by Anna Schmidt
He was silent for the last half block until they reached the café. As she reached for the doorknob, he placed his hand over hers. “All right. I understand. Tell me what I must—and must not—do.”
The American was an arrogant fool, Mikel thought as he lit the stub of a cigarette still good for a couple of drags. The stunt the man had just pulled—calling him by name and speaking in English—could have gotten them all arrested or worse. By his stupidity, the man had placed Anja in grave danger, and for Mikel that was reason enough to despise Peter Trent.
When it came to evaders, Mikel preferred the Brits. Americans and even Canadians were far too sure of themselves, far too outgoing. At least the British had an ingrained reserve that made them naturally more cautious. Mikel would be willing to bet that Peter Trent thought he knew best and was only tolerating Josef’s efforts to treat his leg and help him regain his strength because he knew he had no choice. But Mikel had seen the way Trent looked at Josef and knew the evader could not get past the knowledge that Josef was German. It was also evident that while grateful for everything Anja and Lisbeth were doing to help him, he saw them as women cast into the role of nurse and caregiver for him.
If he only knew …
Mikel took a final drag on the cigarette and then dropped it into the street, crushing out the last embers with the sole of his heavy hiking boots. They would have to get boots like his for Peter. The American had big feet, and Mikel took offense at that as well. He knew he was being irrational when it came to this particular evader, but he had seen something in the way Anja looked at the man, the way he had seen her watch him, her eyes full of curiosity and fascination that made Mikel’s blood run hot with jealousy.
As far as Mikel was concerned, the sooner they moved Peter Trent to Paris, the better.
CHAPTER 6
When they returned to the café, at least a dozen people had gathered there. They sat in the small iron chairs that had been pulled away from the tables and placed in a circle. More people were coming in from the street and taking a chair in silence. Anja could see that Peter was obviously confused and looking to her for answers.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Anja whispered. “This is a special meeting for worship. Will you stay?” She expected Peter to claim weariness from the exertion of the walk. Instead, he sat in an empty chair and glanced at her. He nodded toward another chair next to him, and she sat there. Aware that he was watching to see what came next, she settled herself, closing her eyes and resting her upturned open hands on her lap as she began to empty her mind of all the stresses of the day and turn her thoughts inward toward the Light.
Of course she could not explain this to him, but she peeked and saw that his hands were resting on his knees, his eyes were closed, and his breathing was amazingly calm and even. Josef and Lisbeth were the last to join the circle, and as soon as they were settled, the room went absolutely still. It was quieter than usual because there was no noise from traffic or people passing by outside.
Be still and know that I am God.
Anja thought about the task before them—getting Peter strong enough for the journey, convincing him to let go and trust those along the line to—
Be still….
She thought about the risks they were all taking—risks that she had convinced herself were right. Risks that in the end could bring pain and sorrow for Daniel. And what of Lisbeth and Josef’s unborn child, and what about—
Be still….
She drew in a breath and slowly let it out, and she felt the calm of others surround her and the stillness of this holy night, and without a doubt she knew that she was doing God’s work in helping to save men like Peter. For even as you do this for one of the least of these …
The Quaker service—they called it a meeting for worship—was not even close to anything Peter had experienced before. Back home he had attended various churches with his friends, including some pretty high-octane revival meetings where people cried out and threw up their hands and spoke in strange languages. But this was something totally new.
The most obvious difference, of course, was the silence. Those attending entered the café in silence. They might nod or smile at another person, but no words were so much as whispered. Each person took a seat and appeared to settle in, eyes closed, hands resting on knees, palms open as if waiting for some surprise gift. The second thing he noticed was the lack of anyone who appeared to be in charge. There was no preacher or priest in evidence—not even a lay minister. Apparently the deal was that everyone did his or her own thing. So did that mean there were no rules or rituals?
There certainly was no music—no swell of the pipe organ, no piano, no choir. And because this was Christmas night and all the shops were closed and people were at home with their families, no sounds came from the street. Just stillness and silence … and a hint of peace such as Peter had not felt in a very long time.
Following the example of Anja and the others, he closed his eyes and placed his hands on his knees. After a few minutes, he lost all awareness of the others around him. He focused on his breathing, which seemed to him to be far too loud. Drawing in a breath, he held it for a second and then slowly let it out. As he did so, he realized that his thoughts—always chaotic with everything he had to consider since the plane crash—began to settle into a kind of order. For the first time since he’d landed in that field, he thought about how lucky he had been—Anja would say blessed.
