Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

  “Thank you for coming,” Dr. Weiss said.

  Max leaned back against a post. “I hid the things you gave me. They are—”

  The doctor waved his hands. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Safe, Herr Doktor. That’s all I was going to say.”

  “Where are your parents?” Dr. Weiss asked.

  “Mother stayed behind at the lake, and I suspect my father has forgotten all about me by now.”

  “One of my patients—the Nazis tore apart his house, looking for his family’s jewelry.”

  “It is safe,” Max assured him.

  “Already I have more things.” Dr. Weiss opened his medicine cabinet and took out dozens of glass bottles. “They arrived yesterday.”

  Max held up his rucksack. “Will they fit in here?”

  “I believe so.”

  The doctor glanced toward the window at the front of his office before removing a burlap bag from its hiding place behind the jars. He slid it underneath the remaining food and a schoolbook that Max brought with him in case anyone asked why he needed the rucksack.

  “Did your family attend the parade?” Max asked.

  “Frau Weiss would never celebrate the arrival of that schlimm man.” He’d never heard Dr. Weiss call Hitler by any name other than evil. “I was required to go, but I didn’t stay long.” He pounded his chest. “In here I’m not celebrating.”

  “Nor am I.” Max looked at the ceiling. After a short pause, the music started again. “Will Frau Weiss let me see her?”

  A smile slipped across Dr. Weiss’s face. “If you inquire nicely, Max. Like a house cat instead of a lion.”

  Nothing seemed to irritate Frau Weiss more than someone, particularly Max, stepping between Luzi and her violin. “You won’t ask for me?”

  “Miriam will do as she sees fit.”

  He hadn’t spoken to Frau Weiss about his intentions, but Dr. Weiss knew. One day soon, if Luzi would have him, he planned to marry her.

  He strung the strap of the heavy rucksack over his shoulder and climbed the steps in the foyer to the second floor. Nina, the housemaid, answered his second knock, her knee propped as a barrier against the edge. Through the slat, he could see her graying hair pulled tight in a bun, the blue plaid apron over her dress.

  “Hello, Herr Dornbach,” she said, but she didn’t open the door any wider.

  Behind her were two upholstered chairs and a couch in the sitting room, but no one was seated there. “I’d like to speak with Frau Weiss.”

  “One moment.” Nina slid the bolt across the door as if he might try to break down the door.

  When Nina returned, she opened the door wide enough for Max to squeeze inside and directed him into the sitting room. His gaze trailed toward the hallway as he listened to Luzi’s violin. A private concert, he imagined, just for him.

  “What does your father say about the Anschluss?” Frau Weiss asked as she stepped into the room, her waved hair skimming the collar of her starched white shirt. Suddenly the papered walls surrounding them felt more like a boxing ring.

  Max straightened in his chair, trying to appear as if he weren’t preparing for a fight. “He doesn’t talk to me about such things.”

  Frau Weiss sighed. “We will continue on here, minding our own business.”

  Max feared what would happen, though, when others started minding their business as well. “I’ve come to see Luzi.”

  Frau Weiss shook her head. “She’s practicing for the Opera Ball.”

  “That’s not for two more months!” He sounded more like a lion now, but Frau Weiss infuriated him. He and Luzi had grown up as friends, but for the past year, her mother had thwarted every attempt he made to see Luzi outside a formal social engagement, as if he might harm her.

  “She needs every waking minute to prepare, and you, Max, will only distract her.”

  “Just a few minutes,” he begged. “Please.”

  The door at the opposite side of the sitting room opened, the private staircase leading up from the office. Dr. Weiss joined them in the ring, a stethoscope draped over his white lab coat. “I believe what Max meant to say was that he has the utmost respect for Luzi’s talent and that he is kindly requesting to spend five minutes encouraging her in her endeavors, not distracting her.”

