“I know, Henry,” I sighed.
“Why did they come here, anyway?”
“The men didn’t have a choice in the beginning,” I reminded him. “They were brought to America as prisoners. But they do have it pretty good here now. Why would they leave?”
He sighed too and rolled away from me, staring at the wall again.
“It’s just not right,” he murmured. “It’s just not right.”
I agreed, but as I left his apartment, I was only grateful that Henry didn’t know the half of it.
13
Sofie
Berlin, Germany
1933
A few days after the election results were announced, I took the children to visit Jürgen’s great-aunt Adele. As I opened the gate between our courtyards, Laura was on my hip, chewing on her fist and drooling all over my shoulder. Georg ran ahead, stopping to inspect some chamomile blossoming along the edge of a garden bed. He bent to pick a bunch, then, clutching the stems tightly in his chubby fist, toddled along in front of me, making a beeline for the entrance to Adele’s apartment. When we found her setting up morning tea at the eat-in table in her kitchen, Georg ran toward her to show her the flowers.
“Oma!” he greeted her. Georg had seen Adele most every day of his life—but every time we stepped into her house, he seemed surprised to find her there. “Flower. Blue flower.”
“These are white flowers, Georg,” she said. Adele made a great show of taking the makeshift posy and inhaling the scent as if it were a rose. She rested the bouquet on the table, then scooped my daughter from my hip and promptly pressed a hard ginger cookie into her hand. “Chew on that. It’ll help with those sore gums.”
I had no idea how old Adele was. She said it was impolite to ask, and if anyone tried to, she refused to answer. She was Jürgen’s late grandmother’s eldest sister, and he guessed that she was in her late seventies or maybe early eighties. Adele religiously wore a hat outside even in the winter, and her face was surprisingly smooth. Her long white hair was invariably wound into a bun or, for special occasions, elaborate braids.
Like Mayim, she was a part of the circle of our little family. Adele adored Mayim and Jürgen, and she all but worshipped my children. Her feelings for me were obviously more complicated.
“Why Sofie?” I overheard her ask Jürgen when he and I first started dating. “She’s spoiled. Shallow.”
“She’s wonderful,” Jürgen said simply, and although that warmed me, the knowledge that Adele did not approve of our relationship hung over our courtship in the early years.
Jürgen was seven when his family home in Freiburg was bombed in the dying days of the Great War. His parents and infant sister, Ilsa, perished. Adele was in Berlin, on the other side of Germany, grieving the loss of her own family—both of her sons and her beloved husband, Alfred, were all killed at the front. “Three miserable telegrams over three miserable months, and then I was alone,” she told me.
But then a fourth telegram arrived. This one was from a friend of Jürgen’s parents, and it informed Adele that Jürgen had been orphaned and she was the only family they could find who might care for him. Adele’s sister, Jürgen’s grandmother, passed years before, and until that telegram arrived, Adele didn’t realize her nephew had married and had a family of his own.
Still, she had her driver take her to collect Jürgen the next day—ten long hours in a car, traversing the country. She had cared for him ever since. Even now that he was an adult with a family of his own, she still sometimes babied him.
Over the years, I’d made some kind of peace with Adele’s reluctance to embrace me. I’d also made peace with the reality that I had an obligation to care for her anyway. She had been a godsend to my husband, and that meant I was going to do my best to be a godsend to her, whether she liked it or not.
“How are you?” I asked her, and she rolled her eyes at me, as if the very question were absurd.
“Just fine,” she said, quickly turning her attention to Laura. She tickled Laura’s cheek, and my daughter gave a grin, opening her mouth so wide that the inflamed buds of her new teeth were visible on her lower gum. “Where’s our Mayim today?”
“She seemed anxious. I suggested she go visit with her parents.”
“Ah, that is good,” Adele said, nodding in satisfaction but also surprise, as if it were a great miracle that I’d done something that pleased her. “She needs them, and they need her as we wait to see what the great buffoon is going to do to this country.”