Listen for the Singing

by Jean Little

  But Gretchen was not there. Only Rudi sat at the kitchen table. Something in the way he sat there drove all thoughts of puppies and school from her head.

  “What is it?” she said. “Rudi, why are you here?”

  “I’m waiting for you,” he answered, startling her both by the unexpectedness of the words themselves and by the dead quiet of his voice.

  “Why? What happened?” Anna cried, growing frightened. “Where’s Gretchen? Rudi, what’s WRONG?”

  “Gretchen and Frieda are upstairs with Mama. Fritz had a game after school. He won’t be here till after supper. Papa had to stay at the store. I … I was going to wait with Papa but he sent me home. And then I thought of you … and waited,” Rudi said.

  Anna wanted to shake him, to scream at him to explain. Why was Mama home at all? Why …? Yet she knew that he was doing his best. She did not know how she knew this, but she did. She forced herself to be still and give him time. As she waited, her eyes never left his face which looked dazed with shock.

  “A letter came. Mailed from Switzerland. It was from a neighbour of Aunt Tania’s.”

  Anna felt dizzy. She held onto the table edge and kept on listening.

  “They came to arrest Mr. Riesmann. The Gestapo, I guess. The Nazis anyway. The neighbour doesn’t say who came. Just ‘they.’ It was early in the morning. He wasn’t even dressed. Aunt Tania went out on the step to argue with them. The neighbours could see and hear but they stayed inside their own houses because they were afraid.”

  Rudi paused. He had been staring past her as he spoke. Now he looked down at his own right hand.

  “I would have been afraid too,” he said very softly.

  Anna waited. He began again where he had left off.

  “Although Aunt Tania told them he was old and sick and tried to stop them coming in, they paid no attention to her. Just pushed her out of the way and went in and got him. He was still in his dressing gown and slippers.

  “Then Aunt Tania ordered them to wait because she was going with him.

  “Mr. Riesmann told her to go back in the house. Shouted at her, the letter said.

  “But she was so … so strong, I guess, that they did what she told them to. She ran in and came out with one suitcase and the old man’s cane and spectacles.

  “Then they took them away.”

  Rudi’s voice started to shake uncontrollably on the last sentence. He stopped and wiped his hand across his mouth.

  “But where did they take her?” Anna cried. “What happened? Rudi, don’t stop there!”

  “That’s all,” Rudi said, his voice dead again. “They have not been seen since that morning. The neighbours dared not ask questions. The one who wrote was afraid even to put it into a letter, but she used no names. She called Aunt Tania ‘she’ and Mr. Riesmann ‘the old man.’ She wrote because she was a friend of Papa’s from when they were children but she didn’t sign her name. Papa thinks he knows who she is but he isn’t sure. They are just gone, Anna. To prison to … nobody knows. Just vanished.”

  Rudi stopped talking as suddenly as he had started. Anna stood very straight in the abrupt silence and did not know how she felt or what she should do. Yet, numb with shock, she still, against her will, found herself remembering Gerda Hoffman’s father who had disappeared long before they left Frankfurt and who had never been heard from or seen again.

  Then Rudi’s head dropped onto his right arm which lay crooked upon the tabletop. He began to cry. Anna had never seen him cry before, had never imagined him hurt like this. Now she felt herself coming alive to what he had told her, believing it. And she felt that he, as he spoke, must have seen it as clearly as though he himself had been standing there.

  Like the neighbour who wrote, she thought. He thinks he would have hidden, too, and not helped.

  Even as she thought this, she was shocked most of all by the way he wept. He had always seemed invincible. Now his hand lay stretched out across the table. Almost as if he was reaching out to her!

  Anna, after a moment’s hesitation, put her hand over his large one. He turned his hand over and they held tightly to each other.

  “Poor Papa,” Anna said then.

  Always, even in an hour like this, unlike any she had experienced before, she thought of her father. If they felt grief, what must he feel?

