While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1)

by Petra Durst-Benning

  “Josephine Schmied!” The guard interrupted the lesson and looked from Krotzmann to the assembled class. Josephine hesitantly raised her hand.

  “Come with me.”

  Josephine fled the room under the teacher’s wrathful eye. What was this about? Was this the end of her ordeal? All of it just a misunderstanding? Had Moritz Herrenhus withdrawn his complaint? Josephine sighed quietly—what a pleasant thought.

  The guard unlocked a small, narrow room where a table and a few chairs stood.

  “Isabelle? Clara!” At the sight of the familiar faces, Josephine’s heart skipped a beat. She threw her arms around Clara’s neck. “You came . . .” Tears welled instantly in her eyes.

  “Sit down, all three of you! Physical contact is forbidden,” ordered the guard before leaving the room.

  “What happened to your hands? You’re bleeding!” cried Clara the moment she sat down.

  Josephine hid her hands beneath the table. “That’s from the accident . . .”

  “But . . . an injury like that can get infected before you know it. You must have it treated right away.” Clara looked from Jo to Isabelle, who sat beside Clara, looking aloof.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Josephine. “I’m so happy you’ve come.” She felt a lump rise in her throat and fought back her tears.

  “It wasn’t easy, take my word for it,” Isabelle said. “My father’s as angry as a bull. He couldn’t talk about anything else at breakfast—you and the damage you’ve done. If he knew I was visiting you . . .”

  Jo lowered her eyes. “I . . . I wish the earth would swallow me here and now when I think about what I did. I was so stupid . . .”

  “Sadly, your epiphany is a little late,” said Isabelle in a chilly tone.

  “Isabelle didn’t mean it like that,” Clara rushed to say and shook her head brusquely at Isabelle. “How are you? Are they treating you well? When are they letting you out? Before Christmas? The man at the gate said they don’t actually let anyone visit at all. We don’t know if we’ll be able to come again . . .”

  Didn’t her friends know that she’d been sentenced to three and a half years? “They’ve—” Jo began, then broke off. “We’ll see,” she said as breezily as she could. Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Maybe then she would wake up from this nightmare. To change the subject, she said, “Clara, is it true that old Dr. Fritsche passed away? When I asked my mother to send for him after the accident, she told me he’d died. Strange that I didn’t hear about it earlier.”

  “Does that surprise you? All you could think about was your own obsession,” Isabelle replied. Clara jabbed her sharply in the ribs.

  “Jo practically never gets sick, so it’s hardly surprising. I, on the other hand, found out the very day . . .” Clara said, a tragicomic look on her face.

  “He was a regular visitor to your place until the very end, wasn’t he? Your mother would have just loved for you to marry old Fritsche. Then she would have had a doctor in the house for every little cough and cold you caught. Remember how we all used to joke around about that? Those were the days . . .” Isabelle looked at her two friends and smiled.

  “Joke around? You two teased me mercilessly!” Clara replied in mock outrage.

  The three young women laughed, and for a moment their old familiarity returned.

  “Here. This is for you,” said Clara and handed Josephine the block of chocolate.

  If Adele sees that . . . thought Josephine. “Thank you. But I insist on sharing it with the two of you,” she said firmly. Her hands ached as she set to work unwrapping it.

  “Ever since Dr. Fritsche died, everyone’s been coming to my father as a substitute,” said Clara as she popped a square of chocolate into her mouth. “He’s asked me to help him meet the extra demand by making the medicines, even if it means I have to stay up late in the laboratory every night.”

  Josephine looked fondly at her friend. “Don’t go pretending you don’t enjoy it. There’s nothing you like more than stirring up some potion or other.”

  “Or crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle,” Isabelle added.

  Clara smiled. “You’ve caught me!”

  As the banter flew back and forth, Josephine felt a pang of admiration for her friend. Ever since Clara first helped her father boil soap years before, it had been clear that she would someday go to work in his pharmacy. Her mother, however—who considered such work to be beneath her daughter’s dignity—had sent her off to a home-economics school to prepare her for her future responsibilities as a housewife. Clara had nearly perished there from boredom. With a tenacity that nobody had seen in her before, she had finally managed to prevail against her mother’s will. And now, she stood side by side in a fresh, white apron with her father in the pharmacy. Clever Clara had made her own dream come true, while she, Jo, had simply thrown her own dreams in the gutter.

