Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(5)

Frau Hermann went inside, leaving the door open, and Jenny followed, pausing only to tuck her ponytail inside her popped collar in case Frau Hermann tried to snip off a section.

“Here. Sit,” Frau Hermann said, gesturing to a kitchen table strewn with papers. “I’ll only be a moment.”

Jenny sat looking around at the apartment. Two floral armchairs with sagging cushions flanked a wooden end table flecked with dust. Gold-framed landscapes, pretty but impersonal, had been crowded together on a papered wall gone dingy with fireplace soot. On the kitchen table, a breakfast plate speckled with crumbs and a smear of dark jam knocked against a china teacup whose contents—coffee? Tea? Witches’ brew?—were half-gone and cloudy. An air of loneliness hung over the apartment except for the bookshelves. These were teeming with well-loved, dust-free books of every color and size. Jenny sneaked over to study the spines in the hopes there might be one on witchcraft she could tell Martina about later. There were some of the usual suspects—encyclopedias, dictionaries, Gray’s Anatomy, but one whole shelf was dedicated to fairy tales, another to mythology, and yet another had been crammed with psychology titles like A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales and The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Off to the right hung a framed diploma in psychology from the Freie Universit?t Berlin.

“Have you ever tasted Pfannkuchen?” Frau Hermann called from the kitchen amid a rattling of teacups and plates.

“Nein, Frau Hermann,” Jenny said, quickly taking her seat again.

Frau Hermann entered stiffly carrying a tray with two steaming cups of tea and thick slabs of pastry on delicate white-china plates. “It’s a German specialty.”

It looked like a jelly doughnut and smelled of fresh yeast. Jenny bit into the soft, powdered-sugar-topped dough.

“You like it?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s very good. Um, kostlich.”

“Your German is good,” Frau Hermann said, digging into her pastry with abandon.

“I’m taking classes.”

“Ah. Das ist gut.”

“Are you a doctor?” Jenny asked. “I saw your diploma.”

“A psychologist, yes. I work with patients suffering from trauma. The war, the wall … both have left deep scars.”

Jenny had never met a psychologist before, let alone someone who did such important work. “That’s very…” She searched for the right word. “Noble.”

Frau Hermann’s shoulders gave the tiniest shrug. “I try to help. What do you like to do, Jenny?”

“Oh. Um. I have a camera. I like to take pictures.”

“That is a good way of seeing, yes? Shows you things you might have missed at first glance.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Jenny said. “I also play violin.”

“You shall have to come and play for me next time.”

Next time. What had she been thinking? She’d have to find ways to sneak past Frau Hermann’s door from now on. They fell into halting small talk—“Have you always lived in Berlin?” “Nein, I came to Berlin after the war. Do you miss your friends back home?” “Yes. Very much.” “Change is hard, ja?”—and scraped at their pastry in the awkward silences that followed.

“You have a lot of fairy tales,” Jenny said, gesturing to the bookshelves.

“I use them in my work at the therapy center, Die Eichel. With my patients.”

“You do?”

“Yes. It helps them to put words to their trauma or guilt. To think of it as a story that exists outside of them. Like a fable.” Frau Hermann seemed to be studying Jenny. “How old are you, my dear?”

“Sixteen. Almost seventeen. Well, in October.”

“Seventeen.” Frau Hermann sipped her tea with a sudden faraway look. “That’s how old they were when they disappeared.”

Jenny stopped chewing as if the pastry were poisoned. “Who … disappeared?”

“Two girls from my village up north,” Frau Hermann explained. “I suppose your youth brought them to mind somehow.” She smiles. “Now they, it was said, were witches. Descendants of the ancient Norn. They had a very special friendship. One for the ages.”

Jenny swallowed the bite in her mouth. “Were they friends of yours?”

“No. We were not friends. But it was a large village and tales get told for generations, you see. It was a story I heard about the girls, almost like a fairy tale in itself.”

“What happened to them?”

Frau Hermann gave a half shrug. “They disappeared without a trace on the night of the winter solstice. This was during the war. All sorts of things happened in the forest during the war.” Frau Hermann teased at her pastry with her fork tines. “The story goes that the girls believed in the old forest magic and particularly the magic of the Bridegroom’s Oak, and because of their belief, the Bridegroom’s Oak protected them when they needed it.”

“The Bridegroom’s Oak?”

Frau Hermann’s eyes brightened. “Ahhh! You have never heard of the Bridegroom’s Oak? That is a fable unto itself! It is a matchmaking tree in the Dodauer Forest up north. It is said that if you write to the Bridegroom’s Oak hoping for a match, someone will answer you. Many marriages have occurred this way. In fact…” Frau Hermann rose stiffly and returned a moment later holding a stamped envelope. “I have written my own letter, but … I haven’t worked up the nerve to send it.” Her girlish laugh was a surprise, as if a younger woman lived inside somewhere.