  But then her mind and heart came back to the boy in front of her. He had waited for her. Rudi had thought of her coming home and waited.

  “Rudi,” she said slowly, as his wrenching sobs grew quieter, “Rudi, I cannot do algebra.”

  He looked up at her as though she had spoken to him in Greek, as if he wondered who she was and what the two of them were doing there.

  “Rudi,” she persisted, unable to stop herself, “I cannot understand why you change the minus sign to a plus and add, when you are subtracting. It makes no sense. To add when you subtract.”

  He still looked blank. Probably it was so basic that he did not even know what she was talking about. She wished she had kept quiet. Then his expression changed. He thought for a moment. When he spoke, at last, it was not at all what she expected.

  “When you play that card game Papa invented, Anna, he always beats you, doesn’t he?” Rudi said.

  Anna nodded, still holding her brothers hand, although his grip was loosening now.

  “When you lose, you get a minus score, don’t you?” he asked.

  Anna nodded again. Maybe there was some relation but she still saw none.

  “When you get two minus scores, how do you figure out what your total score is?” Rudi asked.

  “Add them up,” Anna said.

  “But they are minus scores!” Rudi said, watching her face. “Minus means subtract, doesn’t it, Anna? Yet you change the minus to a plus …”

  Suddenly, Anna completely forgot Aunt Tania’s disappearance, Rudi’s tears, Papa’s aloneness. The dark kitchen seemed to grow bright around her.

  “I see! I see! Oh, you make it so plain!” she cried. “How could I have missed it?”

  Rudi let go of her hand. He smiled at her. He stood up. He seemed taller than he had been.

  “You would have figured it out, Anna,” he said. “Let’s go back to the store. Papa shouldn’t be there alone.”

  They did not talk to each other on the way to the store. Anna felt shy, ashamed of talking about algebra as she had, and yet delighted that something that had worried her for so long had proved to be so easy to understand, with Rudi’s help. She wondered if her brother would be sorry he had cried in front of her. She hoped not. He seemed different now — ever since the war started. Sometimes he seemed to be not the big brother she had learned to mistrust and avoid but a person who might almost be a friend.

  Papa was alone in the store. Neither Rudi nor Anna was surprised. Quite a few customers bought their groceries somewhere else nowadays, not wanting to deal with Germans. Now that weeks had gone by and nothing much more seemed to be happening overseas, some were shamefacedly drifting back.

  “I’m closest,” Papa explained it. “But they will remember I am German again when Canadians begin getting killed.”

  “How is Klara?” he asked, as they came in.

  Rudi let Anna answer. Just before they left, she had run up to check and to tell Gretchen they were going. Mama was lying down, sobbing noisily.

  “If Tania had only listened!” Anna had heard her wail. “Ernst tried to tell her. I argued with her myself. And why did she need to go to that old man? How could she help? She should have let them take him. She will get herself killed for nothing!”

  “She’s resting,” Anna said. Papa would probably guess she was not resting quietly.

  It was strange how Mama seemed to have forgotten that she herself hadn’t wanted to move to Canada, that she had begged to stay behind as Aunt Tania was doing.

  Papa smiled wearily, put out one hand to cup Anna’s cheek, and then started counting up the money in the till. It looked like quite a lot. Mostly change though. Har
dly any bills.

  Rudi began to help, his fingers quick, never pausing in his adding. Watching him Anna thought of something to cheer her father.

  “I understand now why you change a minus to a plus and add, Papa,” she said. “Rudi explained. Mr. McNair told me to ask Rudi for help. He said, ‘Rudi is the finest mathematics scholar I ever taught.’” Papa paused and looked from his daughter to his tall son.

  “I am glad your fine mind is a help to your sister,” he teased. Rudi’s head jerked up and the handful of change he was counting rattled and rang on the counter top.

  “Papa, I am eighteen!” he cried. “And the world is at war! And all I can do is help Anna with the simplest thing in her school work. What use am I?”

  “It didn’t seem simple to me,” Anna muttered, picking up quarters.

