Listen for the Singing

by Jean Little

  Anna felt her knees go weak. Papa at war!

  “Papa,” she croaked. “Papa …”

  But when he turned, she could not go on. Miraculously, her father did not need her to put her terror into words.

  “Liebling, I am forty-eight years old,” he said, “and I have five children. They won’t want me to fight.”

  “How can you even think such a thing!” Mama cried out. “This war is none of our concern. How could any of us fight against our homeland? Hitler is a madman! When Germans see what he has led them into, they will recover their senses and it will be the end of him.”

  Papa got to his feet and reached down a strong hand to pull Mama to hers.

  “Stop, Klara. Anna meant nothing.”

  As he led her away, leaving Anna without a backward glance of reassurance, Anna heard her mother say in a voice that shook, “Ernst, how can we find out if Tania is safe?”

  Aunt Tania! Anna’s eyes flew to a picture on the mantelpiece, taken long ago, on Uncle Karl’s twenty-first birthday, in front of their home on Kastanien Allee in Hamburg. Uncle Karl stood terribly straight and looked proud of himself. He reminded Anna of Rudi, although in the picture Papa was the one who was Rudi’s age. Aunt Tania, the youngest, had been just fifteen.

  The sweet-faced girl in the photograph bore little resemblance to the aunt whom Anna remembered with affection, the aunt who had been so much a part of their lives before they left Frankfurt. That Aunt Tania was plump, quick to laugh, and kind like Papa. And, again like Papa, she had a special fondness for Anna, the Ugly Duckling among her brother’s five children.

  Mama had so often been impatient, even angry, with Anna in those days, and the little girl had known why. It was because she was clumsy while the others were graceful; she was slow while the others were swift; she was homely while the others were pleasing to the eye — Rudi and Gretchen fair and tall like Papa, Frieda and Fritz dark and vivid like Mama herself. But Aunt Tania seemed not even to notice how awkward and plain her small niece was.

  One day stood out in Anna’s memory. They were playing tag and she had been It for a long time because everyone could run so much faster than she could. At last, trying extra hard to get to Gretchen, she had stumbled and fallen flat.

  “Dummkopf,” Rudi jeered, “there’s nothing there to make anyone fall. You must have tripped over your own big feet.”

  She got up stoically. She had almost succeeded, by that time, in teaching herself not to cry because she sensed that Rudi liked to see her in tears. Seeing she seemed unhurt, the other three joined him in laughing at her.

  “Couldn’t catch a tortoise,” Rudi went on. “Couldn’t catch a snail. Silly baby. You’re too slow to play our games. Go away.”

  “Shame!” Aunt Tania’s voice cried out then.

  How long she had been watching Anna never knew. But the look she gave the older children stopped their laughter as effectively as if she had doused them with ice water.

  “Four against one!” she went on. “And you’re all bigger. If I could, I would disown the pack of you. I want no cowardly bullies for nieces and nephews.”

  And without wasting another second on the rest, Aunt Tania turned to Anna, gathered her up, and carried her, big as she was, into the house. She sat down in Mama’s rocker, holding Anna close, and sang:

  Bei mein kindeles vigele,

  Shteht a klor veis tzigele.

  Dos vet zein dein beruf,

  Rozhinkes mit mandlen …

  “Put her down, Tania,” Mama had said sharply as the lullaby ended. “She’s too big to be babied like that. She wasn’t really hurt.”

  But Aunt Tania had paid no attention. This was the reason that Anna remembered this small incident for so long. She had sung the little Yiddish song through again.

  It was then that Anna had put into actual words inside her head what had only been a vague, unformed longing before.

  I wish Aunt Tania was my mother instead of Mama.

  The next instant, she knew she wished no such thing. Not to belong to her own Papa! It could not be. Shocked at herself, she said in a small rough voice, “I’m all right. Let me go.”

  Mama had looked pleased. Anna, not wanting to see Aunt Tania’s expression, ran from the room.

  Aunt Tania was still in Germany. Did she already know that Germany and Canada were at war? Germany and Britain anyway. Did that mean that they were on one side and Aunt Tania on the other?

