And the accuracy of Max's comment about her isolation: how can he know this? Anna looks across the table at his narrow face. Although quiet by nature and an object of some envy because of the attention her looks drew from boys, Anna did have girlfriends for a time, school chums with whom she linked arms at recess, acquaintances whose classroom gossip she shared. But the rise of the Reich, coinciding with her mother's death, soon put an end to this. The activities of the Bund deutscher Mädel, which Anna joined with all the other girls, seemed insipid and made her vaguely uncomfortable; during patriotic bonfires in the Ettersberg forest or swimming parties with the boys of the Hitlerjugend, Anna would watch the happy singing faces and think of what awaited her at home: the cooking and cleaning, her mother's dark and empty bed. She began participating less and less, citing housework and her father's needs as the reason, and eventually her friends stopped coming up the drive to the house, their invitations too dwindling into a puzzled silence.
And so Anna is left with only her father, whose demands, once offered as an excuse, are certainly real enough. She thinks of Gerhard performing his morning toilette, wandering about the house in his dressing gown, clearing his throat into handkerchiefs that he scatters for her to collect and launder. She must trim his silvering beard daily, his hair fortnightly. His sheets, like his shirts, must be starched and ironed. She must prepare his favorite meals with no concern for her own tastes, the consumption of which Anna endures in a fearful stillness punctuated only by the snapping of Gerhard's newspaper, Der Stürmer, and explosive diatribes about the evils of Jews. How Anna wishes he had died instead!
Max pushes his rook across the board.
Check, he says, and looks up.
Oh, Anna. I'm sorry.
Anna shakes her head.
I didn't mean to upset you, Max says.
You haven't, Anna reassures him, finally finding her voice. I'm just startled by how well you put it. It's like being in a sort of club, isn't it? A bereavement club. You don't choose to join it; it's thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren't in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.
Max tilts his chair back and considers Anna for a long moment, scrubbing his hand over his face and neck.
Yes, he says. Yes, it is much like that.
Then his chair legs hit the floor and he stands.
Speaking of your father, he says, smiling, would you like to see how his dog is doing?
Anna gazes sadly at him, disappointed by this return to more superficial conversation. But as Max beckons to her, she obediently gets up and follows him.
After turning down the heat under the teakettle, Max takes Anna's elbow and leads her to a door at the rear of the house, which Anna expects to open into a garden. Instead, she finds herself in a dark shed smelling mustily of straw and animal. She hears a thick, sleepy bark, and when Max lights a kerosene lantern, Anna sees that he has constructed a makeshift kennel here. Including Spaetzle, there are five dogs in separate cages, and Anna catches the green glitter of a cat's eyes from the corner, where it presides over a heap of kittens. There is even a canary in a cage, its head tucked under its wing.
Anna walks over to Spaetzle.
Hello, boy, she says.
The dachshund snarls at her. Anna snatches her hand from the wire mesh.
I see his disposition hasn't improved any, she observes.
Perhaps it might, says Max from behind her, if you'd stop stuffing him with chocolate.
Anna flushes. I told you, that's my father's doing-
Ah, yes, of course, says Max. So you've said.
Anna turns to see him smiling knowingly at her. Face burning, she stoops to peer at a terrier.
So you are something of a veterinarian after all, she comments.
Max doesn't answer immediately, and when Anna is certain her color has receded she swings around again to look at him inquiringly. He is standing with his hands in his pockets, regarding the animals with an odd expression, both tender and grim.
I'm more a zookeeper, he says. And not by choice. Not that I don't love animals; I do, obviously. But these have been abandoned to my care. Left behind.
Left…?
By my friends, by patients who've emigrated, to Israel, the Americas, whoever will have them. People I've known my entire life-gone, pfft! Just like that.
Max snaps his fingers, and the canary lifts its head to blink at him with indignant surprise.
Anna digs a toe into the straw.
Circumstances are truly that bad for-for your people?
Worse than you can imagine. And they are going to get worse still. The things I have heard, have seen…
When he doesn't finish the thought, Anna asks, And you? Why don't you go as well?
She looks down and holds her breath, praying that he won't answer in the affirmative. But Max gives only a short, bitter laugh.
What? And leave all this? he says.
Anna glances up. He is watching her, his gaze speculative.
Loneliness is corrosive, he says.
Anna's eyes film with tears.
Yes, she says. I know.
She thinks that she might be able, in this moment, to go to him and put her arms around him, rest her head on his chest; she wants nothing more than to be able to stay here with Max forever, in this simple dark place smelling of animal warmth and dung. But of course this is impossible, and the thought only serves to remind her of how late it is.
God in heaven, it's hours past curfew, I have to go, Anna says, darting past Max into the house.
In the kitchen, while Anna fastens her hat, Max holds her coat out like a matador, flapping it at her; then he helps her into it. His hands linger on Anna's shoulders, however, while she fastens her buttons, and when she is done he spins her around to face him.
Where does your father think you are? he asks. When you come here?
Oh, it doesn't matter to him, as long as his dinner is served on time, Anna murmurs. He thinks I'm at a meeting of the BdM, I suppose. Sewing armbands and singing praise to the Vaterland and learning how to catch a good German husband.
And isn't that what you want, Anna? Max asks. Aren't you a good German girl?
Before Anna can reply, he kisses her, much more violently than she would have expected from this gentle man. He drives her back against the wall and pins her there with a hand pressed to her breastbone through the layers of cloth, making a slight whimpering noise like one of his adopted dogs might in sleep. Anna clings to him, raising a tentative hand to his hair.
Then, as abruptly as he initiated the embrace, Max breaks away and bends to retrieve Anna's hat from the floor. He smiles sheepishly up at her and quirks his brows over the rims of his spectacles. His face has gone bright red.
We can't do this, he says. A lovely creature like you should be toying heartlessly with fellows her own age, not wasting her time with an old bachelor like me.
But you're only thirty-seven, Anna says.
Max hands her the hat, one of its flowers crumpled on its silk stem. Then he lowers his glasses and gives Anna a serious look.
That's enough, young lady, he tells her. You know that's not the real reason why this is impossible. For your own good, you really must not come back.
Over Anna's protests, he pushes her gently through the door and shuts it behind her.
Anna stands on the top step, her hand between her breasts where Max's was not a minute ago. She is too nonplussed by the speed of the encounter and what he has said afterward to rejoice over it. She stares into the garden while she waits for her pulse to resume its normal rhythm, watching fat flakes of snow filter so languidly through the air that they appear suspended.
Naturally, Max is quite right. These evenings should come to an end before either of them get further involved, though the real obstacle-as Max has implied-is not that he is twice her age. The problem, not addressed head-on until tonight, is that Jews are a race apart. And even if Max is not observant, the new laws forbid more than Aryans visiting Jewish physicians: sexual congress between Jews and pure-blooded Deustche is now a crime. Rassenschande, the Nazis call it. Race defilement. It is like the poem Max read to Anna last week-how do the lines run? Something about a dark plain on which armies clash by night. She and Max are pawns on opposing squares, on a board whose edges stretch into infinite darkness, manipulated by giant unseen hands.