From Anna

by Jean Little

  She loved the giant thrum of the ship’s engine too and the different feeling everywhere. Maybe she was a new, a different Anna. In the dining room, ordering her dinner from a huge menu she could not read, she sat up like a queen and she felt new and powerful in spite of the stupid menu.

  “Have something with me, Papa,” she coaxed.

  Papa smiled at her open happiness but he shook his head at the mere mention of food. Anna ate quickly, guessing rightly that if he had to face her beef dinner for long, he also might desert her. It was too bad. Here they were alone together, and yet it was spoiled. Now her father had actually shut his eyes!

  Suddenly, she had an inspiration. She had still not started to use English, although as they drew nearer and nearer to Canada, she knew she could not put it off much longer. Why not try now? It was the perfect moment, with only Papa here to listen and be delighted and not laugh if she made a mistake.

  She thought furiously. She could ask, “When will we get to Canada?”

  No. He would know she already knew the answer. Something else, something clever.…

  “Are you finished, Anna?” her father said, seeing she had stopped eating and was staring into space. He pushed his chair back a little. “I’d like to see how your mother is.”

  Anna knew exactly how Mama was. She was doubled up in a ball and she did not want to be spoken to. When Mama had a headache at home, Gretchen usually fussed over her, bringing her drinks of water, turning her pillow, pulling down the shade. But now Gretchen herself was ill. Anna, suddenly important but shy about it, had asked in a small, self-conscious voice, “Mama, would you like some water?”

  Mama had not even turned her head. “No, no. Leave me in peace,” she had moaned. Then she had added, “And speak English, Anna.”

  Now Papa was waiting for her to come. “Anna, did you hear me?” he asked when she did not move.

  The excitement which had been blossoming inside his daughter closed up as tightly as a flower when darkness nears. Anna pushed back her own chair and stood up.

  “I am finished,” she said in curt German.

  “Being sick is so hard for them,” her father commented as he led the way through a maze of tables.

  The words were in English. Papa hardly ever spoke German now.

  He must know that I understand, Anna thought as she followed him down the passageway.

  Yet only that once, weeks before, had he asked her to try to speak English. And she had promised she would. She could not remember ever before having promised Papa anything and then breaking her word. Why didn’t he say something, remind her, even scold her?

  He knows that I remember, thought Anna. But he guesses that I am afraid.

  Saying the very first words aloud, that was what she could not seem to manage. She had tried, but every time they stuck in her throat. She was sure that when she did speak, her English would come out twisted and sounding ridiculous. Mama made terrible mistakes all the time. The family tried not to laugh at her, but sometimes they could not help it. Rudi would be merciless when Anna’s turn came.

  So she made up English sentences inside her head and even whispered them under her breath sometimes when she was alone, but when anybody was listening, she continued to talk only German.

  The next morning the sun shone, the sea was calm, and the Soldens recovered. After breakfast the five children set out to explore the ship. Papa frowned as he watched them go. He did not like the way Anna trailed along behind, not quite one with the rest. Were the older ones unkind to her?

  He settled down in his deck chair and opened a book. Klara, stretched out next to him, was already half asleep in the sunshine.

  She is coming around at last, he thought with relief. That will make things easier for Anna.

  “What’s the trouble, Ernst?” she asked lazily.

  “Nothing,” he told her. Then, in spite of himself, he added, “It was just Anna. The rest didn’t seem to want her.”

  Klara Solden’s eyes flashed open.

  “And why should they want her?” she challenged. “She’s so touchy these days. She’s not making any effort to adjust.… She can’t hear me, can she?” Her face was suddenly anxious as she pushed herself up on one elbow and looked around.

  “No, no. They’ve gone,” her husband reassured her.

  He smiled as she lay back and let her eyes close again. But a moment later, he put down his book and got to his feet.

  “What now?” his wife asked as he moved away.

  “I’m just going to check on what they’re up to,” Papa called back, walking a bit faster. “You never know with that Fritz.”

