“Gretchen’s home,” Ingrid observed, gazing out the expansive window behind our sitting room couch. “I thought they were going to be on vacation for three weeks. Pity she missed the parade.”
All my gloom concerning Ferdinand vanished; I couldn’t wait to tell Gretchen everything that had happened between me and the Führer.
In my hurry to leave the room, I almost collided with our cook Marta, who was coming in, laden with a tray of Topfenstrudel, Franzbrötchen, and tea.
“Fräulein Hildi, your mother wanted me to tell you that Herr Tritschler has arrived,” she related, as I relieved her of the platter. “And she doesn’t want any more daydreaming during your lessons.”
“But Marta, Gretchen’s back,” I argued, setting the tray down on the nearest table with a swiftness that made the china rattle. “I’ll tell Mami…”
I left before she could stop me.
Voices emanated from the parlour door as I entered the hall. Papi was arguing, and Mami replying, her tone strident and worried.
“I never liked Jews to begin with,” she said. “The Führer is right. They are an inferior race.”
Papi answered her in a tone so low that I couldn’t hear.
“I’ve told you she’s different,” Mami snapped. “And they weren’t regular Jews.”
“It isn’t just the regular Jew who is being forced out of his home and deported to heaven-knows-where,” Papi rejoined. “It’s also the banker, the business owner, even the film star. And I don’t trust these ‘re-location centres’ the Nazis talk about. Nothing this man does can be good-”
“Hush!” Mami’s voice was frightened. “I don’t trust those servants. Remember what happened to the Falkunsters when Herr Falkunster spoke out against Hitler? They were told on by their valet.”
“I don’t care!” Papi retorted. But he lowered his voice.
“This can’t be allowed to go on,” he appended softly. “Imagine how you would feel if they found out-”
Again, Mami silenced him.
“They won’t find out,” she said firmly.
I heard a throat being cleared at my back. I turned.
Herr Tritschler stood in the doorway of the study, surveying me with disapprobation. He was a thin man with the air of a bored codfish, and I detested him.
“Eavesdropping is a serious fault,” he reproached. His manner of speaking always made me instinctively feel like clearing my own throat.
“This is my own house and they are my own parents,” I informed him. “And I was about to request that they postpone my lessons. Gretchen’s back, and I need to see her.”
“Fräulein Reuss can wait,” Herr Tritschler said.
Noting the look on his face, I saw that she would have to.
“You have been neglecting your studies, Fräulein Merveldt,” Herr Tritschler rebuked as I seated myself at the walnut table in the centre of the study, following a glimpse of yesterday’s exercises.
“Werner was too busy to explain the geometry problems. And that’s ‘von’ Merveldt,” I corrected.
He scrutinised me with a mackerel eye, but then decided to overlook my disrespectfulness on this occasion.
Why can’t he call me ‘Fräulein Hildi’ like the servants do? I wondered as I wearily opened the heavy volume of Der Deutsch Geschichte.
“I shall have to speak to Count Merveldt about it,” Herr Tritschler went on. He was never one to say “your father”.
“I don’t really care much for schoolwork,” I stated.
“That is evident.”
“And lately, I’ve had more important things to think about. Like the Führer’s parade, for instance.”
I said it to annoy him. I knew how upset he was that he had been obliged to attend a conference that morning and thus miss Hitler’s visit.
Herr Tritschler was a glaring codfish.
“And guess what happened,” I continued, proceeding to give him a detailed account of my meeting with the Führer.
“And he called me ‘a model Aryan girl’,” I finished in triumph.
“A model Aryan? You?” Herr Tritschler inspected me up and down and shuddered.
But I had wounded him, and he kept quiet after that, relegating his comments to explanations of Charlemagne’s character, the Brandenburg Gate, and “Why the Jews are a threat to Germany’s progress”.
The bright morning had turned to an afternoon of clouds and rain, and I stared gloomily out of my bedroom window at the iridescent globules falling from the eves. Lessons were finally over, but Mami said it looked as if a storm was in the offing, and that I would have to wait until it was over to visit Gretchen.
I lay on my bed and pondered the conversation I had heard in the hall, the latest in a scattered line of clandestine consultations. Who was different? What might the Nazis find out?
Then, I again remembered that Ferdinand was mad at me. I knew that he was perfectly right, that he wouldn’t have obeyed the summons of Hitler. I had; I wasn’t brave like he was. But did that really put me in with Nazism? I was still no fonder of Hitler, or his beliefs, or his soldiers. Except, maybe, the captain on his bay stallion. Who was he? I wondered. Papi had said he had seen him before. I remembered the way he had looked at me, the air of knowing in his dark eyes. I still couldn’t make out just what the look had meant, and so my thoughts turned once more to Ferdinand. He seemed to think I had betrayed him.
I sighed.
Out the window, the sodden flags and garlands draping the Freudenbergs’ veranda dripped, blood-red.
An official Mercedes glided up the street to Ferdinand’s house, its tyres streaming against the wet asphalt. Two uniformed men emerged as the automobile stalled, squirting water, and walked up to the front door. Ferdinand’s father opened it.
I idly watched them talk. The two officers probably wanted to take out a loan. Soldiers always went to Herr Freudenberg to do business, since it was widely known he gave discounts to the army. It was part of that loyalty to his country – and not Hitler – which Ferdinand had inherited.
Maybe I should go over and tell Ferdinand I was sorry, I thought. Tell him I had given the brooch to Ingrid. As soon as the rain stopped, I would.
I closed my eyelids.
It was Gretchen who roused me.
