Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(50)
Karl had gone from the Hitler Youth into the Wehrmacht. Sophie had heard that he was in Lodz, which Sophie could find on her map but which she had never seen and could only tell herself must not be too dissimilar to Kleinwald. After all, they shared the same sky. Every week, Sophie searched the newspaper for any notice of his capture or death and was relieved when she moved her finger past the S’s and did not see Schmidt, Karl Alexander.
At fifteen, Oskar was too young to fight and bitterly disappointed about it.
“Are you that eager to die, Oskar?” Sophie’s father had asked him.
“For the Führer, for the fatherland, I would gladly give my life! Any patriot would,” Oskar said with such passion that Sophie thought perhaps he should’ve been the actress, not Hanna. “The moment I am eighteen, I’ll join the Wehrmacht. After all, I am—”
“The best shot in Kleinwald. Yes. We know,” her father said, firmly but not unkindly. “By the time you are old enough, the war will be over, Oskar. Maybe even next week. Warsaw has capitulated.”
But Oskar hoped the war would hold on just long enough for him to prove himself in battle. He would come home with medals and a rifle as his father did in the last great war, he told anyone who would listen. But unlike his father, Oskar promised, his gun and medals would never lie blood-spattered in the mud under a spring song of starlings.
Now that the war was on in earnest, more troops had moved into the castle barracks. On Sundays, they could be seen roving through the sleepy streets of Kleinwald as if it had also been conquered. Every now and then, some of them would prowl the shop, disturbing the neat order of the books in their efforts to “make sure you are not selling verboten materials, Herr Muller.” Sophie’s father would give a friendly nod. “Of course. Please feel free.” She could feel her father’s tension from the back of the shop where she kept an eye on the soldiers through the cracked doorway. At these moments, she wished she were brave and quick, like Hanna, who, no doubt, would find a way to distract the soldiers and set them on their way. Once the soldiers left, Sophie would go about putting the beloved books back to rights. “I’m sorry you were mishandled,” she’d whisper, slipping the Grimms near Goethe.
But it was the soldiers’ young, handsome commandant, Herr Jaeger, who had captured the curiosity and imagination of most everyone. When he passed by in his sharp gray uniform with the golden epaulets, the Nazi swastika beaming out from his red armband like an all-seeing eye, the town snapped to attention. Older men bowed their heads and raised their arms in salute. The Women’s Auxiliary gifted him with a pie they’d baked by pooling their precious rations of sugar and butter. The younger women found a reason to be on the street wearing their best dresses, the seams of their only nylons lined up down the backs of their legs as straight and bold as their desire. For it was known that the handsome commandant was also unmarried.
More than once, Sophie had seen Klara look up at Herr Jaeger through fluttering lashes, a practiced bashful smile stretching her mouth into an unnatural state. Klara had knitted Herr Jaeger a scarf and offered it one day with effusive patriotic zeal. She did this while puffing out her chest, which had gotten larger seemingly overnight, a fact Klara used to her advantage whenever possible. And when Lotte, standing at her side, had said, “Why are you posing like a pigeon, Klara?” and imitated her chest-forward stance, Sophie had turned away to hide her grin.
On his visits to town, Herr Jaeger walked with a deliberate calm that did not seem innate but like a lever that pressed down against a coiled spring of violence. During his reviews of the Hitler Youth, he became aware of Oskar’s skill as a marksman and had taken a keen interest in the young man. (Sophie would not say Herr Jaeger liked Oskar, for the commandant did not appear to carry affection for anyone above his own ambitions.) But Oskar basked in this interest; he had never known fatherly love and so it was easy to mistake even the slightest attention as affection and praise. Oskar began to prove himself as a promising, ferocious soldier. He took orders without question, and while his superiors had to prod some of the other boys to give their all in a fight, with Oskar, they had to pull him back before he could cause serious damage. On occasion, Herr Jaeger took some of the boys hunting, where Oskar impressed the commandant with a decisive shot to the head of a rabid dog from one hundred meters away.
“It was half-starved and completely mad and if I hadn’t shot it, it would have charged us in the field,” Oskar crowed to everyone later. A crowd had gathered outside the shop, including several of the girls who had begun to see him differently, not as Oskar the Tragic Boy, Oskar the Pest, but as Oskar the Man, Oskar the Soldier, Oskar the Hunter. “But that’s nothing compared to the commandant! He took down three rabbits in a matter of seconds! The rabbits never even heard his approach!”
“Ohhhh,” said the girls.
Herr Jaeger never entered the bookshop, though, and so Sophie rarely had to endure his presence or unnerving gaze.
More than once, Sophie had seen Hanna and Oskar together. Sometimes, Hanna would allow Oskar to walk beside her on the way to or from school while she laughed at something he said. Sophie wondered if Hanna had let Oskar kiss her again. If she’d let him do more than kiss her. At other times, though, Sophie had watched as Hanna brushed past Oskar’s shop, ignoring him as he called after her, and Sophie would be guiltily pleased, both to know that Oskar was being tortured by Hanna and that Hanna was just as mercurial as she’d always been, which made Sophie feel justified in holding her grudge.