Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(104)

Karl helps Sophie into the wobbling rowboat. In the days since their last picnic, the air has turned brisk. Karl picks up the oars and sweeps them far from shore. From this distance, Kleinwald resembles a cuckoo clock village. A flock of graugans lifts into the sky in one fluttering arc. Sophie looks out at the hills, that greened over the summer into a soft hope. The last of the sun is spreading its light. Karl turns his face toward it.

“It was always gray in Poland. I don’t know if that is true or only in my mind, but I don’t remember ever seeing the sun. Only gray. Especially in the woods.”

“There’s a forest like here?”

“There is a forest,” Karl says. The boat drifts like clouds. After so many days and nights of work, this weightless lull is strange, unreal; it’s as if the clockmaker of the universe has stopped time just for them. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I need to say. Just once. And then I never want to speak of it again.”

A cloud passes overhead. The sun vanishes. In its place comes a feeling of dread. It is all Sophie can do not to pick up the oars and row them back toward shore. She wants to outrun this shadow.

“I’m a deserter, Sophie. If this were known, I’d be executed. The war is immoral, and I had a duty to the others. Both things are true.” He doesn’t wait for her response. “After we were attacked, in the fog and crossfire and confusion, I slipped off my helmet and gun and ran into the woods. And then I kept running. I slept in fields at night and drank from the river. I ate whatever I could find. Often it made me sicker than not eating. I was like Siddhartha sitting at the river, so filled with self-disgust that I prayed for lightning to strike me. By the time I had wandered into the forest, it was to let myself die. Until you. And the letters.” Karl clears his throat. “Before that…” Karl coughs. His voice is scratchy. “I was in the Einsatzgruppen. You know what this is?”

Sophie shakes her head slowly.

Karl’s fingers tremble the way they did when he first came home from the hospital. “The officers…” His voice catches. “The officers would give the orders. The soldiers of the Einsatzgruppen were to march people from the ghetto out into the woods. Old men and women. Grandfathers. Grandmothers. Too old and sick for work. But also mothers, fathers. Children. The soldiers had their rifles. They would say to the people, ‘Now you will dig a pit.’ And if they said, ‘But we have no shovels,’ the soldiers would say, ‘Then use your hands.’ They would dig. The grandfathers and grandmothers. The mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. They would dig until their hands were bloody. Until the soldiers told them, stop. ‘Now strip.’ It was cold in the woods. You could see it in their breath. It came out like ghosts. The soldiers made them stand in a line at the edge of the pit. Some cried. Some prayed. Some were finished with God.”

Sophie feels as if she, too, stands at the edge of a pit and doesn’t want to look down. “What happened in the woods?”

Karl looks out at the lake. “I shot them.”

“Soldiers follow orders.” Sophie is quick to offer an excuse, though it’s not quite clear who she means it for.

“But I killed them. I killed them, Sophie.”

Sound carries from the shore. A mother telling her splashing children that it is time to come back in. Once upon a time. Sophie tells herself that if she puts that in front of what Karl is saying, it will be easier to hear. Like a story she can take in. Once upon a time, something terrible happened. But that was a long time ago. It reminds her of a word Herr Kirschbaum taught her—atonement, reparation for a wrong or injury; the expiation of sin. In a way, it is a coda to complicit.

She can see Herr Kirschbaum as he was, in his butcher shop once upon a time, treating flesh as if it were both a blessing and an offering.

“Yom Kippur is the holiest of our holidays,” Herr Kirschbaum had explained. “The Day of Atonement. A time to repent your wrongs and to forgive wrongdoing in order to start the new year with a fresh slate.”

She had liked the idea of this. But now she wonders, Are some sins beyond atonement, beyond redemption?

“Forgive me, forgive me…,” Karl says, and buries his head in his hands.



* * *



Sophie sits at the edge of the lake staring out at the water. It has been a week since Karl’s confession. They have not spoken of it again, but it is in her thoughts every time she sees his fingers trembling at his sides or watches him on the street staring up at the stars for so long it’s as if he’s become part of the night. The weight of it is there in his furtive glances in the garret as he sets about his reparations. He has done unspeakable things and he is haunted by them and she loves him and is now also haunted by them. She decides that time will be the judge, not her. When she returns to the garret, she squeezes Karl’s hand and whispers, “Meet me at midnight. In the bookshop.”





* * *



Sophie waits until she can hear the deep, soft snoring of her father. Then she tiptoes down the steps and slips out the front door. There is a blackout order and the town is as dark as the inside of a coat. She walks the streets by memory until she reaches the bookshop. She waits inside for Karl to arrive.

He’s nervous. Sophie finds this amusing. All those years of pining for Karl and now, at this pivotal moment, she is calm and sure and he rubs his hands through his hair and against the sides of his trousers. Sophie leads him to the small storeroom. When she had imagined this night—before she knew how to imagine such a night—Sophie had pictured a castle room with a four-poster bed and a knight on bended knee professing his love. She’d certainly never fantasized about a blanket on a cold wood floor in the back of the family shop. So many romantic notions she’s had to put away to make room for reality, except for this one small thing: A jar of dried linden blossoms sits on a nearby shelf, and she wonders if she will always associate the smell of linden with the feel of Karl’s body against hers.