Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(52)
“Thank you. I will.”
The shop bell rang and Leon bustled through the door in a flurry of wet snowflakes. “Karl, we need to hurry if we … well, if it isn’t Miss Lonelyhearts! Still writing to the tree? Has your prince come for you at last?”
“Leon. Enough,” Karl barked.
“Okay, okay. Just a little fun.”
But the humiliation, renewed, sat on Sophie’s cheeks as scarlet. When Karl wished her a merry Christmas, she only nodded and picked up her feather duster to attack the dust-free shelves.
Sophie kept to herself for the rest of Christmas. She received a new diary, which she treasured. She gave Lieselotte her book of Norse myths and a precious orange. Later, in her room, Sophie sat at her little desk to write. She stared longingly into the darkness behind Hanna’s bedroom window. She heard a cough, and when she followed the sound, she saw Karl standing outside his house smoking a cigarette. Instead of stargazing, he was looking up at her window. At her. He gave a small wave. Sophie turned off her lamp and shut the curtains. By the first freezing rain of the new year, Karl and Leon were gone. Leon to university, Karl to the action at the front. True to his word, he wrapped the book in brown paper and left it on Sophie’s doorstep tied with a piece of string and an acorn with a perfect little cap.
January marched through Germany like an occupying army. It was a bitterly cold winter, the coldest Sophie could ever remember, made colder by a coal shortage. Sophie shivered in her coat, hat, and mittens inside the house and her father had needed to close the bookshop for several days for lack of heat. When they returned, a sheen of frost sparkled across the spines of the books as if they’d been sprinkled with fairy dust. But the snow was glorious. Deep and shiny, it spread out across the fields in elegant, wavelike drifts. The lake had frozen into a wide, clear expanse and it seemed as if all the youth of Kleinwald had laced up their skates and taken to it. Sophie was a better skier than skater, but the day had rare sun and was not to be missed.
It was Hanna’s laugh she heard first, a deep, husky performance Hanna had patterned after Marlene Dietrich, practicing in her room at night. Sophie was tempted to call her out on the fakery. Hanna was there with Klara and the other girls from the BDM. Klara, naturally, was quite good and wasted no time showing off her graceful pirouettes, circling some of the handsomer boys flirtatiously. She spied Sophie and skated toward her, giving Sophie’s shoulder a little bump as she passed so that Sophie wobbled on her skates and nearly fell. Sophie left the ice and returned home half hoping that Hanna might follow, but she didn’t.
By February, there was no coal at all. The school day was interminable; Sophie’s fingers were so stiff with cold that it was hard to write words upon the slate when asked. New, more restrictive ration cards had been handed out. Even cotton for diapers was in short supply. Sophie hoped it would all be over by the time the new baby came. Her mother looked pale. Food had grown scarcer. Potatoes had gone rotten in the cold. Sophie prayed for spring to come early but spring, it seemed, had other plans. The first week of March brought terrible news: There had been a battle at the front. In the fierce action, Karl had gone missing and was presumed dead. Sophie lay in bed with one of her headaches brought on by crying. She deeply regretted not waving back to Karl that last night. She tried to make a memory of his face as she had seen it from below her window, shadowed in moonlight. But she could only remember one expression: haunted.
The next day, Sophie watched from that same bedroom window as solemn-faced neighbors arrived at Hanna’s house with what plates of food they could pull together. Every time the door would open, Hanna was there to greet the mourners, her face stoic but her eyes puffy.
Lamentations.
Sophie and her mother and Liesl put on their best dresses and attended the small, hastily organized funeral in the tiny cemetery on the hill behind the Lutheran church. It was a dreary gray morning of cold wind and light snow. Winter still held Kleinwald in its grip. Words were said. Ephemeral. The empty pine box lowered. The solemn gravediggers got to work. The living filed past centuries of the dead.
“Go to her,” Sophie’s mother whispered with a nod to Hanna, who had stayed behind to watch the men shoveling dirt onto her brother’s grave as if that were the only way she could comprehend that he wasn’t coming back.
Sophie trudged back up the hill to Hanna’s side. It was the first time they’d spoken in six months and what was there to say now? None of the words she had ever collected were enough.
“I’m so sorry about Karl,” Sophie mumbled at last.
“Thank you.” Hanna blinked. Her eyes watered, with cold, with sorrow.
They stood uncertainly. Down the hill, muted sobs and sniffles carried on the unforgiving wind. Dirt hit pine with a dull, mechanical thud.
“I’m leaving tomorrow for Poland. To reeducate the Estonian Germans there,” Hanna said, her eyes still on the hypnotic grace of the gravediggers.
“Oh,” Sophie said, surprised. She knew the girls from the BDM had been recruited for such projects, but she couldn’t imagine Hanna having the patience to teach anyone anything. “For how long?”
“Six months.”
“A long time, then.”
“At least I’ll be away from Kleinwald. It’s too sad now.”
Oskar marched up the hill, intruding on the moment. “I am sorry for your loss, Hanna. But Karl died a hero. For the Führer and the fatherland.”