“How much do we owe?”
“Enough.”
Enough to worry. Enough to foreclose the farm? God forbid. She didn’t care if the Thalerhof was in her name or not—this was her home. This was her land. And if things turned really bad, Florian would have too good of an excuse to pick them all up and move them to a house he owned. In Germany.
“Not as bad as Hans,” Opa finally said. “If I could just help him…”
Hans too, then.
“Katharina, they build that reservoir and there’ll be hundreds of families without a home. Write to him.”
“To Federspiel?” She was testing him with her insolence.
Opa patiently indicated the newspaper between them.
From outside she could hear her daughter and her husband stamping their boots. “I can’t.”
Opa sat straight and raised his chin. “He owes us. You could reason with him.”
His voice shook with anger, or with pain, or with both. She had caused that pain.
“You seemed to have been able to communicate quite well with him when he was under our roof.”
He sounded like Dr Hanny on her wedding day. The stone in her throat slid past her heart, bruised it, and fell into the pit of her stomach. And Opa did not stop, no. He was picking up speed as the sounds of her family outside grew louder. She stared at her fingernails, growing white where she clutched the table’s edge.
“Tell him what the valley means to us. Be rational. Tell him you want him to cooperate with us and that he has to look at the hard facts. Katharina, that ground can’t hold water. Do you understand that? And if they divert that river, our farmers will have no land left. The best way to convince Grimani is if he has a staked interest in what happens to the people here. A staked interest, do you hear me?”
Annamarie burst in and tumbled towards them, her glee and innocence almost physical in the touch of her. Katharina looked at Opa just as Florian called out to them.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
Opa’s look of defeat created a chasm between them, and she stood alone on the other side of it.
***
S he dreamt of him that night: a man for whom she yearned but was never within her grasp. Angelo Grimani. In her dream, he’d been as real as she’d last remembered him, and when she awoke, the details faded so quickly they left her with the pain of a jilted lover.
She rolled over to see that Florian’s side of the bed was empty, so she was startled when he spoke from the window, a silhouette against the morning light.
“You were talking in your sleep,” he said.
“I was? I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. I didn’t understand anything.” He came to her and brushed his lips on her cheek. “You were asleep before I came to bed last night. What happened yesterday? You and Opa were silent and distant.”
“Nothing. It was nothing.” She saw her Italian primer in his hand. “I haven’t gotten very far at all with that. Were you studying it?”
He scoffed. “On the contrary, Katharina, I don’t understand your need to conform.”
“Conform? But, Florian, we need to know the language. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about, really. It’s a language.”
“The fuss, Katharina, is that it’s not something they’re asking us to add to our repertoire. They want to forbid German completely. They’re Fascists, Katharina, not damned tourists!”
“You don’t need to curse,” she said, but it had stung. It was Angelo’s word, and she’d never heard it from Florian.
To an extent, her husband was right though. To change the focus away from herself, she told him about Alois, and when she finished, he handed her the book.
“Do you understand now what I mean?” He sighed and seemed to be mulling something over.
Anticipating bad news, she sat rigid against the headboard.
“I’ve been thinking,” he finally said. “Maybe we should move to Germany, to Nuremberg, or even to Austria. Don’t you still have relations in Innsbruck?”
“And the Thalerhof, Florian?”
“We sell it. Your grandfather told me about Federspiel’s conversation with him. I think we could still get a good price. The cows, we could take them with us across the border or sell them to the Swiss. They’ve been coming more often for our breed.”
“What will we do in a city, Florian? What should Opa do in his remaining days? This would break his heart. You know that.” It would break hers.
He stood. “Rooted in tradition, I know. Hundreds of years, I know. I’ve heard it all before, Katharina. Unlike you, I can’t see how things are changing for the better.”
“It’s not about that, Florian. It’s about this land. My land.”
He sighed loudly. Now she’d hurt him.
More gently, she said, “So we’re just going to admit defeat?”
“It’s a terrible way to look at it.”
He went to his side of the bed and took something from his nightstand. It was the letter she’d brought him from Graun. She’d almost forgotten about it. He held it out to her. “The attorney’s written regarding my mother’s house.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just requested that he have an assessor look at it and tell me what the value is.”
She waited.
“I could go up there, now that it’s winter, and manage the things I hadn’t been able to when Mother died.”
“Yes, I suppose you could.” He was going to leave her. She had said it aloud again, how the land was hers, not his. She’d said something in the night, called Angelo’s name, and now he would leave her and the baby that was coming, and Annamarie.
“I would have to get a travel visa, but with this letter, it might not take long. I’d be back
