“The horse farm in Poland?”
“Exactly. Because that’s where the knowledge is, and the history. And possibly even a champion or two, hidden during the massacre, spared from the slaughter I saw. And I will ask them how to do this, how to start a line of thoroughbreds.” Erich stared beyond Marina at the lawn, as if he could see horses grazing there already.
Marina looked across the lawn with him. “The girls would love that! Yesterday, I thought I would never be able to get Rosie off that horse.”
“Ah, Rosie. She changed the balance of everything, didn’t she? She’s such a force.”
“Yes,” Marina agreed, picturing her daughter’s small, determined form barreling toward some person, place, or thing that she had set her mind on. “She is a force. A force of life. It’s odd too, in a way. She’s a child of war, and yet she has such spirit.”
“She is the future. Our future,” Erich offered tentatively, as if by articulating their future together, he might jeopardize it. “It is nice to think of our lives being guided by Rosie’s spirit.”
“I wonder how that spirit will respond to the Führer at tomorrow’s tea. I fear it will be like a cosmic collision. You should come watch.” Almost immediately, Marina regretted her words, for Erich suddenly sobered. “I take it you can’t.”
“No. I wish I could, but—” He hesitated. “I have preparations I must make for tomorrow evening’s event at the Weber house.”
“Preparations?”
“Security matters.”
“Ah.” Marina took Erich’s hand and traced the lines on his palm. “Well, if you hear an enormous explosion, you’ll know what happened!” She laughed, trying to recapture the lightness of the previous moment. To her surprise, he winced and pulled his hand away. “Erich?” she asked.
His face was stern. “Marina, there is a chance I may have to leave very quickly tomorrow night. Will you meet me again before I go? After the concert?”
“Tomorrow night? But why would you have to leave?”
“I can’t say. I just may need to get to Berlin very quickly. And I would like to see you before I go.” He wasn’t pleading; his tone was calm but serious. Marina felt she was at a turning point. She remembered something Oskar had told her when she was a young girl. He had just come back from a dinner celebrating a German physicist. Oskar had been fortunate enough to be seated next to the man, who regaled him with theories about time travel and parallel universes. Knowing his daughter loved fantasy, Oskar shared the ideas with Marina. Identical worlds on alternative planes of time, possibly overlapping in certain places, maybe through some time loop or kink. She had been fascinated. Thinking on those ideas now, she wondered: Was it not possible that an alternate world was overlapping with her own, right now, right here in this garden, some corner of it intruding on the present reality? That she could, if she chose to, step into this other space? All that was necessary was a leap of faith. “Will you come to me one last time? At the edge of the Birnau forest, after the concert?” Erich was searching her eyes. His question was a springboard, wasn’t it? A bridge, a ladder, call it whatever she might, she saw the step wide and clear.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course I’ll come to you.”
Marina pressed herself against Erich’s rib cage, ignoring the weight of the atmosphere around her. Fear still gnawed at her, but she fought it back and listened to Erich’s heartbeat. Here with him she was safe, she reminded herself. There, in the house, were her girls and her parents, safe. Nearby, the fountain murmured on, and Daphne stood still, and the cooling air blanketed the perfume of the roses, and there was no other sound or smell. When Marina finally looked up, the last firefly was blinking its way toward the lake.
Day Three
* * *
JULY 20, 1944
– Twenty-Four –
Sofia loved Irene Nagel’s barn. Sunlight flowed in through the grand double doors and illuminated everything in a slow, gentle way, even the stall of Bertha the cow way in the back, even the crevices between the rolled hay bundles stacked in piles under the loft where Sofia now lay. Passing through the barn air, the light seemed to pick up tiny pieces of hay dust and cracked seed that slowed its movement, weighed it down so it hovered over things and outlined them in a soft, chalky silhouette. Sofia loved the density of this light, the way it approached things slowly and rested on them cautiously, as if waiting for permission to reveal them. She loved the quiet of the barn too. The voice of Herr Nagel muttering as he looked for his hammer or the moos of Bertha asking if he had brought her an apple—those sounds were hushed by the time they reached Sofia’s ears, as if the air were fine sandpaper rubbing off the sharp edges of all noise as it traveled past.
