“The end is near, the end is near,” the landlady told Sonya. “The end is near,” sighed the parents of the damaged daughter. “Hitler’s last gasp,” Mrs. Levinger declared. Sonya thought that the Führer seemed to have a lot of wind left in his lungs, but all she said was that the demented mother and her boys must be gotten out of London. “Maybe that house in Hull.” For half an hour they discussed the pros and cons of the children being incarcerated in a virtual bedlam, each woman supplying the other’s arguments like the friends they had become. They resolved on a more farm-like retreat, and Sonya made the arrangements.
Work continued, rebuilding continued; even concerts.
One day at half past noon Sonya was eating an apple on a bench in Hyde Park when she heard the familiar hum. She continued to chew. She saw the flying bomb, there was just one, it was only a bomb, they were all only bombs. Some, she’d been told, failed to explode. This one exploded, south of the park. She was still chewing.
Smoke rose, dark gray and thick, and the sounds she heard now were sirens and further explosions and buildings crashing and shrieks, and footsteps, her own among them, for she was running across the park, her apple still in her hand, toward the bomb, because the place of the bomb was the place of that church, wasn’t it? And they were rehearsing this noontime, weren’t they? She ran across the King’s Road; and now she was part of a mob, some rushing along with her, some against her. Sides of houses had vanished. Faces were black. She stumbled over a woman, stopped; but the woman was dead. She ran on. An arm poked out of a heap of stones. She stopped again and this time helped a fireman dig at the stones and extricate a woman, still alive thank God, and a baby protected by the woman’s other arm, the baby too was alive thank God thank God. The smoke made it hard to breathe. Buildings kept falling. There was the smell of scorched flesh. Sonya reached the street of the church. The church was blasted. There was already a cordon; how fast the municipality had worked; no more than ten minutes had passed; these brave people; but she would simply have to get under the rope. Her apple was gone. She stooped. “Miss!” Somebody strong yanked her by her hips. She whirled into the arms of a red-faced man in a helmet and saw, over his shoulder, Eugene, his brow dark, bruised in fact, and Lotte, filthy. They were holding hands. In her free hand Lotte held the instrument case. They had not been in the church, they explained when she reached them. They had lingered at home.
THE BARRAGE CONTINUED for months. Only storms kept the planes away. Sonya prayed for a hurricane. Churchill conceded that London was under attack. The flying bombs did not cease until three weeks before victory.
But earlier still — five weeks before victory — Lotte and Eugene left for Manchester. The director of the new civic orchestra there had heard Lotte playing with the quartet, had offered her a job. There would be pupils for Eugene.
Lotte had been sharing Eugene’s bed since the day the doodle-bug struck the church. But the night before leaving, she scratched on Sonya’s door. She put on the old clothes — the hat, the plaid trousers. She played “Someday I’ll Find You” and “I’ll See You Again.”
In the morning all three walked to the Tube and rode to the station. Even next to Eugene and Lotte, Sonya saw them as if from a distance — two gifted émigrés, ragged, paired. Father and daughter? Step-siblings? Nobody’s business. As soon as they boarded the train they found a window and stared through it, their loved faces stony with love of her. She wondered how long Lotte would flourish under Eugene’s brooding protection, how soon she would turn elsewhere. She was French, wasn’t she, and Frenchwomen were faithless … His mother’s diamond! She lifted her left hand in its disreputable glove and pointed toward the place of a ring with her right index finger.
On the other side of the window Eugene shook his head. Yours, he mouthed.
So Sonya sold the ring. It fetched less than she’d hoped — the stone was flawed. She bought a voluminous raincoat made out of parachute material. She bought new gloves and some dramatic trousers. She stashed the rest of the money.
IV.
“IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME,” Sonya said, once Mrs. Levinger had left them alone.
“Oh, I wanted to visit,” Roland said. “When I was in Lisbon, in Amsterdam … But each time, something sent me elsewhere.” He shifted in his ill-fitting jacket. He had lost more weight. Mrs. Levinger had hinted that he was some kind of hero.
They left the office and walked into wind and rain. Sonya’s new coat swirled this way and that; it got drenched though it was supposed to be water-repellent; it dragged her backward. Finally she lifted its skirts, so as to be more easily blown to wherever he was taking her.
A pub. They sat down. Sonya knew he would not mention the nature of the work he had done, and he didn’t — not during the first beer, not during the second. So: “Where now?” she asked, resting her worn-out hands on the worn-out table.
He told her about the Displaced Persons camps. He was going to the one at Oberammergau. “I hope you will join us. Your persistence, your intelligence, your accommodating nature …” She waved away his words with her right hand and he caught it midair. “I will stop this talk, though it is not flattery. I invite you to Oberammergau.”
“I speak no German.”
“But you are musical,” he reminded her. He caught her other hand, though it couldn’t be said to be in flight, was just lying there on the table. “Sonya Sofrankovitch. Will you come?”
She was silent for several moments. His odd smile — would she ever get used to it, to him? — told her how much he wanted to hear yes.
“Yes,” she said.
PURIM NIGHT
CAMP GRUENWASSER WAS PREPARING for Purim, that merry celebration when you must drink until you cannot distinguish the king from the villain, the queen from the village tart.
“Purim?” Ludwig inquired.
He was twelve — pale and thin like all the others. But Ludwig had been pale and thin Before, during his pampered early boyhood in Hamburg. While hiding out with his uncle he had failed to become ruddy and fat.
“Purim is a holiday,” Sonya said. She was fifty-six, also pale and thin by nature. She had spent the war in London; now that it was over she was codirector of this camp for Displaced Persons. What a euphemism: fugitives from cruelty, they were; homeless, they were; despised. “Purim celebrates the release of the Jewish people. From a wicked man.”
“Release. Released by the Allied forces?”
“No, no. This was in Shu, Shu, Shushan, long ago …” She said long ago in English. The rest of the conversation — all their conversations in the makeshift, crowded office where Ludwig often spent the afternoon — was conducted in German. Ludwig’s was the pedantic German of a precocious child, Sonya’s the execrable German of an American with no talent for languages. Her Yiddish was improving at Camp Gruenwasser, though. Yiddish was the camp’s lingua franca, cigarettes its stable currency.
“Shu, Shu, Shushan,” Ludwig repeated. “A place of four syllables?”
Sonya briefly closed her eyes. “I was repeating an old song, a line from an old song.” She opened them again and met his reddish-brown gaze. “Haman was the name of the wicked man. The heroine was a queen, Esther. Speaking of queens …”
“We were not.”
“We were not what?”
“We were not speaking of queens.”