  We’re Germans too, Anna thought, confused. Only we’re against Hitler. Surely Aunt Tania is too.

  The direction her thoughts were taking was growing more frightening every minute. Anna headed for the kitchen. At the sound of her step, Gretchen spoke without turning around.

  “Frieda’s gone up to get washed and comb her hair. Carry the rolls in, will you? Mama will be here any minute. I’ve made a really good breakfast to take her mind off the whole thing.”

  Anna, picking up the basket containing the hot rolls, paused to warn her sister.

  “Mama’s worried about Aunt Tania.”

  Gretchen’s busy hands stilled for an instant. Then she went on stirring the hot chocolate to keep the milk from burning.

  “That’s nothing new really; there hasn’t been a letter for months,” she said. “But there’s nothing you or I can do for Aunt Tania this minute, while we can make things easier for Mama, if we all try.”

  “And for Papa,” Anna added, starting off for the dining room.

  Gretchen’s voice, pitched low so it wouldn’t reach in through the closed door to their parents’ bedroom, came after her youngest sister.

  “Of course, but things like this are always easier for men. Check the silverware.”

  Anna looked at the table. There were nasturtiums in a bowl in the centre, their vivid gold and flame colours glowing as brightly as they had yesterday, before there had been a declaration of war. Sunlight glinted on knives, spoons, and forks, and on the blue china egg cups that Mama had been given when she married. Poland, Mr. Chamberlain, even Aunt Tania, seemed unreal, dim, and far off, nothing to do with life here in Toronto at all.

  Gretchen was wrong though about Papa minding less. Anna knew. She had seen him weeping. That memory still made her feel cold and lonely way down inside, despite the sunlight and the nasturtiums.

  Chapter 3

  The following morning, Anna and Gretchen were cleaning the house. Although she was still feeling strange about the war, Anna had started to feel better about school. Her friend Isobel was going to take her there tomorrow, and she was coming today so they could talk about it. Isobel and Anna had been friends since they met in Sight Saving Class. Just last year she had gone off to the same high school. She knew exactly how Anna would feel.

  As she dusted, Anna kept looking out the window. Gretchen came to stand beside her and joined in looking out at the empty street.

  “I thought Isobel wasn’t coming till afternoon,” she said, not needing to ask why Anna was keeping watch.

  “She promised to come the minute she could get away, so there’s a chance …” Anna began.

  There was the sound of a car outside. Anna watched, but it passed the house without even slowing down.

  Anna sighed, started listlessly to dust the thing nearest to her hand.

  Papa’s radio! As she ran her duster over it, she tried to believe that she was living in a country at war. She could not do it. Nothing in her life had changed to give the word “war” reality for her.

  “Does it seem like wartime to you?” she asked.

  Gretchen shook her head.

  “You missed doing the ridge above the dial,” she said. Anna, who only saw dust when it was an inch thick by Mama’s standards, went back.

  “Isobel wouldn’t want to eat with us at noon anyway. We’re having sauerkraut,” Gretchen observed, making no move to proceed to an unmopped area.

  “She says it isn’t the taste she minds but the smell,” Anna stopped dusting to reply. “It’s the same with head cheese
and tongue. Her parents like them, but Isobel won’t even taste them because of their names.”

  “I can just picture Mama’s expression if Isobel ever sat down at our table and held her nose while she ate,” Gretchen said, grinning.

  Anna burst out laughing. Then both girls heard steps coming up from the basement and, without exchanging a word, they made duster and mop fly into action.

  Having work to do did make the morning pass quickly though. Soon Anna was taking her place at the table, sniffing the aroma of sauerkraut and roast pork, which she loved even though Isobel did not. Still she wished the meal was over.

  “How wonderful to be all together at home on a Monday noon!” Mama beamed around at the circle of faces.

  Afraid her mother might notice her impatience to get dinner done with, Anna cast about for some way to change the subject.

  “Where’s Rudi?” she asked, seeing he was missing.