He had landed without incident—if he didn’t count the wounded leg. He could have landed in the trees as Simpson had or hit power lines and died there. He could have been captured as others had. Instead, he had been rescued by an eight-year-old boy, his mother, and his great-grandparents. His wounds had been treated by a German doctor who had risked his life speaking out against his own government back in his homeland. He was now on the first part of a long journey back to freedom, staying in an attic hiding place with adequate food and shelter and the company of people like Anja and Lisbeth and others who were risking their lives to save his. He was in every way he could imagine a very fortunate man. It took him a moment to realize that his lashes were wet with tears of sheer relief and gratitude.
Anja was pleasantly surprised at the way Peter changed his ways following their Christmas night walk. He asked Josef and Lisbeth to help him learn German by speaking only that language to him. He reasoned that, in spite of the need to cross national borders in at least three countries, German would be universally accepted everywhere that he needed to go on his way to freedom. He worked diligently on the exercises Josef prescribed to restore his strength, and although he continued to walk with a slight limp, even that was a kind of blessing. It caused him to stoop slightly as he favored the one leg, so he no longer moved with the upright posture and self-confidence common to Americans.
On the other hand, Anja had some serious concerns about her personal interactions with this most recent evader. In all the time she had been working with the escape line, never had she found herself as drawn to one of the airmen they had helped as she was to Peter Trent. At the hospital, she found herself glancing at the clock far more often than ever before. The minute her shift ended, she put on her wool cape and her gloves and hurried off to the café, where she helped Lisbeth serve the handful of customers and prepare for opening the following day. When the last customer had left and the last dish had been washed and shelved, she and Lisbeth climbed the stairs to the living quarters, where Josef and Peter waited to share a late supper. And all the while as she helped Lisbeth in the café, she was aware that above her Peter was waiting so that after supper they could take their nightly walk.
If the weather was nasty, they would take a longer walk because they were unlikely to be stopped if it was pouring rain or sleet or snow. Even when the weather was good and the streets were busy with people doing last-minute shopping before hurrying home to beat the enforced curfew, they would walk, always alert for a signal from Mikel or another member of the escape line that danger was n
ear. In those cases, they returned to the café and Peter’s hiding place, where she would quiz him on his German and set up situations where he might get caught if he made the slightest mistake.
But it was the way he could make her laugh with his gentle teasing and the small animal figures he carved during the long hours of the day for her to give to Daniel that touched her most. There was also a set of wooden buttons for her grandmother to sew on her grandfather’s winter coat and an intricately carved wooden spoon for her grandmother. These small gestures of appreciation endeared him to her. Counting the time he had spent at the farm, Peter had already been with them far longer than any of their charges, and she was well aware that for his safety and theirs, he would soon need to be moved to the next stop on the escape line. It surprised her to realize how she dreaded that day.
“When do I leave?” he asked one night shortly after the start of the new year as they walked arm in arm through the icy, pelting rain. It was as if he’d read her mind, or perhaps he was simply anxious to move on.
“Soon.” They spoke in German as he had insisted they do whenever they were away from the café.
He chuckled. “You have been saying the same since Christmas. When?”
“When they have lifted the checkpoints set up when your plane crashed—when the time is right,” she replied, unable to keep the annoyance at his insistence from her voice. Are you so anxious to leave me? She found herself wanting to hurl the question at him, yet she knew the answer. It had nothing to do with her. He was anxious to be free again, back with his buddies, back with his unit to fight another day. “I hate this war,” she muttered. They walked a block in silence.
“What do you think you’ll do—you and Daniel—once the war ends?”
“Will it ever end? Back in Munich we were all so excited to learn that America was fighting with us. We all believed that it would all be over in a matter of months—weeks even.”
“We will come out on top in this thing, Anja. It may take a little longer, but we will win.”
“No one wins in something like this,” she said. After they had walked another block in silence, she finally addressed his original question. “Daniel dreams of the day when he can leave the orphanage. The nuns have been kind to him and wonderful to me, but he misses being with me and his great-grandparents. He misses his sister … and his father. His father most of all.”
“You loved your husband very much.” It was a statement, not a question.
“We were speaking of Daniel,” she reminded him.
“You were speaking of Daniel. I asked what you plan to do after the war. You’ll go home, I expect.”
“I don’t even know where home is anymore. I was raised in Denmark, but then Benjamin and I lived for years in Germany. We both attended university there, met there, married, and had our children there, and in time …” Her voice trailed off.
He tightened his hold on her hand as he shielded her with the umbrella. It was a gesture of understanding.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I suppose that I’ll go home, at least for a while. I owe it to my parents to spend time with them and let them adjust to the idea that I made it—if I make it.”
She was not given to empty promises, and so she did not rush to assure him that he would indeed make it safely back to America. “We will do our best to help you,” she said.
“I know. I trust that—believe me. But the truth is that after everything I’ve seen and experienced these last eighteen months, small-town living is not likely to satisfy me. There’s a silly song.” He started to sing the words in English, “How’re you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pair-ee.” He executed a little dance step, and she laughed.
