Hidden Among the Stars

by Melanie Dobson

The cleaning, Annika decided, could wait.

  The orchestra playing in the background, she began unloading and neatly restacking the boxes in a separate pile near the door, so she could put each one back where it belonged. Frau Dornbach’s shoes were beautiful, but Annika didn’t spend time opening all the lids. She only wanted the one at the bottom, the pale-green box striped with ivory and stamped with Georgette of Paris.

  Even a box seemed more glamorous when it was from Paris.

  Instead of shoes, the box now housed ten envelopes stuffed with photographs. She shouldn’t know this, of course, but over the years she’d learned plenty of things about the Dornbach family that were supposed to be secret.

  Annika carefully thumbed through the contents of the box, careful not to disturb the order or leave smudges on the pictures. Sometimes she wondered why Frau Dornbach kept these photographs in a shoe box, but she could never ask. Neither the Dornbachs nor her father could ever find out exactly how nosy she’d been.

  Some of the photographs inside the envelopes were taken on a vacation to the Mediterranean coast while others were of the Alps. One was of Max on snow skis when he was about ten. He’d wavered over the years about things like music and books, but he’d never wavered in his love of skiing, whether it was cross country through the valleys or down the groomed slopes.

  But these photographs left her empty, teasing her with Max’s presence when she couldn’t speak to him.

  One of the envelopes contained several sepia-colored photographs that she’d never seen before, each about twenty centimeters long. One showed an older couple standing beside a carriage, the woman pretty but stern looking, her dark hair pulled back in a knot. The man beside her held a top hat close to his waistcoat, his long beard cascading down over his chest. Relatives, she assumed, from decades back.

  Max never talked about his extended family except for an uncle who had immigrated to the United States and an aunt who’d moved to Paris with her French husband. Then again, Annika never talked about her family either. The grandfather on her mother’s side had died in the Great War, and her grandmother followed soon after. The grandparents on her father’s side lived in Linz, but the Knopf family never visited. Vati had some sort of falling out with them when he was younger.

  Under the photographs were other mementos. A lock of blond hair, probably from Max. She brushed her fingers over it and then cradled it for a moment against her cheek. There was a piece of blanket in the box and white booties with pink strings. Those she assumed to be from the baby girl Frau Dornbach lost in the early 1930s. If they’d given her a name, Annika didn’t know what it was. Max only talked of his sister once, and then he seemed to bury the memory with his animals.

  Max loved well, but then he let go. Annika, on the other hand, clung to the people she loved as the Vogelfreunde did with their prized birds. Except she never released them.

  Perhaps her clinging was more like the salt in the mines. Once hardened, it remained until someone flooded it from the chamber with water or broke it away with a pickax.

  At the bottom of the box, she found something else new. A star necklace, the six-pointed gold pendant ringed with diamonds. It reminded Annika of the necklace Sarah wore. The golden Star of David. Though Sarah referred to it as a shield instead of a star.

  She’d seen this symbol in the papers as well. The Jewish athletes in Vienna, they stitched the shield to their uniforms.

  But why did Frau Dornbach have this symbol of the Jewish people in her box?

  She pressed the necklace into her palm, her back against the armoire. Perhaps one of Frau Dornbach’s ancestors had purchased it from a Jewish jeweler. With its gold and diamonds, the worth of it must be . . . She couldn’t imagine how many schillings one might pay for a necklace like this.

  The chain dangled down her sleeve, the gold threading the forest green in her sweater.

  One day, would Frau Dornbach pass this down to Max’s wife?

  Annika lifted the necklace to her throat, clasping the chain around her neck, closing her eyes. In this quiet space, she could see Max in Vienna, his gaze wandering out of his classroom window. Was he thinking about her as well?

  “Annika?” It was Vati calling her name, the sound muffled in these walls.

  She gasped, reaching for the necklace clasp underneath her braid, trying to release its hold before her father found her with it. When the clasp finally gave way, she dropped it back into the shoe box, but before she slammed the lid, the stench from cigarette smoke filtered through the door. And then her father was in the dressing room.

  She shoved the Georgette of Paris box away as if it were an ember that had leapt out of its fire. Unfortunately, Vati watched its flight across the dressing room floor. Then he surveyed the rest of the shoe boxes stacked beside the antique bureau.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Nothing, Vati.”

  His voice escalated. “You’re rummaging through their things?”

  She shivered. The photographs, even though they left a void, were her only connection with Max when he wasn’t here. Her father must never find out about those. “They are shoes, Vati, nothing more. Some of the prettiest ones I have ever seen.”

  “You are not to touch Frau Dornbach’s things.”

  She nodded furiously. “I won’t ever look at them again.”

  “You’re supposed to be cleaning the rooms. Like your mother . . .”

  “I know.” Her voice sounded small, like the squeak of a squirrel, and she wished she were stronger like Max or even Sarah. Neither of them were scared of their fathers. “I will clean now.”

  “Hermann has arrived. We need your help in the chapel as well.”

  She’d known Hermann Stadler since they were children and liked him well enough, but she hated the chapel. The walls felt as if they were smothering her. “I’ll come, after I clean—”

  “Now, Annika.”

