Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(25)
She FaceTimes him right away. It’s funny how fast everyone responds now that the world is so slow. Chloe wears a pink tee with the word Feminist in gold lettering across the front. Her bangs are short and uneven. “Hey. Did you know that trees communicate via their roots?” She slumps into her papasan chair. It dwarfs her small frame. She sips from a bottle of kombucha.
“Somebody had a good science class.”
“It’s the only thing I retained from today.” She nods at his laptop screen. “You said you found something?”
“Possibly maybe?” He fills her in on the sketches and their model, Hanna Schmidt. “They look like the one your Mormor has—same initials, too. So. Any clue who this EW might be?”
“Nada.”
“Well, maybe it’ll show up in the Die Kleinwald Zeitung archives. I’ve only made it up to 1940 because—and I know this will shock you—everything is in German.” He’s not trying to low-key tell her how hard he’s been working on her behalf, but he’s not not trying to do that, either. “Rude, right?”
Chloe’s giggle roller-coasters his stomach. “So rude.”
“I have learned some fascinating tidbits, though! Let’s see … the Women’s Auxiliary is having a contest for best Zwetschgendatschi. Say that three times fast! Somebody lost a mitten on Alexanderstrasse and—scandal!—the mitten has ein Loch darin, a hole, in it!” Chloe is laughing now. He narrates the most trivial and weirdest news items he can find. He wants to keep her laughing for as long as he can. “Let’s see, there’s … whoa.”
“What is it?”
“Uh, I think I just found something about Oskar Gerber…”
He zips the information into space and waits until he hears it land in Chloe’s texts with a soft ping. She sits forward, staring at her phone. “Holy shit.”
“Doesn’t need much translation but yeah, that’s Aryan Ken doll getting an award from the Hitler Youth for marksmanship.”
“So Oskar was a Nazi.”
“And a good shot,” Miles says meaningfully. “See, if this was our podcast, the dramatic music would come in and we’d cut to a commercial for jock itch cream.”
“Jock itch cream?”
“It’s the only sponsor we can get. But fingers crossed the hemorrhoid folks come through.”
Chloe whistles. “Bleak, dude. World War Two kind of a sensitive topic in the Eisenberg house.”
“Sorry. My bad.”
“Forgiven.” Chloe chews the side of her cheek the way she does when concentrating. “Do you think the others were Nazis, too?”
“Maybe. I mean, we don’t know anything about them—were they friends? Enemies? Looks like the medal was awarded in August 1941, four months before they disappeared.” Miles makes a note of the man presenting the award, SS-Obergruppenführer Rudolf Jaeger.
The commander and the soldiers.
“I’ll keep digging, see what I can find. What about the tapes? Anything good there?”
“Nothing so far. Just the ‘Tale of the Hare and the Deer.’”
“The what-what?”
“The fairy tale she used to tell me when I was a kid? I told you about that!”
Miles has a vague recollection of this. He was always a little jealous that Chloe and her grandmother were so close. “Right.”
“I’d been bugging her to record it for me so I’d always have it. Looks like she did.”
“So not the secrets from her spy days, huh?”
“I wish! That would be an amazeballs podcast.”
“She never told you about that time?”
“Nope. All I know is that she left Sweden to go work for the Allies in London. She was young and pretty and she could speak German really well so they sent her on assignment, but I don’t know exactly what she did. I asked once or twice but she would just say, It was a long time ago, ?lskling,” Chloe says, doing an accent that sounds like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. “I think whatever happened then was hard for her. Anyway, I can see why she was a good spy. You can’t get anything out of her she doesn’t want to give up.” Chloe leaves the chair and flops onto her stomach on her bed. Her face is closer to the camera. It makes her eyes look cartoon big. “I just wish I had asked more about her life when I had the chance, you know?”
Has Miles ever asked his grandparents about their lives? About what it was like to leave the Philippines and come to America, the hardships they faced? Has he ever asked them about the culture, what they miss most about Manila? He doesn’t think so. His casual indifference strikes him now as selfish, a loss all around.
“Well, at least you’ll always have a recording of the story now. Your Mormor’s a total badass.”
“Yeah,” Chloe sighs. She follows it with an eye roll. “And then Joyce married a hedge fund manager and we live in a bougie brownstone where people lose their shit if the Keurig is out of cups.”
“Maybe it skips a generation?” Miles swigs his warming Gatorade. “So what was this fairy tale?”
“Oh. Um. It was pretty basic. Magic and romance. Heroes. Villains. There were these two weavers, sisters—Freya and Saga—who helped save a kingdom from a mad king. This magical tree transformed them into the hare and the deer so they could escape. There were other characters—animals and birds. The scariest one to me was the hunter who was supposed to find the sisters and bring them back to the High Castle to be put to death. That dude was relentless. A total dick.”