But their mood did not improve. “I suppose I’ll be seeing Pair-ee soon, won’t I? I mean isn’t that the next stop on this underground railroad you and the others have created?” He had told her what he knew of the American version of the escape line—the Underground Railroad that operated during the Civil War.
“You’ll go to Paris,” she confirmed. “And then on to Bordeaux and Bayonne and—”
“Have you traveled to all those places?”
“Me? I’m just a simple farm girl and fisherman’s daughter, remember?” She hoped that her flippant answer would serve as a reminder that he was not to ask questions where the answers could be used against her or the others.
“Frankly, I can’t imagine you living out your life on a farm or even in a fishing village somewhere in Denmark.”
“We do have cities there,” she protested, but she knew he was right.
“Will you marry again?” he asked, his voice so soft she wasn’t certain that he had meant to ask the question aloud.
She was surprised at how easily the answer came to her. “I doubt it. By the time this war ends, I’m going to be well into my middle age and not—”
“Mikel would marry you tomorrow or fifty years from now—he is that patient, and he loves you that much.”
“But I do not love him,” she replied.
They walked on—farther than they normally did because she was reluctant to end the evening.
“Tell me about Nacht und Nebel.”
“That has nothing to do with you,” she replied as an unavoidable shiver overtook her.
“It has to do with you and the Buchermanns and others. Tell me.”
She sighed. “It was a policy that Hitler announced back in December of 1941—actually on the same day that the Japanese bombed your base in Pearl Harbor.”
“What are the words? Night? And …”
“Fog. It’s what he called this new program. Certain prisoners are to vanish without a trace—into the night so to speak.”
“And the fog?”
“No information is ever to be given about their whereabouts or their fate.”
“And this could happen to you and the others?”
Anja shrugged. It was something she tried not to think about because her heart broke for Daniel if she should be taken and simply disappear with no word to him.
Peter was silent for several minutes. “I can’t let you do this, Anja. I won’t. You have a family—a son.”
“It is for Daniel and his future that I must do the work I do,” she replied. “Anything I can do to bring this horror to an end so that he and other children can grow up in peace is worth every risk.”
“And how does saving someone like me, or any airman for that matter, further your cause to give Daniel and his generation a better world?”
“This is not for me to decide. We do what we are led to believe is the right thing. Helping you and the others is the right thing to do—it is what we can do, and therefore it is what we must do.” A clock chimed the hour, and she turned sharply and headed back in the direction of the café. “It’s later than I thought,” she said. “We must hurry or risk being stopped for violating curfew.”
He caught up to her, and taking hold of her arm, spun her into his embrace. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered just before he kissed her.
Peter didn’t really have to kiss her. He could just as easily have pulled her into his arms and faked a kiss while the two German soldiers passed by. The truth was he’d been thinking about kissing her for some time now, and once she was there pressed against him …
Her lips were full and moist with rain, and in spite of the difference in their heights, his first thought was that they fit together as if they had been made to complete one another. The thought was stunning. Never in his life had he had such a sense of belonging with a woman as he did holding Anja in his arms. He told himself it was the situation—the danger, the uncertainty of their lives. But deep inside he knew better.
He was aware of the two soldiers passing by. They were young, judging by their snickers and snorts. One of them muttered something in German that Peter was pretty sure he didn’t need or want a translation for. Their leather-heeled boots echoed on the pavement as they moved on down the stree
t. Still Peter held Anja close, and he realized that she seemed in no hurry to move away from him. Her shoulders were shaking, and he tried to soothe her sobs. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “They’ve gone.”
“I’m not crying,” she said through her giggles as she snaked her hands up to his face and cupped his cheeks. “You are very quick thinking, Peter Trent. I will give you that.” She pushed away from him and straightened her hat before starting once again to walk toward the café.
Had the kiss meant nothing to her?
He had been rocked to his core. She had laughed.
The only thing Anja could think to do was to laugh. Peter’s kiss had ignited a fire in her that she’d believed had died with Benjamin. Up to now she had been able to rationalize any hint of attraction she felt for Peter as the result of being overtired or as something that arose out of her concern for his safe return to England and eventually to his family in America. Up to now she had shrugged off Lisbeth’s none-too-subtle hints that perhaps the time had come for Anja to consider a new future for herself and Daniel—one that included the possibility of marriage and even more children. As if such a thing could simply be wished for and it would happen.
But with one kiss, he had made a lie of everything she had tried to tell herself about her emotions when it came to this American flyboy. To have feelings for Peter Trent was ridiculous, impossible, insane. And she simply would not permit such feelings to cloud the serious work ahead of them both.
“That was close,” she said as she glanced down the street to where the two soldiers were turning a corner.
“I doubt they would have questioned us anyway,” Peter replied. “They’re young and—”