“Don’t worry about it, dear.”
“But I could just knock up something simple. Beans and toast?”
“For yourself, if you like. But I must confess this exchange has rather sapped my appetite. I’m tired.” She pushes herself out of the chair with a grunt and stumbles a little, shifts her weight from one foot to the other, working out the stiffness.
“If you’re sure,” Kate says, watching her with concern. Though she isn’t very hungry herself either.
“I am. I’m going up. Good night.”
As she passes by, Audrey squeezes Kate’s shoulder in an affectionate sort of way—hesitant, but tender—and it catches Kate off guard. She rests her hand on top of Audrey’s papery skin just as the older woman is pulling away.
As Audrey disappears up the stairs, Sophie trotting along in her wake, Kate’s mind turns to her own family. When she was seventeen, not long before her maternal grandmother passed, her dad had taken a photo of her hand on top of her mother’s and grandmother’s, three layers of generations together, the skin progressively thinner, more mottled. Kate had always liked the photo, but wasn’t old enough to fully appreciate that her time with her grandmother—and her parents—was limited. That the opportunities to ask about their lives, hear their wisdom, were withering by the day. There’s a lot she wished she had asked that was now unknowable.
Her parents’ hands never even got a chance to grow old.
Later that night, Kate takes a long, hot bath, still ruminating over the conversation with Audrey. She pulls on flannel pyjamas and makes herself comfortable on the bed with Ozzie. She picks up the novel she’s been chipping away at over the past couple of weeks, a contemporary anti-rom-com about single life that she’d hoped would raise her spirits. Her eyes slide over two pages until she realizes she isn’t taking in a word of it. She keeps thinking about what happened to Ilse. Unable to stand it much longer, she tosses the book aside, seizes her laptop, and opens a fresh search tab.
She’s about to google “Ilse Kaplan” when a prick of guilt pokes at her. Audrey is sharing her story for the first time ever. She’s put an enormous amount of trust in Kate, and it would be disingenuous to listen to her experiences whilst secretly knowing the details. Besides, given the survival rates of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, she can pretty much assume what happened to Ilse, and Ruth and Ephraim too. It’s understandable that Audrey doesn’t want to talk about it. At least not yet. But Kate feels a need to know something. The name Ilse Kaplan wouldn’t necessarily retrieve anything concrete in a search… but the names of the Nazis might. She picks at a nail bed. Surely it wouldn’t be a breach of confidence for her to know who, exactly, the men were. Whether they ever received their comeuppance for their participation in the holocaust.
Kate adjusts her glasses. She can’t remember the surnames of a couple of the poker night men, but Friedrich Müller she knows. Audrey hadn’t mentioned Vogt’s first name. And there was a Ludwig. Ludwig Thurman.
She starts with Müller, and finds his name and Thurman’s on a list of men in the Nazi High Command who were tried at Nuremberg in 1948. As Ozzie snoozes beside her, she reads that Müller was sentenced to life imprisonment. There is no mention of his death on this page. Thurman got sixteen years. She can’t locate a Vogt that fits Audrey’s description in any kind of definitive way, and wonders what happened to him. Plenty of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, fleeing to Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. Maybe Vogt slipped out. He wasn’t as high-ranking as Müller, though. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Maybe he was tried in some lower court, or at a later date.
She stares a little longer at the web page, at the names of the men who systematically destroyed the lives of so many millions. Overwhelmed, she shuts her laptop, runs her fingers over the scratches on its once-pristine surface, lost in thought.
After she turns off the bedside lamp, she lies awake for a long while. At least Kate can grieve the loss of her family in safety and comfort. She closes her eyes and imagines Ilse up in that drafty attic, with its bare floors and spiderwebs and Ephraim’s toys and games. The remnants of his interrupted life. She can almost feel the chill of that old Berlin house, and pulls the duvet farther up her shoulder. It’s well after midnight before she drifts into a fitful sleep, her unsettling dreams painted red and black and haunted by the faces of the dead.
