“Is that true?”
“That’s beside the point. You don’t go to school for books. You’re missing out on being a friend. That’s what I mean. You’ll turn out weird like Herr Miihlstein is.” Karel slapped up at a floorboard as he said this, gestured to the attic. “It will be better,” he insisted. “School isn’t so bad. The kids aren’t dirty. You’d feel better if you weren’t hid away so much.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“It’s only Herr who thinks you got to be locked up—and even he’s not sure why. Maybe if Mom was still around she’d tell him how it needs to be.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure I do.”
Anna swept her skirts flat and laid back on the steps. She rested her head on the worn riser a moment, before she stood and put the wire pony back where she found it. She was tired of all this. She said to Karel, “Am I the one who has to tell you? You should listen to Herr. He’s a good man. He adores each of us.”
“What do you mean?” Karel rubbed his arms. He looked cold, a film of dried sweat covering him. He rubbed where there were goose bumps. “I don’t understand,” he said after a moment. “Are you mad?”
“You think you’re all grown up, yeah. You should find yourself lucky if you end up like Father. If you weren’t pigheaded, you’d know this.”
She’d never talked to him this way, her voice sharp with contempt. She was making him angry, reminding him that he was still only a boy. She decided to tell him about their mother—all the things their older sisters had told her in confidence and made her swear to secrecy. Anna made herself sound bored to tell it; she sighed and shook her head at him, like Karel was stupid for not knowing that their mother hadn’t been killed in the war, not really.
“She was older than Father,” Anna explained. She should have stopped talking. She felt this, her stomach turning over, her guts contracting. “About fifty when you were born. She was an actress a long time before she married, that’s why.”
Anna told how it had happened. Once Karel was old enough to be left on his own part of the day, their mother changed. They were still in Austria, where they were from, but she wanted to move to Galizien, where a theater needed taking over. In Salzburg directors wouldn’t cast her. She was commanding and loud, which was necessary when performing, but not otherwise. No longer was she a summery thing, not libidinous and lithe like when she’d earned her stage name: the Sparrow’s Nest, later shortened to just Sparrow, some kind of joke a Viennese producer saddled her with when she was young and desperate. The producer was a lout, but he put a star on her door, and that was all she needed. That was what she needed again when she moved her family to Galizien, far away from Salzburg, where an old colleague, a Bohemian, a washed-up actor himself, had sought her out.
Once they were up there with the Hungarians and Poles, Herr Miihlstein was never happy. He hated Galizien. When war broke out with Russia, he was eager to leave.
“It’s because Father’s a Jew,” Anna explained.
“Aren’t we Jews?”
“In a way.”
“That’s why she died? She wouldn’t go? And Cossacks got her because they hate Jews?”
“No,” Anna said, rising from the steps to clasp Karel’s shoulder. “Silke made that up because you wouldn’t understand the truth. Mother was murdered. But not by Cossacks. The man killed her before the Cossacks even attacked.”
“What man?”
“The one who led us there. The actor. Some Bohemian man. She was seeing him. They had a romance. Everyone knew that. When war started and Father wanted to leave, the actor went into a rage. It was he who did it. Not the Russians. The actor stabbed her one night and ran off.”
Karel looked sick to his stomach, like he couldn’t fully believe what Anna said. “You’re lying,” he said, but she didn’t respond to the accusation. All she needed to do was set her lips in a line and wait for him to come back around. It was obvious he believed her.
“Did we bury her before we left?” Karel asked.
“Yes. She’s buried in a church courtyard there. Don’t you remember? The three handfuls of dirt on the coffin?”
“No.”
“You were there, Karel.”
“No, I wasn’t. I don’t remember.”
“Such a little boy. So pathetic. We wanted to bawl like you, but it was difficult for us. We knew what had gone on. You understood nothing. That’s why we let you go on like a baby.”
Karel left the cellar as soon as she finished the telling. He stomped up the steps and out through the kitchen to the back door and was gone. Anna stayed awhile under the floorboards, moved deeper in the cellar, where it was dark, and sat on a crate. She didn’t understand why she said those things. She didn’t know any better than Karel about their mother or what happened in Galizien. Those rumors she passed on were just what Theresa said. Anna didn’t know them as fact. She sat on a crate and looked at her shoes. They were ugly shoes. She hated them. The straps torn at the stitches. The shine worn off. She saw her legs and hated them too. Her skinny legs, bowed a little. The way her knees knobbed out wider than her shins. That was why she stayed under a quilt so much, even when it was hot, so she didn’t have to see her legs.
Anna stayed in the attic even more the next week. She felt bad about what she said. That Karel had bawled. That he was a baby. Silke and Theresa teased Karel too much about that. Anna should have known better. She laid under a quilt on the sofa and felt her legs hurt. That was right, she thought. That was what she deserved.
Karel and his friends were at a lot of SOSA meetings that month, the nights Emil Braun spoke. It never hurt to have the buddings of a crowd stirring when Emil rose to bellow “Oyez! Oyez!” to silence the old-timers. He passed around a tattered copy of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and claimed he knew its author, Alexander Berkman, personally, grinning across the cigar-smoky room, his back to the pink-armed barkeeps, the balding top of his head in the mirror.