The Plum Tree (3 page)

“I don’t want to be with Luisa,” he said. “She’s nothing more than another little sister to me. Besides, she loves herring too much. She’s starting to smell like a fish.” He smiled down at Christine, and she lowered her eyes.

“But we’re from two different worlds,” she said in a quiet voice. “My mother says . . .”

He lifted her chin, put his fingers over her lips, and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

But Christine knew it mattered. Maybe not to her, and maybe not to him, but somewhere along the way, it would matter. According to her mother, she was wasting her time looking for affection from someone like him. He was the son of a wealthy lawyer, and she was the daughter of a poor mason. His mother grew roses and raised money for charity, while her mother scrubbed his family’s floors and washed their clothes. He had attended school for twelve years and was now in
Universität,
studying to be a doctor or a lawyer; he hadn’t decided which. She’d loved school and had received good grades, as long as she and her fellow students weren’t being pulled out of class to gather a late harvest or pluck potato bugs from the farmers’ fields.

Looking back, she found it ironic how hard she’d studied. Her foolish hope had been to be a teacher or a nurse. It wasn’t until she was eleven, when she found out that it cost money to go to school for more than eight years, that she gave up on her dreams of being anything more than a good mother and a hard-working wife. Her parents, like the majority of the people in her village, didn’t have the extra ten marks per month for middle school, or twenty per month, plus the cost of books, for high school. Bloom where you’re planted, Oma always said. But Christine’s roots were restless, wondering what it would be like in more fertile soil.

Isaac talked to her of classical music, culture, and politics as she stood at the ironing board starching his father’s shirts. He talked to her while she worked in the garden, telling her he’d been to Berlin, to see operas and theater. He described the world—Africa, China, America—as if he’d seen it himself, using colorful descriptions of landscapes and people. He was fluent in English and had taught her a few words, and had read every book in the family library, some of them twice.

And then, there was the fact that the Bauermans were Jewish.

Isaac’s father, Abraham, was fully Jewish. Nina was half-Jewish, half-Lutheran. It didn’t matter that the Bauermans were nonpracticing. Most of the people in the village saw them as Jewish. And anyone who was a member of the Nazi Party—although it was sometimes hard to tell who was and who wasn’t—considered them Jews. Isaac had explained that, while his father would have liked his children to embrace his religion, his mother wasn’t the type of woman who had the time or inclination to follow anyone else’s rules. She didn’t feel any more Jewish than she did Lutheran, so she wasn’t about to force Isaac and his sister into making choices before they were old enough to make up their own minds. But in the Nazis’ eyes, they were all Jews, and Christine knew that some of the people in her village would look down on the fact that he was a Jew and she was a Christian.

“Why are you looking so sad?” he said.

“I’m not,” she said, trying to smile. Then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe.

After a few blissful moments, he drew away, breathing hard. “I told you,” he said. “Luisa knows how I feel. We laugh about our parents trying so hard to make us a couple. She knows how I feel about you, and she wants me to be happy. And I have a confession to make. The real reason I came to see you today is because my father has given me permission to bring a date to our holiday celebration. And I’ll feel a fool if you don’t say yes.”

Christine stared at him, wide-eyed, her heart leaping in her chest, making her think of the startled sheep bounding across the grass.

The Bauermans’ December celebration was an important occasion, the one social gathering where all village officials, dignitaries, and lawyers, along with other influential people from nearby cities, always made an appearance. Christine didn’t personally know anyone who had attended the party as a guest, because the people she knew were factory workers, farmers, butchers, and masons.

But last year, Mutti had allowed her to help in the kitchen with the caterers, arranging expensive cheese and teaspoons of black caviar on crudités and scalloped crackers. Delivering the food to the servers at the end of the hall, she’d been mesmerized by what she’d seen and heard, the colorful scene reminding her of picture pages from a fairy tale. The sound of violins filled the air, and sparkling champagne overflowed in crystal glasses. Men in their finest tuxedos and women in long, shimmering gowns seemed to float as they waltzed across marble floors, like flowers that had pulled up their roots from the cold winter garden and glided into the light and warmth of the grand house. A million tiny lights twinkled on every banister and molding, and a shining menorah lit every decorated room. A huge evergreen tree, covered in silver and gold, towered to the ceiling in the foyer. Mutti kept reminding Christine she was there to work, not to stand there, eyes wide and mouth open, bewitched like a silly schoolgirl.

