Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  Anna wanted to be left alone. She was tired of being the subject of amateur experiments. Tired of everyone watching her and asking how she was. She was fine. That’s right. Perfectly fine. So long as she spent the whole day indoors, up in an attic dedicated to her own disquiets, her crafts, her worrying about what Karel might be up to, her reading. Anna knew something bad was going to happen. She thought it would happen to Karel, but she wasn’t always sure about that. Maybe it just involved him. Which meant maybe it was something bad that was going to happen to her. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to her little brother, who wasn’t so little anymore. She worried about him. This was the only way they communicated.

  Karel was always trying to save her when he was around. It was annoying. She didn’t need saving, not by him. He had these ideas about what Anna needed. These schemes of his. Hiking! There’s a whole park out by the river, three miles wide. Didn’t Anna know that? Calisthenics! She’d be amazed at what good some jumping jacks and knee bends could do for her temperament. Posture! Karel sneaking up behind her, crossing his arms around her chest and lifting so her back popped and her blood could flow freely to exorcise her bad humors. Anna screamed when he did that one. Why couldn’t he warn her first before grabbing her and making her body crack?

  That summer after Karel was found boozing in Mecklenburg’s Saloon was stifling for Anna too. Not that Anna was complaining about seeing more of her brother. But the way he talked to her, his insistence that she cheer up. He was becoming such a boss.

  “What are you doing there?” he’d ask her, up in the attic. She wanted to tell him not to bother her, that he should be quiet. But she wouldn’t risk a demand like that. Karel was sensitive. He wouldn’t talk to her the rest of the summer if she said something like that.

  Anna said, “Just watch.” There on the sofa in the attic. A sketching pad on her lap, some charcoal in her hand. Most of the time she just let her hand go as it wanted to go. Made one mark, then another. Curled out shapes with the curves from the first letter of her name. Drawing the shape of an a was fun. Before long, small shapes turned into bigger ones. She’d been drawing leaves on a tree, she realized, an aspen tree. She stroked two parallel lines in the middle of the mess. “There it is,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you just start with the trunk?”

  “It wasn’t there yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Anna hated having to explain things to Karel. His turning more and more red, until he grabbed the pad and charcoal to show her how to do it. He drew a straight trunk first, thick, with roots flaring where the ground must be. A decent enough start. That was how most people thought of a tree. Then branches, a bit too angular, funnel-like, a metallic kind of shape, Anna saw that right away. “Oh, hell.” Karel stopped drawing. He realized then. It looked bad.

  Karel didn’t bother drawing the leaves. He scowled at Anna like it was her fault he’d drawn a strange, dead tree. “I’m sorry,” Anna said. Then, “Give me that, you klutz.” She tore the page out from the pad and put it on the table. Over those weeks a new pile grew there, separate from the neater stacks of Anna’s crafts. This one of objects Karel had botched.

  Once summer was over, Karel didn’t stay around the attic much. He was free again, off with his friends. If his being in the attic didn’t cheer up Anna then being gone might do the trick. Karel was such a boy about things. He couldn’t understand.

  More and more he was out with that Emil Braun character. With Alfred Braun and Jimmy McHenry. Anna hadn’t met these people, but she heard about them from Maria. Maria knew about everyone and everything on Clandish. That was how it seemed from the kitchen. How Karel was getting good at baseball. Baseball wasn’t played in the winter, not properly, but that didn’t stop him. He got better and better. He’d stay out until after dark. He’d miss dinner. Then, once spring broke, he took her down to that game. The tryout. That was all it was, some grown men playing with each other. Anna had only ever seen boys play baseball—out in the streets of New York, with broomsticks and a pink rubber ball—and hadn’t thought that grown men would play the game too. Men who took things serious. Who glared and spit and kicked at the grass with cleated shoes. Who only cracked a smile when one of them did something wrong or was hurt. Anna didn’t understand why her brother wanted to spend all his time with these men. These were the kind of men Herr taught them to avoid.

