How had things gone so wrong with the world that after all that had happened to Ilse, she still considered herself one of the lucky ones?
Audrey swallowed. “And the doctor, he’s quite sure there’s no treatment?”
“Yes. He’s sure. But you know”—she lifted her eyes to the ceiling, blinking hard—“I’m finding I don’t mind so much. Not really. It’s…”
Audrey waited whilst she searched the heavens for the words.
“I’m happy, in a way. Relieved, perhaps? I believe I’ll be with my family. Somewhere. Somehow. I’ve missed them so much.”
“I know. But we don’t know yet, about—”
“We do,” Ilse said, renewed tears shining in her brown eyes. “Friedrich found out last year. He was finally able to track them down. They were moved to the Dachau camp, then separated at one point, which made it more difficult. Mama…” She took a shaky breath. “Mama died in forty-two at Dachau. January ninth. All the record said was that she was ill.” Her shoulders fell. “And Ephraim was transferred to a camp at Mauthausen, for labour. He was murdered.” Her tone rose as she forced the words from her throat. “In a gas chamber. Last March. The sixteenth.”
Tears poured down Audrey’s cheeks, and nausea surged, tinged with as much rage as she could spare the energy for. “Oh Ilse. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Ilse reached for her face, brushed away the tears with her thumbs. “This is why. I couldn’t bear to deliver you more heartache, make things any more difficult for you than they already were.”
They held each other again for a long while, entwining their grief like a pair of thorn-covered vines. A ray of spring sunlight shone in a bar across Ilse’s bedspread. Audrey looked down at the pattern of forget-me-nots. The flower that represented true love.
“I’ve thought about those dates,” Ilse said, sitting back against the headboard now. “Tried to recall what I was doing. Busy with Daniel, no doubt. But I must have risen and eaten and played with him and gone to bed and never felt a thing. Don’t you think that’s odd? I thought I would have known, would have felt it somehow in my heart. I think that’s part of the reason I never believed they were dead. Why I wanted to wait. But at least I’m not waiting for them anymore.” She tried to smile. “They’re all waiting for me now.”
“Don’t say that, Ilse,” Audrey murmured, her heart breaking all over again. She leaned forward and laid her head in Ilse’s warm lap.
“I’ve come to terms with it, Audrey, and you must, too,” Ilse said, stroking her thin hair. “Do you ever think about what would have happened if you’d found the dress you wanted at Hertie’s? If we hadn’t gone over the street to that little gown shop? We would have still been with my parents, and then… It just makes no sense. That I survived, and they didn’t. Because of a happenstance like that. And now? Maybe I was just never meant to live through this. Maybe nothing we did mattered.”
Audrey took a deep breath and surfaced, mopping her face with her sleeve. “I’ve thought about it. Of course I have. But our efforts weren’t all for nothing. We got you six more years that you wouldn’t have had if you’d been there with your family that day. You got to be a mother, Ilse. You fulfilled a dream. That has to have been worth it. It is for me. That you got to live a little longer. That you get to be here, at home, at—at the end.” It took strenuous effort to maintain her composure. She would need to be strong for Ilse one last time.
“You went to such trouble for me,” Ilse said. “To help me. You saved my life. You endured so much, Audrey.”
“Not as much as many,” Audrey muttered.
“I can’t ever thank you enough for it. And I don’t think I did at the time, really. Not like I should have.”
“I would do it all again. All of it.” And she meant it.
“All of our partings have felt impossible to endure,” Ilse said. “But we’ll only have to say goodbye once more.” Audrey’s heart was barbed with grief. “I love you, Audrey,” Ilse said.
“I love you too.”
Audrey shifted, resting her head on Ilse’s shoulder. At long last, she felt as though she had come home. She closed her eyes, soaking in the comfort.
They stayed like that for a long time. Birds twittered in the tree outside the window. Spring was here, and summer would arrive just as surely afterward, no matter who died or lived or what wonderful or horrible things happened in the world. Summer would still come.
“My great regret is leaving Daniel so young,” Ilse said, breaking the silence. “Here,” she said, leaning forward and reaching around behind her neck. She unclasped her mother’s necklace and held it out for Audrey. “Will you give this to him for me? When he’s older? I want him to have something of mine. Of the family’s.”