  Anna, following the rest, was not unhappy though. Not yet. It was too glorious a day. The blueness and bigness of the sky made her want to sing. And everything was still new. There was still a chance that she might not be Awkward Anna any longer.

  Then the twins discovered some metal handrails. In an instant, the four older children were competing with each other like circus acrobats. They hung by their hands and then their knees. They skinned the cat, flipping themselves over with ease. They held their feet off the ground and went the length of the rails hand over hand. Fritz shinnied up a post, winding himself around it like a pretzel.

  “Try this, Rudi!” he yelled down from high above them.

  Anna stood and watched. She was too full of admiration for her brothers and sisters to feel sorry for herself. These daring, agile creatures swinging and laughing and climbing in the sunlight belonged to her, even though she was not like them.

  Papa spoke from right behind her, startling her so that she almost lost her balance.

  “Why aren’t you playing with them, Anna?” he asked.

  Anna looked up at him helplessly. She couldn’t explain. What would she say? That she was too stupid? That she would fall? That she didn’t know how?

  He was waiting for an answer. The brightness of the morning dimmed.

  Gretchen, flushed from hanging upside down, came running over to see what Papa wanted and saved her.

  “Why don’t you let Anna play too?” Papa asked before Gretchen could say a word.

  It was not a fair question. Gretchen looked at her stocky younger sister. Anna should speak up and tell Papa that she wouldn’t play. Not that they had asked her this time, but they hadn’t asked each other either.

  Anna said nothing. She had her head turned away a little.

  “Nobody’s stopping her, Papa,” Gretchen said. “Really and truly, I don’t think she wants to play. She’s hopeless at things like this. She’s too big … or maybe too little.”

  Gretchen’s words halted. Anna was not quite as tall as Frieda but still she was, somehow, too big. They had all seen her fall many times. She landed heavily and often got up so clumsily that she tripped again.

  As Gretchen gave up in despair, Fritz joined them for a fleeting instant. He caught enough of the conversation to offer a quick opinion.

  “If Anna practised, like me and Frieda, she’d be better. But she won’t, so it’s her own fault she’s Awkward Anna.”

  He dashed off again before Papa could speak. Gretchen wanted to go too, Anna knew, but she waited.

  “You should remember Anna is the youngest and help her, Gretel,” said Papa.

  Gretchen went redder than ever.

  “We have tried!” she burst out. “Papa, she doesn’t want to do our things. Really she doesn’t.”

  At last Anna’s silence reached her father. What was he doing to her? Ignoring Gretchen, he turned and asked gently, “Anna, would you like to come for a walk with your papa?”

  Anna did not want pity, not even his.

  “I have something else I must do right now,” she lied, not looking at either her father or her sister. Keeping her head high, her back straight, she walked away. A lifeboat stood nearby. She strode quickly around it. Once out of sight, she stood still with nowhere to go, nothing to do but ache inside.

  Then she discovered she was still within earshot.
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br />   “Oh, Papa,” she heard Gretchen wail, “why is it that Anna makes you feel so mean when you know you haven’t been?”

  Anna tensed, ready for more hurt.

  “I know it isn’t always easy,” Papa said slowly, thinking his way. “But, Gretchen, there is something special in our Anna. One day you will see that I am right. She has so much love locked up in her.”

  “Yes, Papa,” Gretchen said, her voice flat.

  But Anna had forgotten her big sister. On the far side of the lifeboat, she was standing in a new world, carried there by her father’s words.

  Had she really heard Papa?

  Special!

  She was not certain of the rest but she was sure Papa had used that word about her, Anna.

  Not “different.” She hated being different. Special, though, was something else. It meant wonderful, didn’t it? It meant better than other people.

  Slowly, Anna wandered on down the deck, pondering over this magical word. It shone. It sang inside her. It made the day beautiful again.

  But was it true?

  She stood still again, thinking hard.