  Clara sighed. “But my father will be back to his old ways soon enough—being a know-it-all and hovering over my shoulder when I’m boiling soap or making liniment. A new doctor’s coming by this evening as Fritsche’s successor. It’s taken so long to find anyone willing to take over his practice . . .”

  None of them could think of anything else to say on the subject, and a silence settled over them. The illusion that they were just having a casual chat burst like a bubble, and all three of them suddenly felt self-conscious.

  I’m sorry, Josephine wanted to say. She felt the words on her lips, but she kept them inside. “I’m sorry” was what you said when you stepped on someone’s foot. In her case, it would never have been enough.

  Isabelle cleared her throat. “We should probably be getting along. I . . . I still have to study my French vocabulary—Madame Blanche has set a test for tomorrow. Again! And there’s an English test coming up, too. I’d like to know what the point of all these foreign languages is. I’m never going to get out of Berlin. Besides, we’ve been invited to a ball this evening, and we’ll need time to get ready.”

  Josephine smiled. “Your hair is already perfect. Please don’t tell me you’re going to spend hours getting it done again.”

  Isabelle rolled her eyes. “It is my father’s wish that I always look perfectly turned out.”

  “Has some marriage prospect turned up?” Jo asked, feigning interest. When would the guard come to fetch her? Did she have to go back to Krotzmann? A cold chill ran through her at the thought. Or would she have to go straight to the caretaker? If the caretaker was as repulsive as Krotzmann, then it was all over for her . . . Would she be able to work at all with her injured hands? That Krotzmann had better not try to strike her again.

  “Me and marriage? Heaven forbid,” said Isabelle. “I love my freedom far too much for that.”

  “So what became of that young Baron von Salzfeld, the one your mother thought so much of?” asked Clara. “She came into the pharmacy once and gushed about him as if wedding bells would soon be ringing.”

  “The one with the castle out in the country and the extensive estates east of Berlin and the brilliant connections to the Imperial Court? He was just the type my mother loves,” said Isabelle derisively. “I, however, found him terribly dull, so I sent him fleeing, like all the others. I make a stupid remark or come up with an irritating mannerism—and they’re gone! It’s really very easy.” She laughed. “Father is still trying to guess why the young gentleman beat such a hasty retreat. ‘Dearest Father,’ I told him, ‘am I really supposed to marry some young peacock who can’t even hold a candle to you?’ I’ve always been able to calm him down that way.” Isabelle looked very pleased with herself.

  Clara raised her eyebrows in surprise. “But if it all really means so little to you . . . including all the ball gowns and jewelry and constant visits to the hairdresser . . . why don’t you just tell your father you’re not interested in getting married? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone?”

  “You don’t know my father! He’s got it into his head that through me—or rather, through
the fine match I’ll make one day—he’ll climb into the highest social circles.”

  “But he’s already there. He’s been up there for ages,” said Josephine. She was thinking of Isabelle’s family’s beautiful villa, which was stuffed full of valuable things. She had been wide-eyed when she had first seen it. She had never imagined that people lived like that, let alone that she would ever set foot in such a place.

  Isabelle ran a hand through her mass of red curls. “Money is one thing. But there are many in the upper circles who still look at my father as a kind of tailor, an upstart apron-maker, someone who could never belong to the league of major industrialists like the Krupps or the Rothschilds. But that is exactly where he wants to be, and I am the means to that end.”

  Josephine frowned. “You sound so bitter . . . I always thought you enjoyed all those balls.”

  “You thought . . . For a change, you might have asked me just once how I felt about it.” Isabelle looked from Jo to Clara. “How many times have I told you that these society balls are like an Arabian wedding market? And it’s never occurred to you that I’m supposed to be bartered away to the highest bidder? You seem to think I live in some kind of paradise . . .”

