The Woman Who Heard Color (34 page)

Lauren knew now that this picture had been taken shortly before the German bombings began to destroy much of London.

Finally, several days later, Lauren got up the nerve to ask her mother.

“Your father, his sister, your grandmother Rosenthal,” she said. “Your father says you have your grandmother’s eyes.” Lauren wondered at the time if she, too, had crazy eyes.

“What happened to them?” she asked.

“They’re gone now,” her mother replied.

 

 

I
sabella lifted the cardboard backing off the frame and removed it to expose the back of the photo.

At the top her mother had written—no, it appeared to be Aunt Katie’s hand—the date 1936, Isabella’s age 9, and Willy’s 25.

Below this were several lines in her mother’s script, so she knew these had been added later. They appeared to be dates, then initials, names of German cities, German words. Isabella stared down at the letters and numbers, as if reading some sort of code.
St. Galerie. Galerie N. M.
Her heart tightened and contracted, her stomach turned. She gasped.

After several moments, she shook the frame, dropping the shattered glass into the wastebasket. She picked up the glass of wine sitting on the kitchen table next to the empty salad plate. Taking a sip, she stared down at the words her mother had written.

Was this the very information she had been searching for these past many years?

Had her mother known that one day Isabella would find it?

Yet alone it made no sense at all. Unless it was combined with what Mr. Keller had told her.

 

 

L
auren sat on her bed, Adam, bathed and pajamaed, cuddled at her side. Her laptop, the notes she jotted down on the way home, along with a stack of art books, lay out on the bedspread. She’d just gone through the photos on her phone, studying them, wishing she’d had the opportunity to take more. She felt only a trickle of guilt. Mrs. Fletcher had asked that she not take notes and, as Lauren was about to leave, that she share nothing they had spoken of. She’d told Patrick at dinner that she’d promised Isabella she wouldn’t disclose what they had talked about. He was disappointed, but understood. Lauren wouldn’t show the photos to anyone either, not even Patrick. Not just yet.

One of the art books lay opened to the section on the Expressionists. Adam was especially fond of these paintings—the ones with the
best
colors and blobs, as he called them.

He had gone to his room to retrieve his crayons to do a picture of his own, based on the very Kandinsky that Lauren had been studying—
Composition II
. As he drew, his tongue moving along with his busy hand, he asked his mother to tell him a story about the painting.

It was a little ritual they went through often when Lauren was studying, reading about a particular artist whose work she’d come across in her own work. For those paintings that were representational, the stories often involved the people and the recognizable images in the paintings. Sometimes they were based on true stories, often revised to earn a “G” rating. Sometimes Lauren just made them up. Adam seemed to prefer the made-up stories. He liked stories where the heroes and villains were easily identified. Throw in a monster or two and he was especially delighted.

Lauren started in, “There was once a lovely young woman who heard music in the colors.”

“Was she a princess?” Adam asked, looking up at his mother with large, curious blue eyes. He had his father’s eyes and cute round nose. His hair was dark, like both Lauren and Patrick, but he had inherited his mother’s curls.

Lauren smiled, finding it interesting that Adam made no comment about colors making music. His interest was in whether she was a princess or not.

“Yes,” Lauren said, “she was a princess and her name was Hanna.”

“Like Hannah at my school?”

“A little bit,” Lauren answered, thinking of the beautiful three-year-old, blue-eyed blonde in Adam’s preschool. She thought perhaps her son had a little crush on the girl. “She was also very pretty. But this Hanna’s hair was bright red.”

“No, not red,” Adam said with a giggle, shaking his head of bouncy dark curls. They’d had a similar discussion earlier about red hair. To Adam, red was the color of an apple. People didn’t have
red
hair.

“Reddish brown,” Lauren conceded with a laugh. “Okay—reddish brown.” She picked a crayon out of his box labeled Burnt Sienna, though she knew this wasn’t right. Too brown. How had Isabella described her mother’s hair—
brilliant, showstopping red
? Lauren wondered for a moment if she was betraying her promise to Isabella Fletcher—it was Hanna Schmid Fleischmann she was thinking of as she told Adam the story of the woman who heard music in the colors.