  She did not look special, she knew. She was too big and not one bit pretty.

  And there were all those things she could not do: sew or knit or dust to suit Mama, play games, read even easy books.

  She could sing in tune. She even had a nice voice. Fräulein Braun had said so. But all the others sang as well as she did.

  Yet Papa had said “something special.”

  Suddenly, just ahead of her, she saw another railing like the one the older children had been playing on. She could not have tried earlier with them watching her but now with Papa’s words still sounding in her heart, with this feeling of newness which being on shipboard had given her, and with nobody to see and laugh, maybe she could do it. Then she could go back and show them. She would not say anything. She would just swing herself over as though she had always done it.

  Maybe.

  Anna Solden marched forward to the metal railing. She grasped it tightly, her palms already slippery from tension. Scrabbling with her feet, she tried to turn herself over between her hands the way her brothers and sisters did. She got one foot off the ground — and felt herself slipping.

  “I can do it. I can. I can!” she grunted desperately.

  But something in the way she was holding on was wrong. There must be some trick to it. Her grip gave way and she landed on the hard deck in a tangle of banged elbows and knees.

  She lay, for an instant, wondering whether to try again. But she did not know what mistake she had made the first time.

  She stood up quickly and yanked her dress straight. Then she just ran, ran away, ran anywhere. She knocked into a pillar and bruised her shin on a stack of deck chairs but she did not stop. At last she reached a stretch of deck where there was nobody, not even a stranger in the distance. Panting, she leaned against a wall.

  The sun still shone. The sky was still as big and as blue. Yet the joy in Anna had died.

  “He is wrong,” she cried out to a seagull winging by. “Papa is wrong about me.”

  There was desolation in her voice but the gull paid no heed and no one else was near enough to hear — even though Anna, without noticing, had just spoken her first English words out loud.

  5

  Anna Finds a Friend

  “MR. MENZIES SAID he’d be here,” Papa said.

  The Soldens, just off the train, looked around wearily. Everywhere there were strangers. No one man stepped forward to say he was Mr. Menzies, Uncle Karl’s lawyer.

  “Menzies,” muttered Mama. “It is not a German name.”

  “Klara, we are in Canada now,” Papa said. The tartness in his voice startled the tired children. Papa was not the one who snapped.

  “He must be here somewhere,” he went on after a moment of strained silence.

  The family stood in a huddle near the barriers in the waiting room at Toronto Union Station. After leaving the ship in Halifax, they had come the rest of the way by train. There had not been money enough for berths. Anna had sat up for thirty-six hours, leaning against Papa whenever she dozed, and now she swayed on her feet. If only she could lie down somewhere!

  “He’ll be here any minute,” Papa spoke again, anxiously scanning the faces of people near them.

  Anna had let her heavy eyelids close for just one second. Now she opened them wide in astonishment. Papa had spoken in German!

  He must really be worried.

  Anna did not stop to wonder whether she was right. She just went to his rescue in the only way she knew, butting up against him like a rude little goat, letting him know she was right there.

  “Take care, Anna,” Mama scolded. “If you’re too tired to stand up, sit on the big suitcase.”

  Papa, though, smiled down into his daughter’s anxious face.

  “He’s tall with red hair,” he told her quietly.

  Anna turned to look but before she saw more than a forest of legs clumped about with luggage, Mr. Menzies was there.

  “Ernst Solden?”

  “Yes, yes. You must be Mr. Menzies.”

  The men shook hands. Mr. Menzies was tall but his hair was more grey than red.

  “My wife, Klara,” Papa began introducing them. “My oldest boy, Rudolf … Gretchen … Fritz and Elfrieda, our twins … and this is Anna.”

  Anna blinked at hearing Rudi and Frieda called by their real names. Mr. Menzies smiled politely.

  “You two certainly look like your father,” he told the older ones. “And the twins are very like you, Mrs. Solden.”