  The mockery in Isabelle’s voice was impossible to ignore. Josephine, cut to the quick, looked down at her bloody hands. Had she really been such a bad friend? So selfish? She’d been so caught up in her own projects, her own thoughts. Only ever thinking of herself.

  “Forgive me. I’m so sorry for everything . . .” she said, choking on her own tears.

  Isabelle and Clara shifted uneasily on their hard chairs. Josephine cleared her throat.

  “I don’t want to seem rude, but . . . I’ve been assigned to the caretaker as his assistant, and he’s probably waiting for me.” Without a word of farewell, without any embrace, Josephine fled the room in tears.

  “So you’re supposed to be my new helper . . .” The caretaker looked Josephine up and down. “You’ve got a broad back, at least. Well, we’ll see. It’s actually too late to start on any new tasks today, but if I send you away now, they’ll stick you in the kitchen and I’ll be back to square one.” He turned to the guard who had brought Jo out to him in the yard. “You can go. Thank you.”

  “OK, let’s get started.” He grabbed hold of the handcart and told Josephine to follow him.

  Although initially hesitant, Josephine trotted behind him. At first glance, he made a friendly impression. He was middle-aged with a shaved head. He reminded her of the coachmen who brought their horses into the smithy. They liked to talk big, but under their rough exteriors they usually had soft hearts.

  The caretaker stopped at a shed behind the main building. “My name’s Gerd Melchior.” He held out his hand to shake Jo’s. His handshake was firm and pleasant. “If you behave properly and work hard, we’ll get along just fine. If not . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, but there was a threat in his tone.

  “Josephine Schmied. But everyone calls me Jo.”

  “Fine with me,” said Melchior. Inside the shed, he rummaged briefly on a shelf and pulled out an old paintbrush. He gestured with his chin toward a pile of boards that lay in the center of the shed on a kind of tarpaulin. “That’s going to be the frame for a new compost heap. I don’t want it to rot out after a year, so it needs to get a protective coat. I need you to paint every board with the goudron. And you’ll do it carefully. No light spots, got it?”

  “Goudron? Isn’t that just plain old tar?” Josephine asked, screwing up her nose at the familiar, biting smell emanating from the paint pot.

  The caretaker looked at her in surprise. “One and the same. But how d’you know anything about tar?”

  Jo smiled. “My father shoes horses and I’ve always helped him. We paint rotten hooves with tar.”

  Melchior raised his eyebrows. “You’re a smith’s daughter? What are you doing in here?” But he immediately waved off his question. “I don’t want to know. You children are all so foolish! Instead of using the chances you’re given, you just get up to mischief. Now show me whether you can really work, or whether you’re just one of those good-for-nothings we already have too many of.”

  The dormitory had been quiet for a long time. From here and there came a soft snoring or someone groaning in her sleep. But as exhausted as Jo was—more so than ever before—she could not fall asleep. Her eyes stung from the fumes of the tar that she had spent three hours painting onto the long boards. Afterward, when she had asked a guard for permission to wash her blood-crusted, tar-spotted hands, she was told that inmates were only allowed to wash in the morning.

  “A lack of personal hygiene is behind many a malady,” she suddenly heard in a voice from the past in her mind. Josephine sighed. Who had told her that? One of the doctors in the Black Forest, where she had spent some time because of her lungs? Or had it been Clara, with her pharmaceutical knowledge?

  Before she could stop them, other voices joined in: “All you could think about was your own obsession . . .” “You just get up to mischief.” “Sadly, your epiphany is a little late . . .” Clara’s, Isabelle’s, and Frieda’s words fluttered in her mind like little bats; mixed up with them was Gerd Melchior talking about mischief.

  “Sadly, your epiphany is a little late.” Isabelle’s tone had been so bitter.

  Josephine rolled from one side to the other restlessly. Hindsight . . . Could she even claim that? Or would she do it all exactly the same way again? Wasn’t everything that had happened a logical consequence of what had come before? Could it have happened any other way? Or was she oversimplifying when she thought about it like that?

  As a wan moon shone through the close prison bars, Josephine’s thoughts drifted into the past.

