Life Will Have Its Way (4 page)

Even though she had never so much as mentioned his name before, Anja and Peter greeted one another warmly. He was an imposing figure wrapped heavily with winter clothing, much too heavily for the weather. He set to work right away removing his many layers, once he’d stripped himself down to street clothes, he tossed his things in an enormous pile on the back of the chair. Anja introduced us and explained to Peter that I was the one that had found the girl in the garden. He looked at me suspiciously and produced a cold, weak handshake. I couldn’t help but feel there was something amiss. For one thing, he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Anja, which made the claim that he’d been one of her father’s friends a bit suspect.

She began to give Peter details of the things we knew about the girl. His eyes wandered in my direction, then he quickly pulled her into the kitchen. They spoke in whispers and I watched as Anja interspersed her comments with gestures that brought Peter’s attention to the girl, her little blue coat, her bag. Anja left him at the counter while she retrieved one of the girl’s boots. He took it from her and held it in front of him, his hands cupped the sole as he moved it into the air, holding it delicately in front of him as if he were appraising a priceless piece of art. His enormous eyes grew even larger, his lips became flat and wide. He shook his head up and down earnestly, and as if knowing exactly what he was thinking, Anja nodded in agreement. I wasn’t sure why they’d decided to exclude me from the conversation. I tried to listen to what they were saying but could only pick up fragments and couldn’t properly piece them together in a way that made any sense. I was quite offended at having been left to feel like a child that had suddenly, without cause, been sent out of the room.

Anja sat the boot down, she made motions out to the garden, she pointed her finger along to the back of the apartment, then down to the floor. I couldn’t imagine what she would be saying about the floor. I watched her lips closely, trying to read them. She repeated the same word several times before I made the connection to the cellar. She was talking about the cellar. She held her hands up in a showy gesture. Peter nodded enthusiastically, then looked suddenly
toward me, as if just remembering I was still there. Our gazes met, his eyes narrowed reflexively, then suddenly and without cause, his expression changed, he smiled, raised his chin in a bit of a reverse nod then turned away.

When their discussion finally wrapped up, Peter eased himself slowly back into the living room, at first his movements seemed awkward, apologetic, he reminded me of a parent that had wrongly scolded a child and wasn’t sure how to say he was sorry. He asked me how long I had known Anja, where I’d grown up, where I’d gone to school. Once he was actually making eye contact and engaging me in conversation, some of the suspicious air that had surrounded him earlier began to dissipate. I started to wonder if I’d simply misjudged him. Who knows? Sometimes people just rub you the wrong way for no good reason. Maybe there was something about the way he looked, his body language, the sound of his voice, or perhaps it was nothing more than his completely unnecessary pile of winter clothing that had bothered me.

Peter reached for the can of peaches still sitting on the counter. “So, this is what passes for cobbler these days, eh?”

Anja laughed, I laughed to humor him. He set to work re-applying his layers, then stepped slowly toward the couch, he took a long, thoughtful look at the girl, I could see his cheeks rise, as the edges of his lips pulled upward. A peaceful, satisfied expression crossed his face. He turned to leave, Anja tried to make him take the peaches with him, he waved her away saying that he’d made the trip for cobbler and wasn’t willing to settle for anything less. They had another good laugh and said their good-byes. Once I was sure he was gone I launched into a series of questions about Peter that Anja didn’t seem eager to answer.

“He was just an old friend of my father’s.”

“From the war?”

“As a matter of fact…yes, yes they were friends during the war.”

“Why did you have him come?”

“Well, I, I just thought he might be able to help us if the grandmother doesn’t return.”

I nodded slowly, but wasn’t sure how I felt about letting someone else, someone I had never even heard of, in on our secret. She must have sensed what I was thinking.

“Peter is someone I’ve known for years. He can be trusted.”

“Does he know where she came from?” I asked. “Do you?”

She waited a second before answering. Her teeth were clenched tightly and I could tell she was trying to control the urge to say more than she should. Her eyes blinked rapidly while her lips held firm. She looked as though she might explode if not soon given the chance to say something. I could tell she was pained with conflict, unable to decide what she could say, how much she could say, whether or not she should say anything at all.

“It’s okay, Anja,” I said a little dejected, “you don’t have to tell me.”

Anja exhaled, “It’s not that I don’t want to dear, it’s just that you might think I was crazy if I did.”