  Karel was making a mistake—that’s what Anna thought, sitting there in the stands at Rourke Park. He hadn’t thought things through.

  Anna was going to tell Karel that he shouldn’t be out with rabble like these. He should stay home to make something of himself, learn to play the violin properly so he could find mannerly employment later on. He was so good at reading and languages. English in particular came easy to him, while Anna struggled to speak anything but Deutsch. Karel was wasting his time playing baseball. Anna was going to tell him, but then she saw how he moved on a ballfield. How he covered space. Graceful in the way he drifted over grass, feet barely touching ground, his spine lengthening with each stride. He stood easy and told jokes. He belonged. That was why Anna had trouble talking to him on the streetcar ride back to Clandish, and the weeks later, when he kept at her to get out more, to make friends with some girls who went to his school. She couldn’t talk to Karel anymore, not like she used to. He kept at her, told her she should be more like the girls from school, girls who sounded horrible, crass, dirty, whose fathers worked in mechanic shops.

  “I’m sick,” she’d say. “Did you forget that, Karel? I’m not at all well.”

  It was reasonable to most people on Clandish that Anna might be bitter, even at her age. The situation wasn’t fair. Karel was her little brother, and before long he’d tower over her. He was strong and his body electric. He jumped down the six steps of Maria’s front porch when he left for school and didn’t even quiver. He landed, stiff then lithe, like a gymnast, wished her auf Wiedersehen then dashed down the avenue. Nobody could say that was fair. Older sister Anna slinking to the attic, legs shaking, remembering the sound of Karel’s feet hitting the pavement after leaping from the porch. Her legs would snap if she tried something like that. Poor girl.

  She barely made a sound upstairs. Hung her straw hat on the balustrade. Curled under a quilt. Lay there a while on the sofa. Listened to Herr working away. He wouldn’t bother her. Not right away. Herr’s hands were busy restringing a cello whose tuning pegs kept unwinding. He didn’t offer much company to his youngest daughter, even if they were in the attic together most of the day. Between the string section of the Musik Verein and the horde of amateur fiddlers lurking in immigrant Omaha, he was kept busy year round. If only he charged what his services were worth and worked at a quick pace, Herr could have made quite a chunk of profit. If he made more money he wouldn’t have to work as hard. Anna understood how these things went.

  After a while Herr took a break. He started his tea and perched on the edge of the sofa while he waited for the kettle to whistle. “What’s wrong, Mädel Anna? Can’t you tell me?” Anna hidden, the pattern of the quilt illuminated green and gold from the lamplight on the other side. “Will you sit up? Won’t you read awhile?” Herr shifting his weight and stretching his arms around the lump on the sofa. Anna the lump. “Don’t go away from me, Mädchen. I won’t lose you. I won’t let you get away.”

  Anna couldn’t help it. She sat up and let the quilt fall and leaned into him. A silly man. He was small, like Anna. He didn’t eat much. She felt his ribs rise and fall through his shirt.

  “I’ll read a bit,” she told him. “Now leave me alone.”

  Anna began to miss certain crafts she’d done the spring before. Some favorites that Karel had stuck in the coal cellar. A pony she’d bent out of scrap wire, a little carved elephant with an Oriental-looking gem drawn on its forehead, a yarn June bug. She wanted to have these special ones in the attic, the best of the best, so she slipped through the kitchen and down the steps into the dark. There was a
lightbulb, but, when she pulled the string, the weak filament did little good. Lit the landing, bled but little into the deeper shadows. Anna sat on the bottom step to let her eyes tune to the dark. After a moment she could see why Karel liked it down here. Nobody came looking for you. Nobody was looking at you. They all must have thought Anna needed their company, that she couldn’t stand to be alone and waited all day for her siblings to return—and she did, the unfortunate part about it. The house was always occupied. Maria around in the parlor, the kitchen, the front rooms. Herr all day in the attic. Even Jake Strauss coming home late in the morning, bursting into the bathroom to wash at the sink, even if Anna was in the bathtub or using the toilet. Anna liked Jake. She did. But he had a habit of embarrassing her.

