Fall, back in Vienna. The days growing shorter, the sky paper white. Rose attended an all-Jewish school deep in the nineteenth district. It took more than an hour to get there by tram. There was discussion of keeping her at home. But for the time being, she continued to go. Everything, it seemed, now fell under the category of “for the time being.”
Each day, a different embassy. This was how her parents spent their days, waiting at consulates for hours at a time—Canada, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ireland, Cuba, China, it didn’t matter where—lines snaking around corners, switchbacking up the sidewalk. A new dialect sprang up at home: Words like affidavits, baptismal certificates, exit and entry visas dominated the conversation. It was all the adults talked about: Try the Bolivian embassy in the late afternoon; avoid the man with the leathery face.
Wasn’t there anything else they could discuss? Rose didn’t want to hear their strained voices, the urgency with which they spoke. She missed Bette.
And Gerhard wasn’t around to distract her. Her brother would disappear for hours at a time, sometimes saying he was going to meet Oskar, other times just slipping out without warning. They all knew he was going to see Ilse. “At least he doesn’t look Jewish,” Rose overheard her mother say to her father. It was true; Gerhard was rangy and blond, and at sixteen he had a good couple of inches on their father, hitting six feet. Rose knew that Gerhard’s looks brought her parents no small amount of comfort as they thought about him on the streets alone. She tried not to think about her own dark complexion.
In early November, a Jew murdered a Nazi in Paris. School was let out early, and Rose was told to hurry home, avoid the main thoroughfares and the trams. In the flat, they gathered around the wireless, glued to the broadcasts. Her parents wouldn’t let her go outside for days.
There were so many stories swirling: her mother’s old piano teacher, Herr Schulman, had been arrested and was being held in Dachau. The Begeleisens had had their apartment repatriated—soldiers had come in the graying hours of dawn—and had been forced to move into a flat with three other families. Rose hadn’t liked Peter Begeleisen; he had told her that witches like to yank teeth out of the mouths of little girls in the middle of the night, but still she felt bad for them. The Volkmans had managed to get out last week, their visas came through for Ireland. The husband had been able to land work as a machinist for a clothing factory outside of Belfast.
Their friends the Klaars had taken out a small classified advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle, seeking work in London, and Rose’s parents decided to follow suit. They fought over the language in the ad. They fought a lot those days.
Wolfe wrote: “Would noble-minded people assist Viennese couple, capable of every kind of housework, knowledge of English, French, and Italian? Exemplary references upon request.”
“No one cares what languages we speak,” Charlotte said to Wolfe. He was sitting in the velvet wingback chair near the window, trying to balance the writing tablet on his knee in the watery light of the late afternoon. He now avoided his study.
“What do you suggest?”
Charlotte took the writing paper out of his hands. Wolfe played with the loose ivory threads from the Persian throw covering the velvet head cushion. His wide face looked slack, jowly.
She wrote: “Married couple, cook and footman, Jews, seek position in household.”
“Everyone knows we’re Jews,” he said bitterly. “Why else would we be looking for work?”
“Then we shouldn’t hide from it, should we?” Her mother said the words with such sharpness that Rose half expected blood to bloom.
One day in January, Rose came upon her mother in the kitchen. Charlotte wore Bette’s old apron, which was too long on her. A jumble of pans and bowls and piles of snowy flour crowded the table. “What are you doing?” Rose asked.
“What does it look like? I’m baking.” Charlotte pushed a strand of loose hair out of her glistening face with the back of her hand. “A poppy-seed cake.”
“You bake?” Rose wouldn’t have been more surprised if her mother had donned a pair of ice skates and broken out in song.
“Of course I bake,” Charlotte said. “I do lots of things that you don’t know about.”
The next morning, Mutti dressed in her best suit, a houndstooth pencil skirt and flared jacket that Rose loved, with a creamy blouse with a scalloped neck. She looked like Greta Garbo. She muttered something about visiting Tante and rushed out the door, the poppy-seed cake held carefully in both hands. Rose watched her hurry down the street; the bare crooked fingers of the chestnut trees sliced the putty sky.
A week later, Rose found out where she had really been. The Kultusgemeinde, the city’s Jewish community organization. Onkel George had a cousin who had a fiancée named Edith who worked for it. And because of this connection, Mutti said brightly, stooping to meet her daughter eye to eye, you’re going to England!
They were in the drawing room, her father in his wingback chair, not saying a word.
“What?” Rose asked, blankly.
“You are going to England, where the queen lives with her two little princesses,” Charlotte told her. “Remember Mutti showed you the pictures of the little girls in their beautiful dresses who live in castles?”
Rose stared. Her mother was speaking as if she were a baby, a girl of six years old, and not eleven. She wasn’t making sense. England? How could she go to England?
But what she said was this: “Are you coming?”
Her mother shook her head, soundlessly.
“I’m going alone?”
“No, no, not alone,” Mutti said quickly. “Of course not! Gerhard is going too. Along with hundreds of other children. It will be a great adventure.” She straightened the hem of Rose’s middy blouse, flattening down the sailor collar.
“Where am I going to live?”
Mutti’s eyes were glassy bright, her cheeks aflame. “You,” she said, “are going to live with an English family. A lovely generous English family,” she emphasized.
“Who are they?” Rose asked, her insides slickened with a hideous sickly sensation. She hadn’t known this was possible, but now she realized that it was everything she feared.
“They are good people,” Mutti finally said. “They are very good people. I know this, because they’ve agreed to take care of you.”
“No,” Rose said. “I won’t go.”
Her mother must have answered, Rose knew she did, but the roar of her fear descended and tore through her, like a train bulleting ahead. Mutti had done her best to comfort her, but try as she might, Rose could never recall what she had said.
3
New York and Los Angeles, 2006