  The Georgette box was sitting on its own, under the canopy of hanging clothes. She lifted another box to return to its original place, hoping to distract her father, but he stepped over her and snatched up the Georgette of Paris box. Then he opened it and dumped the contents onto the carpet.

  “What is this?” he whispered, lifting the star pendant.

  She shrugged, trying to calm the pounding in her chest. “Just a necklace.”

  A dangerous necklace with all its diamonds, the symbol of a people who increasingly needed a shield.

  Vati’s eyes changed before her. Angry at first, turning wild and gray like a wolf’s, and then narrowing with greed. As if he’d found a trunk filled with gold. “In Frau Dornbach’s room . . .”

  She scrambled to her feet, following him out of the dressing room. He held the necklace up to the window and the diamonds and gold glistened in the light.

  Was her father planning to sell it? Surely not. The Dornbachs would release him from his position for thievery, and he and Annika would lose everything. The cottage and the milk from the goats. The samlet from the lake. The birds that sang to her in the spring.

  Unemployment, she’d read in the papers, was already rampant in Austria. Her father would never be able to get another position.

  Annika held out her hand, her voice gaining strength. “Give me the necklace, Vati.”

  A strange smile crawled across his lips—the most awful smile she’d ever seen. “I knew it,” he muttered more to himself than to Annika.

  Her hand dangled in the air like the hook at the end of a fishing rod. “What did you know?”

  Instead of answering her question, he dropped the necklace into his shirt pocket, and she feared this necklace would find trouble in her father’s greedy hands.

  “Please, Vati.” She reached out her hand. “Frau Dornbach will find out that we went through her things.”

  He glanced out the window again; then he turned back toward her, the eerie smile still pasted on his lips. “She’ll never ask about this piece.”

  CHAPTER 6


  “Remarkable.” Charlotte traces her neatly trimmed fingernail, polished with a pearly white color, under the script on Bambi’s third page. “The print is almost identical to the original text.”

  My fingers clench the velvet arms of the chair beside her, my sandals tapping the Oriental rug in time with the classical music playing softly through Charlotte’s speakers. “What does it say?”

  She inches her reading glasses closer to her eyes, their rims pressing against her silver-white bangs. Then she checks inside the front cover—a familiar routine for her, this searching for the owner’s name inside a used book.

  “A lovely tribute,” Charlotte says quietly after she discovers Annika’s name and the words from her mother.

  Even as she says the words, I know she’s thinking about Nadine, her deceased mom. Charlotte’s mother was French, but as a German teacher living on the border between France and Switzerland, Nadine spoke both languages to the daughter she adopted postwar.

  There’ll be no magical reconciliation between my biological mother and me, but at least I know my story—our story—as broken as it is. Charlotte doesn’t know where she was born or to whom. Family connections, I’ve discovered, go way beyond blood, but I’ve always wanted to find Charlotte’s biological family for her.

  I glance over at the worn blue spine of Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon by Franz Ginzkey on a bookshelf near Charlotte’s piano, the magic balloon book that shaped her childhood and inspired the name of her store. It’s also the one item that Charlotte has left from her early years, the only clue to her past.

  The German classic has never been translated into English, but when we were younger, Charlotte translated the story as she read it to Brie and me. Hatschi Bratschi swipes little Fritz from his village in the magic balloon, and in the following pages, they travel the world until the wizard, searching for more children, falls off the balloon. Fritz enjoys the rest of his voyage until he reaches the wizard’s castle. There he discovers more kidnapped children and valiantly returns them all to their homes at the end.

  The story is harsh compared to many of the books for American children, but I’ve always been fascinated by Fritz. Not only with his ability to escape from an evil wizard, but his incredible journey around the world.

  I look between the Bambi book in Charlotte’s lap and Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon. Both books—one about tragedy and the other about triumph—written by Austrian authors in the same era, except Felix Salten fled from the Nazi Party while Franz Ginzkey joined its ranks.

  Charlotte turns to the handwritten text on the third page again, studying the words. “The Germans banned this book during the war.”

  I nod. “Felix Salten was Jewish.”

  “They thought he’d written this story as an allegory about those who wanted to kill the Jewish people.”

  I shiver, thinking about the antagonist called Man, hunting down the innocent deer for sport. I haven’t been able to find much useful information about Felix Salten for my post, so I’ve requested several articles from the National Archives of Austria. The researcher there, a woman named Sophie, said she’d send me one later today.

  Charlotte looks up, her short hair combed neatly behind her ears. “Where did Brianna find this?”

  “From a seller in Idaho.” I dip my spoon into a bowl of fudge ice cream and savor the sweet chocolate. “She wanted to surprise me for my birthday.”

  She turns the page. “My mother read this story to me when I was a girl.”

  And then she seems to slip away as she stares at the page.

  She’s done this ever since I’ve known her, losing herself in the pages of a book. Once she told me that books were her own magic balloons, the words and stories transporting her to another place, often back to her home in France.

  Someone renamed her Charlotte when she first arrived at the orphanage east of Lyon. It means “free woman,” a new birth in a sense. After the war, Nadine had wanted her newly adopted daughter to embrace that name and embark with her on a journey of freedom.

