Perhaps that was why Frau Dornbach closed these curtains. Perhaps she didn’t like the Beinhaus either.
While Annika no longer laughed about death, it still made her nervous. In fact, it terrified her. After she died, she hoped her bones would stay intact and that someone would bury her near her mother’s grave on the hill.
Annika rested her broom and dustpan by the dressing table and placed her bucket of rags and jar of Domestos on the hardwood that rimmed the carpeted floor. Then she tied back the curtains and opened the windows to flood the room with mountain air, mollifying the remnants of dust and mold that had accumulated over four hundred years. Generations had lived and died in this house, but mold clung to the place like the salt buried deep in the mine above Hallstatt.
A Victrola stood near the bureau with dozens of vinyl records in a case beside it. Annika selected one of Bruno Walter conducting Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and let the music permeate the room as the crossbill’s song had the forest. Along with the sunlight, the melody brightened the room, and she wished she could stay here all day.
Her duster in hand, she stepped toward the bureau, but the shoe boxes in Frau Dornbach’s dressing room seemed to call out to her. Dozens of them packed neatly into an antique armoire, many acquired during Frau Dornbach’s trips to England and France.
The cleaning, Annika decided, could wait.
The orchestra playing in the background, she began unloading and neatly restacking the boxes in a separate pile near the door, so she could put each one back where it belonged. Frau Dornbach’s shoes were beautiful, but Annika didn’t spend time opening all the lids. She only wanted the one at the bottom, the pale-green box striped with ivory and stamped withGeorgette of Paris.
Even a box seemed more glamorous when it was from Paris.
Instead of shoes, the box now housed ten envelopes stuffed with photographs. She shouldn’t know this, of course, but over the years she’d learned plenty of things about the Dornbach family that were supposed to be secret.
Annika carefully thumbed through the contents of the box, careful not to disturb the order or leave smudges on the pictures. Sometimes she wondered why Frau Dornbach kept these photographs in a shoe box, but she could never ask. Neither the Dornbachs nor her father could ever find out exactly how nosy she’d been.
Some of the photographs inside the envelopes were taken on a vacation to the Mediterranean coast while others were of the Alps. One was of Max on snow skis when he was about ten. He’d wavered over the years about things like music and books, but he’d never wavered in his love of skiing, whether it was cross country through the valleys or down the groomed slopes.
But these photographs left her empty, teasing her with Max’s presence when she couldn’t speak to him.
One of the envelopes contained several sepia-colored photographs that she’d never seen before, each about twenty centimeters long. One showed an older couple standing beside a carriage, the woman pretty but stern looking, her dark hair pulled back in a knot. The man beside her held a top hat close to his waistcoat, his long beard cascading down over his chest. Relatives, she assumed, from decades back.
Max never talked about his extended family except for an uncle who had immigrated to the United States and an aunt who’d moved to Paris with her French husband. Then again, Annika never talked about her family either. The grandfather on hermother’s side had died in the Great War, and her grandmother followed soon after. The grandparents on her father’s side lived in Linz, but the Knopf family never visited. Vati had some sort of falling out with them when he was younger.
Under the photographs were other mementos. A lock of blond hair, probably from Max. She brushed her fingers over it and then cradled it for a moment against her cheek. There was a piece of blanket in the box and white booties with pink strings. Those she assumed to be from the baby girl Frau Dornbach lost in the early 1930s. If they’d given her a name, Annika didn’t know what it was. Max only talked of his sister once, and then he seemed to bury the memory with his animals.
Max loved well, but then he let go. Annika, on the other hand, clung to the people she loved as the Vogelfreunde did with their prized birds. Except she never released them.
Perhaps her clinging was more like the salt in the mines. Once hardened, it remained until someone flooded it from the chamber with water or broke it away with a pickax.
At the bottom of the box, she found something else new. A star necklace, the six-pointed gold pendant ringed with diamonds. It reminded Annika of the necklace Sarah wore. The golden Star of David. Though Sarah referred to it as a shield instead of a star.
She’d seen this symbol in the papers as well. The Jewish athletes in Vienna, they stitched the shield to their uniforms.
But why did Frau Dornbach have this symbol of the Jewish people in her box?
She pressed the necklace into her palm, her back against the armoire. Perhaps one of Frau Dornbach’s ancestors had purchased it from a Jewish jeweler. With its gold and diamonds, the worthof it must be... She couldn’t imagine how many schillings one might pay for a necklace like this.
The chain dangled down her sleeve, the gold threading the forest green in her sweater.
One day, would Frau Dornbach pass this down to Max’s wife?
Annika lifted the necklace to her throat, clasping the chain around her neck, closing her eyes. In this quiet space, she could see Max in Vienna, his gaze wandering out of his classroom window. Was he thinking about her as well?
“Annika?” It was Vati calling her name, the sound muffled in these walls.
She gasped, reaching for the necklace clasp underneath her braid, trying to release its hold before her father found her with it. When the clasp finally gave way, she dropped it back into the shoe box, but before she slammed the lid, the stench from cigarette smoke filtered through the door. And then her father was in the dressing room.
She shoved the Georgette of Paris box away as if it were an ember that had leapt out of its fire. Unfortunately, Vati watched its flight across the dressing room floor. Then he surveyed the rest of the shoe boxes stacked beside the antique bureau.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Nothing, Vati.”
His voice escalated. “You’re rummaging through their things?”
