by Maureen Lang
And clearly, she couldn’t do that here. Not with Jurgen, who went from a socialistic appeal for justice to a communistic demand, then assumed she would go along.
Perhaps she couldn’t even remain at Christophe’s side, seeing his disappointment every time something came up to reveal just how far she was from believing in God the way he did. She needed to be away from both of them, where she could think.
Home was the first place that came to mind. But to go there . . . No, that would be going backward, not forward.
Then . . . where?
26
“You don’t know where she is?”
“That’s correct. I do not know.”
Christophe eyed Jurgen, not believing him. It was Jurgen who kept as close an eye on Annaliese as Christophe himself, whenever he was under this roof.
“She went out? When the city is still in a state of emergency, and nearly anyone could be arrested by a police force who isn’t even sure who governs them?”
For someone who earlier that same day had welcomed himself back into Annaliese’s arms, Jurgen looked surprisingly unconcerned about her safety. “I didn’t send her away. She went by her own design. I suspect it’ll be some time before she returns, though.”
Christophe had started to turn away, to leave through the door he’d just entered by, but stopped. “What do you mean, some time?”
“Because she took her little bag, the same one she arrived with, and left.”
Christophe lurched forward, hands that wanted to throttle the other man now shaking in restraint. “And you let her go without knowing anything more?”
Jurgen pushed aside the papers in front of him and stood. “She didn’t give me the chance, didn’t say good-bye. Bertita saw her walking away toting the bag, or even I wouldn’t have known.” He looked Christophe over as if mirroring the judgment he saw aimed his way. “You think me cold for not worrying over her; I can see that. It only proves I know her better than you. I’ve seen her take care of herself in a crowd, seen her confidence and know how independent she is. She doesn’t need you. Or me, for that matter. Let her go, and if she comes back to either one of us, it’ll be all the sweeter.”
Christophe didn’t stay to argue. He turned to the door, hurrying down the steps and out to the streets. To find her.
* * *
The church spire shot straight up, drawing the eye heavenward. Annaliese stood across the street from St. Luke’s, where she’d been for the past half hour, pacing and shifting her bag from one hand to the other, wondering if she should go inside. There was no reason to enter; there was no service today, no one inside at all as far as she could see.
Except . . . maybe . . . God.
Another cold wind whipped at her, stinging her cheeks, forcing tears from her eyes. At least it would be warmer in there than it was out here.
She glanced around again at the empty street. Nothing kept her away from the church except her own fears.
But why should God want any part of her? She’d been shaking her fist at Him since the day Giselle died. She’d grieved the parents He gave her. She’d denied His existence to anyone who asked ever since she came to Munich. Everything in her political choices refused to acknowledge the existence of God at all.
Despite all that, her feet had brought her here. Not by her design, yet here she was. Drawn as though God Himself did want to see her, to hear her speak to Him.
Christophe had once said if God came to mind, maybe it was His nudging. Maybe He’d nudged her all the way here.
She crossed the street and walked up the wide cement stairs. The door was open and she went inside, into the dim light. She took two steps past the narthex, where the sound of her footsteps reverberated within the cavernous sanctuary, echoing from the dome. She tiptoed after that, only as close to the altar as one of the side chairs at the back. Not far from where she’d sat the night Christophe had brought her here.
She stared ahead, seeing only what she expected. The columns, the mystery and majesty of the dome, so perfectly set, so huge yet so securely towering above her head. Beautiful, a work of worship in itself. Yet empty. Had she really expected God to be here, to tap her on the shoulder?
“If You’re the reason I’m here,” she whispered, closing her eyes even to the artistry of the man-made church, “then tell me. Tell me what to believe. I don’t want to believe things because of other people. I want to discover on my own what’s real. Faith in You or faith in this world . . . I don’t . . . know. . . .”
Then she sat, silently. She didn’t know how to pray, so she let her mind say what it would to the God who’d inspired this building. Giselle came to mind, and Annaliese told the God of the universe that He shouldn’t have let her sister die.
She thought of her father. A father who had let Giselle die. He’d said as much when he came back that day, when he’d sobbed in her mother’s arms. Annaliese had heard every word, though neither of her parents knew that. He’d said he saw Giselle running from the factory. She’d spotted him and run back, away from him, too close to the fire she’d set. It was his fault Giselle had been so close to the explosion that followed, because he’d frightened her simply by discovering her.
While her mother had turned to God for comfort, her father had resolutely refused to acknowledge God could benefit either one of them. His failure to save Giselle hadn’t softened him toward God. Just the opposite.
Maybe that was part of the reason it had been so easy to leave God behind, to adopt the politics of man that excluded any hint of a God concerned about governments and people. It had been so easy to leave God out, especially when others showed her how. She thought of Jurgen and Leo and Ivo, of how God had been absent to her since knowing them, silenced by their influence and by her anger toward her father for Giselle’s death.
Why had God surrounded her with so many people who didn’t acknowledge Him if He wanted her to know Him? Even her mother hadn’t spoken of Him with any regularity, though Annaliese had often seen her reading the Bible. Only Christophe . . .
