A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

I motioned to Anton to stand quietly by the front door, then did a quick pass through the apartment to see that it was empty, and that Paul and Miriam had no telephone. The Gestapo often opened a line and listened to occupants’ conversations. But as I suspected, Paul and Miriam could not afford such a luxury.

  I returned to the hall. “You can talk now. There is no telephone to listen in on what we say.”

  In my mind, I drew a half circle around the cupboard. I dropped to my hands and knees and searched that half circle.

  “What are you doing?” Anton asked.

  “Looking,” I said. “Please keep out of the light.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “I know.” I picked up a door. “Let’s see what is. Perhaps something will give us a clue to her whereabouts.”

  The door had little dents hammered on the inside near the bottom. Had the little girl tried to kick herself free? I stared at the smooth depressions and admired her grit. It must have hurt to kick the wood that hard, but she had kept at it. The dents were in a nearly straight line across the back of the door, showing determination as much as desperation.

  A scrap of white fabric dangled from a broken hinge. I carefully picked it free and held it in my open palm.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “I would guess that it belonged to Ruth, or to the person who freed her from the cupboard.” I studied the cloth. Thick cotton and expensive looking.

  “A piece of a dress? Or a shirt?” he asked.

  I rubbed the cloth between my fingertips. “It feels thicker than that. Perhaps a jacket?”

  “Not a warm one,” he said.

  I opened my satchel, pulled out my notebook, and pressed the cloth between the pages.

  He pointed to a dark mark in the middle of a door. “What made that mark?”

  “Something small,” I said. “Perhaps a pen.”

  “Or a screwdriver.”

  “Could be.” I ran my fingertips over the mark. Whoever had opened these doors had no key and had not bothered to look for one. Surely that boded well for Ruth. She was with someone who cared more for her than for the furniture and worries about the noise of wrenching off the doors. I stacked the doors atop the cupboard, not sure what else to do with them.

  Why had Miriam not left the key here? If she had a key, she would have given it to me at the stable, with her house key and locket. I checked atop the cupboard. The key rested there, in plain sight.

  I searched the rest of my imaginary half circle. Shoes lined up near the door: a pair of old slippers that probably belonged to Miriam, worn patent leathers for Ruth, and brown slippers for Paul.

  Who had ripped the doors off? It could have been Lars. I regretted not asking him for more details. Where he was concerned, I regretted much, I reminded myself, and cupboard keys were the least of it.

  With any luck, she was with Paul. I told myself that, but I did not believe it. Miriam had not thought so.

  The cupboard smelled of urine. The little girl had wet herself. No matter how brave she was, she was only two years old. The terror that she must have felt while sitting in the dark, listening to them take away her mother.

  The last thing the cupboard held was a soft green blanket. I sniffed it—Miriam’s perfume and urine. I folded it and set it on top of the ruined doors.

  There was no sign that whoever had rescued the girl had brought her back inside the apartment.

  We checked the bedroom that my friend Sarah had used for her son, Tobias. It probably belonged to Ruth now. The white-painted wardrobe held little girl’s clothing, neatly hung or folded on the shelves. Most of the dresses had stains on the knees. I thought of the many pair of pants that I had mended for Anton. I was proud of Miriam and Paul for letting their daughter get dirty. My own dresses had been pristine at that age. Even then I feared my father.

  No evidence of hasty packing, so the person who took her away had taken their time and packed carefully, or they had taken nothing at all. I searched for a urine-soaked dress. That, too, was gone. Was she still wearing it?

  I saw nothing that would explain who had taken Ruth, or why her mother had thought that she might be safer locked in a cupboard than on a train to Poland. Did she fear what the Nazis would do to her, or someone else?

  I gave up, for now, and went to the kitchen where I found stale bread, butter, and honey. I heated water for tea and found eggs to boil.

  I cut a piece of hard bread and handed it to Anton. He smeared it with butter and honey and devoured it. I sat at the table and ate a piece myself, more slowly.