  Chapter Four

  Berlin, spring 1889

  “Tell her she’d better not cross my path at the funeral.” Schmied-the-Smith reached for his coffee cup with trembling hands, then thought better of it and pulled a hip flask from his pocket. His wife opened her mouth to say something but changed her mind.

  Josephine inhaled sharply, horrified. “Father, I—”

  The smith’s heavy fist thundered onto the table. Josephine jumped, as did her mother and her sisters.

  “And tell her to keep her mouth shut. I don’t want to hear another word come out of it.” The icy coldness of his voice was worse than any shouting could have been.

  Josephine looked to her sisters in despair. Like the rest of the family, the older Schmied girls were dressed in black, and both were holding umbrellas. The skies were weeping on this spring day. Gundel looked back at her blankly, but on Margaret’s face Josephine saw open hostility. Neither said a word in her defense.

  Elsbeth Schmied laid one hand on Josephine’s shoulder and led her out of the kitchen. “Go to your room.”

  “But he was my brother—” She broke off in a fit of coughing.

  “You should have thought of that when you went sneaking off to see that fancy pharmacist’s girl. If you’d been looking after Felix like we told you to, our boy would still be alive!”

  While Josephine’s family accompanied Felix to his final resting place, Josephine ran over to Frieda’s place. Pattering raindrops mixed with her tears and fell onto her carelessly bandaged hands. Beneath the strips of cloth, her flesh was inflamed and throbbing. The dressings should have been changed long ago. Dr. Fritsche himself had emphasized how important proper care and hygiene were for burns. And he had told Josephine’s mother that something had to be done about her daughter’s smoke poisoning. She needed to be inhaling menthol, eucalyptus oil, or a thin camphor solution. Elsbeth Schmied had nodded. But no one had yet paid a visit to Anton Berg to get the medicine.

  “You’re to blame, you’re to blame—I can’t bear to hear it one more time,” Frieda said to her as she removed the dirty bandages from Josephine’s hands. “Do you really think you’re lord over life and death? What happened was God’s will and only God’s will. Yes, you should perhaps have listened to your
parents and stayed with Felix. But that act of disobedience is the only thing you can blame yourself for. Your father could just as easily accuse himself of being careless with the key to the barn. Or of not locking the matches away. Your little brother was obsessed by fire. Everyone on this street knew that. Wherever he went, wherever he was, he was always pilfering matches. Something was bound to happen sooner or later. Once, I left my reading glasses and newspaper outside. And when I went to get them, there was Felix holding the glasses up to the sun, using them like a magnifying glass. The newspaper was already in flames! Because I love footbaths so much, I was lucky to have a bucket of water under the table. Who knows what would have happened otherwise.”

  “You never told me that,” said Josephine, her voice low. She wrapped the old cardigan that Frieda had given her tighter around her body. A moment later, another fit of coughing racked her body.

  “Child, you’re going to cough to death!” Frieda handed her a cup of sweet herb tea. Then she began wrapping Josephine’s hand in fresh white cotton gauze. “Your mother knew that Felix liked to play with fire. She clipped his ear every time she caught him, and that was that. Of course, she was deathly afraid that something worse would happen one day. But what was she supposed to do? Keep watch on a twelve-year-old rascal, day and night? Impossible.” Frieda laid her calloused hand on Josephine’s arm. “God’s will is stronger than we mortals are. Besides, you did everything you could. You risked your own life trying to get Felix out of that barn alive. When the men from the fire department found you, you were unconscious in front of the barn. A minute, two minutes later and you would have been dead yourself.”

  Josephine shook her head. “No, I can’t let myself off so easy. If only I’d . . .”

  The weeks passed. Josephine withdrew more and more into herself until, soon, there was nothing left of the sturdy, curious, and bold young woman she had once been. Pale, with sunken eyes, she dragged herself to school, where Clara, trying her best to console her friend, read her one Bible passage after another during the breaks. But Josephine’s feelings of guilt carried more weight than the words of Matthew or John. After school, she continued to help her father at his forge. Schmied-the-Smith had begun the work of rebuilding his workshop the day after Felix’s funeral. The people called him brave and clapped him on the shoulder. But they avoided Josephine’s eye.