“Oh.” Magda shifted on her feet. She was finished with the biscuit. “And you?”
“I did it for fun. And to stay out from underfoot, I suppose.”
“How is your mother?”
Walter winced.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” Magda’s face flushed.
“It’s all right. She hasn’t gotten better. Dr. Tauber says a few months at most.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He nodded.
“So if you’re not working here after the summer, what will you be doing next?”
Walter shrugged. “Swim. Find a job. Work.”
“What about working here?”
“I’m looking to do the kind of technical work I’ve been trained for. This agricultural stuff, it’s not really for me.”
“I suppose.” What was really for her then? Was this it? Then she realized, back in Voštiny, her prospects had been fairly limited as well.
“Then there is…” He tilted his head toward the door. “I suppose I’ll get the letter at some point. Get conscripted.”
She thought about that. She thought about her brothers. Her parents, piled into a house that was not theirs, onto land that did not belong to them. Her heartbroken grandparents, hours and hours away from their farm in Voštiny. The lines on her mother’s face the last time Magda had seen her. And how very wrong Mayor Brauer had been. Hitler seemed far from finished with his efforts to expand Germany’s territories.
“Yeah,” Walter said. “There is that too.” Then, “I’m in a swim meet next week. You could come watch.”
Magda looked up at him.
“Renata and Aleš are coming.” He grabbed an apple off the table and tossed it into the air, then winked as he polished it against his shirt. “Would be nice to have a whole cheering section.”
It was only a friendly invitation then. He was not interested in her.
Walter stood in front of her. She only came up to his chest. She shifted to the left. He moved to his right. She smiled a little and turned sideways so he could get past her. He still stood before her, the apple in his hand.
“You doing a treasure hunt with Eliška this afternoon?” he asked.
He must have seen her setting up secrets on the grounds earlier. Magda looked out the kitchen window. The drizzle seemed to have let up, but the sky was still cloudy. She could have Eliška dress warmly. She nodded.
Walter grinned. “OK. See you around.”
Magda’s school in Voštiny had been a whitewashed one-floor building. It had looked innocent enough from the outside, but Magda’s hell had been inside.
“Look, she’s got the map of Siberia tattooed onto her cheek,” hollered one of the boys. It had been that fateful geography lesson that shaped Magda’s youth. The schoolchildren taunted her, and sometimes the adults in the village also made snide remarks about the devil’s marks and vampires. It did not help that she had ginger hair even after, when she was older, it had turned more into a light chestnut color.
Magda’s brothers kept busy, standing up for her any time they caught someone teasing their baby sister. Often it came to fistfights. And Magda felt that the only people that could possibly love her—or defend her—were those in her family.
Except for one other person. Radek Jelínek, the next door neighbor’s youngest son, was Magda's age. Radek accepted her disfigurement because, he’d once logically explained, he had seen it all his life so there was nothing novel about it. For Magda, Radek’s friendship was a relief from her loneliness, until it all changed. In the summer they turned thirteen, Radek became uncertain, shy, silly, and sometimes downright flabbergasting. Magda’s brothers had been the ones to reveal to her that “it’s because he’s smitten with you.”
She had been astonished by the revelation. The next time Radek wanted to walk with her to school, she pretended she had forgotten something, later following at a distance. When she showed up empty-handed, Radek was standing in the doorway waiting for her. His confusion turned to anger, and it stabbed her in the heart. She knew how rejection felt, and she swore she would never do that to him again. It was time to talk to him.
Except when she tried to explain she could never love him other than as another brother, Radek kissed her instead. First, quickly on the cheek—on the left one—and that left a tingling that was not at all unpleasant. He watched her for a moment with those dark, deep brown pools of his, and then he leaned in to kiss her mouth. She pulled back and so did he.
She placed a hand on her cheek, where the gesture of affection still lingered, and said, “That’s enough for now.”
They continued being friends after that—but not without humiliation and moments of discomfort. When they were both fifteen, it was clear that Radek would remain persistent. He showed up at her house one day with a bouquet of wildflowers and an invitation to the village dance. Her mother shoved her outside the cottage to accept the flowers and the invitation, and when Magda—inconsolable—begged her mother to let her renege, her mother sat down on the bed.
“Why won’t you go?”
“Because they’ll all make fun of him.”
“Who all?”
“Everyone, simply everyone!”
“Your brothers will be there.”
Magda huffed. “They’re going to be defending me until I’m an old woman, is that right?”
Her mother had remained silent, but she stroked Magda’s arm.
“I don’t want to go out there,” Magda said. “Not so that he can be made fun of. At some point, Radek will be sick of it too. Besides, I think he’s doing it because he feels sorry for me.”
Her mother sighed, took Magda’s hand, and held it. “Magdalena, your birthmark is not an excuse for avoiding risks. It should not be the thing that prevents you from performing acts of courage.”
“There is nothing courageous about letting Radek take me out.”
Her mother smiled gently. “Everything about showing love requires an act of courage. Absolutely everything. But loving yourself is perhaps the most heroic act a person can perform.”
Magda told her she did not want to be a