  “So,” he said. “Are you and Lars married?”

  “We are not married.” I struggled to decide how much to tell him. He might as well know most of it. “When I was last in Berlin, Lars and I ran afoul of the Gestapo. We had fake identities made and the man who made them, for reasons of his own, decided it would be easiest to make us married.”

  He looked unconvinced. “Why would he do that?”

  I sighed. There would be no peace until I had explained it to his satisfaction.

  Stalling, I removed the eggs from the stove and poured water for tea. As on my last visit, they had only odious nettle tea. They must have gathered the leaves themselves because they could afford no other tea. “Lars and I had been pretending to be engaged.”

  “Why?”

  “To make my visits to Berlin have a reason besides the obvious one: spying. And you may not tell anyone this.”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “I am not a child.”

  I did not point out that he was, in fact, a child. “Do you have your pocketknife?”

  He drew a bone-handled folding knife out of his coat pocket and dropped it in my palm. It smelled faintly of sawdust, probably from his pocket.

  I set my satchel on the table and emptied its contents. I snapped open his knife and slit the satchel’s lining.

  “What’s in there?” he asked.

  I plucked my Hannah Schmidt passport out with a sigh of relief. At least now I had valid papers, even if they were not properly stamped.

  I handed him the passport. He read it. “You’re Hannah Schmidt?”

  “You are Anton Schmidt,” I said. “We shall get you proper papers tomorrow.”

  “Who is my father?”

  I hesitated, but it was there on the passport. “My husband, Lars Schmidt.”

  “From Lars Lang?”

  “Yes.” I threaded a needle from my sewing kit and began to stitch up the satchel’s thin lining.

  He put the passport back on the table. “Do you love him?”

  “I am certainly grateful that he rescued me from the Gestapo yesterday.” I kept my eyes on my needlework, partially so I did not have to look at Anton, but also because I wanted to make the stitches as small as I could so that they would not be visible to a casual searcher.

  “That is no answer,” he said, as I had so often said to him.

  I pulled the next stitch taut. I did not know the answer. I had loved Lars very much. I still did. But acting on that was another matter. “I did.”

  “Is that why you’ve been so sad since you came back from Berlin last time?”

  “What do you think?” It was, but I did not wish to talk about it.

  “I’m glad I punched him.” Anton took a defiant gulp of tea.

  “It was completely inappropriate to hit him,” I said. “Whatever happened between Lars and me is my concern, not yours.”

  “But you would never hit him yourself.” He put his teacup down on the table.

  “No,” I said. “Because it is an inappropriate way to solve problems.”

  “Isn’t Gretl inappropriate?”

  I tied off the last stitch and cut it with a little pair of folding scissors.

  “Did Fräulein Ivona turn you in, back in Poland?” he asked.

  “Did she seem surprised when the Gestapo came in and took me?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention.” He leaned forward on his elbows and looked away guilt
ily. “I was trying to listen to you and Lars, and then I was trying to help you.”

  “You did the correct thing to listen to Lars.”

  I stood and took a hot egg from the pan. I placed it in an egg cup for him, then fished out one for myself.

  “So, did she turn you in?”

  “I think not,” I said. “But only because the Gestapo arrested me for being Hannah Vogel, not Adelheid Zinsli, and I believe Fräulein Ivona did not know my real name.”

  We finished our eggs and bread in silence. Anton looked at my cast. He stood to do the washing up.

  I went to the living room to see if Ruth’s savior had left a note. I riffled through papers on Paul’s desk. Handwritten letters in a language I did not know, but I guessed it was Polish. The other letters were official looking, and they came from the Reich. A letter stating that Paul must append the name Israel to his identity card, officially changing his name to Paul Israel Keller. A Jewish Asset Inventory Form where he and Miriam had been required to list their possessions. I skimmed it. It included even the locket I now wore around my neck.

  Anton came into the living room wiping his hands on his pants. “Any clues in there?”