  Frau Weiss glanced between the men, and Max attempted to smile in the kindest way possible so that Luzi’s mother didn’t think he was a cad who expected to get everything he pleased. Or a man who would misuse her daughter’s heart.

  A baby’s cry broke through the music, hijacking the beauty of Luzi’s song. It was Marta, Luzi’s only sibling.

  “Nina?” Frau Weiss called toward the kitchen.

  The housemaid peeked her head through the door, nodding. “I’ll get her.”

  Frau Weiss turned back to Max. “Five minutes,” she said sharply.

  Max thanked both Frau and Dr. Weiss before rushing down the hallway. Near the end of it, he stepped into the library, a room devoted to both music and books. Luzi stood beside a tall window, the violin fixed between her jaw and shoulder as she played, her ash-brown hair swept back in a loose chignon.

  The stand before her was layered with music sheets, but instead of reading the music, her gaze was focused on the park behind the apartment as if she could will its flowers to bloom.

  Their city might be unraveling, but Max was content right here. “Hello,” he said quietly, not wanting to frighten her.

  Stepping away from the window, she lowered her bow, but the violin remained cradled over her arm when she smiled at him. Her eyes were a pale green, the color of spring. “You are here.”

  “Indeed.”

  She gently placed the violin in its case. “How did you convince Mutti to let you in?”

  “Your father convinced her for me.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Five minutes is all she gave us, but it’s enough for today.”

  How could anyone hate someone as beautiful and talented as Luzi Weiss, no matter her heritage? For that matter, how could anyone hate another person because of their ancestry?

  If only he could scoop Luzi into his arms and steal her away to the lake, hide her from men like Ernst Schmid.

  “Did you attend the parade?” she asked.

  “Yes, so my father can tell whoever he must that his son was there.”

  She sighed. “I wish I could go outside with you, if only for an hour or two.”

  “I’ll ask your mother.”

  When Luzi shook her head, a soft strand of hair fell forward across her white blouse. “Mother thinks only of the music.”

  His fingers drummed against his leg, aching to brush that strand back over her shoulder, but he reached for her hand instead. “I think only of you.”

  She blushed.

  “One day soon we must leave this city.”

  “My parents will never let me go.”

  A picture ran through Max’s mind of him and Luzi hand in hand, husband and wife, taking a train to Czechoslovakia or south to Italy. Far away from Hitler and all those who seemed to worship him.

  “I have a friend who can make papers for us,” he whispered. “A wedding certificate and passports for Herr and Frau Dornbach, married this year.”

  Luzi glanced toward the door before focusing on him again. “Father has started making inquiries for our family.”

  “To emigrate?”

  She nodded. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I’ll accompany you—”

  “Away with you now,” Frau Weiss interrupted them as she stepped into the room, carrying Marta. The baby’s cheeks were red and streaked with her tears. “Luzia must practice.”

  Max slowly released her hand before turning toward Frau Weiss. “It hasn’t been five minutes.”

  “Clearly you are not a musician, Max.”

  “No.” He smiled. “But I have the deepest appreciation for the violin.”

  Luzi laughed and then quickly choked back the laughter when her mother st
amped her foot.

  “You shall hear her at the ball.”

  He waited a moment, hoping that Luzi would contradict her mother, but her eyes were focused on the music stand.

  Baby Marta squirmed in Frau Weiss’s arms. “On your way now,” the woman said, shooing Max again. He glanced back at Luzi. She’d placed her bow on the strings, preparing to play.

  He lingered by the door, hoping to hear Luzi’s voice one more time.

  “May I hold her?” Luzi asked her mother.

  “Another hour, and then you can rest.”

  The memory of her violin trailed Max through the streets as he turned toward Vienna’s old town. What would it be like to move with Luzi and her family to a place like England or America or even South America, where other European Jews had gone? A place where Luzi and her family would be safe?

  They would have to leave soon. He would be eighteen in December, the age of conscription. Like so many students in his city, he’d been planning to join the Austrian Army to fight against the invasion of Nazi Germany, but their army never shot a single bullet to ward off Hitler.