This morning, the only sound Sofia could hear was the soft suckling of the kittens snuggling up to their mother, Mathilde, for breakfast. There were five of them, one black and four black-and-white. Since Mathilde was black, Sofia thought the kittens’ vati must be white, because how else could Mathilde have had babies that had white in their fur? Of course, she did not know who the vati cat was. The vati was not around. Vatis were not often around. Her own vati had not been home for years, and she missed him, but at least she had her opa. Sofia loved Opa very much, maybe even more than she loved her vati. Poor kittens. They didn’t have an opa. Sofia wanted to take her kitten in her arms and cuddle her close to make up for her missing vati, and her nonexistent opa, but right now her kitten was eating, so Sofia had to wait.
She lay on her stomach in the warm hay, crisscrossing her feet in the air behind her. Waiting felt as natural as breathing. She liked waiting, because she could close her eyes and go to the watery blue space in her mind, and no one would chide her for daydreaming.
Sofia didn’t remember anything about the night in the cellar in Berlin other than a fear so deep that it felt attached to the inside of her bones. For a long time after that night, Sofia had the same nightmare, in which she was floating above the floor of a cellar in a cloud of dust and dirt and bits of debris, while all around her, the walls collapsed one by one. Each time a wall fell, it revealed a terrifying black emptiness, a chasm of nothingness that sucked things into its powerful vacuum. In her nightmare, a pair of round glasses floated in the cloud right next to her, but she couldn’t reach them, though she felt desperate to keep the glasses from being sucked away into the blackness. She pushed with all her might against the walls to keep them from collapsing. But still they fell, one by one, and the glasses got closer and closer to the void, and Sofia always woke up screaming just at the moment when the last wall was about to fall and the glasses were about to disappear forever. After the night in the cellar, Sofia stayed with Oma and Opa for a while, because Oma made her feel safe. But Oma had trouble sleeping too, and her doctor gave her some medicine that made her sleep so deeply that she didn’t wake up until after breakfast sometimes. So it was always Opa who came to Sofia’s bed and held her in his arms and asked her to tell him about the nightmare. One night, he suggested she stop trying to support the wall. “You mean I should let it fall?” Sofia was aghast. “But I’ll get sucked away like all the others, I’ll be pulled into the blackness!”
“But you don’t know for sure what’s behind that last wall,” Opa said, stroking her hair and speaking softly. “Maybe it’s different. Maybe it’s another color.” Sofia had never considered that there might be something different behind the last wall. Several weeks later, back in her own home, the nightmare woke Sofia again. This time Opa wasn’t around. She let herself return to the dream, and instead of bracing herself against the last wall, she stretched forward to secure the glasses, and just as she grabbed their frame, the last wall crumbled—and suddenly everything was blue: a breathtakingly beautiful blue, a deep, dark indigo, magically luminescent. With the last wall down, the blue in her dream washed over Sofia like a great tide. It held her tenderly, securely, like the water in the lake held her when she went swimming and dove underwater. There was no fear in that buoyant blue, just
a sense of security and peace. And an invitation. When she woke in the morning, Sofia felt that the blue had welcomed her to return anytime. All she had to do was close her eyes and make her mind blank, think of nothing, and within moments, she would be suspended in the world of blue, free to leave her body behind and wander in its limitless expanse.
A slow creak interrupted Sofia’s thoughts. Someone was pushing open the gate that led to the stalls where the barn animals were kept. Sofia couldn’t see who it was, but if she crawled forward on her belly just a few meters, she’d reach the spot in the hayloft where the removable wood knot Irene had showed her last year was located. Sofia quietly brushed the straw away from the area and felt around to lift the knot up. She pressed her cheek against the plank and looked through the opening. Nothing. The person, whoever it was, was too far away.
