ANNA WAS IN BED less than half an hour after walking through the door. She hurried the boys through their baths and put Polly in her crib. Bruno was asleep when Anna came into the bedroom. She undressed as quietly as she could, changed into a thin cotton nightgown, and slid into bed. Bruno rolled over and draped his arm around her. It was an action born of habit. Anna curled into herself and faced the wall.
How did I become so unprincipled?
Tomorrow Anna would begin her second month of German classes: Advanced Beginner, II.
Oh Bruno, Bruno, she mouthed silently as she waited for sleep to steal her. This is your mess too.
A MONTH BEFORE POLLY Jean’s birth Anna left the house in the middle of the night and walked up the hill to the bench where she always went to cry.
To the night, to the cold autumn air, to the stars, to the trains in the distance, to the forest behind her, and to the sleeping inhabitants of the town below, Anna confessed:
I love him. I love him. I love him.
Like people in pain love opiates.
october
9
“A MISTAKE MADE ONCE IS AN OVERSIGHT. THE SAME MISTAKE made twice? An aberration. A blunder. But a third time?” Doktor Messerli shook her head. “Whatever’s been done has been done to an end. Your will is at work. You beg a result. A repercussion.” Anna held her left hand with her right and rested both on her lap. “A precedent has been established. You will get what you want. And there’s no need to seek out these mistakes. For now it is they who seek you.”
THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER was as easy as the end of September had been uncertain. It is often like that. Every month begins at its own beginning. Chalkboards are washed clean. Work kept Bruno occupied and distracted. Victor and Charles were busy with school. Every morning Ursula came to the house on Rosenweg to mind Polly Jean. And Anna had begun the second term of her German class.
Most of the graduates of the September session enrolled in October’s. The remainder of the class was made up of graduates from other sections. Everyone’s German had improved. Anna’s as well. Anna’s especially. It became less difficult to sit through Roland’s lectures. They began to make more sense. The mood in the Oerlikon classroom was sociable and friendly, even as the autumn days grew bleak.
The consequence of Anna’s lessons was, as Doktor Messerli rightly predicted, that Anna was becoming accustomed to speaking German aloud. And the consequence of that consequence was that Anna began to feel a little less out of place, perhaps even somewhat comfortable in her daily life in a way she hadn’t before. On one day she spoke to the mothers in the square. On another she made chitchat with the cashier at the Coop. That was an absolute first. The checker offered a forced, availing smile in return.
But Anna wasn’t entirely at ease. In the same market on another day, she’d mistakenly weighed her pears under the code for bananas and a different checker—a fat, belligerent woman with close-cropped hair—huffed and rose from her stool to make a big, bullying point of walking to the scales and weighing them herself. Anna felt scolded and two feet tall. She carried the agitation all the way home and didn’t speak another word of German for the rest of the day.
Bruno noticed the upward, progressive arc of her speech, her level of comfort, her general mien. “I am impressed,” he said. “But it’s not Schwiizerdütsch.” It was a cynical, ungracious comment, but it was true. She didn’t know any more Swiss German than she did when she began the class. “Still, it is a start.” Then he added he’d be glad to pay for more lessons. As many as would keep Anna happy. And Anna was, perhaps, happier than she’d been in a long while (if indeed “happy” was the word for what she was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn’t). The classes were the axis around which her present life—public, private, and secret—spun.
“YOU SEE?” DOKTOR MESSERLI cheerfully pointed out. “What you’ve needed all along was simply a way of facilitating an ease of speech, of feeling more comfortable with your own vice.”
It was a slip of Freudian magnitude.