mère.
“His mother? My mother? That’s impossible! She’s dead, don’t you know that? She’s been dead for years! Dead!”
“She’s not dead,” whispers Ursula. “She’s in Switzerland.”
Elfriede
March 1944
(Switzerland)
In the afternoons, Elfriede still plays the piano. She likes to think it keeps her fingers from getting stiff, but the truth is more sentimental than that. She follows the same chronology as always, all the way up through Chopin and no further, because really what comes after Chopin? Nothing anybody cares about. There was a young woman ten years ago who asked her if she knew any Gershwin. Elfriede said she’d never heard of him. The woman said she would find the music, she would order it from this shop in Paris she knew, but she never did. Just packed her suitcase and left one day. Oh, well. Never mind Gershwin, then.
Outside the window, the sun’s come out. They’ve had a warm spell over the past few days, and much of the snow has melted. Some of the infirmary patients were outside this afternoon, soaking up the sunshine, and one still remains, bundled in a woolen coat, reading a book. Elfriede smiles and turns back to her music. From the refectory comes the clink and clatter of tables being set. The children do this, it’s their job. Elfriede believes firmly in the importance of children having jobs, and so the children set the tables while the adults make dinner, and everybody’s mind is relieved of its troubles for a short time. Because she’s an early riser, Elfriede takes her turn at breakfast. Never ask your troops to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself, that’s what Wilfred used to say.
When she comes to the last note, she pauses for a moment, eyes closed, fingers resting on the keys. In that space of time, while the music still exists in her head but not in the air, she feels Wilfred’s spirit in an especially pungent way, as if she’s absorbed him inside her body, as if she’s become Wilfred. Then the notes fade, and so does Wilfred, but not entirely. He’s still there, only less immediate, which allows her to rise from the piano bench and take her cardigan sweater from the top of the piano, where she’s left it. She shrugs her arms into the sleeves, belts the waist together, and heads down the hallway to the garden door.
Now that Elfriede owns the clinic, now that the clinic runs not as a mountain retreat for wealthy invalids but as a refuge for the uprooted, the unwanted—Jews, mostly, but also some Resistance, some downed pilots—that daily hour of music is sometimes her only interlude. Still, she tries to spend some time outdoors each day, even in the middle of winter, clearing snow from the pathways and so on. Exercise is absolutely vital for one’s psychological health, she feels. During the spring and summer, there’s the garden to plant and tend, the livestock to care for. In autumn, it’s the harvest. She requires all the able-bodied guests to pitch in. Thus there’s always food to eat, even when they’re snowed in for weeks, and everybody feels as if they’ve contributed, even those who arrived here with only their clothes. Friendships are made, sometimes love affairs. One couple married last October. Shortly after, the American embassy in Zurich approved their visas. (In special cases like that, Elfriede sometimes asks Johann—who seems to have some trusted friends inside the American government—to pull a string or two.)
In fact, she’s holding a telegram from Johann in her hand right now. It was delayed a bit because the melting snow caused some flooding in the valley, blocking the roads, so perhaps the news inside is old. Still, she wants to share it with the man in the garden, soaking up the sunshine on the bench next to the wall. He’s reading a book, and he looks up when he notices her approach. His hat hides his hair, but she knows the color, she knows every note of him. She asks if she can sit with him. He nods yes.
“There’s a telegram from your brother,” she says.
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know. I thought we might read it together.”
She hands him the yellow envelope, and he opens it with his bone-thin fingers. She remembers Gerhard, recovering from typhoid, and she reminds herself that this frailty will pass, that he’s over the sickness, his strength will build rapidly in this good, clean mountain springtime, her abundant homegrown food.
She bends over his arm and reads