Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(14)
“Hanna!” Klara loitered outside Hanna’s house wearing her Girls League uniform—a navy skirt and white blouse, with a dark kerchief tied in a knot at the collar. She looked picture-perfect, as if she could be smiling out from a recruitment poster for the glory of the new Germany. Klara’s nine-year-old sister, Lotte, circled her like one of Saturn’s rings. “Hanna, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You must come and see the quilt I’ve made for the next meeting. Better yet—come stitch with me. My mother has made apple streuselkuchen!”
“She won’t let us have it unless there is company,” Lotte added.
“Lotte! Hush!” Klara pinched her sister’s arm.
“I want to have streuselkuchen!” Lotte complained, rubbing her arm.
Hanna raised an eyebrow. “You want me to come over so that you can have cake?”
“We could eat cake and quilt,” Klara said with a toss of her honeyed hair.
“Fine. Sophie and I will come,” Hanna said.
“I … have to help my mother,” Sophie said. She knew Klara didn’t like her and she wished Hanna wouldn’t push it.
“Did you go to the forest again?” Lotte asked.
“Yes,” Sophie said, lighting up.
“Klara says you and Hanna pretend to be magic and write to the tree and that it’s babyish.”
“Lotte!” Klara pinched Lotte a second time.
“You did say that! To Hedy! I heard you!”
“I didn’t say it about Hanna,” Klara insisted, and Sophie imagined slapping Klara on her perfect face. Sophie’s parents might’ve been pacifists but they never had to put up with Klara Hehl.
“I want to go to the forest! I want to be magical, too!” Lotte begged.
“You’re too little to go to the forest, Charlotte,” Klara said, giving her sister a tiny shove.
“I’ll tell Mama you hit me and she won’t let you go to the hike on Saturday!”
“You’re always tattling, Lotte! That’s why no one wants you around!”
Sophie could sense the storm brewing between the sisters and she felt sorry for Lotte, who was annoying but also only nine.
“Lotte, come here.” Sophie took off her flower crown and placed it on the little girl’s head. “There. Now you are a goddess of the forest, too.”
* * *
At home, Sophie’s father sat in his chair reading Die Kleinwald Zeitung. “The newspaper is nothing but propaganda now,” he complained to Sophie’s mother. He raised his eyebrows at Sophie’s bedraggled state. “Ah, I see the priestess has returned! Whose fate did you decide today, Liebchen?”
“Erich. Don’t encourage her. There are fantasies enough around us,” Sophie’s mother said. Something passed between her parents, but it was beyond Sophie. “Well, we aren’t pagans at the supper table. Wash, please.”
Sophie bounded up the narrow staircase past the framed photographs of her grandparents and two lithographs of the village as it had looked in the last century. Generations of Mullers had been born and raised here and Sophie had no reason to doubt that generations of Mullers would go on living here in this house across the street from their best friends. It was, as far as Sophie could see, a good life. Once she was clean, she sat at the table with her parents and her seven-year-old sister, Lieselotte. Most parents believed that children should be seen and not heard, but Sophie’s mother and father encouraged their children to be part of the conversation. But when Sophie told them about seeing the caravan of soldiers led by the SS officer, her mother went pale and glanced worriedly at Sophie’s father, who began talking in detail about their chickens out back, which Sophie knew by now was his way of changing the subject.
As Sophie washed the supper dishes, she overheard her parents in the parlor talking in hushed voices.
“… should we go, Erich…”
“… where would we go, my love?…”
“… to my sister’s in Fussen…”
“… what makes you think it will be better there, Anna? It’s the same all over Germany…”
“… then maybe it is time to leave Germany…”
Whenever her mother spoke of leaving Kleinwald, all Sophie could think about was that it meant leaving Hanna and the forest. And she would get one of her headaches. Her mother said these headaches were from not eating enough meat. But Sophie thought they were from feeling too much with nowhere to put it.
* * *
Sophie pushed her reading aside and peered out her bedroom window, which had a nice view of the village. At one end, across a gaslit bridge that spanned a narrow portion of lake, sat an ivy-covered medieval castle that had been bombed during the Great War but whose stones were still mostly intact. It had been built in the thirteenth century by Baron Wilhelm Alexander, who had thwarted an invasion by Magyar chieftains but had been unable to save his own family. A bronze statue of the local hero atop his horse stood just outside the castle’s iron gates. Sophie thought his story was tragically romantic and she liked to sit beneath the Baron and imagine his arms around her as he swept her away from some great danger. She had only confessed this once to Hanna, who had laughed. “You are in love with a statue? Oh, Sophie.” And so she never mentioned it again.