Then, knowing it probably wasn’t her place to scold God, she thought of what she and Giselle had believed growing up, because of their mother. That God was always there, always with them. She wondered if Giselle remembered that after she’d been surprised into running back toward the factory, when she knew it was going to take her life. When she knew she would see God face-to-face.
Annaliese sat with her memories of people she knew, of things she’d done, trying to see God in any of it the way she’d seen Him bring her here tonight. Because here she was, complaining to the very God who’d given her life. In a building that had inspired enough love in someone to make it lovely.
Christophe came to mind more often than anyone else. Christophe, who’d broken her heart so many years ago. She was afraid he was doing it again. It was Christophe who’d said he didn’t want to be stingy in his faith. Maybe it was God who’d put Christophe here in Munich, not because of her mother at all. If not for him, would Annaliese be here, seeking God’s guidance on what to believe?
Surely He wanted the things she did: an end to poverty, help for the needy. If His plan to help people was to be carried out through people, then history had shown often enough they would have to be forced. Hadn’t it?
She settled back in her chair. Christophe believed it was up to the individual to make the world a better place, not the government. But individuals had let people down. And yet what government had proven up to the challenge of stomping out unfairness?
Christophe was undoubtedly right about one thing. Neither a government nor the people could make the sacrifices necessary to meet the needs of the poor—not without God’s help.
A God that Communists—and most Socialists she knew—refused to acknowledge existed.
* * *
Christophe turned yet another corner, noticing his own shadow defined by the moonlight on the cold pavement beneath his feet. He couldn’t wander the streets much longer; it was senseless. And ye
t where else could he search? He’d been to every corner she’d called hers, back in the days she’d used those corners for her lectures. He’d been to the old party office, the warehouse where some of the men still loyal to Jurgen—no matter the party—housed themselves. He’d even gone to the last place she’d been before joining Jurgen, the hotel where she’d known the widow. Not even Frau Haussman was to be found there, and no Annaliese.
He would return to Mama’s restaurant, where he’d already been several times to see if Annaliese had turned up. He would tell Mama to watch out for her, to keep her there until he came for her. It was late, past midnight, and he was tired from the weight of his boots and the weight of his spirit.
Where could she be? And why hadn’t she told him she was leaving or where he might find her?
Perhaps he shouldn’t try to find her; perhaps he should let her go. Maybe that was what she wanted.
Yet he couldn’t give up so easily. In the last few steps toward Mama’s, one passage from the Bible came back to him again, a passage that described the nature of love.
Beareth all things, it said, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
He wouldn’t give up, not even if that was what she wanted him to do.
27
Annaliese stared out the window. The sight had nearly blinded her when she’d first turned her gaze to it that morning. Bright sun reflected on a ground quilted with the white of a late February snowfall. Even a lake in the distance was cast in pearl, shadowed by a cluster of pine trees whose branches served as platters for snow. Slopes swelled the landscape, picturesque and so reminiscent of the little village where she’d grown up.
She’d sledded down just such foothills, so happily free of every worry, not even feeling the cold. Trudging uphill through the snow with a heavy sled behind her hadn’t been difficult. Not with neighbors like Christophe, who had more than once pulled not only his own sled but the one Annaliese had shared with Giselle.
She was well south of that little town now, closer to the mountains, away from everything she knew. Away from the city, too—from its strife, from the dangerous tension between the workers and those of the bourgeoisie and upper classes. The bourgeoisie like Annaliese used to be, and like the widow Meika Haussmann, who had taken Annaliese in.
“. . . so I ran away,” Annaliese finished, bringing Meika up to the day before, when Annaliese had returned to the hotel where she’d begun her trip to Munich and found the note Meika had left at the desk, directing Annaliese here to Meika’s country estate should she ever want to leave Munich.
“And you didn’t tell either one of them where you were going? neither Jurgen nor Christophe?”
Annaliese shook her head, then looked away, letting her eyes rest instead on the white dog on Meika’s lap. “I suppose I should have—at least Christophe.” She thought of how he’d watched over her during those days between Eisner’s shooting and his funeral. For her own good, he’d insisted, and she knew he’d been convinced of that. “Christophe is prone to worry.”
Meika stroked her pet’s long fur. “Why didn’t you tell him, then?”
Annaliese returned to the chair in the cozy sitting room where they’d shared small biscuits and coffee that wasn’t much better than what Bertita had served. Evidently coffee was the taste of fairness, since even the wealthy could not bring in what the blockade did not allow. Meika’s dog, a little white Maltese named Schatzi, wiggled a welcome for Annaliese, as if to say he was glad she’d decided to come nearer.
“When he kissed me that night,” Annaliese said, “I wanted so much for Christophe to tell me nothing else mattered except how he felt about me—despite our differences. And yet last night, when I was thinking how afraid I was that he would only break my heart the way he did when we were children, I realized how wrong I was. It sounds romantic, doesn’t it, to have someone say you’re more important than everything else? But what would that really mean? That the very things I admire about him—his faith, even his politics—aren’t important?”