Anja took the tea from my hands and looked up through the steam rising from the cup, “I once had a coat made by Bremer-Klein. They were very popular in the thirties, and quite expensive.”

“So, you’re trying to tell me you were a spoiled child?” I asked with a laugh.

“Oh no, I was far from spoiled. But I suppose my father did have a fairly good job compared to most.”

When Anja was young, her family lived in a small town in one of the more rural parts of the country. Their house was on the main street, directly across from the city hall, one of many in a string of homes that went on for blocks. They lived in difficult times, the economy was painfully depressed and the rate of unemployment was incredibly high, both of which caused men by the thousands to travel from town to town desperately searching for work. The men would start coming around early in the day, working their way from the top of the street and stopping at each house along the way, asking if they might do chores to earn a bit of food. They kept at it until they got something, then they might move along. Anja said her neighbors were good people and they tried to help where they could but more often than not the men were sent on without anything.

“So there I sat in the front garden playing with my dolls. Oh, how I loved that garden,” she closed her eyes and tilted her head to its side. A sweet, enchanted look covered her face. Her eyes opened slowly, she seemed to be looking both at me and th
rough me. I could tell she was still in the garden, surrounded by lilac trees heavy in bloom, dancing undetected under the pink flowing vines of the Elm trees as they moved gently in the slow summer breeze. I knew she didn’t want to come back and felt bad that she had to. She took a long slow sip of her tea and continued.

“Sometimes I found myself watching the beggars, and I suppose that sounds rather callous now, but remember, I was just a girl. Anyway, there was a time when I started to notice that the men that came along our street were no longer stopping at the first house, they didn’t stop at the second house either, and they
didn’t stop at the other houses in between. But do you know where they did stop?” She looked at me expectantly.

I shook my head.

“They stopped at our house.” 

“Why?”

“Well don’t you see?” she asked with obvious frustration. “They
knew
to come to our house. Someone was
telling
them to come to our house. Someone told them they would be given food if they came to our house.”

I nodded, “Oh, okay, now I see.”

She seemed upset that I hadn’t been more impressed.

“Well,” she sulked, “maybe that doesn’t seem so strange to you because I said my father had a decent job, but all that meant was that we had enough to feed
our
family, it didn’t mean we had enough to feed every hungry person wandering through town.

She lifted her cup to her mouth, and placed her lips on it, pulling it back before she took a sip. “I never saw my mother turn anyone away, not one person, somehow she managed to stretch whatever she had. You know, for some reason she just had a certain weakness for people that needed help.”

I nodded thoughtfully and tried again to give Anja the reaction she had originally been hoping for. “Your mother sounds like a wonderful person, I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned anything about her before.”

She shrugged her shoulders casually, “My mother? Oh no, I’m sure I must have.”

“No… I think I would remember if you had.”

“Hmm,” she replied indifferently.

There was a distance in her eyes, she looked across the room as if she were in a theatre watching a giant screen, allowing the images to simply come and go without any thought or effort on her part.

“Where
is
your family?” I asked, cringing as I heard myself say the words out loud.

She stood up slowly, walked over to the couch and straightened the covers on the girl, “My parents have both passed on and my sisters live in the West.”

“Really?” I asked. “They went to the West?” I was surprised that Anja had never mentioned anything about that before either. 

“Yes. Yes they did,” she replied with an unusually straightforward tone. 

“Why on earth didn’t you go with them?”

She sat back down and resumed her blank stare in the direction of the imaginary screen across the room. “We woke up one morning and the border was sealed. It was sealed… just like that.”

“But then how did they get out?”

“Oh, early on, if you knew the right people, you could still find a way, but, for me, well, I was married by then, and Nikolaus thought we should stay put. He was convinced the situation was only temporary.” She fiddled with her bracelet, spinning it around her wrist and twisting the clasp until it was tight. “Of course my parents were hopeful that I’d come to my senses, they even made arrangements for me to leave.”

As it turned out, Nikolaus was quite wrong, the border closure turned out to be anything but temporary. By the time Anja finally decided to leave, it was too late. Her father’s connections were no longer reliable.

“So then what did you do? What did you do when you realized you couldn’t leave?”

“At first, of course, I panicked, it was dreadful, I felt miserably trapped.”

