Although her stomach was careening, Rose obliged. She could feel an emerging, nearly drowsy sensation that took her a few beats to recognize as calm. Bette transferred the ladle to Rose, but kept her hands on Rose’s, and it was this warmth too, this feeling of support and connection, that Rose cottoned to, would remember for years to come when Vienna seemed like a dream.
“Now!” Bette ordered, and Rose released the bubbling metallic mass. A bright, tinkling noise sounded as the hot metal hit the water. Though there was little splash, Rose tipped back. She wiped her sweaty forehead and peered over the pail. The metal had hardened immediately. She couldn’t discern its shape. She was almost afraid to look. Over the past week, she had listened attentively as Bette described the possible shapes and their corresponding fortunes: Would they see a ship, which would indicate travel in the next year? (Rose very much hoped this would be the case.) A ball could mean that luck would roll your way. If the metal resembled an anchor, that meant that you must help someone in need; and a cross . . . “Well, let us hope we don’t see a cross,” Bette had said, making the sign of a cross.
But all Rose could make out was a bubbly surface: “That’s money! That’s definitely money,” Bette said with true excitement, but Rose was looking down farther—more money would mean more movies, it would mean more travel too, wouldn’t it? But then, oh, there was something else, a small little something, a thin piece of metal no wider than her thumb.
“Do you see that? What’s that little piece, there?” Rose pointed.
But Bette had already turned, she had pulled out the spoon. “I saw it—that doesn’t count—let’s try again.”
In February, Bette’s mother fell ill and she went home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters. In March, Chancellor Schuschnigg opened the gate for Hitler after all. Now instead of shillings and groschen, there were marks and pfennig. There were German soldiers in uniform on the street saluting one another. They spoke in funny accents, which Papi imitated with gusto at home, but fell silent when outside.
The Vienna spring of 1938 was unusually balmy. The lilac bloomed early, the chestnut trees preened with their gaudy pink blossoms, and the park benches sprouted new signs: no jews permitted to sit here.
In school, Rose and her Jewish classmates were moved to the back of the room, six of them occupying the last row, separated from the Christian students by two empty rows. They were a world apart now, the Jewish students. Rose hated sitting in the back. She hated class. And to make matters worse, Gerhard didn’t have to go to school anymore. The new restrictions said that Jewish children the age of fifteen or older didn’t have to attend. It was so unfair, Rose thought, why couldn’t she stay home like her brother?
By June, Bette was no longer allowed to work for them. Wolfe’s importing business—which Rose’s grandfather had started when he was a young man living in Constantinople decades earlier—had been repatriated. Papi disappeared for hours at a time into his study, barricading himself behind the tall thin pages of the Neue Freie Presse. But more distressingly to Rose, nearly as significant as Bette’s departure, was this: Rose wasn’t allowed to go to the movie house anymore.
“I can’t go to any movie?” she asked. For a moment, she could imagine a dividing line: Snow White, yes; anything with Deanna Durbin, no.
“It’s part of the restrictions,” Papi said. “Those are the rules.”
They were sitting at the dark oak dining table after dinner, drinking coffee and eating tiny delicious choux pastries with cream filling that Tante Greta had brought over. Mutti kept the bell to the right of her, as if a new unnamed maid might miraculously appear if she rang.
They had been talking about visas. They were always talking about visas, Rose thought, tired. They weren’t going anywhere. Tante Greta had come for a visit while Onkel George went to the American embassy. Everyone said there were no American visas available until 1950, but still, they went to put their names on the list.
“Can Ilse still go to the movies?” Rose asked.
“Of course. She’s not Jewish,” Gerhard said, waving a spoon at his younger sister. “Idiot.”
Rose waited for her father to admonish her brother, but Wolfe only lifted his eyes skyward. Rose followed his gaze up to the plaster ceiling.
“She’s a child,” Charlotte said to her husband, plainly enough for everyone to hear. “You think they would bother a child?”
His dark eyes became slits. “Do you really want to find out?” he snapped.
Mutti shook her head, gaze averted. Rose shot a look to her brother, but Gerhard bent over his plate and ate uncharacteristically fast.
Papi looked at all of them, into that great bowl of silence. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped. “My apologies,” he said. His strangled voice was far worse than his yelling. He pushed his chair back, hurried out of the room.
For a moment, there was only the sound of scraping: Gerhard’s spoon against china, as he took great care to chase down every last morsel of whipped cream. Then Tante Greta spoke: “And, Charlotte, Rose should get rid of her movie-stub collection too; it’s unhygienic to have all those old tickets lying around.”
Rose stared at her plate, blistered by her fury. She hated every single member of her family, but her Tante Greta most of all; she truly did.
A week later, Rose, Mutti, and Gerhard decamped from Vienna to spend the summer months with Charlotte’s parents in the country in Parndoff, and for a while everything seemed normal, good even. Every morning Rose helped her grandfather tug his apartment window open and lower a string down to the street. Within a few minutes a boy would yell out, “Ready!” and Rose’s grandfather, with her assistance, would haul the string back up, the day’s newspaper attached.
Rose spent countless afternoons swimming in the Danube with Gerhard, who liked to ignore her but never said no when she tagged along. Rose would lie on the marshy banks, pushing her toes into the warm squishy mud, the sunlight against her bare arms a reminder that no, she hadn’t fallen asleep. She wondered if Heinrich had gone back to the holiday camp. She listened to the drone of insects, she tried to ascertain the shapes of the gunmetal clouds scuttling above. She decided that the country was better than the city after all.
One afternoon she and Mutti went to the grocery store. As they were about to walk inside, Charlotte recognized a stout, redheaded woman fishing a triangle of cheese out of the wooden barrel out front. “Gertrude?” she said, “Gertrude Bieler?”
The woman looked up.
“It’s Charlotte Zimmer. How nice to see you!”
With seeming ease, the fat woman spit at Mutti—a great hurl of saliva. Rose saw it darken a spot on her mother’s lovely cotton blouse.
“What do you people want?” Frau Bieler hissed. “Why are you still here?”
Charlotte stood, a smile cemented on her face. She smiled and she didn’t say a word.
“Juden.” Frau Bieler spit again, this time at her feet.
It was Rose who tugged at her mother’s hand, Rose who sprang back to life first. “Mutti, Mutti,” she said, the words tumbling out of her.