  Anna was startled again. She had never heard her mother called Mrs. before. Of course, it meant the same as Frau, but it made Mama seem a stranger.

  “Anna,” Papa said quickly, “is lucky enough to look like nobody but herself.”

  The lawyer looked at the youngest Solden and cleared his throat.

  He doesn’t know what to say next, Anna thought with scorn.

  “Of course,” the tall man murmured and turned back to Papa. “Did you have something to eat on the train?”

  The adult talk went on over Anna’s head. It was of no interest. This Canadian was like most of the other grown-ups she had met. He did not like her. Well, she did not like him either.

  Moving automatically, she followed the others out of the station, across the street and into a restaurant. There she munched on a sandwich — something she had never eaten before — and sipped from a tall glass of milk.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay in a hotel until tomorrow, anyway?” Mr. Menzies was asking.

  “Are there still people in the house?” Papa said.

  People in their new house? Anna came almost awake to hear the answer.

  “No. Mr. Solden’s tenants left last week — and I was able to buy some furniture from them, as you hoped. They were glad to get the cash. It isn’t very good stuff …”

  The lawyer sounded worried. Ernst Solden laughed.

  “Right now, all we want are enough beds to go around. Good, bad, or indifferent, we don’t care, do we, Klara?”

  Mama murmured agreement but she did not sound as sure and carefree about it as Papa did.

  “Did the two big trunks come with the bedding and dishes?” she asked.

  “Yes, I had them delivered to the house. If only my wife hadn’t been ill,” Mr. Menzies worried on, “she would have gone over to see the place was clean. These people Karl had there were foreigners, you know. They …”

  He stopped suddenly and reddened. Papa laughed again.

  “Foreigners, is it?” he repeated. “It is all right, Mr. Menzies. We speak that way in Germany also. If the house is empty and the bedding has arrived, we should be fine. We can clean the house.”

  “The food tastes queer, doesn’t it?” Frieda whispered to Anna then, and Anna stopped trying to follow what the adults were saying.

  She nodded and made a face over her next bite, although really she did not notice anyth
ing wrong with it.

  “You’re crazy,” Fritz told his twin. “Here. Give it to me.”

  Food was one of the few things over which the twins differed. Fritz gobbled up whatever was put before him. Frieda fussed and nibbled. Yet they both were thin and wiry. Anna, who ate more than Frieda but less than Fritz, was stocky and had big bones.

  “Like a little ox,” Mama sometimes teased.

  “Franz Schumacher said he’d meet us here,” Mr. Menzies was explaining to her parents. “He was a great friend of Karl’s.”

  Mama beamed. Schumacher was a good German name. Franz, too.

  “We’ll need two cars to get you and your bags to the house. He’s late. A last-minute patient, I suppose.”

  The words blurred in Anna’s head. She dropped her sandwich half-eaten. By the time Dr. Schumacher came hurrying in, she was sound asleep in her chair. This time, she missed the introductions. She did not rouse until a deep voice, close beside her, said, “I’ll carry this little one.”

  Mama objected. “She is much too heavy to carry. Wake her up. Anna … Anna!”

  I can’t, Anna thought groggily, keeping her eyes shut.

  Strong arms gathered her up.

  “She’s not heavy at all,” Dr. Schumacher grunted, shifting her to get a better grip. Anna flicked open her eyes for one split second, just long enough to see the big, friendly face. What had he said? Could she really have heard?

  If the doctor knew she was awake, he made no sign. “Light as a feather — really!” he said to Mama.

  Anna lay perfectly still in his arms. She kept her eyes tightly closed and she did not smile.

  Yet she loved Franz Schumacher from that moment.

  6

  Half a House

  FRANZ SCHUMACHER was panting before he reached his car, but he did not put Anna down.

  As they followed him, Frieda poked Fritz. “She’s not really asleep,” she whispered.

  “Anybody can tell that,” Fritz agreed. Then he shrugged. “With Anna, who knows why?” he murmured.