  “He took sandwiches and went on a hike in High Park with his school friends and Mr. McNair,” Mama said, her happiness dimming as she spoke. “I told him we’d like to have him with us, but he said they had planned this for a long time.”

  “Catch me ever going hiking with a teacher!” Fritz said, with an exaggerated shudder.

  “Catch any teacher going hiking with you, you mean,” Frieda said.

  “Rudi’s growing up, Klara,” Papa said. “He’ll be away more and more often. We’ll just have to make up our minds to accept it.”

  Mama nodded in reluctant agreement but Fritz laughed.

  “He’s not all that grown up,” he said. “You should have heard him talking in his sleep last night. He was talking German a lot of the time so I didn’t get all of it. But he must have been playing something like tag in his dream. He counted up to ten and then he yelled out, ‘I got you, Wolf. You’re It.’ And another time, he said, in a really furious voice, ‘That’s not fair, Helmut. It was my turn.’”

  “How funny!” Gretchen said. “I haven’t heard him mention Wolf or Helmut for years. I remember them, now I hear their names, but it all seems so long ago … I don’t ever remember dreaming about Frankfurt.”

  Papa looked as though he were about to say something about dreaming about Frankfurt himself, Anna guessed, but then he changed his mind.

  “I never dream at all,” Fritz said.

  “When I wake up out of a really good dream, I make myself go back to sleep so I can finish it,” Frieda told them. “Sometimes they’re as good as a movie almost.”

  Anna was waiting for Mama to say she could begin to clear away the first course when her mother, blushing slightly, admitted that she, too, had dreamed she was back in Frankfurt.

  “We were having dinner with the Jakobsohns,” she said, “and, just as I was about to start eating, I realized I had on that huge old flannel nightgown I used to wear when I was pregnant. And I said to you, Ernst, in as dignified a voice as I could manage, that I wanted you to take me home because I had a headache — and you turned around and stared at me and said, ‘Do I know you?’ as though you’d never set eyes on me before.”

  “Then what happened?” Anna demanded as the laughter around the table broke in on the story.

  “I woke up,” Mama said, “and I was greatly relieved to find myself safe in bed.”

  “With a man who didn’t even know you,” teased Gretchen.

  “You and Anna may clear the table,” Klara Solden said, pretending she was not amused.

  Anna was on her way back from the kitchen when the doorbell rang. She almost dropped the bowl of fruit she was carrying.

  “It’s Isobel!” she cried. Dumping the dessert down in front of her mother, she ran to open the door.

  But it wasn’t Isobel; it was Mrs. Schumacher, Anna’s teacher in Sight Saving Class.

  For one surprised moment, Anna stared, open-mouthed. Then she came to her senses and beamed.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, the glow in her face affirming her words. “It seems like years since you were last here. And Isobel’s coming! She should be arriving any minute. She’ll be so pleased when she finds you. Mama! It’s Mrs. Schumacher.”

  Anna’s parents came out to the hall to make her welcome.

  “You got here at exactly the right minute,” Mama said. “I baked a gugelhupf on Saturday night as a surprise for Isobel and now you can share it.”

  “How’s Franz?” Papa asked as they all moved back to the table. “It’s been weeks since we’ve had a game of chess.”

  “He’s fine,” Mrs. Schumacher said, taking the chair Mama pulled forward for her. “More tired than usual perhaps. The news, of course, and he’s had a lot of preschool examinations to do. Also, a youngster he’s very fond of has polio. They still don’t know whether she’ll pull through. Even if she does, she’ll be almost completely paralyzed. He’s spent hours with her parents.”

  Everyone looked grave at this. A friend of Fritz’s had died of polio two summers before. He had been perfectly well one day, and four days later he was dead.

  Mrs. Schumacher’s husband was a doctor. It was at one of those preschool examinations that he discovered how poor Anna’s eyesight was. Then he told her parents that, even with the help of glasses, she would have much less than normal vision and she would have to go to a Sight Saving Class. How angry she had been; how frightened! Yet over the years in that very class, Anna had changed from an unhappy outsider without friends into the person she was now.

