brother. I’m not going to tell you the details because we are not a family that’s interested in the personal business of others.” Dorrit had bowed her head, and he put a warm hand on her arm. “I don’t judge you, little mouse, and we’re not going to judge Willy’s mother either. The kid doesn’t have anybody right now. We can help him until he finds his own way.”
“What if he doesn’t want to be helped?”
“I can only offer him a home. A temporary home until he gets used to how things are out in the real world. I know it’s a lot to ask of you. We don’t have much space and there’s the cooking and cleaning and he’s a stranger. But he’s fifteen, right between you two. Gabi, you could take him to school, maybe. Oh, and Gertrud, his bird, would come too. She could be free here in the parlor.”
Gabi’s face brightened as she looked around, imagining, he assumed, the yellow canary hopping across the sofa back. Dorrit was unimpressed. “Where’s he supposed to sleep?”
“In here. On the floor or in this chair, I don’t know. But he won’t go near you at night.”
“He better not.”
“And I’ll put him to work. We got repairs needed all over the house. We can string some electrics, we got to do something about the water pipes, there’s that hole in the kitchen wall . . .” He went on, detailing the chores he’d put off, wanting the girls to imagine Willy hammering down loose floorboards or up on a ladder funneling wire through a hole in the ceiling. If they could envision Willy being useful—and sane—Jakob had all but won.
Dorrit was stroking the dark blue wool stretched over her belly. Jakob squeezed onto the sofa between her and Gabi and put his arms around them.
“I have to do this.” He stopped, his words lost, too twisted up as he pictured Clara in the bare cell of an Allied prison or the rough barracks of an internment camp. “I have to do this for Clara. She’d want to know her brother is safe until she comes back.”
He didn’t say the next bit. That if she came back and Willy was living in this house, he knew that she would come here, right here to this parlor, looking for him. If that was the only way Jakob could see her again, so be it. If she stormed at him or turned away from him in disgust, he could live with that if he had to, but at least he’d see with his own eyes that she was all right. And she would see that he had tried to help her, in the end, the only way he could.
“All right,” Dorrit said, sighing, “he can come. For a little while. As long as he does his own laundry. I’ll have enough to do when the baby comes.”
They shook on it, and then he pulled her into as tight a hug as he could manage with her belly between them. Gabi joined in, the three of them—four, actually—wrapped in a warm embrace that Jakob tried to imprint in his memory just as he had years ago when he was about to leave for the front.
AFTER THE GIRLS left the parlor, Jakob switched on the lamp and began packing the things he would take to Willy’s mine. First, his beloved calendar. The American girl smiled at him as always, but she bored him now. Compared to Clara, she was as sticky sweet as an old toffee. Just the thing for a fifteen-year-old boy who hadn’t seen a girl his age since the war. The year was printed in bold next to each month. Crazy as he was, even Willy couldn’t think Jakob had somehow manufactured a 1946 calendar to fool him into believing that time had passed.
Next, Jakob carefully tore off the front pages of the newspapers he’d kept to use as toilet paper or to light fires. He looked for dates, headlines, photos, news of Allied conferences. If Willy had any sense left in him, he couldn’t read them and think the war was still on.
The last thing Jakob had to do was the hardest. His family didn’t have much that anybody else would call precious, but the wooden trunk his mother had brought into her marriage had always seemed so to him. It was good German oak, and that meant it would last forever. Jakob hadn’t so much as opened it since she