“And then,” Adam said dramatically, his hands rising into the air, “a bad man comes and tooks all the colors away. And all the music.” He was lately into joining in the storytelling himself, adding his own elements of drama. “All the peoples are very sad.”

“Yes, the bad man came and took them away.”

“And the kingdom was sad and black and lonely,” Adam said. He looked up and grinned at his mother. “What is the bad man’s name?”

“Adolf,” the word slipped out.

“That’s a funny name,” he said, nose wrinkling.

“This story takes place in Germany,” Lauren replied, at the same time telling herself,
Not yet.

“What’s Germany?”

“A faraway place.”

“Across the ocean?”

“Yes.”

“Are there castles and monsters?”

Lauren said, “Germany is full of lovely castles.”

“Can we go there?”

“Someday. Maybe.” She thought of the lovely, magical Neuschwanstein Castle she’d toured years ago in Bavaria. Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle had been modeled after this very castle, which looked like something out of a fairy tale. Adam would love it.

“And then the good guy,” the little boy continued, “comes and founds the colors and the music and puts them all back happy on the earth.”

“Yes,” Lauren said, wondering what was wrong with her that she would tell such a story to a small child, making a fairy tale out of a terrible reality. Soon enough he would learn the truth about the evil man in Germany who had taken away the music, the colors.

“Time for bed, sweetie,” Lauren said as she scooped up a handful of crayons and started replacing them one by one in the box. Adam helped her, slowly putting them in, point up, just the way she’d shown him.

“But I want to finish the story,” he said. She could see he was being so particular with the crayons in hope of extending his bedtime. “I want you to tell me about the man who rescued all the colors and music.”

Lately he was into such big words—
rescued
?

“What makes you think it was a man?” Lauren said with a laugh. “Maybe it was a woman.”

“A mom?” Adam asked, an incredulous grin spreading over his face.

“Yes,” Lauren replied, sweeping him up off the bed into her arms. They needed to do a little more gender-equality training at that preschool, she thought. “Yes, a mom,” she said emphatically.

As she carried him into his room and settled him into bed, kissed his forehead, and tucked in the covers, she was struck by one of those moments of pure, true love.

She stepped out, and then glanced back as she lingered for a long moment in the doorway, wondering what she would do to protect this child from harm. What she wouldn’t do. Send him away if necessary? And what would she do to survive if they were separated? What would she go through to find her way back to him?

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

 

Late one afternoon when she returned to her hotel, Hanna found a letter from her brother Frederick. She wondered how he knew where to find her. She had not been in contact with him for more than a year.

The note was brief, the writing shaky, almost unreadable, and at first Hanna doubted it had come from him. His wife used to write, but she’d been gone for years now, and Hanna didn’t recall ever getting a letter from her brother.

Much time has passed since your last stay at the farm,
he wrote.
Please come for a visit.

The brevity, typical of her brother, convinced Hanna it was indeed Frederick’s hand. But she found the formality of the words very odd. He must have something to tell her, something he could not write in his letter.

She requested time to visit her family before her departure for Switzerland. She did not believe her request would be granted, though her tasks toward the auction had been completed. The art had been prepared; the proper packing and shipping for transport to Switzerland had been arranged. Hanna was scheduled to leave the following week to arrive for the uncrating and installation at the first exhibition preview. At times she wondered if she would truly be allowed to leave for Switzerland. Hitler had eyes and spies everywhere. Possibly one of them was aware that she wanted desperately to go to America. Yet, she had no money, and she was without the proper papers, even if she could flee from Switzerland.

Surprisingly, she was granted a short leave. Her young assistant, newly assigned—her third—was sent to accompany her.

The day of her arrival, Frederick, Hanna, and her escort, a thin young man named Klaus, sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

“The children are well?” Hanna asked.