  “Rudi, the world is not yet at war. Not really. On the brink, yes. And it will come. But the best thing an eighteen-year-old boy with a fine mathematical mind can do at this moment is to train that mind further so that he can be of use when the time comes. For weeks now you have been wondering where your duty lies, I know. A couple of your classmates have enlisted, I imagine.”

  “Only one really,” Rudi said, with a sudden grin. “Ike tried but he has flat feet. How do you like that for a reason for not going to war? He would never have told except that we all knew he was going into the Army.”

  “Anyway,” Papa said, smiling at the digression but not led astray by it, “what use would you really be at this time, Rudi? Canada has become your country, true, and when she needs you perhaps you will have to go. But Klara is your mother and she needs you now more than Canada does.”

  Rudi whirled on him, all the laughter gone from his face.

  “What about Aunt Tania?” he cried. “Mama is safe enough. Who is helping Aunt Tania?”

  Anna was surprised to see her father smile again, even though this was a wry smile with amusement in it but no mirth.

  “At this very minute, I expect Tania is taking care of herself better than anyone else could,” he said. “Since she was little more than a baby, my sister has been standing up to people and getting her own way. She is a deeply loving person, sometimes too loving, if such a thing is possible, but extremely headstrong. As Mutti used to say, ‘If Tania decides to help you, she will help you, whether you want help or not.’ If it is possible for her to survive, she will fight to do so.”

  He took a deep breath. Anna wished she was not there. Yet she was not bothering them. They hardly seemed to notice her.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Rudi. I am desperately afraid for her. But she herself told us what we were to do when this happened. Didn’t you understand her message? ‘Don’t try to do anything for me, no matter what news reaches you.’”

  As he repeated his sister’s words, his hand moved slightly as if to take the envelope out of his coat pocket and, in that instant, Anna knew, as surely as if he himself had told her, that he carried the letter with him always and that he had read it over until he knew the whole thing by heart.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Papa,” Rudi said.

  Anna understood how inadequate he felt and why he turned away from Papa and began counting the money again. Their father walked away from them and busied himself for a few moments rearranging something on one of the shelves. When he came back, the anguish had left his face and he was himself again.

  “Part of the torment you are putting yourself through is simply because you are ashamed of being German, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “Maybe some of the others have said cutting words … or no words at all. Am I right?”

  Rudi nodded. Then he lifted his head and faced Papa.

  “It’s not just that I’m ashamed. That might be easier. It is partly that I still care about people in Frankfurt. Mrs. Gimpel who made us the gingerbread. Dagmar Berger. I had a crush on her. What are the boys I knew doing, Papa? Helmut was nearly two years older than the rest of us. Did he fight in Poland? Such questions come hammering at me all the time even in school. Twice I’ve almost answered a question in German and just caught myself in time.”

  “You have to be stronger than this, son,” Papa said. “I, too, could let thoughts of those we left behind haunt my every moment. But we have work to do, both of us.”

  “Work,” Rudi said with scorn, as though his studies were beneath contempt.

  “Work,” Papa repeated. “And an important part of your work is helping Anna. If Hitler and his henchmen had been taught to care for and serve those weaker than themselves, to protect rather than to destroy …”

  He stopped short. Anna, watching him, wondered. Did his own words make him remember himself helping his younger sister with something? Anna had always loved hearing stories of when her parents were children. Especially Papa’s stories because he made the past live again as he spoke of it. But this was not the time to ask.

  Or was it?

  If it were a happy memory, maybe it would heal more than it would hurt.

  She stepped closer to him, so close that she could touch the rough material of his coat sleeve. Then she spoke quickly, before she had time to lose courage.

  “Was Aunt Tania good at school work? Or did you have to help her, Papa?”

  “She was smarter than I in school in everything but languages,” he said. “But she could not learn to ride a bicycle. She wanted to. She had one. But she could not balance. Hours and hours I ran beside her, trying to keep her from toppling over.”