Now Isaac was asking her to be his date at the biggest celebration in the village, not to arrange sandwiches and drinks on a silver tray, but to attend as one of those women wearing an elegant, flowing gown. His question hung in the air between them, and she had no idea what to say. As if to punctuate her hesitation, the rhythmic chop of a wood ax echoed from the valley below. Finally, the shrill whistle of a train declaring its arrival at the village station broke her trance.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked.

“We used to watch from across the street,” she said, smiling.

“What do you mean?”

“We used to watch you. Me and my sister, Maria, and my best friend, Kate. We used to watch the rich people stepping out of their automobiles in their fancy clothes to come to your parents’ party. We saw you and your little sister greeting people at the door.”

“Ugh,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I hated that. All the ladies wanted a hug. And all the men patted me on the head like a dog. Even now, I’m taller than most of them, but they still insist on whacking me on the shoulder, saying things like . . . good boy, good boy, or your father’s a good man, a good man.”

“But you were so handsome in your black tuxedo. Kate and Maria thought so too. And little Gabriella is the spitting image of your mother, with her auburn hair and dark brown eyes.”

“Well, I don’t have to do that this year. Besides, Gabriella loves the job. She’ll be happy to have it to herself. She loves the attention.” Then, to Christine’s surprise, his face went dark. “But I’m afraid there won’t be as many people as usual.”

“Why not?” she asked, suddenly afraid it had something to do with the reason he’d invited her.

“A lot of my parents’ Jewish friends have left the country,” he said. “Their invitations came back marked: ‘Return to sender.
Adresse Unbekannt.
’ ”

The sudden change in his mood surprised her, and she tried to change the subject. She didn’t want this glorious moment to be ruined. “I don’t see how I can say yes,” she said. “I don’t have a nice enough dress.”

“We’ll find a dress,” he said, reaching for her. “My mother has a closet full of them. And if you can’t find one you like, I’ll take you shopping. Either way, you’ll be the most beautiful girl at the party.” Then he kissed her again, and the rest of the world, along with its cares and worries, disappeared.

A half hour later, they walked hand-in-hand out of the hills. In the fields, local farmers spread manure from horse-drawn wagons and tilled the remnants of summer wheat into the ground, using giant gray oxen to pull their plows.

To the east, a train was approaching, having passed through the village, its black length growing short and squat as it rounded the wide curve. Christine and Isaac stood near the crossing, his arms around her waist, to watch it pass. The locomotive picked up speed as it turned into the straightaway, then thundered past, hot currents of air pulling on their clothes and hair. Great swells of gray smoke billowed out from the hot stack, and the smell of burning coal filled the air. The giant cast-iron wheels clacked along the tracks, insistent and loud, consuming all other noise in the train’s frantic, mighty rush toward its next destination. Christine laughed and waved to the passengers behind the glass windows, trying to imagine what distant and exciting places they were headed to. After the last car passed, she and Isaac ran all the way back to the village.

C
HAPTER
2

C
hristine rubbed her thumb over the smooth surface of the stone inside her coat pocket as she walked, trying to remember every word Isaac had said. She wanted to memorize the strength of his arms around her waist, and the warmth of his kiss, so she could tell Kate every detail. If she hadn’t been in such a hurry to get to her best friend’s house, she would have stopped on the edge of the cobblestone street to take the stone out and look at it more closely. Instead, she smiled, pleased that he trusted her with something that meant so much to him. He’d kissed her again before they’d parted ways at the end of Haller Bridge, making her promise to find him when she came to work that afternoon, because he wanted to be with her when she told her mother that she wouldn’t be able to work at the holiday party this year.

“I’ll be in the garden,” he’d said. “Trimming the blackberry bush and repairing the limestone fence.”

“But how am I supposed to get out there? I have to pass through the house, and my mother will be waiting. . . .”