“Ja.”
Frederick didn’t know that she had lost her own son, but she would not tell him about Willy. Such conversation might lead to talk of Isabella, safe now in America.

Hanna surveyed the room and realized how little their home had changed—the same stove where her mother, Hanna, Käthe, and then their stepmother had prepared meals. The plank floors covered with well-worn rugs where little Peter often curled up for a nap, where Leni played with her dolls, perhaps dreaming of the day she would be a mother.

Then she glanced at young Klaus as he got up to refill his cup for the second time, and Hanna realized how much everything in her own life had changed since she’d left her childhood home.

“The grandchildren?” she asked her brother.

“Visiting with Fritz and his wife, her family, before the harvest.” He had lost weight. She knew he was not well, as he held his cup with a shaky hand. She thought of the uneven script of his letter, while Frederick went on to explain that his youngest son and two grandsons were serving in Hitler’s army.

“Fritz has been allowed to stay?”

“Hitler believes the farmers are as important as the military in rebuilding the strength of Germany.”

Young Klaus sat quietly, gulping his coffee. Again he refilled his cup, and then held up the empty pot. Hanna rose to make more. Klaus paced the floor, gazing out now and then through the window as he waited.

Shortly, after the coffee was ready and Hanna had poured them each another cup, after little conversation had passed, she commenting on the warm weather, the young man excused himself. Perhaps to relieve his boredom, as well as his bladder, Hanna thought.

“I’m going to Switzerland,” she told her brother.

Frederick nodded, but he did not inquire about her present employment. Her escort’s red-and-white swastika armband left no doubt that she was working for the party or the government, now little distinction between the two. Surely Frederick understood it was not a position she had taken voluntarily.

“Helene visited,” he said.

Hanna gasped with surprise. “Oh, thank God she’s alive.” And not in one of the camps, she reflected with a prayer of gratitude. Her gratitude was accompanied by a sense of relief that Helene had not attempted to contact her or come to her with the sad news of Jakob’s death. After the events of November ninth, life had become especially dangerous for any Jew attempting to move about in Hitler’s Germany, and Hanna was now living within a nest of Nazis. But why had Helene come to visit Frederick? As far as Hanna knew, she had never come to the farm, had never communicated with Frederick in any way. “You know about Willy?” she whispered, feeling a tear well in her eye.

“Ja,”
Frederick replied, but his eyes could not meet hers. “I’m sorry, Hanna.” He glanced cautiously toward the door.

Hanna knew they would have little time to speak before Klaus returned.

“Why did she come?” Hanna asked softly.

“She has left you some egg money.” He smiled, despite what Hanna knew was on both their minds, thoughts they would not speak aloud.

“Egg money?” She realized he meant there was something upstairs in the girls’ bedroom, in the bureau in the middle drawer, right between Käthe’s and Leni’s. She had never suspected her brothers knew where she kept her private treasures. She smiled now, too, thinking how simple it would have been for anyone to know.

“Also, something in the barn,” Frederick added in a low voice. “I will keep it safe until you return from Switzerland.”

“What is it?” Hanna whispered to Frederick. She did not tell him she would not come back, something she had sensed since arrangements were made for her journey. She did not tell him that her nights were filled with dreams of rescue, dreams of Johann, that these dreams were always overpowered by the nightmares. She did not tell him that after the auction she would have no useful purpose to Hitler, that these terrifying nights were filled with visions of her own death.

“Helene called it ‘Willy’s Colors,’ ” he replied.

“A painting?” Hanna asked in shock.

“From Botho von Gamp?”

“I don’t know. She said you would understand, because both Willy and you had loved it.”

Hanna wanted desperately to go to the barn to look, but soon Klaus returned. She couldn’t imagine how Helene had managed to get the Kandinsky. When they parted the last time, she feared that Helene hated her for leaving her son to die in America, for working for Hitler. Had she been wrong?