  “Did she learn?” Anna’s face was eager with interest as she pictured the two children she had seen in old brown photographs.

  “One day, she just took off like a bird,” Papa said, wonder at it still in his voice, “and she shouted back to me, ‘Oh, it’s easy, Ernst. You never told me it was so easy!’”

  “Exactly the way I felt when Rudi told me about us playing cards and going into minus scores,” Anna said. “I couldn’t believe it was as simple as that.”

  “There are a few more things you’ll have to learn yet, Anna, before you take off like a bird,” Rudi said.

  Anna, pretending to be affronted, held her head high.

  “I have faith in myself,” she answered. “Mr. Appleby told us, ‘Faith is when you hear the bird singing before the egg is hatched.’”

  “I would hatch the egg first and be sure,” Rudi mocked her gently.

  “I …” Anna paused, searching for the right words, the words Mr. Appleby himself had used, “I would listen for the singing.”

  “Sometimes it will be very hard to hear, Anna,” Papa said. “But keep that faith. Come, let’s close the store even though it is fifteen minutes early. We should be at home together. Your mother will be worrying.”

  As Anna watched her father lock the door, she saw he had grown stooped. Why, she was up to his shoulder.

  Frightened, she turned away and found Rudi’s eyes on her.

  “It’s all right, Anna,” he said and pulled her hand through the crook of his elbow.

  He did not explain what he meant. Perhaps he did not know himself. But walking home between the two of them, holding onto both, Anna felt comforted.

  Chapter 15

  “Anna, concentrate!” Rudi said sharply.

  Anna sighed, leaned her forehead on her hand, and thought that learning algebra wasn’t like Aunt Tania flying away on her bicycle, calling back, “Oh, it’s so easy!” It was much more like all those hours Papa had talked of when he had run beside her, yelling orders at her that she just couldn’t make work.

  “Start again,” Rudi said. “I don’t think you have that first step clear.”

  “I can’t,” Anna said, putting down her pencil with a little click and watching as it rolled away across the table. She made no move to catch it. Rudi scooped it up just as it reached the far edge.

  “What’s the matter with you? If you don’t want to learn, I have better things to do with my time, no matter what Papa says.”

  Anna had not seen that scornful look in Rudi’s blue eye
s for a long time but she recognized it. He thought she was a dummkopf. But it was just that she was worried about something. And she couldn’t explain because there was nothing he could do to help.

  “I’ll give you one more chance,” Rudi said in a cold, slow voice. “Either you tell me what’s on your mind and why you’ve stopped learning anything, just when I was …”

  He stopped and drew a deep breath.

  “When you were what?” Anna asked, curiosity breaking through her despair for a moment.

  “Well, you were learning so fast, that’s all. I was proud of you. You could come out top of your class. But now you don’t want to bother so I won’t bother either.”

  He stood up. She had let her one chance slip. Self-pity engulfed her as he began to pick up his things. Then, before she could stop herself, the truth came out of her mouth.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to learn. It’s … it’s the dance.”

  “Dance?” Rudi echoed, no sympathy as yet in his ice-blue eyes.

  “Our grade is having a Christmas dance next Friday night,” Anna said, miserably. “They’ve had tea dances after four and a class dance, and lots of the kids went but I can’t dance so I just didn’t. Lots of times Maggie didn’t either. Paula and Suzy went every time.”

  “So?” Rudi said, sitting down again.

  “Everybody’s going to this one. Some of them will be in couples, although most won’t. But even Maggie is going. And she’s at me and at me and AT me to go, too. Then Suzy said …”

  Anna’s voice broke off. She swallowed.

  “Said what?” prompted her older brother mercilessly.

  “I don’t mean to be mean,” she said, “and she didn’t either. Suzy does say mean things, but she doesn’t think how they make people feel …”

  Gretchen had drifted into the room and had now come close enough to listen. Anna put her head down on her arms so they couldn’t see her face. Why had she told? Why?

  “What did Suzy actually say?” Rudi demanded.