now, I believe, in Canada. Aptly named, don’t you think?
Anna retreats a few steps.
I suppose, she says.
She resumes her position at the chessboard. Is Max smiling as he does the same? Anna moves her rook quickly, without forethought.
Max pushes his spectacles up onto his forehead as though he has another set of eyes there.
That’s done it, he says, sighing. You’ve completely foiled my plan, young lady.
Anna watches him covertly as he canvasses the board, holding his head, hands plunged into his undisciplined light hair. He puts a forefinger on his rook.
Tell me something, he says. Your father. Is he a member of the Partei ?
He has leanings in that direction, yes, says Anna carefully.
Max rubs his chin.
As I thought, he says. He impressed me as being the sort who would. He’s an—opinionated fellow, yes?
You could say that.
Mmmm. And tell me something else, dear Anna. I’ve been wondering. Has it been very difficult for you, living alone with him these past five years? You seem so very . . . isolated.
The room is quiet enough that Anna can hear the bubble of the water in the pot. Despite the astonishing ease of these evening conversations, which Anna reviews each night as she lies in her childhood bed, this is the first time Max has asked her something this personal. She would like to answer. But her response remains bottled in her throat.
Max strokes the rook.
The death of a parent, he says to it, is a profoundly life-altering experience, isn’t it? When I was a child, I often had this feeling of God’s in his Heaven: All’s right with the world—that’s Robert Browning. An English poet. But ever since my father died in the last war, I’ve awakened each morning knowing that I’ll never again feel that absolute security. Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off . . .
As Max talks, Anna is paralyzed by simultaneous realizations, the first being that nobody, since her mother’s death, has ever spoken of it. At first, neighbors came bearing platitudes and platters of food, and there were well-meaning invitations from distant relatives to spend holidays in their homes, summers at their country houses. But nobody has ever had the courage, the simple human kindness, to ask her how she feels in the wake of the loss. To approach the matter directly.
And the accuracy of Max’s comment about her isolation: how can he know this? Anna looks across the table at his narrow face. Although quiet by nature and an object of some envy because of the attention her looks drew from boys, Anna did have girlfriends for a time, school chums with whom she linked arms at recess, acquaintances whose classroom gossip she shared. But the rise of the Reich, coinciding with her mother’s death, soon put an end to this. The activities of the Bund deutscher Mädel, which Anna joined with all the other girls, seemed insipid and made her vaguely uncomfortable; during patriotic bonfires in the Ettersberg forest or swimming parties with the boys of the Hitlerjugend, Anna would watch the happy singing faces and think of what awaited her at home: the cooking and cleaning, her mother’s dark and empty bed. She began participating less and less, citing housework and her father’s needs as the reason, and eventually her friends stopped coming up the drive to the house, their invitations too dwindling into a puzzled silence.
And so Anna is left with only her father, whose demands, once offered as an excuse, are certainly real enough. She thinks of Gerhard performing his morning toilette, wandering about the house in his dressing gown, clearing his throat into handkerchiefs that he scatters for her to collect and launder. She must trim his silvering beard daily, his hair fortnightly. His sheets, like his shirts, must be starched and ironed. She must prepare his favorite meals with no concern for her own tastes, the consumption of which Anna endures in a fearful stillness punctuated only by the snapping of Gerhard’s newspaper, Der Stürmer, and explosive diatribes about the evils of Jews. How Anna wishes he had died instead!
Max pushes his rook across the board.
Check, he says, and looks up.
Oh, Anna. I’m sorry.
Anna shakes her head.
I didn’t mean to upset you, Max says.
You haven’t, Anna reassures him, finally finding her voice. I’m just startled by how well you put it. It’s like being in a sort of club, isn’t it? A bereavement club.