weeks later the labor pains started. For the next three days the thin little girl lay there trying to push out the baby. Jacob had help from the neighbor woman, who was used to assisting at childbirths. She was the one who saw when Rachel died. Jacob refused at first to accept it, but she screamed, ‘Now it’s a matter of seconds!’ She stuck her hands into Rachel’s womb and with the blood streaming down her forearms pulled out the little baby in a torrent of blood. At first Jacob didn’t want to look at the miracle that had cost his only daughter her life. But the midwife was a resolute woman. She bathed the screaming little mite, wrapped her up, and placed the infant in Jacob’s arms. Then she said, ‘Jacob Uhr. This little child is without guilt. Your daughter died that night in the schoolyard, and she never came back to us. But the child is alive and healthy. You have received her as a gift from God, instead of Rachel who was taken from you. The little girl shall be called Sonya, after me!’
“Then Jacob looked down into the baby’s dark sapphire-blue eyes. The little one had stopped crying and looked steadily at her grandfather. And in his heart a light was lit for the little life and he whispered quietly, so that only she could hear: ‘You will live. You will have a better life!’”
“Damn! What a damned shitty story you’re making up!”
Jenny had jumped up from her seat, and her eyes glittered with tears and rage. Tommy looked at her calmly. Without a word he pulled out a thin, worn book with a brown leather cover from the pocket of his jacket. At first Irene thought it looked like an old diary. When Tommy held it up to the light, she could clearly see an elegant monogram in the lower right corner of the cover. The gilt had flaked off, but you could make out the letters J. U. Calmly he said, “You can read it yourself. This is Jacob Uhr’s diary.”
He held it out to Jenny. She instantly put her hands behind her back. She looked at the little book as if it were a cobra ready to strike. Tommy didn’t take his eyes off her as he again spoke. “To make a long story short, with the help of the midwife Sonya, the little Sonya survived. A year later Jacob managed to get out of Germany. He found a job in a bookstore here in Göteborg that was also owned by a Jew. When he married a Swedish woman—Britta, a stubborn fisherman’s widow from the island of Hönö—he fell into disfavor with his employer.”
“Hönö! That’s where your summerhouse is! Is that where you heard this story?” Katarina seemed relieved to begin to divine an explanation for the awful things she had heard this evening.
Tommy smiled and went on, “Part of it. Both Jacob and this woman were more than forty years old when they met. She once had a son, but he drowned in the same shipwreck as his father, during a storm in the North Sea. So little Sonya became like a daughter for Jacob and his wife. But the Jews in Göteborg threw him out of their congregation. Jacob had never been a particularly religious Jew, so he converted to Christianity. Little Sonya was confirmed in the Swedish Lutheran Church. She had blue eyes and wonderfully shiny red hair. She was teased about it, but not because she was Jewish. Nobody knew about that; she didn’t even know herself. She knew nothing about her ancestry, but thought she was Jacob and Britta’s child. Jacob had told her only that he came from Poland, but not that he was a Jew. He never mentioned the time in Germany or what happened there. Britta knew, of course, but she didn’t say anything to Sonya either. She didn’t find out anything until Jacob and Britta died a few months apart, fifteen years ago.”
Irene couldn’t help exclaiming. The pieces had fallen into place and she understood how it all fit together.
Tommy nodded to her and smiled. “You’ve figured it out. But Jenny and Katarina couldn’t know about this, since they weren’t born yet. Sonya is my mother. Jacob and Britta, whom I always called Grandma and Grandpa, turned out to be my great-grandfather and his wife!”
Only Sammie’s faint snoring under the coffee table disturbed the total silence that had descended over the room. Irene couldn’t