“Dark roast, ground. Two pounds.”
Kate repeats the order to herself as she drives into town to pick up coffee. Audrey likes a particular blend sold at Barter’s, the local bookshop café, and apparently no other brew will do. Kate doesn’t mind though. Other than a run through the woods around the inn a couple of days ago, she hasn’t left the Oakwood since she arrived and she could do with a reminder that other humans exist. The inn has a dreamlike quality to it, set on the edge of town with the crows and old creaking trees. Kate could spend a decade there, wandering the dark halls or lounging by the fire with Audrey as the snow piled up around the foggy windows, to find that only a few days had passed. Living at the inn was like falling into Narnia, or some sort of slipstream in time.
Head bowed against the misty autumn drizzle, Kate ducks into the shop and is greeted by several rows of fiction, the scent of coffee and dust, and a couple of patrons browsing the shelves. There’s a small brick fireplace to her left with several cushy red chairs clustered around the flickering flames. She wanders farther into the shop, which opens up into a larger, brighter space with even more shelves. At a ticking sound, she glances up; above her head is a children’s electric train, the tracks suspended from the ceiling, circling their way around the shelves beneath a peaked glass ceiling. Her jaw falls open a bit.
“It’s quite something, eh?”
Kate turns to find Ian, smiling politely a few feet away.
“Oh, hi,” Kate says. “How are you?”
He pushes his glasses up. “I’m well. How’s the roof doing in this rain?”
“It does seem to be holding. Thank you.”
He sidesteps to allow a pair of exuberantly chatty women to pass. “You just in to browse?”
“I was actually looking for the café. Audrey sent me here for beans. Some kind of magic beans, I take it.” She raises her eyebrows. “She lives on the stuff, eh?”
Ian laughs heartily. “I’ve wondered more than once whether coffee is the elixir of life. It would seem to be for Audrey, anyway.”
“How old is she?” Kate drops her voice conspiratorially, as though she’s uttered something indecent.
“In her nineties, for sure. At any rate, if you’re getting beans for Audrey, why don’t you get a cup now too? My shift just ended. I’ll join you.”
Kate hesitates for a moment. She did want to get out and about a bit today before tackling Audrey’s filing system in the front office this afternoon. It’s ancient and can certainly be digitized.
Ian’s smile is so genuine. She’s interested in finding out more about him—and Audrey. She can stay for a cup and still have time to get a bit of work done before supper.
“Yeah. That sounds great. Where is the café, anyway?” She glances around at the rows of books and bustling shoppers. The place is busy for a weekday. It must be a popular spot.
“Have you not been here yet?” Ian asks, a little incredulous.
“No.”
“It’s a bit of a tourist trap in the high season, like most of the town, with the castle and everything,” he explains. “But it’s good for business. And the café has the best chips around. Back here.”
He leads her farther inside. The store appears endless, and is already decorated for Christmas. Fairy lights drape over and between the towering rows of books. Large red armchairs call out to patrons to settle in for the afternoon, and Kate can’t tear her eyes away from the interior brick walls and the thousands of books in her view.
“It’s an old train station,” Ian says, slowing down to match Kate’s pace. “The trains stopped running here sometime in the sixties, but they didn’t tear it down. Later they renovated it into this.” They enter a small room off the main shop with several two-person tables. “This was the waiting room.”
“You’ve given this tour before, haven’t you?” she asks, smirking.
“Once or twice, yeah.” He winks, then approaches the counter. “What would you like?”
“No, no,” Kate says, a little flustered at the offer. It’ll feel too much like a date if he buys. “Thanks, but I’d really like to get these. I’ll order.”
Ian shrugs good-naturedly. “If you insist. Hey, Craig.” He nods at the barista. “Flat white, please. And a plate of chips.”
“Chips?” Kate queries. “With coffee?”
