Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum Page B

suitors? he asks.
    An endless supply of them. Hauptsturmführers, Obersturm-führers, who knows what rank Vati’s managed to dig up this time. He has such high aspirations for me.
    Max sneezes again as Anna stands and smoothes her skirt, and she looks at him with concern. I wish I could get a doctor for you, she says.
    He waves this away. I am a doctor, and it’s nothing, believe me. But Anna, all joking aside, you must tell Mathilde to hurry with the papers. I can’t stay here much longer.
    I know. Just until the end of the war.
    Max shakes his head. Please, Anna. Promise me you’ll see Mathilde tomorrow.
    I promise, says Anna, and begins to climb the steps.
    I mean it, Anna.
    So do I, she whispers down to him. Don’t worry.
    She smiles at Max and shuts the inner door on his imploring face.
    As she steps into the hallway, Anna is assaulted by a wave of vertigo. She leans against the wall and presses her forehead with her fingertips. They are freezing despite the heat, and when she takes them away, they are slick with sweat. She too must be reacting to the air in the room behind the stairs, which is hardly fresh. But how peculiar that she should feel ill only upon leaving it! Perhaps Max is right; the pressure of hiding him here is taking a physical toll on both of them. What a pair they are, sneezing and reeling. Anna walks shakily to her bedroom.
    Here a rapid transformation occurs. Anna exchanges her housedress for one of blue silk, splashes her face with water from the basin on the bureau, and pins her long dark hair, wavy with perspiration, into a chignon. Then she assesses herself in the full-length mirror and sighs. As it is widely held that praise spoils children, Anna has rarely been told outright that she is beautiful, but she knows she is from the effect her looks have had on others: covert admiration, shyness, envy. She knows too that vanity is wrong, but she has always taken a secret pride in her slim waist and high round breasts, the pale eyes and curious light streaks in her hair that for as long as she can remember have won exclamations and candy from strangers. Since entering young womanhood, however, Anna has found this more bother than benefit, given Gerhard’s constant parading of her before prospective marital candidates. And now Anna would pay a high price to be plain, for her looks pose an ever-greater danger to both herself and Max. If only she were ugly, Gerhard would not persist in bringing this new species of suitors to the house, hoping to further his own ambitions by pawning Anna off to a high-ranking Nazi husband.
    However, Anna knows enough of what is expected of her to play her part, and what matters most at the moment is that no sign of how she has spent the afternoon shows on her face. Anna frowns at her reflection, counting to one hundred, until the feverish color has receded from her cheeks. Then she descends to the kitchen, where she garnishes the chilled soup with sprigs of parsley. She surveys the place settings in the dining room and tweaks a rose in the centerpiece vase. She sits in one of the chairs, folds her hands in her lap, and waits. By the time Gerhard and his friends arrive, Anna’s demeanor is one of docile, vapid composure.
    There are two guests this evening. Anna has never seen the big blond officer before; he is handsome enough, but he has the skewed nose and pugnacious stance of a boxer. She thinks, smiling sweetly at him, that he would have been a street brawler in the unsettled period between the wars, the sort who would have ended up in prison without the Partei. His lips are full, like halved peaches, obscene in that block of a face.
    SS Unterscharführer Gustav Wagner, Gerhard announces; Gustav, my daughter Anna.
    As Wagner bows over her hand, Anna asks, Are you perhaps related to the musician?
    She sees the wet flash of Wagner’s eyes as he glances up at her.
    No, Fräulein, but I appreciate beauty in any form, musical or otherwise, he says, and Anna feels the