  I shook my head. “Receipts, paperwork for various visas, and notifications from the Reich announcing further restrictions against Jews.”

  I opened the drawer and sorted through pens, pots of ink, and rubber bands. At the back, folded into a square, was a sheet of paper. I unfolded it and smoothed it flat. The undated and unsigned typewritten note read:

  Enough. I will not continue paying. I cannot do what you ask. It ends now.

  I turned on Sarah’s old desk lamp and held the paper under it. The watermark was the same as on the letters I had been receiving from Berlin. The paper trembled in my hand.

  “Mother?” Anton asked. “What does it say?”

  I handed it to him.

  He skimmed it and gave it back. I folded it up and returned it to its place at the back of the desk. I did not mention that it matched my other letters. Anton did not know about them. And he did not need to.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I am not certain,” I said slowly. “But I think it might be a reason for Miriam to leave Ruth here instead of taking her along. Perhaps she was being threatened.”

  My heart beat faster. It did not matter what I found in the desk. I had to get Anton and myself out of Germany. Ruth was no longer in the cupboard, and there was little I could do for her now.

  Should I chance going to Herr Silbert’s tonight? The sky outside was already growing dark, which made it around four. His shop would close before we got there. First thing tomorrow morning, I would get Anton a Swiss passport and get mine stamped. We might be on a train to Zürich by lunch. But what of Ruth? What if the person who typed the letter had taken her? What if she had not been rescued at all?

  10

  The lock in the front door clicked.

  I pushed Anton ahead of me into the kitchen, where we would not be visible from the front door, and took a carving knife from the drawer by the sink. I had a quick memory of the last time we had stayed here. Then, too, I had drawn this knife to defend myself against a mysterious late-night threat. I hoped this one would prove as harmless. I pushed Anton behind me, knowing he would hate it.

  The front door closed quietly.

  “Miriam’s boots are gone,” said a deep voice. Paul. I relaxed. He belonged here. “She must be at her mother’s.”

  “Thank god for small mercies,” said a woman. Maria? Paul and Maria had been lovers before he married Miriam and, perhaps, after. Had Maria broken the Nuremberg Laws forbidding sexual relations between Germans and Jews? She hated to risk herself, but I thought that she did love Paul as much as she could love anyone. So perhaps she had.

  “I’d hate to run into her so soon after our two-week trip,” Paul said. “It takes some time to adjust.”

  “Since she’s not here…,” Maria said.

  I put down the knife on the table so that the tablecloth would muffle the sound. “He is Miriam’s husband,” I whispered to Anton. “We are old friends, but stay here, just in case.”

  Paul and Maria stood next to the sofa with their arms wrapped around each other. A small suitcase rested on the floor next to Paul’s stocking feet. I cleared my throat loudly and felt gratified when both jumped. They turned to look at me. Paul ran his elegant hand quickly through his thick dark hair, straightening it where Maria has mussed it.

  “Hannah?” said Maria. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same.” My voice shook with anger. He had been off gallivanting with his mistress while his daughter crouched, terrified, in a cupboard and his pregnant wife died alone in a stable.

  “Hannah,” Paul broke in. “I don’t understand.”

  “Have you any idea where your daughter is?” I had no time for social niceties.

  “It’s not your concern.” Paul leaned against the arm of the sofa and angled his long legs to the side. He still carried shrapnel in his leg from the War, and it pained him to stand for long.

  “Nor, obviously, are you concerned about the whereabouts of her mother,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you are implying,” he said, “but that is not your concern either.”

  “I saw Miriam,” I said. “Yesterday.”

  Maria scrutinized me.

  “In Poland,” I said.

  Paul’s eyes dropped to the locket around my neck. He must have last seen it around his wife’s neck. He could not know that I had taken it from the soldier who had removed it from her corpse, but he had to know that she never would have given it to me unless the situation were dire.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “Where is your daughter?”

  He dropped onto Sarah’s old purple sofa. The wood groaned. Maria stayed put.

