I looked at my watch and discovered it was 4:35 in the afternoon. The library closed at 5:00 P.M., and a furious new wife would be waiting for me.
She scoured the map. “Ach, now I see. It’s a river, not a town. Eger on the border.” She pointed to a dot that read Cheb (Eger). “The town you are looking for isn’t called Eger now, and it isn’t in Germany. It’s in Czechoslovakia.” She licked her finger and paged back through the atlas to find another map. “Bohemia. Look here, in 1859 this was all Bohemia, from here to here. And Eger, right there. I have to say I much prefer the old name.” Smiling, she rested her hand on my shoulder. “But we have found it. One place with two names. Eger is Cheb.”
“So, how do I get to Czechoslovakia?”
“Unless you have the right papers, you don’t.” She could read my disappointment. “So, tell me, what is so important about Cheb?”
“I’m looking for my father,” I said. “Gustav Ungerland.”
The radiance melted from her face. She looked at the floor between her feet. “Ungerland. Was he killed in the war? Sent to the camps?”
“No, no. We’re Catholics. He’s from Eger; I mean, Cheb. His family, that is. They emigrated to America in the last century.”
“You might try the church records in Cheb, if you could get in.” She raised one dark eyebrow. “There may be a way.”
We had a few drinks in a café, and she told me how to cross the line without being detected. Making my way back to Mendelssohnstrasse late that evening, I rehearsed a story to explain my long absence. Tess was asleep when I came in after ten, and I slid into bed beside her. She woke with a start, then rolled over and faced me on the pillow.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Lost in the library.”
Lit by the moon, her face looked swollen, as if she had been crying. “I’d like to get out of this gray city and see the countryside. Go hiking, sleep under the stars. Meet some real Germans.”
“I know a place,” I whispered, “filled with old castles and dark woods near the border. Let’s sneak across and discover all their secrets.”
? CHAPTER 26 ?
The morning is perfect in memory, a late-summer day when blue skies foretold the coming autumn crispness. Speck and I had awakened next to each other in a sea of books, then left the library in those magically empty moments between parents going off to work, or children off to school, and the hour when stores and businesses opened their doors. By my stone calendar, five long and miserable years had passed since our diminished tribe took up our new home, and we had grown weary of the dark. Time away from the mine inevitably brightened Speck’s mood, and that morning, when first I saw her peaceful face, I longed to tell her how she made my heart beat. But I never did. In that sense, the day seemed like every other, but it would become a day unto its own.
Overhead, a jet trailed a string of smoke, white against the paleness of September. We matched strides and talked of our books. Shadows ahead appeared briefly between the trees, a slender breeze blew, and a few leaves tumbled from the heights. To me, it looked for an instant as if ahead on the path Kivi and Blomma were playing in a patch of sun. The mirage passed too quickly, but the trick of light brought to mind the mystery behind their departure, and I told Speck of my brief vision of our missing friends. I asked her if she ever wondered whether they really wanted to be caught.
Speck stopped at the edge of cover before the exposed land that led to the mine’s entrance. The loose shale at her feet shifted and crunched. A pale moon sat in a cloudless sky, and we were wary of the climb, watching the air for a plane that might discover us. She grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around so quickly that I feared imminent peril. Her eyes locked on mine.
“You don’t understand, Aniday. Kivi and Blomma could not take it another moment. They were desperate for the other side. To be with those who live in the light and upper world, real family, real friends. Don’t you ever want to run away, go back into the world as somebody’s child? Or come away with me?”
Her questions poured out like sugar from a split sack. The past had eased its claims on me, and my nightmares of that world had stopped. Not until I sat down to write this book did the memories return, dusted and polished new again. But that morning, my life was there. With her. I looked into her eyes, but she seemed far away in thought, as if she could not see me before her but only a distant space and time alive in her imagination. I had fallen in love with her. And that moment, the words came falling, and confession moved to my lips. “Speck, I have something—”