Anna sighs, wishing there were a neighbor she could trust to watch Trudie without asking questions.
Come now, she says, nudging the spoon against her daughter's lips. Be a good girl.
Trudie screws her mouth shut.
Mama drink it, she suggests craftily.
Despite her impatience, Anna has to laugh: Trudie is definitely Gerhard's grandchild. Anna pretends to sip from the bottle.
Mmmmm, she says, miming ecstasy with a roll of the eyes. Delicious. Now your turn.
Mollified, Trudie accepts the medicine. Anna doesn't dare give the child more than two teaspoons, but this should be enough to put Trudie out for a few hours. The elixir has a codeine base.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Anna waits, stroking the child's slippery hair, until she is sure Trudie is fast asleep. Then Anna layers a sweater over her dress, wraps a dark shawl around her head, bundles herself into her coat, and leaves the bakery through the back door. She crosses the field to the Ettersberg.
The woods are not welcoming this time of year. As the birds have fled in search of kinder climes and the deer and rabbits have become stew, the only sound Anna hears is the ice crunching like thin glass beneath her boots. It begins to snow. Anna catches a few flakes and rubs her fingertips beneath her nostrils to test whether it is precipitation or ash from the crematorium, but she is not really conscious of doing so. She creeps alongside the road, closer to it than is advisable, but she is straining for any sign that something bad has happened to the delivery van: the black swerve of tires marks on the tar, for instance, or broken branches that would indicate the vehicle's plunge into a gully.
This is foolishness, really. The baker has handled deliveries in far worse weather than this. And Anna is going the wrong way now, following the road as it branches toward the quarry, which Mathilde would not take unless she were making a Special Delivery, which in turn she would never attempt in daylight. Yet Anna's unease has reached such a pitch that she is shocked but not surprised when her suspicions of disaster are confirmed by the sight of the van canted off the roadside, not a quarter kilometer from the quarry. A hot filament, like that in an electric bulb, glows for a moment in Anna's stomach, then is extinguished. That is all.
She wends through the underbrush, branches snapping back across her face, until she is almost to the pavement. Then she sees the foot lying on it, shod in a sturdy black boot laced to the ankle. Anna has often poked fun at these boots, teasing Mathilde that they are for old ladies. A meter to the right and the rest of the baker comes into view. She is splayed half-on, half-off the road like a big pallid doll, her eyes staring at the sky. There is a neat hole in her forehead, its edges charred black with gunpowder, and all around her the blood has turned the snow into a slushy red soup.
No, Anna whispers. No.
She takes another step toward the baker, though some vestigial instinct warns her that this is unwise. The blood is still spreading from the body, and the snow falling into Mathilde's eyes melts and trickles down her cheeks. The execution is recent, then, and whoever has done it is most likely still in the vicinity. Yet Anna doesn't conceal herself until she sees the SS noncom stumble around the side of the van. Then, trapped on her stomach in the undergrowth, she has no choice but to watch him. He is young, and obviously a newcomer to the business of killing, for his greatcoat is spattered with vomit, his expression both horrified and sheepish. But he recovers quickly: when he has finished swabbing his mouth on his sleeve, he walks a slow circle around Mathilde, squatting to peer curiously into her face. He withdraws the truncheon from his belt and uses it to push up the baker's coat and skirt. He prods one of her legs. He lifts the limb and lets it fall. The boot thumps on the paving.
Forgetting herself in her outrage-is it not enough that he has murdered the baker, he has to play with her too?-Anna reacts before she thinks.
Stop that! she says.
The noncom's head jerks up. He fumbles his pistol from its holster. His hands are shaking so hard that any shot he fires will go high and wild.
Who's there? he yells, his voice cracking. Show yourself!
He starts toward the thicket in which Anna lies, her hand belatedly clamped over her mouth.
