Consider that there were five Miihlsteins altogether. Karel, Anna, the two older sisters, who were off six days a week cleaning streetcars in an immense underground garage, and their father. Herr Miihlstein was a lanky man with short arms and a thin mustache that was often stained by his lunch. Karel didn’t look like his father. He had darker hair and skin, and was broad in the shoulders. His feet were so big he could hardly keep shoes that fit. Sometimes he wore his father’s, which fit just as well, at least when Karel was eleven and hadn’t yet outgrown them.
Miihlstein worked nearly all day and night in the attic of the Eigler house. He hummed along as he measured string or reinforced the neck of the viola he was charged with reviving. He squeezed the wood to put it under stress, to find the reason it didn’t sing right, then rolled a red felt carpet over the worktable and pulled all the tools from his kit to examine them, to make sure each was still fit. Little cans of lacquer and thinner pressed on the felt. Tools pulled from nooks and leather slots. Waffled metal files, awls and emery cloth, spools of catgut, spare pegs, clamps, chisels, a skinny metal hammer. Wood shavings popped from the block plane as Miihlstein revealed new fingerboard then sanded it round. Notches were filed and awled for strings, the fingerboard painted an ebullient, endless black. Miihlstein’s wire glasses rode down his nose on a bead of sweat. He bit his upper lip, sucked the prickles of his mustache into his mouth to concentrate. He engaged a single instrument a whole week or more to repair it, like this viola, stretching and tuning and playing, humming along as he plucked and bowed, until: “Perfection!”
The whole rigmarole bored Karel. He hated to be stuck in the attic dormer. There were two beds, a rocking chair, a sofa draped in yellow chintz. He and Anna devised docile and melancholy games to occupy themselves before supper, imaginings that often involved the war. Karel’s favorite was to play army surgeon with Anna’s rag doll. She allowed this. There was great commotion in Karel’s mind as the doll was rushed from an open battlefield—a circular woven rug strewn with sock garter barbwire and newspapers crumpled into craters—to the great bed where the girls slept. Under the bed the real fun began, their legs stuck out opposite ends. Because she was sickly herself, Anna had a nicely dark mind for details. She described a simple shrapnel wound in an arm. But then! Then the ambulance was hit by mortar fire and overturned on the road, the poor souls inside tossed on top of each other. Broken bones now, fractures, splinters of glass and head wounds. “The driver died at once,” Anna hushed. “A tragedy, for he was greatly loved by his wife, as all in his village knew.”
Once Anna completed her treasury, Karel took over. The poor soul was in real trouble. Only one thing could save him. An amputation. Karel pinned the rag doll to the floorboards and revealed the yellowed cloth skin. He sawed with the edge of his index finger and tucked, as if Anna wouldn’t notice, the doll’s arm into its dress. The dress was back in place, the sleeve folded up. At first the poor soul was saved, lifted from the operating theater and slid under the blankets atop the bed. “You’re in luck,” Anna said to the poor soul. “Nothing but raspberry torte for a year.” Then things took a turn for the worse. The poor soul couldn’t be saved after all. They enclosed the corpse in a white paperboard box—the rag doll corpse-like already, as they saw it—and took the box out back of the Eigler house to bury it in the garden.
Karel worried his new friends from school would find out how he played with Anna. It was shameful, of course. A boy shouldn’t enjoy carrying on like that with a doll, not a boy who was nearly twelve. He resolved to end his childishness. Soon, anyway.
Maybe Karel was too old to play such girlish games—but it was how he and Anna spent time together. By age eleven Karel was aware of how Anna was different than other kids. How she didn’t mature the way she should, because she was stuck at home with her illness, at Herr Miihlstein’s insistence. So she remained the same age, played the same games over and over, obsessed over the same old gossip, the same books of Viennese poems. Anna liked playing with Karel, with her dolls, and that was fine with him. Karel loved his sister—all three of his sisters really, but Anna the most—and he didn’t know how else to spend time with her.
Anna always wore a white straw hat when outside. It was dented, the brim slightly twisted, but she kept it clean and a purple ribbon was attached and neatly tied. She believed the hat made her beautiful. She was right. She wore a matching lavender overcoat, and the way she smiled, black hair swept around her face, her overbite and pointy nose and dark eyes, how she sat in the grass to weave wildflower stems together for the dead—the boys on Clandish would never forget her. The times they caught a glimpse of Anna on a chair by the doorway as they walked by the Eigler house, Anna sitting in the front window, Anna planting flowers by the lattice skirt under the front porch. She spent most of her time doing craftwork up in the attic dormer where the Miihlsteins lived, so it was rare for a boy to even catch a glimpse of her, a boy stopped on the walkway to stare up into a window of that grand Victorian house where Frau Eigler took in roomers during the late years of her life.
After the box was buried, a prayer sung, Anna and Karel retrieved the doll from the damp spring soil. Anna didn’t have so many dolls, even rag dolls, to leave them interred. “He’s alive!” the two of them chanted, pulling the rag doll from its now-muddy box. “He’s alive! The boy’s alive!”
Maria Eigler must have seen the two of them burrow in her daffodils. “Stop it!” she snapped, surprising them as she rushed out the back door. “You shouldn’t do that. The woman across the alley lost two babies these years. Both of them she buried in little white boxes, yeah.”
Maria hushed at them, a hissing, cutting kind of inflection old women perfected, those years especially, the war years. Each reproach made Karel feel miserable and small. He covered himself with his arms. Anna was shrinking too. She clutched the doll to her chest.
“Leave her alone,” Karel shouted. “Can’t you see she’s crying?”
He popped off his knees to shield Anna, rallied up his fists, trembling. It was instinct to dig his heels in once he saw his sister frightened. She was as delicate as a doll, her skin porcelain white, her hair limp in pigtails. When she pulled off her glasses to dry the lenses, sores bloomed on the bridge of her nose.
“What’s wrong, Karel?” Maria released her skirts and patted the wrinkles she’d made in clutching. “I don’t know why you act this way.”
“We didn’t do anything!”
Anna stood and secured the hooks of her glasses behind her ears. “Stop that,” she said to Karel. “You know Frau Eigler doesn’t mean it.”
Karel was ashamed already and couldn’t take Anna scolding him. Once he dropped his fists, Maria swooped in to hug the both of them. He let her.
He wouldn’t have liked to admit this, but Karel felt better squeezed to Frau Eigler’s soft hips, her body padded by layers of skirts and underskirts, her own well-buttered girth below that. Her body bounced into his as she walked them to the back door. He felt lighter being jostled.