  Down by the banks of beetroots and mass of dried flower stems it was different. Maria was too old to use the wobbly cellar stairs anymore. And nobody else cared to come down. The cellar was full of what most folks would consider junk. The junk represented new worlds to Anna. Not only did she find stacks of her own work but other treasures too. Ancient ones, which were the best kind. She poked around. Looked in crates without digging deep. She was curious what Karel had been up to down here and mined for evidence. Paths had been cleared through the junk, so she could wander from wall to wall. The dirt floor turned over fresh where a crate had been dragged across the room. Crates stacked four high in their new spots, as high as they’d go before tumbling. There was scrap metal in the back, the frame of an old bicycle. There were some paintings, some plaster busts of Viennese composers—Schubert, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, of course—small busts about the size of an infant’s head. Even Anna’s crafts had been sorted into stacks. Her drawings. Her clay. All the wire work hung from a floor joist with tacks, so they swayed a little as she approached, vaguely alive and menacing. Anna was moved, seeing this. Her eyes wet. Nobody was watching as she let a tear brim and fall. Karel was always trying to fix things for her, wasn’t he? He hadn’t thrown her works away, like she’d feared, but preserved them in this secret place they shared. At least Karel did right down here, under the floorboards, where his efforts couldn’t be seen.

  Of course, just as she was touched by Karel’s invisible kindness, a tear on her cheek, Anna noticed that he was sitting on the steps watching her.

  “What are you doing?” He jumped down the wobbly steps and thumped to the dirt floor. “I didn’t think you came down here.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it? That cleaned up. And hung my wires to save them.”

  Anna moved next to Karel to touch his shoulder. His shirt was damp and his skin red. She could almost hear his heart pumping. “Is it hot out?” she asked. “You’re soaked.”

  “I had to run home.”

  “Oh.” She stepped away and poked around some, told him that she loved it down in the cellar and she saw why he did too. She was babbling, but she didn’t care. She could babble if she wanted. It wasn’t the sole right of Herr and Maria to babble on about nothing whenever they felt like it. She told Karel this. He looked at her like she was strange. “Oh, you know what I mean. Just to have an hour alone without someone picking on you. That’s all. But I’m glad to see you, Karel. I wasn’t talking about you.”

  She noticed how he was holding something behind his leg. The dagger. He went to put it away, picked up the case the violin was in. Anna had no interest in the dagger—it wasn’t the least bit odd that Karel would borrow a knife, the kind of boy he was—but the old violin caught her eye.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, it’s a violin. Let me see it.”

  “You’ll break it,” Karel said. “Don’t touch. It’s fragile.”

  “I won’t. I know how.”

  “Don’t come down here and ruin things.” Karel latched the case before Anna could touch the violin, before she could even really see it. He was angry for some reason.

  “I wasn’t going to ruin it.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  He lifted the crate that held the violin case and set it high on a stack where Anna couldn’t reach. She’d be too weak to get it.

  Anna couldn’t believe him. How he turned and smirked at her and waited to see what she’d say about that. She felt like she was sinking into the floor, her legs failing under the light of her brother’s cruelty.

  “I’m sorry. I wanted to see. That’s all,” she said. Him staring at her. “You did good here. Cleaning. Putting the cellar in order.”

  “Yeah. That’s what you said.” He was put off even more after she apologized. “None of this belongs to us. It’s Maria’s things.”

  “I know that,” Anna said. “What isn’t mine belongs to Maria.”

  “Why should I care what happens to this junk?”

  “You do. That’s all. Don’t yell at me about it. Answer your own question.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Karel said. “You’re always sulking. You’re mad, that’s all. Jealous.”

