“I just happened to—”
“You’re a hero.” Frau Tauber kissed Magda’s cheeks.
Magda shrank into herself.
The next morning as Aleš and his friend Davide inspected the house, Magda wandered out to feed the chickens but stopped when she saw Walter come around the corner of the villa. Her pulse quickened at the sight of him. He was in Wehrmacht uniform, cap on a shaven head, the rim of which rested just above those perfect ears of his.
She looked around and went to the end of the chicken coop, where she could see the front drive. The black vehicle was back.
“I hear you’re a hero,” he said in greeting.
“No such thing,” she said. His presence in her dream came back to her, his hand on her thigh, the whispers in her ear. Wake up.
“Aleš was certainly singing your praises.”
Aleš would do no such thing. Walter was embellishing. “She was in danger. I wasn’t even thinking. Anybody could’ve done that.”
“That’s not what I heard. Aleš said you had your wits about you. Even checked the door before throwing it open. Knew it was an electrical fire right away, all that.”
She rubbed a hand along her skirt and pulled her scarf up higher over her brow.
He grinned and leaned against one of the posts. “You never came to say goodbye. I thought I’d see you at the lake again.”
“Did you expect I’d just be waiting where you left me?”
Walter frowned. “No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Are you angry because I left with the boys without you?” He faced her. “I didn’t want to embarrass you. I didn’t think it was any of their business, that’s all.”
Magda sniffed. “You knew where to find me.”
“Would you have been happy to see me?”
She scattered more feed.
“Wehrmacht,” he said, removing his cap. “I guess Germany needs soldiers and not swimmers. I’ve got a different type of training now. In the meantime, I’m driving the Obergruppenführer to his appointments.” He waved the cap toward the front of the house. “His results came in, so…”
Magda paused, one hand in the bowl. She lowered it to the ground. “Walter, do you know about…” She couldn’t. She could not say the words. She looked meaningfully at the house. “Can you help them? Can you say something? Anything?”
Walter’s fingers flexed in the holes of the fence. “I don’t know how. It’s the law now.”
“Did you see what they have to sign?” Her voice broke. Renata had shown her the documents Mayor Brauer had brought with him. Stateless, all of them, in two months’ time. Their signatures would confirm they were the enemies of the Reich.
Walter turned away from her, looking toward the deer park. “You know, I’ve got my own worries. Are you even listening to me, Magda?”
“My brothers,” she said, “were sent to the eastern front. I haven’t heard anything from them.”
“Yet. Just say you haven’t heard from them yet. It takes a long time for letters. Anyway, I’ll be done with the training in about a month. And then, I don’t know.” He looked east. “We’ll be taking Leningrad soon.”
We’ll? She was never with the “we.” To which “we” would she ever belong?
“Will you write me?” He faced her again. “Can I write you?”
Magda watched two hens fighting over a piece of lettuce. She glanced at him and shrugged.
“Damn it, Magda.” It was his voice that cracked now. “You’re not like the month of April. You’re more like the middle of January.” He sighed and tapped the flimsy fencing with an open palm before shoving his hands into his pockets, his mouth set into a thin, straight line. “See you around, Magda.”
She raised a hand in return, and he made that clicking noise again and backed away.
“And you are a hero.” He waved his cap at the villa before replacing it on his head. “They owe you. But the Taubers, I suppose, are in no position to take on credit.”
5
March 1942
The cuckoo clock, the one the Taubers had brought home from the Black Forest one summer, entertained Eliška for only the first hour of Ruth Tauber’s labor. Thereafter, she begged Magda to play games with her, pausing only occasionally when the cuckoo popped out to mark yet another fifteen minutes of muffled agony in the bedroom above.
The sound of Dr. Tauber’s pacing in the corridor occasionally rewarded the girls with his harried appearance. Once he began the ascent up the staircase, Magda and Eliška went and peeked around the doorway of the dining room. He hesitated on the top landing, the uncertainty and anxiety evident in the way he tipped his head, the way his hair was disarrayed. One end of his cravat—loosened hours ago—was whipped over his back. Although he was a medical doctor, Eva—who Magda discovered was not only the baker but a midwife—had requested Dr. Tauber to cite one Scripture from the Old Testament about a husband allowed at his wife’s childbed. When he was not able to, she respectfully showed him the door. It did not stop him from moving upstairs by midday to continue wearing down a trail of anticipation.
Jana had gone through the house, opening all the cupboards, which supposedly promised to speed up the birth. Renata and Magda had been playing at distraction for hours. Renata, in Dr. Tauber’s library, dusted the leather-bound books again and again while Magda played yet another round of Little Finch with Eliška.
“It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” Dr. Tauber’s jubilant announcement tumbled down from the second floor.
Before he reached the top of the landing, Magda and Renata had run into each other at the bottom of the staircase. They grabbed hands and raised them in a happy hurrah. Eliška flew upstairs to meet her father. He raised her into the air, and his cravat flew over the banister and onto the marble floor below. Late-afternoon light pooled in from the front foyer. It was the first sunshine after a week of heavy spring rains.
When he reached them,