“Hildi, they’ve taken Ferdinand!” she said desperately, surging into the room. Her face was pale, her lips red where she had bitten them.
I sat up with a start, and speedily wished I hadn’t. My vision was turning grainy, and Gretchen’s face sported dark blotches. I sank back down amongst the pillows, waiting for my eyes to sort themselves out and ordering my brain not to faint.
“Hildi, are you all right?”
Gretchen’s voice came to me in a fantasy, and I paused a second before answering. Twin beats pulsed in my ears, and I felt sick.
“About as all right as you are,” I murmured at last.
“Should I get someone?”
At any other time, I would have chuckled. Gretchen was now more worried about me than about Ferdinand.
I shook my head.
“No,” I responded hazily. “It’s just light-headedness. I sat up too quickly.” In a minute the world in its awful reality would return, and I would be able to reason again.
“Why?” I said, when that minute came.
Gretchen sat down on the bed beside me and sniffed.
“They caught him tearing down a Nazi flag and stomping on it,” she said.
“Oh, no!”
I knew why Ferdinand had done it because I knew exactly how he thought. Since I had seemingly made a public act for Nazism, he felt it was his duty to make a public act against it.
The sick feeling was coming back.
Gretchen sniffed again.
“They’ve taken him to the Polizeistation in town,” she expanded.
“They didn’t issue a fine to him?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know how long they will keep him?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t his father stop them?” I demanded. I was getting angry.
“He tried to,” Gretchen replied. “He offered them money for his ransom. But they said that Ferdinand is now considered an enemy of the state.”
“I think they’re going to kill him,” she appended, beginning to sob.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I retorted. Worry made my voice sharp. “They wouldn’t shoot a boy.”
“Well, what will they do?” Gretchen asked tearfully.
“I don’t know. But not much, if I have anything to do with it.” I had completely recovered from my shock, and fear made me resolute.
“I’ll talk with the Chief of Police tomorrow,” I said. “Don’t worry, Gretchen, I’ll get him out.”
I took her hand in mine and sealed the promise with a clasp.
“But what can you do, Hildi?” Mami queried.
We were at the lunch table, and I had informed the rest of my family of my responsibility for Ferdinand’s predicament and detailed to them my plan. Papi had also learned from Count Freudenberg of his son’s arrest, and he told the others at the table, who were all properly horrified, but disagreed emphatically with my statement of guilt.
“Don’t let her go, Papi, she’ll get us in trouble!” Ingrid whined.
Papi ignored her.
“What good do you think it would do, talking with Chief Stadler?” he questioned me.
I stared down at my plate. My idea was beginning to sound less feasible than I had at first thought it.
“I could at least try,” I mumbled, pushing a piece of Schwarzewälder Rehrücken over the tinted burgundy scrolls with my fork.
“Isn’t there any other way?” Mami prevaricated.
I shook my head.
“We’ll all be put in a relocation centre,” Ingrid worried.
Papi was silent.
A minute passed while I unhappily contemplated the meat, and Grete arrived with dessert. Once she had left, Mami and my sister resumed their dissuasions.
“Think of what it will mean to our name,” Mami concluded victoriously, sure that there she had me.
“I must go,” I insisted one last time, almost crying. Ingrid angrily forecast that she wouldn’t be able to hold her head up around any of her friends ever again “after this”.
“Just wait till Cecilia learns of it!” she threatened.
Papi tapped his cigarette between his fingertips and surveyed the middle horizon. Then,
“Let her go,” Werner ordered, in a tone to end all arguments. I gazed at him in gratitude.
“After all,” he smiled around to the others, “what harm can it do?”
Later on, Ingrid stalked into my room as I was buttoning on my coat. The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast outside, and Mami insisted that it looked chilly.
Werner had decided on a visit to town on his motorcycle to see a friend, and had offered to drop me by the police station, and then pick me up on his way back. I had readily agreed, not much liking the idea of trudging to the place on foot.
“Why do you have to do this?” Ingrid demanded. “Don’t you realise that you’re putting all of us in danger, as well as yourself?”
“If you like the Nazis so much, why are you afraid of them?” I countered evenly. “I don’t see what you have to worry about. Heinz will protect you.”
“Don’t talk to me about Heinz!” my sister snapped. Then she put her hand on my arm.
“You don’t know what will happen if they find out-”
She stopped.
“Find out what?” I prompted.
Ingrid’s face flushed.
“Do you really care more about Ferdinand than your own family?” she interrogated quickly.
“Of course not,” I abjured. “I love you all the same. Ferdinand is like a brother to me. He always has been. I have to get him out. It’s my fault he was arrested.”
“You mustn’t say things like that,” Ingrid objected. Tears had risen in her eyes. “Here,” she told me, “you can have this back.”
The brooch lay shining on her palm.
“I don’t want it,” I said, turning away. “I never want to see it again.”
But she clasped my right hand and placed the brooch upon it, pressing my fingers over the smooth curves of the metal.
“The Führer gave this to a beautiful girl,” she said softly. “And now I am giving it to a brave one.”
Then she kissed me on the cheek and left the room.
I opened my hand to look at the brooch.
The light from my bedside lamp shone on the black of the raven’s feathers, and the woman’s blue eyes seemed to be watching me in mockery.
It was just a piece of jewelry, and yet the safety, and maybe even the life, of a boy already hung on it.
I pressed my own eyes shut for a few seconds as the realm of my heart ached terribly and tears stung my eyelids.
Then I set my lips and slipped the brooch into the breast pocket of my Chanel coat.