“Are you so different? your politics? your faith?”
“I thought we were. I know he thinks we are.” She remembered the look on Christophe’s face when she’d accepted Jurgen’s kiss. She knew he’d felt betrayed. “He felt obligated to watch out for me because of my parents. But I’m sure they’ve sailed by now, so Christophe is free of whatever obligation he felt.”
“I don’t think that obligation extended to kissing you,” Meika said softly.
“No. . . . But I couldn’t see him. What he believes really is more important than whatever he feels for me.” Annaliese settled her coffee again. “That’s why I was so happy to accept your invitation, to think on neutral territory. All I have to do is figure out what I believe, and if any of it is compatible with what either he or Jurgen believes, I’ll go back.”
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course. Only don’t keep them waiting too long. They say women are fickle, but with men . . . they don’t last alone for very long.”
“I’m sure that’s true of Jurgen.”
“I think by your voice that you hope Christophe will wait for you. Don’t you?”
Annaliese shook her head. “He’ll go home. He hated Munich; I saw it on his face often enough. Someday, maybe—if I know I won’t hurt his faith—I’ll find him again back home. If it isn’t too late.”
Meika smiled. “He’ll wait in Munich, at least for a little while, where you knew each other best. If it’s meant to be.”
Annaliese studied Meika a moment. As friendly as they’d been in the first few days after Annaliese had arrived in Munich, they’d never spoken about faith. Even such a statement as that—“if it’s meant to be” . . . Did that mean Meika thought there was some design to life?
She wondered what Meika would think if Annaliese told her it was God Himself who’d brought her to that church the night before. In the light of day, it sounded ludicrous even to Annaliese—evidence in itself that she was far from believing what Christophe believed. He probably wouldn’t doubt God could and would do such a thing, even for someone like Annaliese who’d turned her back on Him.
But even as she pondered those things, she wondered why it should matter what anyone else believed about politics or God, including Meika or even Christophe. Would someone else’s doubts or convictions define hers?
“Last night,” Annaliese said, reaching over the gap between their chairs to touch the Maltese’s silken fur, “after Jurgen said what he did about my beliefs mimicking others’, I only knew I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to see either one of them. I knew if I stayed in that room just up the stairs from Jurgen, it was like agreeing with him. Letting him define everything I believed, letting him think there might be some kind of future for him to keep telling me what to believe.”
She leaned back in her chair. “And I knew that if I asked Christophe to help me find a place to stay,” she went on, “I would be tempted to agree with his beliefs, just to be with him. So I had to go off on my own, even though the only people on the streets these days are the ones with guns. I walked along the march routes we used when I was working for the party. I went to my favorite rally corners. But somehow I ended up at St. Luke’s. I don’t know why; I never intended to go there. I believe—don’t think me insane—God led me there.”
Meika reached across this time to put a hand to Annaliese’s forearm, and when the dog took the opportunity to switch laps, Meika let him. “I’ve done some wandering of my own since Freidrich was killed. I wandered from here to Munich because that was the last place we were happy. I didn’t find Friedrich there. How could I? His body is gone, buried somewhere in France. But I did find God. His peace was more real to me in my pain than I’d ever imagined in happiness.”
Peace. A word that had replayed in Annaliese’s mind repeatedly, ever since her first moment of prayer the night before.
Annaliese stroked the softest fur, just behind Schatzi’s ears. “Thank y
ou, Meika.”
“But I haven’t done anything!”
“Oh yes, you have. So much. Thank you for taking me in, for listening and not judging. For being my friend.” She laughed and drew the pet close for a hug. “For sharing Schatzi.”
“I’m glad you’ve come.” Meika winked and accepted Schatzi back. “But I suspect neither one of your gentlemen are glad you left. They both care for you; no doubt they’d both welcome you back and hope to work out the differences later.”
Jurgen would at least welcome her as his partner, and Christophe would welcome her as . . . what? If she couldn’t be what he needed, equal in faith, a partner in making the world a better place, not working against one another but side by side . . . if she couldn’t do that, be all of that, then it was better if she never saw Christophe again. For his sake and for hers.
28
Sudden pounding echoed like gunfire, even though Christophe knew the sound came from a fist at the door. Ivo’s little sister shrieked when her mother scurried behind Christophe and Ivo.
Ivo answered, letting the door open only as far as one massive shoulder allowed.
“Leo!”
Barely waiting for the door to open wider, Leo suddenly stood in the small room, a room that served as parlor and bedroom, too, at least for Christophe since he’d left Leo’s home three weeks ago. Ivo shared one of the two other bedrooms in the flat with four younger siblings, but Christophe had chosen the floor in front of the fireplace instead. No sense waking all of them with his restless sleep.
“We need you, Ivo!” Leo said in place of a greeting. He thrust a newspaper at Ivo. “Our numbers are in the thousands, but we need every man we can get—ones we can trust to guard Jurgen and Leviné. Are you ready to return to service?”