I waited all day.
Her mother must have locked her inside. Her father must have beaten her so badly she couldn’t move. Maybe she argued with the Nazis and they took her away. Maybe they had punished her for her friendship with me. I had no way to know.
* * *
• • •
WILLI HAD ALSO BEEN OUT looking for me. When he came home and my mother told him what happened he put his fist through the kitchen window. “We don’t have enough violence in this country?” my mother asked. “We need you to join them?” She stared at him, burning her fury through his skin, until he fetched a piece of cardboard and began fixing it to the window. His hands shook as he tried to slice the cardboard with a knife, as he unpeeled the tape. When he finished, he came and sat beside me in the sitting room on the blue velvet sofa. “What’re you reading, Erdnuss?” I turned my book over to show him the cover. Fünfzehn Hasen.
“You’re not bored with the rabbits yet?”
I glared at him and pulled the book to my chest. To me, the plight of the rabbits, stalked by two-legged murderers, felt more relevant than ever. Willi could be such a snob.
“You and your bunnies.”
“Today, let her have the bunnies.” My mother stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her face expressionless. “Though that one’s banned now. It was banned in Germany ages ago. Burned or banned, or maybe both.”
“You’re joking. Those Saupiefken banned a book about rabbits?”
“Apparently they’re a metaphor.” Normally my mother chastised Willi when he used rude language, but today I had the feeling she didn’t consider the word strong enough. She turned back toward the kitchen, lifted a lid over a pot. The flatulent smell of broccoli filled the air. My mother didn’t cook very often, but Stefi was spending the day with her parents.
“Let me guess—we’re the rabbits?”
“Well, somehow I doubt we’re the predators,” she replied drily. I heard the oven creak open and slam shut.
“Hard to believe the Third Reich is devoting time to reading children’s books.” He pulled me onto his lap. “Wait until they discover the secret Jewish conspiracy in Bambi.” I didn’t smile. “I know a better bunny story. Tell us, Erdnuss, tell us about Friedenglückhasenland. Tell us tales of a better world.”
As soon as I thought of Friedenglückhasenland, I thought of Anneliese, and my heart went cold. I couldn’t tell the stories without Anneliese. Every word of them had been a collaboration. If she were lost to me, then so was our world. Our sitting room blurred around me.
“Willi?” I whispered. “Ana—”
“Hush,” he said. “Mutti told me. But that isn’t Anneliese, Peanut. I think I know her a little by now.” He was quiet for a minute. “How I would like to wring that woman’s neck.”
For a moment, I agreed, before remembering that if we were to strangle Anneliese’s mother, she would be left alone with her father. “Willi, don’t.”
He sighed. “How did those two ogres create that child? Tell me that.”
“They used to be nice.”
“Used to be doesn’t count.” Willi’s smile slipped away.
I wriggled back into his arms, back into his familiar smells of damp wool and tobacco. He had taken up smoking at my grandmother’s meetings, although my mother wouldn’t allow it in our home. I wanted to cheer him up. “Well. You would like Friedenglückhasenland, Willi, because it’s full of silence. There’s nothing to ruin your writing.” Willi wrote lots of poems, though I didn’t understand all of them.
“Do you think I could come to Friedenglückhasenland with you one day?” He sounded wistful. He pulled me closer, tucking his chin over my shoulder. His curls tickled my neck.
I shook my head. “You don’t have the right passport.”
“How do I get one?”
“They aren’t issuing them anymore. You’d need a visa anyway.”
He fell silent. “So it’s like anywhere else then.”
“It’s not like anywhere else.” I was indignant. “There is no money! People just give things to each other. And they drive around in carrots that are completely silent! It has the best cinnamon rolls in the world and there are hardly any boys at all!”
“A paradise indeed.”
“I’m sorry for you,” I told him as gently as I could. “I’m sorry for you that you don’t have a country of your own.”
He turned my shoulders so that he could see my face. “Erdnuss,” he said. “I’m not sure any of us do.”
Twelve
In March 1938, street violence against Jews escalates in Vienna.
The next afternoon they came for us. My father had gone out to work, or rather to discover whether he still had work, although my mother had pleaded with him to stay home. She had already been told not to bother coming to rehearsal. Stefi had not come. The streets were no longer safe for us, if they ever had been. Willi had gone out for a paper, defying maternal orders. But I, her youngest, was home. My mother was sitting over her third cup of coffee—we were no longer allowed in our cafés, she told me—not sipping it as she gazed into the middle distance. Kept home from school, I lay on the blue couch with a book, red-eyed and trying not to think about Anneliese. We listened to the German planes descend on our city. We listened to the end of Austria.
There wasn’t anywhere left we could go. We could not go to the parks. We could not sit on public benches. We were banned from theater and opera and cinemas. We could not swim in public pools. We could do nothing but pace the streets or sit in our apartments like rats in a trap. Our world had shrunk so fast it made my head spin.
The knocking brought us both to our feet and the coffee cup crashing to the floor. “Don’t answer it,” my mother ordered, watching the milky coffee leak across the tiles. I tiptoed to her, slipping my hand into hers. It was ice cold.
Again, the knocking, followed by the shouting. “Aufmachen, Juden!”
I felt my mother trembling under her dress. “Open or we will break down this door.”
“Go to your room, Orly. Go to your room and hide. Under your bed, somewhere.” I didn’t want to leave her side, but I obeyed her, running into my room and closing the door. A second later I heard them in the kitchen, their boots on our floors. “You’re alone?”
“I am alone.” There was no tremor in her voice. Her voice she knew how to control.
“You won’t mind if we search the apartment then.”