She could picture Mutti now—her spotless white apron, her red hair in a French twist—working at the massive oak island in the Bauermans’ tiled kitchen, the wood-fired stove behind her, turbulent and hissing with sputtering copper pots and steaming kettles. She imagined her mother’s face when she looked up from kneading dough to see Isaac standing beside Christine, possibly holding her hand. Mutti would either smile and ask what was going on, or turn, her face blank, pretending to tend to a pot on the woodstove. If she turned away, it would be her way of showing disapproval, and Christine wasn’t ready for anyone to ruin her day. Maybe they should wait. After all, the party was months away.

“There’s an old access door in the stone wall on the west side, along Brimbach Strasse,” he’d said. “I’ll unlock it from the inside.”

“But what if someone sees me and wonders what I’m doing?”

“Just open the door and slip inside,” he’d said. “No one will notice.” Then he reached in his pocket and folded something cool and hard into the palm of her hand. “Here,” he said. “I want you to bring this to me this afternoon. It’s a lucky stone my father gave me when I was eight. I was a big collector when I was little, dead insects, snail shells, pebbles, acorns, that kind of thing. But this is special. My father said it’s from the Triassic period. See, it’s got a snail fossil on one side. Maybe it’s foolish, but I keep it in my pocket all the time, because that’s when I first realized that there’s a whole world out there, waiting for me to learn about and explore it.”

She turned the stone over in her hand, smooth as silk on one side and indented with an intricate spherical pattern on the other, and said, “I don’t think it’s foolish.”

“Well, you’d better bring it back to me, first thing, or my luck might run out. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for me cutting my hand with the hacksaw or dropping a rock on my foot, would you?” Then he started across the bridge, sprinting in the other direction. “I’ll be waiting for it,” he called over his shoulder.

Now, she walked faster, bursting at the seams to share her news with Kate before going home to change. She and her best friend, Katya Hirsch, were only two weeks apart in age. Their mothers had been friends before they were born, and as newborns, they’d slept together in prams, bouncing along cobblestone streets on the way to market. As toddlers, they’d played together on a blanket in the sunny yard while their mothers picked plums. And as adolescents, they jumped rope for hours on end, dared each other to wade beneath Hangman’s Bridge, cut each other’s hair, and scared themselves silly with tales of the “Black Monk of Orlach,” who haunted the woods, or the “Water Girls,” who tricked people into falling into the river. Christine couldn’t wait to tell Kate that she was in love.

As she made her way along the sidewalk, she smiled, listening to the comforting noises of the bustling village. The rhythmic scratch of birch tree brooms on stone sidewalks and the flap of clothes in the breeze was accompanied by chickens clucking in dooryards, roosters crowing from their perches on garden gates and Dutch doors, and cows thumping against the inside walls of half-timbered barns. Wagon horses clip-clopped along the cobblestones, while sows and hogs grunted and squealed, rooting in sour-smelling pens built between sidewalks and buildings. The high-pitched clang of metal striking metal and the smoky aroma of hot fires rose from farmyards, where blacksmiths shoed horses and farmers repaired harnesses and tools. Mothers called out back doors for their children, and snippets of laughter and conversation drifted from open windows, along with the smell of baking bread and frying
Schnitzel
.

Christine skirted the old and middle-aged women trudging along in front of her, wondering if they could remember the giddy thrill of passion before life had forced them to rush through their days without seeing the world. Wearing dark scarves around their worry-lined faces, they pulled miniature wooden wagons with chapped, calloused hands, wobbly spoke-wheels click-clacking along the cobblestones behind them. Their carts held barrels of cider or tins of fresh milk, burlap bags of cabbage or potatoes, or, if they were lucky, the carcass of a rabbit or a slab of smoked pork.

She hurried past little girls playing make-believe on front door stoops, their soft curls falling from knitted caps, their thin arms clutching tattered dolls as they poured imaginary tea and nibbled on pretend
Lebkuchen
and
Springerle
cookies. A group of shouting, ruddy-cheeked boys ran by, kicking a dented can, their scuffed shoes and short, patched trousers making them look like a band of orphans. She felt sorry for all of them, not just because of their hardship, but because they had to go on with their ordinary, everyday lives while hers had been forever changed.