Because her father is a doctor, Ania’s small family is able to live relatively well on a currency of traded goods—eggs and potatoes in exchange for stitches, help stacking wood or cleaning gutters for treating a sick child. And there are always sick children because the local coal factory workers live in such poor conditions. Unlike the many locals relying on cash wages in a period of food shortages and inflation, the Fortzmanns are at least warm and well fed.
Frau Fortzmann has not left her bedroom since Ania’s younger brother died. Back pain. Chest pain. Her delicate constitution. She does not venture beyond the confines of her sitting room. My sweet Ania, she says when Ania brings the breakfast tray Frau Richter prepares each morning. She runs her hand through Ania’s hair and her eyes fill with tears. Ania can barely stand to look at her. Her breath smells of the chamomile tea she drinks, and underneath of something sour—the essence of inaction. Tell me what is happening, she asks. And Ania is nothing if not dutiful: Frau Richter has a new cozy for the kettle, knitted by her sister. Father read from Corinthians last night. In school we studied fractions. Some men in Munich tried to kill the president. All news is equal. She has no idea what to tell her mother, no idea what she might be most interested to hear. Frau Fortzmann listens without really listening. She pats Ania’s hand if she stands nearby, or smoothes the soft skin with her thumb. For Ania, the act of recounting feels like vomiting. When she finishes, she immediately flees to the relative warmth of the kitchen and to more of Frau Richter’s salacious talk of politics.
On this day, when the French troops roll in to occupy the Ruhr, Ania has already visited her mother and completed her daily quota of embroidery. Frau Richter has gone out on “errands” and can certainly be found among the crowds gathered to watch the advancing troops. Herr Doktor Fortzmann is reading in his office, frowning over the latest news of German indignities. Only Ania is at loose ends, trapped in her room with the oppressively dark armoire, the stark painting of her paternal grandmother, and the tightly made bed she is not supposed to sit on. Out there in the world, not two blocks away, a conquering army is taking over her city, and here she is, locked in a chamber of relics.
Standing at the window and picking at the pills on her stockings, she has an idea. The most radically transgressive idea she has ever had in her life. She will climb out the window, across the roof of the kitchen, down the mirabelle tree, and into the garden. If someone catches her, she will certainly receive the beating that lurks behind all her father’s commands, implicit in the switch that peeks out from behind his umbrella stand and his perpetual air of restrained violence. She would rather die than catch this beating. So she will make sure she is not caught.
Ania crab-crawls along the window ledge to the flat roof, a move so nimble she is surprised at her own ability. At the edge, she shimmies down the rough tree trunk and drops to the ground. From there, she dashes along the bushes at the far side of the garden and into the alley. And with a heaving chest, she looks around. She has done it. She has escaped. It is the first time she has ever disobeyed her father; the feeling is thrilling and sickening.
Ania draws closer to Uhland Strasse and hears the booming rumble of tanks receding—she has missed it!—and the hard clip-clop of horses’ hooves. But rounding the corner, she comes upon everyone: here are the citizens of Dortmund, lined up on both sides of the street, watching restively.
The French ride through the middle of the street on proud, high-stepping horses, bayonets poised on their shoulders like oversize needles. Underneath their helmets, though, they are disappointingly ordinary looking. There are no nine-foot Africans. No fire breathers or weasel-faced French overlords. But the soldiers’ disregard for the crowd is an open insult. The air is thick with anger and hostility.
Ania edges her way forward. She reaches the front line in time to witness a humiliating spectacle. One of the foot soldiers marching at the front of the battalion breaks formation to lunge toward a man in the crowd who has forgotten to remove his hat. The soldier knocks it to the ground.
The man, who is young, stocky, and strong looking—the kind of boy Frau Richter would call ein richtige deutsche Bursche, a real German lad—attempts to fight back, striking at the soldier, but the people around him grab his arms. It sends a stir through the crowd, a collective intake of breath. Once the soldier has moved on, the people release the young man’s arms, and Ania watches him scurry forward to retrieve his hat, now rolling dangerously close to a set of stamping hooves. As he darts before the great beast, he nods at the mounted soldier—a small, demeaning act of self-preservation.
It is nothing in the grand scheme of things (they have just been through a war, after all), but at the time, Ania is shocked. The rough way the soldier swatted the hat from the man’s head—it was as if he were an unruly child, or worse, an animal. It alters her understanding of what it means to be a German. This is a personal manifestation of defeat. This is what it means to be a member of a defeated nation.
Ania’s next transgression is more complicated.
The chancellor of Germany has encouraged citizens in the Ruhr to engage in acts of passive resistance against the occupiers. The girls’ troops at the Munich Gymnastics Installation carry signs proclaiming we don’t want to be your serfs. Workers at the steel and iron plants are on strike. In the south, there are violent clashes between Communists and right-wing Freikorps militias. Maybe Ania is influenced by all this protest. Or maybe she has simply reached the age of rebellion.
On the first Sunday of Lent, Ania is supposed to accompany her father to visit her grandmother and aunt. It is a tradition, like most in the Fortzmann household, that Ania hates. Aunt Gudrun believes it is her singular responsibility to mold Ania into a proper young woman. Since her mother has decided to become a useless invalid, Gudrun teaches Ania to wash and scrub and “learn household responsibilities” and to sit absolutely straight and silent while the adults eat. So Ania is forced to perch on her aunt’s horsehair sofa and nibble digestive biscuits while the adults eat slices of cream-topped gooseberry tart. The oppressive ticktock of the clock, the sour air of the room, and the dry, shaggy bits of skin that hang from Grossmutter’s face all make Ania think, in an oppressive, suffocating way, of death.