A moment later, the gate squealed more loudly, and she saw Pastor Johann stride by beneath her. Sofia knew Irene’s family was Protestant, but why would the pastor come to the barn instead of the house? Sofia heard the other person whisper to Pastor Johann. A woman’s voice! She moved her head slightly around the knothole so that her ear was flush with it.
“Meerfeld is out of the question now,” Pastor Johann said.
“Yes, I haven’t seen Captain Rodemann yet, thank God, but I’m sure he’s marching around somewhere.” Sofia inhaled sharply; it was her mother!
“We can’t risk bringing the refugees to Ernst.”
“I know, I know,” Marina said. “How will you even get them from the train station, with Rodemann’s men patrolling all the roads?”
Sofia was now completely confused. Years ago, when they lived in Berlin, her mother had taken some of her and Rosie’s old clothes, the ones they had outgrown, and put them in a box. She told Sofia that these clothes would be donated to “refugees,” children who had to leave their homes because of the war, and who needed any kind of clothing they could get. But Blumental didn’t have refugees; as far as Sofia knew, none of the children in Blumental were going to leave their homes. So where were these refugees coming from? And why were they coming here?
“ . . . along the old city wall and then down from the Birnau forest,” Pastor Johann was saying.
“I wish I could help you, but I promised Edith I’d help her with this damn tea.”
“Tea?”
“Oh, you don’t know.” Marina’s voice had a pinched tone. “The Führer will be gracing our house as well as Herr Weber’s today.” She paused. “He is coming to tea.”
“Oh, no.” Pastor Johann was suddenly very quiet. Was he crying? Sofia pressed her ear closer to the floor. If Pastor Johann was crying, her mother would pat him on the back to make him feel better. But she could hear no patting, sobbing, or sniffling. “I had hoped you’d be able to take them, just for a very short time. I was going to push up my departure from Fritz’s. But if the Führer is coming to your house . . . no. They’ll just have to stay at the train station. I’ll tell Max to wash all the church windows, not just the ones in the nave.”
“Max?”
“Max Fuchs has taken to checking our train station these days. He thinks he might find spies. So I’ve given him a window-washing project at my church to keep him busy.”
Sofia thought of the windows at Pastor Johann’s church: they were the most beautiful blue. A blue that flowed through the glass like water, swirling around all the other colors, surrounding them and turning them into undulating flowers swimming in a stream. Suddenly, Sofia remembered the blue dress she used to have, the one with tiny multicolored flowers. She had loved that dress, but Mutti made her give it to the refugees in Berlin, because she said it was too small. Maybe one of the refugees in the train station would be wearing that dress. What would it look like on her? Sofia would so love to see her dress again. But which train station would the refugees be at? East Blumental or the main one? She’d check both later. Sofia was too scared to go alone. Maybe she could get Rosie to go with her.
“I wish I could take them to the rectory, but another urgent matter needs my attention,” Pastor Johann said. “And they need to be on the east side anyway, near here.” He was pacing now. Sofia could hear hay crunching beneath his feet. “On top of everything else, last night I received an invitation from Sabine Mecklen to join her for dessert at her home! Of course I won’t go . . .”
Sofia heard her mother laugh quietly. “No, you should. Absolutely. With all the other fuss in town, it might be a good idea to have someone who can attest to your whereabouts.” The barn was silent except for the sound of Bertha sniffing through her hay feeder for stray pieces of fruit. Sofia felt something soft at her ankle, and she looked up from her peephole. One of the male kittens had wandered over to her and was testing her leg with his paw, considering the best approach for climbing on top of it. Gently, she picked him up and cradled him in her palms, then returned to her listening.
“The best hiding place for the refugees might be right under his nose,” Mutti was saying.
Sofia was again confused. Whose nose were the refugees going to be hidden under? And how would that person not see that they were there? Dislodged slightly from the knothole, Sofia could hear only snatches of the conversation.
“ . . . unexpected location, and the cellar is so dark . . .”
“ . . . already been searched . . .”
“ . . . the cellar . . . coal . . .”