The chain pooled in the palm of Audrey’s hand. What she had always taken for a pendant was actually a small locket, the family monogram K ornately engraved in the centre.
“Of course,” Audrey said, closing her fingers around the silver.
A long time passed, each of the women lost in her own thoughts. It was peaceful, and soon Audrey began to think Ilse had fallen asleep again, but then she spoke, murmuring into Audrey’s shoulder.
“Before I go, there’s something else I need to ask you.”
Audrey lingered in the doorway of the Kaplan house as she watched the solicitor leave. The boulevard trees were in full leaf now, but the summer colours and scents were diminished this year, as though painted over with a sheen of grey. The warm July breeze touched her skin and her mind traveled back. Time moved fast and expired quickly at the best of times; even more so under the incubating heat of a war.
How many times had she crossed this street to go play with Ilse? If she listened, she could still hear their little girls’ voices on the wind, chanting out skipping rhymes. She could see the withered shadows of their bouncing ringlets, their buckled shoes on the road. Their childhood selves were suspended in time on this street, and always would be, even though Ilse was now gone.
She had died quietly in her sleep a week ago. Audrey was at the piano with Daniel, teaching him how to play Ilse’s theme when Gisela came downstairs with a full breakfast tray. Audrey knew what had happened by the look on her face. Gisela set the tray down on the coffee table and pulled Audrey into a hug. She was much shorter, but held her tightly as Audrey wept. Daniel looked up at the two of them with wide brown eyes that were keen for answers. Answers, Audrey feared, she might never be able to give him.
Only one family from Ilse’s synagogue had come back from the camps. A woman named Anna who was once pretty but returned from Auschwitz with thin, short hair, dull eyes, and a limp. She came home with her teenage son, just one of the five children who were taken with her and her husband in the winter of ’42. Ilse had left her name and address, and a few hours after Ilse’s death, Audrey knocked on Anna’s door. Anna didn’t say much, just followed her back to the house and directed Audrey on how to prepare Ilse’s body. She wished she could honour her friend more thoroughly, but this was the best they could do under the circumstances.
Ilse was buried in the Kaplan family plot on the Grosse Hamburgerstrasse alongside her paternal grandparents. Audrey stood beside the grave, holding Daniel’s little hand as he cried for his mama. She was at a loss for what to say that might soothe him. They didn’t sit shiva in any formal way, but Audrey stayed at the house for a week after Ilse’s death, delaying the inevitable.
Now she glanced at the stack of documents from the solicitor in her hand and turned to go back inside. She stopped for a moment, leaned against the doorway between the hall and sitting room, remembering how it was Ludwig Thurman’s usual spot. She wondered on occasion what had become of him. Was he arrested along with Friedrich? Or had he managed to turn his coat effectively enough to avoid capture? She shook the questions from her head. After all he’d done—or rather not done—she found she didn’t really care what had become of him.
Daniel was sitting at Ruth’s piano in his blue collared shirt and suspenders, feet grazing the pedals as he picked at the high notes, the summer sun illuminating his hair from the sitting room window.
When Ilse asked Audrey that day up in her bedroom if she would take Daniel, she had agreed, of course. Audrey couldn’t bear to deny anything Ilse wanted or needed, particularly in those final weeks. She would have fought a bear or cut off another one of her own toes if Ilse had asked her to.
“Thank you, Audrey,” Ilse had said through more tears. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Gisela made some enquiries with an orphanage right after Friedrich’s arrest. But you turning up here has answered my prayers.”
Ilse knew Audrey never wanted to be a mother, knew the prospect terrified her. Ilse always thought that her resistance was based on a fear of childbirth, given how her own mother had died. She’d presumed Audrey was actually all right with the concept itself. But she was wrong.
Gisela came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Lunch is nearly ready. Everything settled with the solicitor?”
“Yes,” Audrey said.
In April, when it became clear that Germany was on the brink of surrender, Friedrich had withdrawn most of his money and put it in a trust for Daniel. Audrey would now manage the account until he came of age to inherit.
