“Please, Max,” she said. “I don’t want to leave without my family.”
And with those words, he felt trapped inside a box that kept shrinking. He’d thought Luzi would go if he secured the papers.
“Then we must find a way to get you and your family out together.”
Marta stirred, reaching her arms out for Luzi. He handed the baby back as she began to cry.
Luzi nodded toward the upper windows on her building. “Ihave to feed her before our neighbor complains.”
When Max leaned forward to kiss Luzi’s cheek, Marta gripped his ear. Her cries stopped for a moment, distracted by her find. Luzi laughed, and Max smiled at the glimpse of joy a child could bring.
He took the folded paper out of his rucksack and handed it to Luzi. “Take this.”
“What is it?”
“Your baptismal certificate in the Catholic Church.”
She looked at the paper as if it were powdered with poison. She and her parents may not be practicing Jews, but they were grounded in the heritage of their ancestors’ faith. “I can’t take that.”
“You might need it, Luzi. And your father wanted you to have it.”
When Marta began to cry again, Luzi reached for the certificate.
“Good-bye, Max,” she said before escaping back inside.
He didn’t like how she’d said her good-bye, so final. As if she thought she might not see him again.
He stayed in place, underneath the light of the Weiss library. After it turned off, another light flicked on, farther down the apartment. Luzi’s bedroom? She’d yet to draw the curtains, and it took every ounce of strength for him to turn away.
“I see you’re enjoying the view here as well.”
Max swiveled at the sound of the voice behind him. It was Ernst Schmid, except the man was wearing a brown shirt and red armband with a black swastika emblazoned on the white circle. He’d gained weight since Max had seen him last, feasting, perhaps, at the table of his commander.
“What are you doing here?” Max demanded.
“Same as you,” Ernst said, nodding toward the lit window.
Max pounded his fist into his hand, wishing that he could knock the smirk off this man’s face. “You’d best keep walking.”
“And you’d best straighten up your priorities, Max.” Ernst glanced at the window again before looking back at him. “I hearda rumor at headquarters...,” he started. “Something to do with your mother.”
Max cringed.
“Heard she was a—” The word he said was so terrible, so vile, that Max didn’t think; he flung out both hands and shoved Ernst back.
Ernst’s hand dropped to his holster and he pulled out a black pistol, aiming it at Max’s head. “Don’t touch me again.”
Max backed away, his hands up. If the Gestapo found out one of their cronies shot the son of Herr Dornbach, surely there’d be hell to pay. Then again, if they’d already begun to spread the rumors about his mother, maybe they’d spin his death as the son of a Jewess, another piece of trash the Nazis had heroically cleaned from their city. Or Ernst would say that Max attacked him first.
He wouldn’t be much help to Luzi dead.
“Go home,” Ernst said.
Max stepped into the trees, but he didn’t go far. He waited until the light in the window was extinguished. And Ernst Schmid walked away.
Tears, they caked Luzi’s cheeks like rosin on the hair of her bow. Aviolin wouldn’t play without rosin; some people didn’t know that. No music, not a single sound, came from the strings without the rosin to gently coax it out. A violinist, no matter how good, relied on this amber block made from pines.
She brushed the tears away as she hurried through the mist-laced streets. She couldn’t play her music without rosin, and how—how was she going to live without her sister?