  “Jealous? Of what?”

  “Of me, that’s what. Because of how things worked out here.”

  “In Omaha?”

  “In America.”

  “Oh. I don’t think so. That’s wrong.”

  “Listen,” Karel said. “I know how it is. Let me fix things for you. I’ve been thinking it over. You need to come to school with me. That’s what it’s going to take.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For you to feel better!”

  Karel had it all worked out. She had until next autumn to build her strength, to find one of Maria’s potions that worked. If Anna was just a little better they’d let her come to school in the fall. She’d have something to look forward to then. Something worthwhile to work at instead of wasting time like she had been.

  “We’d be in class together. We’d see each other all day. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “But I’m older than you. I’d be a grade above.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. With what schooling you missed already, they’d let us be together. Maria could work it out with the principal. I’d be there to help. Introduce you to kids.”

  Anna wasn’t so sure. She unhooked a wire work, the pony, and took it to the steps to sit down. She’d consider what Karel suggested, she committed herself that much. Sat there and bent the components of the pony, made its tail wend upward and wild like in the wind.

  “What do you do all day anyway?” Karel asked. “Why wouldn’t you come to school?”

  “You know I do lessons. Every morning. In the books Herr bought.”

  “Sure. The primers. But they’re old. None of the kids heard of them.”

  “Is that true?”

  “That’s beside the point. You don’t go to school for books. You’re missing out on being a friend. That’s what I mean. You’ll turn out weird like Herr Miihlstein is.” Karel slapped up at a floorboard as he said this, gestured to the attic. “It will be better,” he insisted. “School isn’t so bad. The kids aren’t dirty. You’d feel better if you weren’t hid away so much.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “It’s only Herr who thinks you got to be locked up—and even he’s not sure why. Maybe if Mom was still around she’d tell him how it needs to be.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure I do.”

  Anna swept her skirts flat and laid back on the steps. She rested her head on the worn riser a moment, before she stood and put the wire pony back where she found it. She was tired of all this. She said to Karel, “Am I the one who has to tell you? You should listen to Herr. He’s a good man. He adores each of us.”

  “What do you mean?” Karel rubbed his arms. He looked cold, a film of dried sweat covering him. He rubbed where there were goose bumps. “I don’t understand,” he said after a moment. “Are you mad?”

  “You think you’re all grown up, yeah. You should find yourself lucky if you end up like Father. If y
ou weren’t pigheaded, you’d know this.”

  She’d never talked to him this way, her voice sharp with contempt. She was making him angry, reminding him that he was still only a boy. She decided to tell him about their mother—all the things their older sisters had told her in confidence and made her swear to secrecy. Anna made herself sound bored to tell it; she sighed and shook her head at him, like Karel was stupid for not knowing that their mother hadn’t been killed in the war, not really.

  “She was older than Father,” Anna explained. She should have stopped talking. She felt this, her stomach turning over, her guts contracting. “About fifty when you were born. She was an actress a long time before she married, that’s why.”

  Anna told how it had happened. Once Karel was old enough to be left on his own part of the day, their mother changed. They were still in Austria, where they were from, but she wanted to move to Galizien, where a theater needed taking over. In Salzburg directors wouldn’t cast her. She was commanding and loud, which was necessary when performing, but not otherwise. No longer was she a summery thing, not libidinous and lithe like when she’d earned her stage name: the Sparrow’s Nest, later shortened to just Sparrow, some kind of joke a Viennese producer saddled her with when she was young and desperate. The producer was a lout, but he put a star on her door, and that was all she needed. That was what she needed again when she moved her family to Galizien, far away from Salzburg, where an old colleague, a Bohemian, a washed-up actor himself, had sought her out.

  Once they were up there with the Hungarians and Poles, Herr Miihlstein was never happy. He hated Galizien. When war broke out with Russia, he was eager to leave.

  “It’s because Father’s a Jew,” Anna explained.