busy places are when the people who normally occupy them have gone.
I haven’t been particularly helpful, have I, says Trudy. Was there anything else you wanted to ask?
I guess not, the Pretty Girl says.
She hoists her backpack more firmly onto her shoulder and trots off, breaking into a run a few meters away. At the door leading to the parking lot, she turns and yells, Have a good weekend!
You too, says Trudy.
The door wheezes shut after letting in a few whirling flakes of snow. Though now free to leave, Trudy stands in the fruity synthetic wake of the girl’s shampoo, looking thoughtfully after her. How she envies the young woman, not for the obvious reasons but because she has a family history she can talk about and be proud of. A history somebody has related to her firsthand. A history she knows.
A nebulae of instincts coalesce, and from the brilliant vapor of their collision an idea emerges. Takes cogent shape. Grows. For another minute Trudy is paralyzed by its logic, its persuasive simplicity—why hasn’t she thought of this before? Then she pivots and jogs up the nearest stairwell. She has to find Ruth before her sudden conviction deserts her.
Ruth is not in her office nor in the teachers’ lounge, but Trudy finally spots her in the cafeteria. She is sitting alone at a long wooden table, picking withered blueberries out of a muffin and wiping them on a napkin with a child’s scowl of distaste.
What are you doing here? she asks Trudy.
Looking for you, Trudy says.
Well, that’s flattering, but I don’t get it. I’d have thought you’d be home in a hot bath by now.
Trudy pulls out a chair and sits next to her.
Listen, she says rapidly. I need to pick your brains about your Remembrance Project. How you organized it, exactly how you’re going to find subjects, where you’re going to get your videogra-phers—
Does this mean I’m going to have a shiksa interviewer? Ruth interrupts.
Trudy laughs. She is shaking all over with excitement.
No, she says. I’m afraid not. But I have a proposal for you, and I’m going to need your help. Because I’ve got my own Project to do.
Anna and Mathilde, Weimar,
1940–1942
“Backe, backe Kuchen!”
der Bäcker hat gerufen.
“Wer will guten Kuchen backen,
Der muss haben sieben Sachen:
Butter und Salz,
Zucker und Schmalz,
Milch und Mehl,
und Eier machen den Kuchen gel’.”
“Bake, bake a cake!”
the baker called out.
“Whoever wants to make a good cake,
He must have seven things:
Butter and salt,
Sugar and lard,
Milk and flour,
and eggs to make the cake gold.”
12
ANNA HAS BEEN AT THE BAKERY FOR A WEEK BEFORE SHE ventures upstairs. Or perhaps it is more than a week. She doesn’t know for certain; she has lost track of time. As she lies on the pallet in the bakery cellar, she stares at the ragged black marks on the damp wall next to her head. Somebody hidden here before her has obviously charted the duration of his stay with a lump of coal: about a month, all told. Anna could do the same. But she rejects the idea as involving too much effort, and in any case, the passage of time means little to her.
She curls on the cot like the embryo within her, drifting in and out of sleep. Sometimes when she wakes, she hears the wooden soles of the bakery’s patrons clocking overhead, the meaningless snippets of their conversations. At other times, she opens her eyes to a darkness so complete that it seems to press on her with the weight of a mattress. It is only then that Anna can bring herself to choke down the food Mathilde has left for her, in a covered tray at the foot of the treacherous wooden staircase.
Since Anna’s arrival, mindful of Anna’s delicate condition and the cellar’s lack of amenities, the baker has implored Anna to move into her own living quarters above the storefront. But Anna cannot stomach the thought of lying beneath a braid of Mathilde’s long-dead mother’s hair, surrounded by dried flower arrangements and gay photographs of Mathilde’s deceased husband Fritzi. The claustrophobia of the basement suits Anna much better; it is as close as she can come to the conditions Max must be enduring. Cupping her swollen breasts, Anna relishes the ropy rasp of rat tails across the floor with a penitent’s zeal. She is grateful to cough in the fine black dust that the delivery of coal into the nearby chute raises each morning. The rank smell of fear from the others Mathilde has concealed here comforts Anna;