brimmed hat, held by sashes tied under the chin that match perfectly the blue of her cape.