A few years passed before Anja learned she might be allowed special permission to join her family in the West. When she discussed her plans with Nikolaus he was adamantly opposed to the idea of trying to leave and he hoped she would drop it altogether, warning that it would only bring them trouble.

“At that point, believe it or not, I actually became torn about what to do,” she said, “Nikolaus was very persuasive. He had a way of talking me into things I didn’t really want to do. And talking me out of things I did.”

Nevertheless, Anja finally decided she had to apply for an exit visa just to see where things might lead. She intentionally kept Nikolaus in the dark about what
she was doing, in the end, it didn’t matter anyway, her permission to leave was denied. And in a strange twist of fate, before she had a chance to fully recover from the disappointment of not being able to leave, Nikolaus was arrested along with most everyone else on his staff.

“Of course they were arresting people left and right in those days. They tried to tell us that spies were everywhere and Niki was accused of sympathizing with the enemy or some other ridiculous such thing like that.” She waved her hand in the air as she spoke, furrowing her brow, trying to recall the exact details, before giving up and brushing the thought away. “I knew he was innocent. I knew he would never do or say anything to jeopardize himself or anyone else. He was much too smart for that.”

Anja became suddenly distressed, her pupils grew large and dark and her complexion became pale, “I just don’t know why they had to go after him like that, the whole thing about going to the West was my idea,” her voice quaked. “It was me that put in the applications, made the appointments, everything, you know he had nothing to do with it. He really had nothing to do with it. Nothing.”

She stopped there, got up and went to the bathroom, I heard water in the sink. “You don’t have a few aspirin, do you?” she yelled out. 

I got the bottle from the kitchen and met her at the door with a glass of water, she was drying her face, her eyes looked red and tired but she still managed a partial smile. We settled back into our chairs in the living room and a period of awkward silence followed. She fidgeted in her seat, and cleared her throat several times, I had the impression she wanted to keep talking, but wasn’t sure.

“Do you want to tell me more?” I finally asked.

“Go ahead,” she said flicking her fingers back and forth, “what else would you like to know?”

“Um, I guess more about Nikolaus.” I thought about all the time I had spent in Anja’s apartment, I scanned my memory for some sign of him there, a photograph, a memento, something, anything that might have indicated that someone named Nikolaus had at one time actually existed, had at one time lived in the same building. There was nothing. “What happened to him?” 

“Well, let see, let see, where was I?” she said to herself, now speaking with an almost noticeable lack of emotion. “They kept him downtown,” she pointed in the general direction of the local police station, “you know the building, don’t you?”

One afternoon several months after his arrest Anja entered their apartment. The curtains had been drawn, a putrid combination of disinfectant and body odor hung heavily in the air. Nikolaus sat on the couch, barely recognizable, he was unshaven, his hair over grown, his thin pale body was buried somewhere beneath filthy, oversized clothing.

“Nikolaus had always been so conscientious about his appearance, he’d always been so well put together, but the man sitting on my couch… he was none of those things, he was just a shell, nothing more than the shell of the man that I had known.” She paused and clapped her hands together, “Oh dear, I don’t mean to drone on, you certainly needn’t be burdened with all of this.”

“No, no, Anja, please continue,” I said. To be honest, I was quite eager to hear more. Just about every family had a story similar to hers, a tragic story that involved the unfortunate arrest of a cousin, an uncle, a grandfather, a sister, a friend, but no one ever seemed willing to share the details.

Anja went on. Nikolaus was cleared of all wrong doing, but it soon became apparent that he would never recover from the stigma attached to the accusation. Once he realized what the future held for him, he basically lost the will to go on. Anja arrived home one evening to find him nearly unconscious.

“He took my hand, he was so weak. He kept trying to say something, but his voice was so shallow, so empty. I had to put my ear nearly to his mouth just to make out what he was saying.” Anja choked up, I could see the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes, she paused, pursing her lips as she tried to regain her composure. “He said he was sorry. Sorry for everything. That was the last thing he said.” She shrugged and raised her hand to push away a tear that had been slowly working its way down her cheek.

“Life is funny, you know. If you really think about it, we don’t have much say in things.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, sometimes it feels like we’re nothing more than passengers.”

“Passengers?”

“Well, yes. In life, you’re put on your train and you must go where that train takes you.”

“But what if you don’t like your train? Why not just switch trains?”

“Oh no. No. You can’t switch trains.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t change fate my dear, you can’t change fate.”