Rosalind’s lips press together.
“You cannot take notice of what he says.” She turns to face him. “I want to thank you. I know I didn’t sound grateful for saving my life, but I am. Some days I think perhaps . . . well sometimes it might be for the best if he would get it over with and put me out of my misery.”
“You should not think such things.”
She is weeping again, silently, her face turned away so he cannot see the tears. He remembers the sounds of his mother’s cries that weren’t silent. He remembers the last night he spent with her, and the sadness at being apart from her, Nina, Toni, and the others, the fear of losing everyone who mattered.
Rosalind lies back down on the couch. “Would you stay awhile?” she asks.
Something about her request sounds too restrictive, but he must do what he has to.
“Yes.”
7 August 1942
Dear Papa,
I am still in Vienna. Erich made many inquiries about your whereabouts but to no avail. I’ve been miserable thinking about you, wondering if you have been taken elsewhere. Erich thinks you have been transferred to a camp far away. I cried for days when he told me. But I will never give up on you, Papa.
We will soon be leaving for Germany to stay at the river houses with Rosalind and Georg, and I am praying for this time to come quickly. It is painfully boring here. The women I am expected to mix with here talk about subjects that don’t interest me. I can’t bear the thought of going to another function. They are always trying to impress one another with their wealth and their knowledge of politics, of which there is very little. This tedious talk is something I bear, and I can’t say what I really think of anything. I want to tell them they are all wrong. I want to tell them about my friends who were sent away, about how Alain would climb fences to avoid the Gestapo on the way home from the club. But I bite my tongue until it bleeds, and I think of you and grow another inch taller.
Today I walked to the square in Vienna. It is not quite the same Austria as I remember. There are soldiers in the street, and it is not as colorful. People do not dress up like they used to. Traditional folk dances and festivals are held, but there is a certain formality to them rather than gaiety. And once they are over, we all go home. In the days when I was small, I remember the dances and parades that you took me to. I remember that we would hang around the square, all of us, the whole town, until late in the night. I remember the fireworks. It is a different Austria, one that you will not recognize and one that I daresay you cannot spy through the cell walls that most likely surround you.
Sometimes I see you in the square where the men play cards. I know you liked to tease the older ones who came there, and they would joke that you were the baby of their group. You took me once; do you remember? And you bought me ice cream, and I sat and watched you play cards, and when I got bored, I would run after the pigeons in the square.
The streets here are still beautiful, but I wish you were with me. It is so lonely sometimes.
I pray daily that you are being treated well, wherever you may be.
Love,
Monique
CHAPTER 21
ROSALIND
There is a knot in Rosalind’s stomach. She saw the look that Georg gave Erich. He knows, she thinks. He remembers things, perhaps everything. Part of her wants Stefano gone so that he does not learn the truth, but part of her, the dark part, the part she struggles to recognize, now wants Georg gone also.
He has been getting worse lately. Several weeks earlier he picked up chairs and threw them across the room. Now this, an attempt on her life.
“So, you saw him at least. Georg. How did he look?” she says.
“Placid. The hut must be a special place.”
She closes her eyes to block out an image.
“Yes,” she says. “We have not always had a great marriage.” She is thinking, remembering Berlin. It was the best time they had, but even then it wasn’t great. She can’t tell Stefano this. How to explain a relationship like that? One built on friendship and then . . . what?
“Monique used to say that love isn’t immoral in any form,” she says aloud, and then wonders why she said it. Monique used to say such things, and Rosalind would scoff. Though now she is wondering if Monique had it right, whether Rosalind could throw away her prejudice or, better still, drown it in the river. She feels the need to talk to Stefano, to tell him things.
“We met here. We grew up together. After Georg joined the army, we used to meet in Berlin and later married there. I don’t believe that he loved me as much as I loved him. I always thought he was too good for me.” She stops herself. Stefano is watching, leaving spaces for her to fill in. He makes it easy to talk and does not appear to judge.
“He was a good fighter. He won medals for bravery. He faced battle head-on. The more he left to fight, the braver he got.” She pauses. “But it was almost suicidal in a way. He would want to be at the front of every battle. I heard stories that he always put himself in the firing line. That was Georg. He thought he was invincible.”
“Of course, you miss him very much, yes? The way he was?”
She contemplates the words, swallows hard. In that moment, she is not sure that she does.
“He was a good man in a bad situation,” he continues.
Something about this comment bothers her, some deeper thought that is masked by her aching head and the trauma that has just occurred.
“I should let you rest,” he says. “You look tired. You’ve been through a lot.”
He touches her hand, and she instinctively draws it away. She is not used to intimacy, to someone being so close, to someone wanting to know so much about her.
“Please excuse me. I will take something for my headache.”
In her bedroom at the far side of the house, she reaches for her medical bag on the table beside the window. Through the sheer curtains she can see the top bedroom window of the house next door, where Monique and Erich once stayed. The sight of it sends a cold shiver up her spine. If only she could forget. If only she could start over again.
She stares inside the bag at the bottle that Erich had brought her in the event that circumstances are irreversible. She understood the message and the strength of the chemical. She had outwardly dismissed the notion, but she had kept it just the same.
Deep down she knows why. In extraordinary situations, she is capable of anything. She has been sacrificing for love that is not returned. And perhaps Erich’s way is kinder.
August 1942
Rosalind had received a letter from Monique that said she and Erich were spending a week at the river later that month. As promised, Erich had orchestrated that Georg could take the same week, which he’d already been made aware of. Rosalind applied for time off, something she rarely asked for, though she was annoyed that it was Monique who had contacted her and not Georg, annoyed that Georg had not reached out to her first.
Georg advised her later by telegram to say that he would meet Rosalind directly there. They had arranged that Georg and Rosalind would stay in her Oma’s house, and Monique and Erich in the other. Meanwhile the cousins’ grandmother took the opportunity to visit her son in Berlin, to give the two couples some “marital privacy.”