The following morning, I woke early. The third floor I’d always shared with Brigitta was painfully quiet. I went downstairs to make the coffee but found Johannes in the kitchen with the French press already out. We had not talked again after dinner the previous night. After the kitchen was cleaned up and the children were in bed, Johannes hadn’t emerged again from the master bedroom. He made the coffee now and spoke to me as if no time had passed since our last words at the dinner table the night before.
“It served no purpose going to Am Steinhof yourself,” he said as he scooped the ground coffee beans into a measuring cup.
“It was the only thing I could think of to do. So I did it.”
“But that hospital didn’t take her from us. It was an administrative office here in Vienna that ordered it. I will go there tomorrow.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I need you to stay here and do your job.”
He sounded angry with me. Like maybe he believed it was my fault, too, that Brigitta was gone.
“If I had known this would happen, I never would have let that woman in the house,” I said.
Johannes set down the tin of coffee and stood silent and still at the counter for a moment. “I am not saying this is your fault,” he finally said.
“But I told Fraulein Platz I would be here for Brigitta for years to come. Years. I made it seem like she wouldneedsomeone for years to come.”
“These people don’t need a nanny to tell them what kind of care someone like Brigitta needs and for how long. This isn’t about whether or not you will be able to keep renewing your visa for years on end. It’s not about you at all. This is all about Brigitta. All they had to do is look at her medical file. The visit here just confirmed what they already supposed.”
“Then I should have told Martine that woman had been here.”
Johannes sighed, picked up the tin again. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything anymore.”
The kettle of water began to boil, filling the kitchen with its trembling wail.
•••
Over the next three days, Johannes was in and out of the house, tending to his wife when he was home and making the case for his daughter at the local administrative office for the Reich when he was not. I went to Brigitta’s school to ask Emilie Pichler if any more children had been taken. None had, but I learned the parents of the other six students snatched the same day as Brigitta were also visiting the local administrative office and writing letters to higher-ups. I learned parents of children too young yet for school had been forced to hand over their disabled babies and toddlers, and they were doing the same. Some of these parents, Emilie said, were in the beginning stages of planning a joint trip to Berlin to advocate for the return of their children.
Johannes also made daily calls to Am Steinhof to ask about visiting Brigitta. Each time, he was told there had been such a large influx of new residents that visiting hours were still temporarily suspended.
“When will they be reinstated?” he’d asked.
“Soon,” was the answer.
By the afternoon of the third day, however, Johannes’s leave was nearly up. He was to depart in the morning to return to his division, which was still deployed for control measures in Poland. As he placed one of his bags at the door for the next day’s early departure, Martine implored him to ask for an extension.
“I won’t be granted one, Martine,” he said. The children were still at school and only I was in the house with them. “I was lucky to get the time off that I did.”
“But you haven’t even asked for it. You can at least ask!”
“It won’t do any good.”
“Give me your commander’s telephone number and I will ask him myself!” Martine shouted, and Johannes finally said he would make the call. But he insisted he needed to finish packing first. Martine, furious with him, climbed the stairs to their room and slammed the door shut.
I wanted to be anywhere but in the same room while they fought, but I’d been right there at the kitchen table, just a few yards from them, mending one of Liliana’s blouses.
Seconds later, Johannes stepped over to the telephone on its little table by the entrance to the kitchen. Apparently he was not going to pack his second bag before making the call. Now he was only a few feet away from me on the other side of the wall. In another short stretch of seconds, he was talking to one of his superiors. I heard him ask if he might be granted an extension of his leave, as his wife was not well. The person on the other end of the line began to yell, his voice clearly projecting out of the handset and into the airspace where I sat.
“We are at war!” the man yelled.
And then the man said something so vile I stabbed my finger with the needle.
“Stop obsessing over your monkey child, Captain Maier, and get back to your duties.”
When I heard Johannes answer, “Yes, Obersturmbannführer,” I dropped the mending and bolted for the back door to the alley to get away from the phone call, the house, the madness. I came back inside only after I was sure Johannes was no longer downstairs.