  Max would never salute, and he would never fight for that man.

  CHAPTER 5

  ANNIKA

  LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA

  MARCH 1938

  Two aspirin and a piece of toast. Annika placed both beside the percolator of coffee as Vati’s snores rattled down the hall of their cottage, shaking the wood counter, oven, and lump of a refrigerator in their kitchen space.

  The snoring thundered louder as she snuck along the hallway and inched open her father’s door, the cigarette smoke in his clothing searing her nose. The key to the castle’s front door dangled from a hook near his bureau, and she quietly swiped it, folding it into her palm.

  As she stepped outside their home, she buttoned her woolen sweater over her white blouse and the waistband of her blue coarse-cotton skirt. Her father’s head would be pounding when he finally awoke, like one of his hammers against a nail, and she preferred to be far away when he started shouting her name.

  The spring air awakened her swiftly, much more than a cup of coffee ever could, and she heard the song of a bird weaving through the boughs of a conifer. She searched the knobby cone buttons and fur coats of the trees, but the bird evaded her.

  Swallows were prevalent in Austria—the one songbird that preferred the sky to the trees or marches. A bird that the local Vogelfreunde—the bird friends of their region—couldn’t catch. But this was a crossbill singing, she guessed. The parrot of the Alps.

  The Vogelfreunde prowled through the woodlands and meadows with their nets every autumn in search of the crossbill, goldfinch, bullfinch, and siskin that often roamed low to the ground. During the winter months, these men and women cared for the birds and then sold them at their spring exhibition. Any unsold birds were released into the forest for the summer months.

  Had the Vogelfreunde released their catch for the spring, or had this bird managed to maintain its freedom?

  A branch rustled, and this time Annika caught a glimpse of the bird, his russet head coloring the winter branches like a cranberry garland on a Christmas tree.

  “Fly free,” she whispered. The Vogelfreunde never harmed their prisoners, but still she thought neither the songbirds nor the silent ones should be locked in cages for the winter.

  The crossbill’s song of freedom played in her head as she skirted out of the trees and around catkins fringed over the lakeshore, past buildings that housed cows and horses long ago. In the yard beyond her, the medieval Schloss Schwansee towered like a cathedral on the land between the mountain and the shore. Lake Hallstatt mirrored blue below it, its glassy surface broken only by the village’s candy-colored reflection across the water.

  Schloss Schwansee was smaller than other nearby castles like Hohenwerfen or Schloss Mirabell, but it was every bit as intriguing with its three turrets, each one topped with a cone of slate. Dormer windows lined the attic with a much taller tower standing at its side, a former bell tower perhaps, and a family chapel linked to the rear through a narrow corridor.

  Like most of the outbuildings, the chapel was typically locked when the family wasn’t home, but during this last visit, Herr Dornbach had asked Annika’s father to build something inside the chapel. Or at least that’s what she’d overheard when Vati was talking to her friend Hermann, the youth he hired to help with all the construction projects. When Vati had seen her, he’d asked for lunch.

  Between the lake that lapped up against its front lawn and the mountain wall on the other side, the house would have been well protected in centuries past from any warring enemy, but someone in the past generation had cleared a lane through the forest, connecting with a country road that led into the nearby town called Obertraun.

  Herr Dornbach and Max had already taken the train that stopped in Obertraun back to Vienna, but Frau Dornbach had lingered here another week. Now that Frau Dornbach was gone as well, Annika would spend her morning sweeping floors, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the porcelain in the bathrooms with Domestos like her mother used to do.

  This role of housekeeper was only for a season, but it was a role Annika wore like a badge trying to honor both Max and her mother every day with her work. If God ever allowed Mama to glimpse down from the heavens, Annika hoped that she’d see her taking good care of both Vati and this castle.