  What’s so different? a voice inside her asked. You’re just as scared now. You’ll be an outsider again tomorrow.

  “I thought Isobel would be here by now,” Anna said then. “What time is it, Papa?”

  “Nearly half past one,” Papa said. “Don’t worry, Liebling, she’ll come in her own good time.”

  “I’m afraid she won’t,” Eileen Schumacher said. “That’s why I’m here. She telephoned our house a while ago. She had tried to get me all morning, she said, but I was over at the school, getting the classroom ready.”

  She paused for breath. Nobody spoke in the second of silence. Mrs. Schumacher went on.

  “I’m afraid she’s sick. She has a very sore throat and a fever. Franz says she must stay right in bed.”

  “But she’s taking me to school tomorrow!” Anna said.

  Only silence answered her.

  “You mean she can’t go out at all?” asked Anna, her voice thin.

  “Not at all,” Mrs. Schumacher said. “And there’s something more. Perhaps we should go into the living room, Anna, and let the others finish eating while we talk.”

  Anna stood up like a puppet whose strings are jerked. She felt herself moving ahead of her guest into the next room. What else could there be? Isobel not coming with her …!

  “Let’s sit on the couch. Don’t look like that, Anna. It’s a disappointment but you’ll weather it. Oh, Mr. Solden, I’m glad you came too.”

  Anna was dimly conscious of Papa sitting down in his usual chair. Mrs. Schumacher had taken her hand and was warming it between her own. Funny. She hadn’t known her hands were cold. But suddenly they felt like ice.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” Anna asked. The words came out in a whisper.

  “There was a letter about Isobel’s new school,” Mrs. Schumacher said, her voice calm and steady. “When the Browns moved last month, they didn’t realize that they crossed the boundary between one school district and the next. Isobel won’t be going to Davenport after all.”

  Mrs. Schumacher sounded sorry for Isobel. Anna glanced at her father. His face wore the same concerned expression. Didn’t they realize what this meant to her, Anna? Didn’t they care?

  She saw, the next moment, that both of them were watching her with loving eyes. They were sorry for Isobel, but they were sorry for her too.

  She willed herself not to cry. They said nothing, letting her take her time, seeing that she wanted to speak. Finally, she managed to say, in a small pinched voice, “Can’t I just stay on in the senior Sight
Saving Class with you? Please! I know you don’t want me to but … but …”

  She choked and had to stop.

  “I would love to have you in my class, Anna, and you know it,” Eileen Schumacher said. “You’re a joy to teach. But you’re ready to leave the nest. Right now, hundreds of students your age are facing the uncertainty of beginning high school tomorrow. If you go now, you’ll be one of them and you’ll learn to fit in along with everyone else. If you wait, the way Isobel did, till you’ve finished grade ten in a special class, the others will have already made their adjustment and their friendships too. If it hadn’t been for your sisters, Isobel would have had a pretty lonely time last year.”

  “I don’t feel ready to leave the nest,” Anna said stubbornly, knowing the two of them were not going to let her win.

  “Anna, we pushed you out years ago, not knowing you couldn’t see, and you had a bad time in regular school in Germany,” Papa said. “I’m sure that, deep down, you think it will be that way again. You do, don’t you?”

  She had never been able to lie to him. She nodded reluctantly.

  “But you’ve come so far since then,” Mrs. Schumacher said. “You’ve done nearly eight years’ work in five! When you tried your entrance exams, you did exceptionally well and you were competing with pupils with normal sight.”

  “Not in math, I didn’t,” Anna muttered.

  “Well, you passed anyway. Most people have one weak subject,” her teacher said. “What’s more, I think your main problem with math is sheer laziness. Anna, Anna, you’re afraid because Isobel won’t be there to go with you, but she couldn’t have gone that far with you anyway. You have so much to learn about yourself and you won’t find it out while we keep you protected.”

  “I don’t want to go alone!” Anna cried, making one last plea.

  “Isobel told me to remind you that she isn’t your only friend,” Mrs. Schumacher said.

  That made no sense. What other friend had she?

  Then a new voice broke in.