Now for Erich, she looks after two, his mother less capable than the second. He is not what one might describe as grateful for the help, since Marceline is doing a service and being paid well, but he respects the position she has. He has always understood the effectiveness of delegated and rigid roles. Understanding them made him indispensable to the Reich.
He looks back at the little girl, Genevieve. She wears her mother’s smile, her pale skin. She still asks for her, but the crying is lessening.
“You look very nice today,” he says, and remembers his sister, Claudine, remembers her dresses always covered in mud. The tug again, harder this time, and the push, the rejection of the memory, more violent.
“Vati,” she says, and shows him a picture book that Marceline has bought from the marketplace stalls. Genevieve coughs several times, her small chest rising sharply, though she is unaware of her illness, her interest in the book distracting her.
He was good at taking care of his younger sister and brothers, but a child of his own has been harder, less mechanical. He knew straightaway that he couldn’t take care of her like her mother, that he could not bear the emotional load.
Genevieve is pointing to one of the animals in the book quizzically, and he answers her thoughtfully. His father taught him that, to answer seriously and factually. Children are simply incomplete adults, he would say. It is important to help complete them, not treat them like imbeciles.
He looks at the time. He is already thinking about the Italian, about returning to the river house. It is his gift to watch people, understand and learn their motivations and desires. And he is especially interested in those who might benefit him.
He spends the remainder of the day between the two women, the old and the new, both with different needs. He talks to his mother about the economy, about the town. Though he makes things up. He talks as if Hitler won the war. She doesn’t know any different.
“I am leaving after supper, but I won’t be back until tomorrow,” he says to Marceline. “Please cut me some of the pork and a large piece of the potato pie from yesterday, and more of anything else that you can spare today. I will purchase more items tomorrow. Hopefully there will be more grain.
“Genevieve, you need to be good for Marceline and take care of Oma while I am away. Can you do that?”
She nods. She is accepting of instruction, though she does not understand the world yet, does not even know what she is agreeing to. She will be like him, he thinks, accepting orders from her superiors, without question.
CHAPTER 11
ROSALIND
Georg sits very still on the edge of the bed while she sponges him with warm soapy water. Rosalind is gentle, and she can tell from the way he closes his eyes that it soothes him. Sometimes she passes him the cloth to wash himself, but most times she prefers the task, to feel close. A dusting of fine ginger stubble along his jawline tells her it is time to shave, though she is hesitant. Last time he attempted to fight her for the razor, thinking that she was trying to harm him. Since then she has kept the object out of sight in case he has any more strange ideas.
The geese are creating a ruckus outside, and she leaves Georg to investigate, taking with her a small cup of feed. The birds appear agitated, squawking and rushing at her as she enters the pen. Her attempt to distract and pacify them by scattering the feed on the ground is unsuccessful. She turns to the wood to see if perhaps there are dogs or foxes waiting nearby and is unsettled by the emergence of two people from the trees instead, who stop to view her from the edge of the pen: an older man with trousers held up by rope and a younger girl wearing a dress, soldier’s boots that are oversized, and a man’s jacket, too hot for the weather.
“What do you want?” says Rosalind.
She has seen beggars before and turned them away.
The man is staring at one of the geese, and the girl stares at Rosalind.
“I have nothing I can spare,” says Rosalind.
She imagines the girl is around fourteen or fifteen, with hair that is very short like a boy’s. Without the dress it would be difficult to tell her gender, and her expression is haunted, fearful. The older man has a hardened face, so darkly stained and lined it is a challenge to tell his age, his hair white and gray, his shoulders sagging. The size of him says he is harmless, but the face is what she fears. The narrow eyes look sharper than others she has seen.
“You must go.”
“Goose!” he says.
“No!” she says.
But the man turns to look at the house as if he might head there, and the girl watches them both. Rosalind can sense that he is wondering whether she is alone, and she feels exposed and suddenly vulnerable to this stranger who might do her harm.
The girl says something in her foreign language, then unlatches the gate and pushes it back to let the man step through and past Rosalind, who is too afraid to move. The girl glances at Rosalind in some way apologetically.
Sensing danger, one of the geese waddles toward her enclosure at the rear as the man moves after her. He fails at first in his attempt to grab at her, then chases her awkwardly on infirm legs. He finally throws himself on top of the bird, which squawks loudly.
“Stop!” says Stefano, who has just arrived.
In the meantime, the thief has thrown a cloth over the head of the goose.
“Give it to me!” says Stefano in German. The small boy stands a safe distance behind him.
The older man doesn’t respond at first but then sees the height of Stefano and throws the goose toward the gate of the pen. The bird falls sideways, protesting loudly at her badly damaged leg, allowing Stefano to usher her, risking her snapping beak, back into the pen. Rosalind hastily closes the gate, and the goose limps away toward her tin enclosure, her grumblings more muted now.
“Where are you from?” asks Stefano.
The man steps closer to the girl. He looks worried now, perhaps more so for the girl.
“France,” says the man.
Stefano says something in French, and then a conversation between them ensues. Rosalind doesn’t know enough French to understand.
Stefano turns to Rosalind. “They are French Jews. The girl is his granddaughter. They were in a concentration camp and then after the war in a hospital in Poland for several months before the man could walk again. The man’s wife, daughter, and his two other grandchildren were killed in the concentration camp . . . They are traveling back to France and have not eaten a proper meal in days.”
The pair stares bleakly at Rosalind.
“Do they have any other family they can go to?” says Rosalind.
Stefano asks them, then reports their response.
“He says his son who was taken to a different camp might have survived, but he is no longer hopeful, not after the things he witnessed.”
Rosalind wills herself to feel something, but she can’t. She has had little to do with Jews, has distanced herself from news of their fates.
“I can’t help them,” says Rosalind.
“They are starving,” he says.
“They hurt the goose. They were about to steal it. Why should I offer them any charity? They look at me as if they want to kill me.”
“They are starving. People do crazy things. They look at you, at your health, at what you have. They can only envy.”
“They would not envy me if they knew the truth.”
Rosalind looks at the girl, who doesn’t look so alien now, and the grandfather, who appears not as hostile. She is remembering a time on her way from Berlin when she had nothing, when she ate the potato peels she found on the ground.
“They can’t have a goose.”
Stefano reaches into his satchel and pulls out a chocolate bar, which he breaks, and hands a piece to each of them.
“Can you spare anything else?” Stefano says to Rosalind.
Rosalind walks angrily inside the house to the pantry and cuts a portion of rye bread, only enough for one. She is not yet over the damage to the goose.
When she comes out she hands the bread to the girl, not the man, who is likely to snatch, she thinks. She does not want to touch him. The girl takes it cautiously from her.
Stefano shrugs at something the Jew says in French before he nods in reluctant gratitude to Stefano only, and turns to leave.
“What did he say?”