“Beg your pardon?”
“Your niece wasn’t adopted. She is here.”
31
Before...
JUNE TO JULY 1940
Over the next few days, I was one moment numb with disbelief that Brigitta was dead, and the next either consumed with sorrow or seething with anger that we’d all been kept from her as she lay dying. Martine, at least, should have been allowed to see her sick child. What if Brigitta succumbed to her illness because of loneliness and fear, begging for herMuttiwith gasping breaths as she grew weaker? What if Brigitta could have rallied if only she’d been able to have her mother hold her and soothe her fevered brow and sing to her? Visions of such scenes tormented me day and night.
Martine refused to believe that her child was gone, insisting it was a trick of the government to keep them parted. It made no difference when Johannes told her that those in power had no reason to tell them their daughter was dead if she wasn’t.
“It was just Brigitta’s time,” he’d said to his wife that first terrible day. “Pneumonia can be a difficult disease, Martine. You know this. Your own grandmother—”
“My grandmother was seventy-two years old when she died!”Martine had shouted. “And my baby girl is only seven. She’s seven, Johannes. She needs a step stool for the bathroom sink. She still has baby teeth!”
As their parents argued nearly hourly about this, the remaining Maier children wandered aimlessly around the house. The boys seemed in a brooding daze and the girls acted out in agitated confusion. I knew I had to be strong for them, and as I summoned the resolve to do so, I discovered that attending to Brigitta’s siblings kept me from caving into despondency myself. The children needed to be listened to and cared for. And they needed answers.
“Did it hurt when she died?” Liliana asked me on the second day.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I think Brigitta probably just went to sleep one night and, because her tired lungs could not give her all the air she needed, she just slipped away without waking up.”
“Is she in heaven?” Hanna asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Does she have all her fingers now?” Amelia asked. “And straight legs?”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe. I don’t know. We loved her just the way she was, didn’t we? So maybe it’s quite all right to think of her there just the way we loved her.”
They nodded, relieved, it seemed.
The boys had different questions. How come the hospital didn’t let anyone see their sister before she died? I didn’t have an answer for that. How did Brigitta get pneumonia? It was June. Warm and sunny. I didn’t have an answer for that, either. But I thought they were good questions.
On the third day, Martine’s parents arrived from Innsbruck, and the children naturally turned to them for comfort. I couldn’t help feeling cast aside. I tried to busy myself with answering the doorbell and receiving the covered dishes, baked goods, andflowers brought by neighbors and friends, but Martine’s mother stepped into that responsibility, too. When callers came to offer their sympathy, they wanted to talk to the family, not the nanny. I spent much of the fourth day trying to stay out of the way.
It took five days for Brigitta’s remains to be released. Johannes had offered to hire a driver from a funeral home to go to Am Steinhof and collect his daughter’s body but was informed her remains would be sent to the house by an official transport. Martine was expecting a casket and one last look at her little girl. I assumed this, too. But Brigitta’s remains arrived in a wooden box the size of a breadbasket. She’d been cremated.
Again Martine raged that Brigitta was still alive and being kept from her, and again Johannes struggled to convince her that the Reich had no purpose for doing such a thing. The Reich was all about its purposes. He showed her the death certificate and she screamed that it was just a piece of paper. When her mother tried to calm her down, Martine stormed from the house. After an hour had gone by and she’d not returned, Johannes got into the Opel to look for her. On instinct, he drove the nine kilometers to Am Steinhof and learned Martine had just been arrested for refusing to leave the property. She had taken a taxi there. He’d been able to convince the local magistrate that his poor wife was overcome with grief. Martine was released, the charges were dropped, and the couple arrived home well after dark.
On the sixth day, the family brought the little box of ashes to St. Elisabeth’s so that the priest would bless Brigitta’s remains and conduct a funeral mass, which was to be followed by an interment in the mausoleum at the central cemetery in Simmering, where Johannes’s parents had been laid to rest years before. Martine had at first refused to go to either place. Johannes, who never raised his voice to his wife, did so then, telling her she would go and pay her respects, and he would not stand for her not to.
The family dressed in black and sat in the front pews of thechurch, with me just behind them. There were music and prayers and words of reassurance from the priest, but the longer I sat there listening, the angrier I became. What had been a comfort a few days earlier—picturing Brigitta in heaven—was now a jagged thorn. Brigitta was no doubt flooding the halls of paradise with her laughter and smiles, but she belonged here on earth with us, not up in the clouds.
And for the love of God, why had she been sent home in ashes? What kind of thoughtless, heartless regime does that? Unless those were not Brigitta’s ashes in that little box. I couldn’t help but share Martine’s doubts. What if the Reich had some dark purpose for children like Brigitta, concealing them away, intent on everyone forgetting about them? As I sat in the hard wooden pew, I couldn’t shake the nauseating feeling that something dark and malevolent was now hovering over that pretty hospital campus called Am Steinhof.
I impulsively stood up and turned to flee the sanctuary, my shoes tapping out a noisy retreat. People turned to look at me as I passed them, including Emilie Pichler, whose gaze lingered on me in a curious, telling way. It was almost as if Emilie had discerned why I couldn’t sit there any longer listening to empty consolations, almost as if she shared my contempt and suspicions but was better able to conceal it.
Two hours later, back at the town house, as friends served coffee and little sandwiches and Martine sat glassy-eyed in the parlor, I caught Emilie Pichler looking at me again, in the same penetrating way. Our eyes met for a few seconds, held each other’s gaze, and then Emilie made her way to me.
“Fraulein Calvert.” The woman’s voice was quiet, as though she was intent on not being overheard. “Perhaps you could come by the school the day after tomorrow? I have some artwork of Brigitta’s that she told me she’d created especially for you. Shallwe say ten o’clock?” Before I could say I would be there, Emilie Pichler bowed slightly in farewell and left.
The following day, I overheard Johannes tell the children seated at breakfast to pack their suitcases when they were finished with their muesli, because they were leaving with their grandparents that morning for Innsbruck. Their mother was going, too. When I started upstairs from the kitchen to pack my own bags—I always accompanied Martine and the children when they went to Innsbruck—Johannes called me into the parlor.
He asked me to have a seat on the sofa, and he took an armchair opposite me.
“The children and Martine are going to be staying with her parents for the foreseeable future, not just the summer,” Johannes said. “My deployments are only going to get longer as the war gets more complex, and Martine cannot stay in this house. Not now. Not after what has happened.”