  Charlotte loved her mother dearly, bringing her to the United States almost sixty years ago following Charlotte’s marriage to a soldier from Ohio named Marshall Trent.

  After Nadine died, the Trents searched for Charlotte’s biological family but found no record of her birth in Lyon or the surrounding towns in France, so they crossed the border to search the civil registrar’s office in Geneva. When that proved unsuccessful, they moved on to Germany. No central registry office recorded German births, so they combed through records in civil registration offices in several of the larger cities.

  Later I tried to help Charlotte find her family as well, searching online in the catalog of the Family History Library. Though her biological parents were probably deceased by now, I was hoping to find a brother or sister or even a cousin who remained behind. Someone to fill in the gaps of her story.

  But none of us have been able to locate the record of her birth. We need the name of the town or city where she was born in order to find any information about her family.

  Charlotte remained at the orphanage near Lyon for about five years until Nadine rescued her, and then she emulated Nadine’s kindness when she met Brie and me. Not orphans exactly, but two girls who desperately needed a mom. Or at least an auntie who could help guide us across the mountains and valleys of life. Charlotte filled in these missing gaps for us.

  When Charlotte looks up at me again, her dark-green eyes are confused. “It seems to be a list.”

  “What sort of list?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not certain.”

  Brie and I have found plenty of forgotten lists tucked between a book’s pages—usually cataloging groceries or things to do—but none inscribed in the copy. This list, it seems, was meant to be remembered permanently by either its author or the recipient of the book.

  “Can you translate any of it?” I press.

  Charlotte pats my leg. She’s known me since I was eight and knows very well that sometimes I push too hard. This tenacity, she once told me, was also a gift, but not everyone appreciates it as much as she does.

  How Charlotte saw my determination all those years ago as a child empowered me in a sense, making my grit a blessing instead of a curse. Even today, my perspective on myself often evolves to match the view from her eyes.

  She reaches for the bowl of cherry cordial that I brought her from the ice cream shop once owned by her husband and digs her spoon into one of the three scoops. In all these years, I’ve never known her to waver on books or ice cream.

  After taking two bites, Charlotte returns her bowl to the glass coffee table and looks at the book again. The words come to her slowly as she scans the lines on one of the first pages. “Gold necklace, ruby brooch, and six silver teacups with—” it takes her a moment to translate the last word—“saucers.”

  I glance over her arm, studying the script again. “Perhaps someone recorded their family heirlooms.”

  “There are two initials at the end of the line,” she says. “R. L.”

  “Strange.”

  “Maybe Annika was trying to hide her secrets in plain sight. If she didn’t want an adult to find it . . .”

  “No better place to hide than in a children’s book.”

  She nods, pushing her reading glasses back over her short hair. We’ve commiserated over the years about how few adults actually open books written for younger people. The older population, we both think, would learn a lot about children by reading what intrigues them. And while I’m admittedly biased, some stories written specifically for children are light-years more entertaining than what’s marketed toward their parents.

  The author of the list certainly valued precision in her script, taking the time to do her work well. She seemed to care deeply about what she was recording, and I wonder if it was Annika Knopf trying to hide something between these pages or if her mother wrote this list for her.

  I glance again between the two books—one on the shelf
and one in Charlotte’s hands—and wish they could both tell me about their journeys.

  “I can’t read any more today.” Charlotte lowers the book to her lap.

  This time I pat her leg. “It’s okay.”

  “My mind is still sound, just not my recall.”

  “Your mind is even sounder than mine.”

  Charlotte continues flipping through the pages, scanning the illustrations of Bambi playing with his cousin Faline, hiding with his mother in the forest. Some of the illustrations are printed in bright colors, others in black-and-white. Then she looks back up at me. “Did you see the picture?”

  I scoot toward her. “What picture?”

  She slowly rotates the book, and I see a yellowed photograph, torn from a newspaper and attached to a page near the end of the book with about a dozen pieces of clear tape. It’s a picture of a young man, seeming to gaze into the eyes of a woman cut from the photograph, though her gloved hand is resting in his. He’s striking, with light hair and a smile that must have stirred the hearts of many young women in his day.

  The caption’s missing as well, but I can read the name of the newspaper and the date above the photograph.

  Neues Wiener Tagblatt. 6 May 1938.

  “The Vienna newspaper,” Charlotte says.

  “Perhaps Annika was from Austria as well.”

  Charlotte closes the book, staring down at the cover. “I was baptized in 1938.”

  Elbows on my lap, I wait silently. She rarely speaks about her memories from the orphanage or the tragedies of a great war that spared no one, including the children.

  “I wish I could find your family for you, Charlotte.”

  She reaches for my hand; her skin is so soft, so thin, that I worry about bruising her. “It’s much too late for a reunion now.”

  “Do you still want to know what happened to them?”

  “Sometimes I do.” Her voice shakes. “Other times, I’m afraid to find out.”

  “Everyone should know their story.”

  Closing her eyes, Charlotte rests her head against the chair. “Hopefully this Annika left Europe long before the war began.”