Something mewed right next to Sofia. It was her own kitten, the little black one, come to introduce herself! “Kuschi, kusch, kusch,” Sofia clucked in a reassuring motherly tone. Very slowly, she moved her left arm around her kitten, sweeping it up with some hay, and in one continuous motion, she sat up, carefully depositing the kitten into the skirt of her dress. She scooted her body over to a hay bale and leaned back.
Sofia was tired of listening to conversations she couldn’t understand. She stroked the kitten’s tiny ears, and it purred and pushed its head against the palm of her hand. Then it stretched its back and yawned, curling itself into a puffy ball. Sofia arranged the fabric of her dress snugly around it, creating a little nest—a small blue world above all the ruckus of hammering and machine guns and bombs, away from refugees wearing donated clothes and hiding in train stations under people’s noses, a simple world that smelled of hay and warm milk, that was blanketed in filtered light and bits of downy fur and seed, a world that was safe to sleep in.
– Twenty-Five –
The large iron clock suspended in the main hall of the Blumental train station read 10:20 as Johann Wiessmeyer hurried toward the doors that led to the train tracks. Before leaving the rectory for the station, he had fastened his clerical collar, which he usually didn’t bother with. Even though the Third Reich officially denounced religion, Johann knew that many of its constituents had been raised in religious households by religious parents. And the young southern constituents of the Reich, like the soldiers in Captain Rodemann’s regiment, had probably grown up in Catholic towns not too far from here. It was impossible to undo years of Catholic upbringing with just a few weeks of military training. Johann trusted that these boys would instinctively treat a man of the cloth with deference and respect.
Indeed, nobody stopped him on his way to Track 2, and he headed to the end of the platform, where he knew the last second-class car would come to a stop. There he waited, buttoning his overcoat. The weather had worsened overnight. What had started out this morning as a cool, overcast sky was now deteriorating into a cold mist that saturated everything. Not a desirable development for those planning the Weber concert, but Johann himself welcomed the drifting shrouds of wet fog. The more pairs of eyes that stayed inside while he transported these refugees across town, the better. Yesterday, when Johann received the telegram from Gottfried directing him to deliver the briefcase by two today, he very nearly sent a response saying he couldn’t do it. The timing was impossible: he had refugees coming, they had to be smuggled out that night, and an assassination attempt was out of the question. Joh
ann wasn’t certain that the bomb would be utilized at the Weber concert that evening, but it seemed likely. Then he decided that the confluence of events was fortuitous. If the bomb did go off during the concert, the chaos that ensued would be a window of opportunity, as long as he moved the refugees out quickly. He only wished he could be as confident as Marina that the Eberhardt house would be a safe place to hide them in the interim.
“Don’t you see, Johann?” she had said in the barn. “It’s because it’s such an unexpected location that it’ll be safe. The house will already have been searched in advance by the Führer’s men. I just need to get them inside, and then I can bring them down to the cellar to hide behind the coal pile. No one will look down there, I guarantee it. And even if they do look, they won’t be able to see anything. I’ll take out the light.”
“I suppose we have no other choice, do we?” Johann agreed reluctantly. “But I hate putting you in any kind of danger.”
Marina had ignored his concern. “You want them at Fritz’s by midnight, right?”
Johann realized that midnight would be too late. All the roads leading out of Blumental would surely be blocked by then, whatever the result at the concert. They’d have to leave long before midnight. “No, it will have to be earlier, but still after dark.”
“What time?” Marina had looked confused, but he could not tell her more, not without jeopardizing her further.
“I can’t give you an exact time, Marina, but you’ll know. It will be clear to you when to move them, I promise. There will be a sign at the concert. You’ll hear it.” Marina opened her mouth and closed it without speaking. Johann watched her stifle her curiosity. The taste of unanswered questions was, he knew, quite bitter. It was a taste familiar to the entire country, an acid tang of self-imposed ignorance. But everyone tolerated it, Johann thought, because the knowledge they so deliberately ignored was poisonous and terrifying. The collective mind and belly of the Third Reich was filled with ulcerous questions.
The Good at Heart Page 20