and indignation. Max would never have done that to her. She ground her teeth until her jaw ached, wanting Max gone—out of her mind. He shouldn’t ruin this moment. But he was still her standard by which all other men were measured. He had known how to blaze through her and leave her as groomed as when they began. Dr. Blum didn’t realize or care that she was going to have to walk out of the surgery looking like a tart who couldn’t keep her hosiery in one piece.
Looking pleased with himself, he gave her one last kiss, poured schnapps from his desk drawer into two mugs, and toasted their future as Herr and Frau Doctor Adolf Blum. “I’m so glad we’ve sorted this out,” he said. “Now we can drop the pretense.”
The electricity flashed on. Around the consulting room, overhead lights glinted on the scale, the tap, the instruments on the cart. Clara blinked the sparks out of her eyes, but they didn’t clear. They were in her head, insistent as an alarm.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be a good wife,” she said cautiously. “Old maids are motivated to learn.”
“Now, now, I’m serious.” He caught her hands in his, tighter than was comfortable. “We’re going to be married. Don’t you think we should talk? Be honest with each other?”
“Yes, of course.” She glanced at the door. “But you have patients . . .”
“They can wait. My dear, I’ve been bothered by . . . well, not doubts. I don’t doubt you. But I have questions. I hope you’ll answer them right now. Then we’ll start a new life, closer than we were before. Isn’t that what you want?”
Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad. She had spoken very little of herself. Wasn’t it natural for a groom to want to know something about his bride? “Tell me what’s bothering you. We’ll clear it all up.”
He kissed her fingers. “These are complicated times. One must be careful, as you well know. When I decided to propose, I took the precaution of asking around about you.”
She freed her hands from his. “Spying? You were spying on me?”
“Learning about you, especially what you were like before we met. You took lodgings at the Hermann house soon after the war. Frau Hermann said you always wore a scarf over your hair.”
Frau Hermann, the old busybody.
“Once, by chance, she glimpsed you without it. Your hair”—he touched the strands at her temple —“had just begun to grow back. It had been shaved.”
“I had lice, I’m afraid.” A lie. “I don’t like to remember those times.” The truth.
“Before you found work, you paid your rent on time without fail and never lacked for money. Where did you get it?”
“My family never believed in banks. We kept Reichsmarks under the mattress. When the war was ending—”
“Your family, yes. An important point.” Dr. Blum folded his stethoscope into his pocket. “You never speak of your family. Frau Hermann said you get no post from anyone named Müller and no visits at all.”
“The war, the Collapse, you know how hard it is to find people—”
“My dear, be honest. Are your parents alive?”
This was dangerous territory. It would be easier to say they were dead, but the thought alone opened up a vast well inside her.
“They’re all right. I think. I haven’t seen them since the war.”
“You quarreled with them?”
“No. No, not really.”
“Well, what then?”
She tried to think of an explanation he would believe. It was taking her too long, and his face grew grim. “Did they emigrate?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s more . . . they’re hard to reach.”
“If we’re to marry, I really should speak to your father.”
She searched his face for an ulterior motive and saw only the earnest wrinkle of his brow. Of course the bridegroom wanted to meet the father of the bride. But Dr. Blum was treading too closely to the very problem that had kept her up all night. She had lied to him; she had seen her father since the war: yesterday evening in a British newsmagazine she’d been surprised to find in her land-lady’s parlor. He was standing in front of what looked like a barracks, staring out of the photograph across two Allied zones directly at her.
She had smuggled the magazine up to her room and thrown herself onto her narrow bed before she had had the strength to examine the picture more closely. His coat billowed from his body as if he’d shrunk. Weren’t the Americans feeding him in their