By the next time Ania runs away, Otto Smeltz has faded to no more than a whisper in her childhood memories. This time she decides to leave home for a convent, the Sisters of the Holy Sacrament. She is now twenty-three, a young woman, but under her father’s roof she is still a girl. She has finished high school with high marks and honors but is not bound for university. Herr Doktor Fortzmann does not believe in higher education for girls. He believes it is Ania’s duty to keep house for him now that her mother has died. One day she will marry and have babies, so what is the point of a higher degree?
Ania, on the other hand, is not interested in housekeeping or marriage or, for that matter, babies. She is an athletic girl with a quick, literal mind, accustomed to spending most of her time alone. In a crowd of girls, nothing about her stands out. She is of average height, has average blondish hair, and ordinary features. Her eyes are maybe a little wide set, her lips a little thin, her legs gangly. She doesn’t care. Her body is strong and healthy and in her gymnastics troop she runs faster and hurls herself higher than any of the other girls. Her steadiness of character and good citizenship make her well liked. She is always invited to the young people’s dances at the Guild Hall. But she accepts the invitations only to be polite. What is the point of romance? It seems like a distraction from the important things in life.
Which are, in order: the wider world (not Germany, but the whole planet, full of all the odd varieties of human life—she has devoured every book in Herr Doktor Fortzmann’s collection on foreign civilizations and anthropological research), science, and physical fitness (or her membership in the local Girls’ Sport Training Group, to be exact).
So Ania leaves home for the convent not because she wants to be a nun, but because she wants to go to Africa. The convent has a mission there, in the former Hapsburg colony of Namibia. She imagines herself teaching chubby native children how to read and boil their vegetables, and falling asleep under mosquito netting listening to monkeys’ cries. She hungers for an opportunity to see the wider world. And also to get out of Dortmund.
Ania does not ask her father what he thinks of her idea. She knows what his answer will be. For all his criticism of the current state of government, the Nazis and the Communists alike, Herr Doktor Fortzmann has never set foot outside Germany. It is his home, his Heimat, and, in his opinion, the only truly civilized nation on earth.
Since his wife’s death her father has become even more remote. At dinner they eat in silence, listening to the clink of their own cutlery. It makes her miss the days when he lectured her about the sins of the Communists, the glories of the kaiser, and his favorite German heroes—Hermann, Karl der Grosse, and General Bismarck. Even his patients are deserting him. The Nazis have opened a new hospital on the other side of town that provides free care for the factory’s workers. Herr Doktor Fortzmann locks himself in his study for whole afternoons, reading and scowling over the newspapers.
Meanwhile, the world beyond Ania’s stifled childhood home is blossoming. There is excitement in the air; it is a new day for Germany. The young Hitler—so handsome, so vibrant, and so unlike the tired old intellectuals who, for the past fifteen years, have muddled the nation through riots, unemployment, and political strife—has been named chancellor. The papers are full of his bold plans and ideas. He has the vision and energy to make Germany great. He has rounded up the Communists who burned down the Reichstag and averted the revolution so many Germans have feared for years. Even Herr Doktor Fortzmann gives him credit for this. And Frau Richter is an ardent supporter. Thank God for Herr Hitler, she says. He will save us from the Bolsheviks.
Under him, Germany is to be one nation rather than a collection of rivalrous factions sniping at one another in the face of defeat. Together, they will create the finest, strongest, and greatest civilization on earth! And Hitler says it is the young people who will accomplish this.
It would be death to stay locked up in the Fortzmann house.
On the day Ania leaves, Rainer Brandt waits for her on the corner. He is, what? Her friend? Her beau? Her unlikely confidant? There is no label that quite covers their relationship. She has known him since they were children. They have attended the same school and church. They have waited in the same lines for bread and gone to the same funerals and played at the same carnival games. His father, a bricklayer at the hospital, is a patient of Doktor Fortzmann’s. As children she and Rainer played backgammon in her father’s waiting room during old Herr Brandt’s weekly appointments.
“Last chance,” Rainer says, pulling himself off the low wall he has been sitting on. “Instead of joining those religious zealots, you can run away with me.”
“And go where?” Ania asks, trying to keep her voice light, though actually she feels as though she might collapse. She has said good-bye to no one—not her father, who would forbid her from leaving, or Frau Richter, who would cry and wring her hands. She is no longer a child, but she is still, effectively, running away.
Rainer takes her suitcase from her hands. “Why go to Africa when there are so many Germans who could use your help? Seriously.”
They have debated this often. Rainer is a recent convert to the Nazi Party. He plans to be on the front lines of Hitler’s wonderful new empire. He has already signed up to become a leader of a Landjahr Lager, or camp—part of a national service program in which young people spend a year on the land, developing the necessary skills they will need if Germany is to return, under Hitler, to a great agrarian society. Soon it will be compulsory for all the country’s youths. Rainer will be poised to rise in the program’s ranks.
Ania sees the beauty in his dream, but all the same, she would like to go abroad. She would like to travel farther than the German countryside. Africa beckons with its promise of lush jungles and primitive tribes.
“Just think of what you will miss here,” Rainer continues. “The beginning of a whole new Germany!”
“Oh, Rainer.” Ania sighs, unable to think of anything but her father sleeping like an old man on his narrow bed. She peeked in through his door on her way out and was surprised by how rumpled he looked, mouth open, snoring—his shirt loosened at the collar, his stockinged feet on the bedspread. “I’ve already chosen my path.”
Rainer lifts his eyebrows. He has always been a quiet boy, cowed by his family’s poverty, his father’s poor health, and his mother’s rough Swabian German. But now that he is a Nazi, he glows with an appealing, newfound confidence. Girls have begun to take note. He is not handsome—his face is too angular and long, and there is something truculent about his chin—but he is compellingly intense. And he has eyes for no one but Ania, his childhood friend.
“I give you three weeks in the convent,” he says, kicking a stone down the street. “You’ll come around.”