  “Why was Miriam in Poland?” he said.

  “Deported. With the other Polish Jews.” Now that I saw his worry, I regretted my hostile tone. I would have to tell him his wife and unborn child were dead. I should not do that from a place of anger. And if Ruth was not his, perhaps he had expected someone else to stand by her and Miriam.

  “How was she?” He picked at his cuticles.

  I stood next to the sofa. “She went into labor there. The refugees were quartered in a stable.”

  His burnt umber eyes stared into the distance. “How is she? Is the baby a boy or a girl?”

  “I am so sorry, Paul.” I hesitated, hating to finish the sentence. Maria watched avidly. “Miriam. She…”

  A smile twitched on Maria’s lips and was quickly hidden.

  I took a deep breath. “Miriam did not survive the birth.”

  He gulped. “The baby?”

  I shook my head.

  Maria stood stock-still. I tilted my head to indicate that she should sit by Paul and comfort him. Not surprisingly, she did not.

  “Ruth?” he said hoarsely.

  “She left Ruth here,” I said. “Locked in the cupboard by the front door.”

  He leaped to his feet. Maria and I jumped. He raced to the broken cupboard and threw himself on his knees in front of it.

  “Where is she?” His voice rose in panic.

  “I arrived here not long ago,” I said. “I had hoped that you had come home and found her.”

  Someone else had taken Ruth.

  “The neighbors, Maria,” he said. “We must ask the neighbors.”

  She backed away from him. “You can’t expect me to be seen with you. I can’t traipse around announcing my presence to your neighbors.”

  He gaped at her as if he did not know her. But I did. She would not help him. She did not know how.

  “I think it’s best if I leave.” She collected her hat and coat and fled without closing the door.

  He slumped to the floor and stared at the empty cupboard.

  I eased the front door closed.

  Anton appeared in the hall and looked from the cupboard t
o Paul. Every day he witnessed more than I would ever want him to. I squeezed his hand and quickly let go.

  “Paul.” I knelt and put my hand on his shoulder. “We should ask the neighbors now. Perhaps one of them has Ruth. If so, she needs her father. She needs you.”

  He looked up. His eyes had gone blank. I had seen that look in his eyes long ago, when I was a nurse. He had been brought back from the trenches as the only survivor in his battalion, carried in, nearly comatose, with a badly wounded leg. It had taken a week before he spoke, months before he learned to walk again. He had to recover faster this time.

  I left him on the floor and crossed back into the living room. I poured out a glass of schnapps and brought it to him. He had not moved. When I handed him the glass, he tossed the schnapps back in one swallow and dropped the glass onto the floor.

  “Anton,” I said. “Please finish washing up in the kitchen.”

  He shot me a worried look and backed out of the hall.

  I knelt beside Paul again. “Paul?”

  He clenched the stained green blanket in his fist. I sat next to him, keeping one hand on his arm. I waited.

  An hour passed. Still he remained silent. I wondered if I should go to the kitchen for Anton, but he would be all right. He had seen much in the past days, but he was strong. Paul was not.

  I touched Paul’s shoulder and spoke his name once more. “Paul?”

  Without looking at me, he stood and shambled to his bedroom. I followed a few paces behind. He threw himself on his marriage bed face-first. I covered him with a well-worn quilt.

  “Should I stay?” I asked. When he did not respond, I closed the door. I could not leave him alone with the knowledge that his wife and baby were dead and that two-year-old Ruth was lost. We would spend the night here.

  I went to the kitchen. Anton sat on the floor, whittling what resembled a duck from a stick he picked up on the way to Zbąszyń.

  “A duck?” I asked.

  “A duck-billed platypus.” He held it up. I recognized the plump shape of the mammal now, with webbed flippers and a bill. A creature caught between two worlds, like us.

  “Very lifelike,” I said. “Are you hungry? How was the tea?”

  He made a gagging noise. “What kind of tea was that?”