Magda’s eyes widened, but Frau Tauber plowed ahead, as solicitous as Eliška when the child had an idea for a new game. “We have discussed this, and Johan and I both agree that you should be Samuel’s sandek.”
Magda blinked.
“It’s a great honor, and, oh, I know it’s quite unusual, especially for us to be asking a Christian woman.” Frau Tauber laughed a little. “Yes, the Jewish community, if we had one left around here, would certainly have something to talk about other than the war and Hitler and…well, beware, Magdalena. If any of them find out, they will make a real scandal of it!” She pulled a face in mock anguish, but her eyes were filled with sadness.
Magda fidgeted with her hands.
Frau Tauber brushed a hair off her forehead and smiled wanly. “But they will accept our decision. When this is all over, we’ll set a signal that Jews and Gentiles can live together.” She reached for Magda’s hand. “I’m sorry. Our request is not at all political. You have no idea what I’m asking of you, do you?”
Magda shook her head.
“As sandek, you will hold Samuel in your lap during the circumcision. It’s a great honor, Magdalena. You have such compassion, and I want it to be you holding our son during the mitzvah.”
“But I know nothing about—”
“You’re a farmer’s daughter, Magdalena. I know you will not flinch.” Her pout was playful, but there was a smidgen of impatience in her tone. “I just had a child. I’m too tired to argue. Would you simply be your agreeable self, please?”
Magda looked down at her lap to hide her grin. “I’m sorry. Yes.”
“Good! Dr. Tauber is the official mohel in Litoměřice. Or was.” She giggled again, like someone drunk. “He will do the circumcision himself. I really want Samuel to be in your arms, where I know he’ll be safe.”
This had to do with the fire. This was how they were repaying her.
Magda squeezed the woman’s hand, homesick for the intimacy of her own family, of the certainty she once felt. “Thank you, Frau Tauber. I will be Samuel’s…what was that again?”
“Sandek.” Frau Tauber gazed down at the newborn. “It’s as close to a godmother as you can be.”
The periwinkle and the forget-me-nots in white, yellow, and pink. The cedars giving voice to the breeze. A stolen moment, and his hope for a stolen kiss.
Walter’s surprise visit made Magda’s insides effervescent. She’d gone to fetch eggs for Renata, when like a ghost, he materialized from the fog, standing between two cedars, his uniform as gray as the bark. He whisked her away with the promise, just as the sun broke through the haze, that he would help her with the chore.
“You have to see the deer first.” Walter took her by the hand and led her across the road to where they could watch the wildlife grazing in the fields. Aleš had not put up the pen in the winter, but the Taubers had known the deer would stay nearby, looking for food. They depended on it, especially as the winter gripped them with record low temperatures. But there was less of everything now. The villa was one of the few in the district that contained a unique heating system built into the walls, but the boiler had broken, and the water pipes responsible for carrying warm water froze and burst. There had been severe damages to the walls up in the attic, the household staff having to move into the guest rooms on the second floor. Then there were the requisitions, doubled on the Taubers. The farm’s grain, the wine—requisitioned in return for some semblance of protection.
But they were coming out of that cruel winter leaner and tougher. Now, with the birds singing and the sun rising over the fields, Magda could forget the cold.
There were three pregnant does. The big stag, Walter said, had to be somewhere in the forest nearby.
Magda had been feeling anxious for them all winter. “I’m glad there won’t be any hunting this year. You feed them all winter only to release them in the spring. It seems too easy, giving them a feeling of security only to hunt them down.”
Walter shrugged. “It’s the way things are done, Magda. It’s how we control the population. Some animals are castrated. Some we hunt for sport.”
That word “we” again.
“Dr. Tauber usually waited a few weeks until after they’d dispersed,” she said. “At least he did that.”
“It does make the chase more exciting.” Walter looked down at her. “How are they?”
There was a tone of regret in his voice, and it gave Magda pause. She wanted to tell him about the excitement in the past week, how the spirits in the house had lifted, brushing off the dingier layers of war. For the past seven days, Renata and she had not heard a single whisper about the rumors that Jews were being forced to build a ghetto across the river. Magda had not caught Dr. Tauber standing on the ridge above the rose garden and looking across the Elbe. It seemed he had laid aside the guilt that shrouded him. There was no mention of the friends in Switzerland or of how another village had been emptied of all its Jews. Of collaborators who had hidden entire families being executed by Nazis. Instead, in Samuel’s wake, the darkness had dissipated.
It was Dr. Tauber’s significant patient list that had kept them squirreled away on the hill. He’d been allowed to continue seeing the chief of police, even the new mayor, who had replaced Brauer shortly before Christmas. Villa Liška, the authorities felt, was far enough away that the comings and goings of his patients were kept discreet, and for as long as the Obergruppenführer needed Dr. Tauber, for now that he had been diagnosed with cancer, he did need him and he did tolerate a Jew doctor.
Or maybe, Magda thought, it was Walter’s doing. Perhaps he had somehow contributed to the lax