  One could only polish so much silver, though, sweep and scrub so many meters of floor. In the winter, Annika would go for weeks at a time without cleaning a single room until Herr Dornbach’s secretary sent a message via telegram to say the family would arrive soon. Then she’d air the musty smell out of the house, make all the beds, stock the icebox with food from the grocer.

  She unlocked the front door, and inside, the carpeted staircase dipped down into a hall floored with polished marble, the vast space between the walls built to entertain aristocrats from Vienna and local men after a hunting party in the hills.

  The staircase split at the landing, and she climbed up to the left, each step groaning as if its back were on the verge of breaking, its joints aching with four hundred years of service to the Dornbachs and other families who’d called this castle home.

  Others, like her mother, had spent their lives serving this house—and sometimes its inhabitants. Annika had no intention of giving up her entire life for a house, but each time Max left, it felt as if her heart were on the verge of breaking like these steps. A deep thundering ache that made her tremble on the inside.

  A giant portrait of Max hung in the corridor above a wrought-iron tripod empty of its flower vase. She didn’t linger there. His handsome face was so firm in the painting, his lips pressed together in a way that made him look cruel. Like his father could be.

  The door into Herr Dornbach’s bedroom was beside his wife’s, both rooms overlooking the lake and village and rugged Alps in the distance. Max’s room was in the back of the house; the view from his window faced the forest and fortress of a mountain.

  She always saved the cleaning of Max’s room until last.

  Some nights, when Vati left for the beer hall, Annika returned to the house, though she never cleaned in those late hours. Sometimes she riffled through the clothing and records in Max’s room, as if he’d left part of himself there. Other nights, she’d settle into the library on the ground floor and read one of the many books neatly lined on the shelves. Sometimes she even borrowed a book or two, carefully replacing them before the Dornbachs returned.

  Vati would have her head if he knew she snuck in while he was away, pretending to be the lady of the house, but it seemed to her that he often forgot his role as well, propping himself up, in his mind at least, as the king of this castle.

  Annika retrieved the cleaning supplies from the hallway closet and stepped into Frau Dornbach’s bedroom. Instead of portraying family members or landscapes, the oil paintings on her walls were swirls of odd colors and shapes, contrasting with the worn chintz curtains that draped ov
er the windows, a marigold-yellow and green design topped with marigold fringe to match the bedcoverings.

  Why the mistress pulled these heavy curtains over the windows was beyond Annika, especially with the view of the boathouse in the reeds below and the village of Hallstatt across the lake with its dual church steeples gleaming like two bronze candlesticks.

  The Catholic church was posted like an elegant stamp in the right corner, but next to it was the creepy Beinhaus filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of bones, dug up from graves after their ten-year lease expired. Or at least that’s what her friend Sarah Leitner said after she’d visited this house of bones.

  Perhaps that was why Frau Dornbach closed these curtains. Perhaps she didn’t like the Beinhaus either.

  While Annika no longer laughed about death, it still made her nervous. In fact, it terrified her. After she died, she hoped her bones would stay intact and that someone would bury her near her mother’s grave on the hill.

  Annika rested her broom and dustpan by the dressing table and placed her bucket of rags and jar of Domestos on the hardwood that rimmed the carpeted floor. Then she tied back the curtains and opened the windows to flood the room with mountain air, mollifying the remnants of dust and mold that had accumulated over four hundred years. Generations had lived and died in this house, but mold clung to the place like the salt buried deep in the mine above Hallstatt.

  A Victrola stood near the bureau with dozens of vinyl records in a case beside it. Annika selected one of Bruno Walter conducting Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and let the music permeate the room as the crossbill’s song had the forest. Along with the sunlight, the melody brightened the room, and she wished she could stay here all day.

  Her duster in hand, she stepped toward the bureau, but the shoe boxes in Frau Dornbach’s dressing room seemed to call out to her. Dozens of them packed neatly into an antique armoire, many acquired during Frau Dornbach’s trips to England and France.