Then he whips around. From the direction of the camp comes the noise of an approaching convoy: the growl of engines, the waspish buzz of motorbikes. Replacing his pistol, the noncom adjusts his cap and checks his reflection in the van's wing mirror. Thus satisfied, he stands at attention over the corpse, thrusting his chest out, a hunter posing with his kill.
Anna uses the opportunity to begin wriggling backward, still on her belly, pushing herself along with her hands. Thirty meters into the forest, she jumps up, turns, and runs, heedless of noise. Nor does she make any effort to cover her tracks, though the snow sifting through the pines may soon hide them. It doesn't matter. The SS are thorough. They will know. They will investigate. A long black car will pull up in front of the bakery and officers will emerge and pound on the door. By this evening, Anna will be in a basement cell at Gestapo headquarters. Or, more likely, she and Trudie will have been shot where they stand.
She crashes through the undergrowth, her breath tearing in her lungs, her eyes stinging with tears not of grief but of rage. Were Mathilde alive, Anna would shake her until the baker's teeth rattle. How dare Mathilde do this? How could she have been so selfish? There are better ways to commit suicide than making a Special Delivery in broad daylight; she could have done it without endangering anyone else. She has left Anna with nothing, not even information as to how to contact other members of the Resistance. There is nowhere for Anna and Trudie to go where the SS will not find them. Anna has no choice but to return to the bakery and change her clothes and give the appearance that everything is normal. She will feed her daughter, who should at least die on a full stomach, and she will keep the child close to her, and she will try not to think of her dead friend. And through all of this she will wait. She will wait until they come for her.
Trudy, December 1996
18
TRUDY IS WAITING FOR THE GERMANS TO COME TO HER. While the rest of Minneapolis throngs the malls and swarms the supermarkets in a pre-Christmas frenzy, while Trudy's colleagues gripe about balancing holiday obligations with grading their final exams, Trudy has been huddled in conference with Ruth, trying to get her German Project off the ground. It is true that the Director of Holocaust Studies has to be prodded out of initial reluctance-stemming more, Trudy suspects, from Ruth's having to share her hard-earned funding than her objections about giving the perpetrators of the Nazi regime as much airtime as its Jewish victims. But Trudy persists, coaxing and wheedling. Put the History Department's needs above your own, she pleads, and finally she sees Ruth kindle.
I suppose you're right, Ruth says thoughtfully, one dreary December afternoon when, exhausted from wrangling, the pair are picking at dispirited sandwiches in the university cafeteria. There never has been a really extensive study of the reactions of German civilians-not live sources recorded on tape…
Her sputtering enthusiasm sparks, then catches fire; she begins to wave her small freckled hands about, scattering crumbs. Forget Yale; this double-headed Project would put us on the international map! All right, Trudy, you've got it. I'll give you access to my videographers and equipment and some of the money-with the proviso that you apply for more when we need it. Why should I have to do all the work? Deal?
Deal, says Trudy, and pats her lips with a napkin to hide a smile of victorious relief.
But now, as she sits in her office just before Christmas, praying for her prospective subjects to call, Trudy thinks that her triumph may have been a bit premature. She has done all she can to lure the Germans from their foxholes. She has gone to their restaurants, the Black Forest Inn on Nicollet Avenue and the Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit in North Minneapolis, where pilsner is drunk from life-size glass boots and men in lederhosen wander among the tables, forcing from wheezing accordions nostalgic folk tunes that get stuck in Trudy's head for days. Ich mein Harz in Heidelburg veloren… She has ventured to the local chapter of the German-American Society, where a moth-eaten stag's head presides over the door and polka parties are listed on the bulletin board, where beer-bellied old fellows give her glances of cursory interest before returning to their cards. She has visited Die Bäckerei on Lyndale, where she waited warily for a déjà vu that never came: the lights and appliances too modern, the display case crowded with cupcakes and reindeer-shaped cookies instead of the Lebkuchen and Stollen Trudy had anticipated. And in each of these places, Trudy has posted flyers that say this: