Stephan said, “I’m sorry, Žofe, but I don’t think friends help each other by letting the things that are holding us back from finding homes keep happening. It had to be said.”
She slid the pages of Stephan’s playscript across the table to him, with her edits:
THE LIAR’S PARADOX
by Stephan Neuman
ACT I, SCENE I.
In the main room at the Warner’s Holiday Camp, children sit more patiently than children should be expected to sit. Prospective parents browse the tables as if searching for a chop for dinner, an unbruised pear, an eggplant to set in a bowl on the table, just for show. Only older children are left, the toddlers all claimed in the weeks before.
Tall, elegant Lady Montague approaches a beautiful teenaged girl, Hannah Berger boy, Hans Nieberg, who holds a baby his younger brother.
Lady Montague: Isn’t this a dear baby little boy. You aren’t the child’s mother brother, are you? I couldn’t take a baby little boy from its mother his brother . . .
Stephan sat, staring at the words.
“I’m sorry,” Žofie-Helene said quietly, “but it had to be said.”
“What had to be said?” Walter demanded.
Stephan folded the pages of the playscript and stuffed them in his satchel. He handed Walter a book to read, and opened his own journal. Sundays passed more quickly since they’d decided to do something rather than just sit there waiting for the parents to pass them over in favor of the newer arrivals.
“What had to be said?” Walter repeated.
“That even a damned stuffed rabbit could write a better play than I can. Now just read quietly, will you?”
Walter pulled his rabbit to him, of course he did.
“I’m sorry,” Stephan said. “I’m sorry, Walter. I’m sorry, Peter.” He patted the rabbit gently on the head. How low had he gone, having to apologize to a stuffed rabbit?
“I didn’t mean to disparage your writing ability, little rabbit,” he said.
Walter looked up at him from under his long eyelashes, which were moist now. Moist, but not wet. It left Stephan wanting to cry himself, not that his brother was tearing up, but that he wasn’t crying, that in just a few weeks he had grown so much tougher.
“I’m sorry, Wall. I really didn’t mean that the way it came out,” he said. “I’m as cranky as old Rolf, aren’t I?”
Walter said, “More cranky.”
“More cranky,” Stephan conceded.
Stephan said to Žofie, “Mark Stevens told me there’s a rumor going around that the organizers are going to close the camp.”
Žofie, still a bit disgruntled, said, “Your fellow Zweig fanatic?”
“Says the girl who has memorized every line of Sherlock Holmes.”
Although that wasn’t exactly fair either. Žofie didn’t memorize the way most people did; she just read and remembered, recalled.
Žofie said, “They’ll have to send us to families, then?”
“To hostels, I think. Or schools.”
By the end of March, Mark had told him, which seemed pretty specific for a rumor. Today was March 12. Stephan didn’t suppose he and Walter could go to the same school, so today might be their last chance to stay together.
“I’d like to go to school again, wouldn’t you?” Žofie said. “Maybe I can go to Cambridge.”
What Mark had said was that they would be sent to special Jewish schools, but Žofie wasn’t Jewish, so he wasn’t sure about her.
“I don’t think they take girls with babies at Cambridge,” he said.
It was mean. He knew it was mean and he oughtn’t have said it, he saw that in the way Žofie quietly retraced a symbol in her notebook. But she refused to see what people thought; she refused to see that the prospective parents imagined the baby was hers and maybe his as well, that it was the baby who kept them all from finding families. So many parents wanted the baby until they got the idea that Johanna might be, as that woman the day they’d arrived at Dovercourt had suggested, the child of a “ruined” girl. Not just damaged but ruined, not capable of being restored. But Žofie’s ruin was not what he now understood that woman had imagined. Žofie was ruined, as were he and Walter, by circumstance, parentage, the fact of a whole world sitting idle when someone, someone, needed to stand up.
Žofie set down her pencil and kissed the baby’s head. “Her mama said my name,” she whispered. “How will her mama find her if she isn’t with me?”
Stephan stared down at his journal, the words blurring as he imagined Mutti searching for Walter and him. “I wonder if Peter is tired of reading so much,” he managed to say, addressing the rabbit. “How about if I read to you both?”
Walter handed the book back and leaned toward him, impossibly forgiving.
“You are so like Mutti, Walter,” Stephan said. He put his arm around his brother and pulled him close, and opened the book. “I’m sorry I was cranky. I really am.”
The prospective parents began arriving, and an exquisite middle-aged lady and her husband approached them, the lady addressing the baby—“Well hello, little one, what’s your name?”—as the husband eyed Žofie’s notebook.
“May I look?” the man asked Žofie.
Stephan liked him already. Most of the prospective parents would just have assumed they could look at Žofie’s work if they wanted to, or at Stephan’s writing.
“It’s just something I’m playing with,” Žofie said, her English so much better now than when they’d first arrived.
The man, somewhat incredulously (incredulous was a word Stephan had just learned; he loved the sound of it), said, “You’re ‘just playing with’ the axiom of choice?”
“Yes! You know it?” Žofie said. “It’s quite controversial, of course, but I can’t see another way for infinite collections, can you?”
The man said, “Well, it’s not my area, precisely. How old did you say you are?”
“I didn’t say,” Žofie said. “I would, but you haven’t asked. I’m almost seventeen.”
The man said, “Look, darling. Look at this,” indicating Žofie’s notebook.
His wife hadn’t heard him; she was across the room, speaking intently with a volunteer. She looked to her husband and smiled broadly, and hurried back.
Stephan watched Žofie watch the woman as all the while she snuggled Johanna. She would usually hand the baby to a prospective parent at this point. She knew how easy it was to fall in love with little Johanna once the child was in your arms, how much anyone who held her wanted to take her home, and they all knew that was the goal, to find parents who wanted to take you home. But Žofie only snuggled the child more closely. She wanted this family too much, this man who spoke her language when it came to mathematics even when it wasn’t his area, precisely. Stephan wished he knew as much as the man did. He wished he could talk with Žofie about all those odd squiggles on the graph-paper pages. He wished he hadn’t written the damned play, that he hadn’t pushed her. What if this family took her? He wanted them to, of course he wanted them to. But he couldn’t bear it.
“Lord Almighty,” the woman said to her husband, her voice lowered as if for a secret. “The baby hasn’t any papers.” She turned to the baby, saying, “You haven’t any papers, have you?” To her husband she continued, “It’s complicated, I know, but . . . well, we could ask my brother Jeffrey to . . . to sort out a birth certificate, couldn’t we? I mean if . . . in case no one ever comes to claim her? She must be an orphan. Who would send a baby from Germany with no one but strangers?”
Her husband looked to Žofie-Helene. The husband would take Žofie, Stephan was sure of it. The husband would rather take Žofie. Why didn’t the man say so?
Žofie, clearly trying not to cry, handed the baby to the woman, like she did each week, except that she was usually dry-eyed.
The baby touched the woman’s face and laughed.
“Oh, I could love you to death,” the woman said.
The man said to Žofie, “Is she . .
. Is she your sister?”
Žofie-Helene, unable to speak, only shook her head.
“What’s her name, sweetheart?” the woman asked.
Žofie mumbled, “Johanna.”
“Oh, I could love you to death, little Anna,” the woman said. “I’m going to love you to death.”
“The child’s surname?” the man asked.
Žofie didn’t answer. She peered at Stephan through her smudged lenses. If she tried to say a word, surely she would weep.
“We don’t know,” Stephan said to the man. “She was just a baby on the train. She was just there, in a basket, after the door had been closed and locked.”
Brothers
Stephan waited in the main building with Walter, who held his suitcase and Peter Rabbit. Žofie waited with them, the three standing at the door, which was open to the spring afternoon, just as he and Walter had waited with her when the parents came to collect Johanna two days earlier, although that had been a cold, rainy day, and the door had been closed.
“You promised Mutti we would go to a family together,” Walter said.
“I know, I did promise Mutti,” Stephan agreed, and he again began the explanation. “The thing is, I’m eighteen now, so I have to work. I’m too old to go to a family, and I can’t properly take care of you yet. But I’ll think of you every day, and you’ll be busy in your new school. I’ll visit on weekends. The Smythes said I can visit every weekend. And after I’ve saved some money, I’ll get an apartment and come get you, and we can live together again, okay?”
“And Mutti too?”
Stephan looked away, to the chalkboard, “Walter Neuman” now on the list of children going to homes. The radio was on, music with English words and an English announcer, to help them all learn. He didn’t know anything about Mutti, really. Not for certain. Her letters all came from Czechoslovakia, and told of life in Vienna; the only sense he could make of that was a sense he didn’t want to know, a sense Mutti would not want him to tell Walter, certainly not today.
“I’ll come visit you as soon as I can,” he promised. “You and Peter.”
“And Žofie will come too?” Walter turned his Peter Rabbit up to face Žofie. “You’ll come visit us, Žofie?” he asked in his rabbit voice. “Mrs. Smythe says we can visit the Tower Bank Arms, from Jemima Puddle-Duck. Not the picture in the book. The real place.”
It was a long way from Cambridge up to the English Lake District, where Walter’s foster family lived. It was an even longer way from Chatham, where Stephan would be at the Royal School of Military Engineering—not as a student, but doing some job that needed doing. He hadn’t yet been told what it was, but he would have two days off each week, just barely enough time to take the train to Windermere and back if he left right when his work was done.
Stephan said, “Žofie is going to be very busy.” The foster father who had taken the baby had arranged for her to study mathematics at Cambridge, where he taught.
“I’ll come visit you and Peter,” Žofie promised, giving first Peter Rabbit and then Walter a fond kiss on the cheek. “And maybe Stephan will bring you both to visit me. Or we could even meet in London, at No. 221B Baker Street!”
The Smythes arrived then, in a black Standard Flying Nine four-door sedan, dirty from the drive. The car had barely stopped before Mr. Smythe was swinging his long legs out and hurrying around to open the door for Mrs. Smythe. As the two approached, Stephan wrapped Walter in a hug. He had not imagined how impossible this moment was going to be.
Mr. Smythe said, “Is Mr. Rabbit ready for a new adventure?”
Walter said, “You promise, Stephan?”
Stephan swallowed against the ache in his throat. What good was a promise? He’d promised Mutti so little, and disappointed her at every turn.
Walter pressed Peter’s face to Stephan’s cheek and made a kissing sound.
Stephan lifted Walter and held him tightly, one last time. “I promise,” he said.
He set Walter down, then, and removed the tag, number 522, from around his little neck. “Now off you go, Wall. And remember, no looking back.”
He turned his brother around then, to face the Smythes.
Mr. and Mrs. Smythe each took one of his little hands, Mr. Smythe with Peter Rabbit’s hand in his too. They began chatting easily about the comfortable bedroom they had made for Walter and Peter to share at their new home in Ambleside, not far from a little house that was said to be the smallest in the world. Now that the weather was improving, they could take Peter out on the lake. They could take bicycles on the ferry down to the Mitchell Wyke Ferry Bay and bike over to Near Sawrey, to see the places in Mrs. Potter’s picture books.
“Peter doesn’t know how to bicycle,” Walter said.
“We’ve put a basket on the front of your bicycle for him,” Mr. Smythe assured him.
Walter said, “I’m going to have a bicycle?”
“We already have it for you,” Mr. Smythe said. “You said your favorite color was blue, like Peter’s coat, so we got you a blue one.”
Walter said, “I don’t know how to bicycle either.”
Mr. Smythe scooped him up in his arms and, with a glance back at Stephan, stage-whispered so that Stephan would hear, “I’ll teach you, so we can surprise Stephan when he comes to visit! Does Stephan know how to ride a bicycle?”
Walter said, “Stephan knows everything. He’s even smarter than Žofie-Helene.”
And then they were in the car, and Walter was looking out the window, and holding Peter Rabbit up to see. Stephan closed his fist around his brother’s number as Žofie took his other hand in hers.
“You didn’t tell him,” Žofie said gently.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t manage a word. But he was keeping some sort of promise to Mutti, who hadn’t wanted Walter to know, who hadn’t wanted either of them to know. He was keeping some sort of promise to his mother as he watched the car pass under the Warner’s Holiday Camp sign, and disappear down the road.
The Kokoschka Paradox
There was no real line at the camp’s little post office that morning, with most of the children now placed with families. Žofie didn’t have to wait for the postmistress to hand over her day’s haul: a letter from Mama and another, separate letter from Jojo. The postmistress asked Stephan to wait, though. As Žofie waited with him, she opened the letter from Jojo, not words but a drawing of all of them together inside a heart—Mama, Grandpapa, Grandmère Betta, and Žofie herself.
The postmistress returned with a letter for Stephan from his mother, which always made him sad. Žofie would have written Grandpapa to tell him to quit sending them, but she thought the only thing that might make Stephan sadder than getting his mother’s letters from the grave would be when they stopped coming.
Today an intriguing package also arrived for him—a narrow box nearly as long as Žofie was tall.
“It’s postmarked Shanghai,” Žofie said. “It must be from your aunt Lisl. Well, go ahead, open it!”
Stephan set the package on the long, empty table where they all used to eat together and write in their notebooks—Žofie’s maths and Stephan’s plays—and wait while prospective parents passed them by. Stephan opened the package carefully. Inside, an envelope was loosely attached to a roll of something wrapped in butcher paper. He unsealed the envelope and read.
Žofie touched his arm gently as tears streamed down his cheeks. He handed the letter to her, and she read it herself:
Dearest Stephan,
I am so sorry to send you news of your mutti’s passing. You must know how very much she loved you.
I hope you know how much I too love you—you and Walter both. I love you like I would love my own sons. I pray for the day this sorrow will be over and we can be together again.
I worry about you, Stephan. I know you are eighteen now, and are perhaps considered too old to be placed with a family? You are so talented. I know you will find work. But your mother would want you to con
tinue your schooling. So I am sending the enclosed, which Michael arranged for me to have here in Shanghai. It is the only thing of real value I have to send you. Find the artist, Stephan. He lives in London now. He left Prague for London last year, but he is from Vienna. Tell him you are my nephew, tell him you are your mother’s and your father’s son, and he will help you find a reputable dealer.
I know you will not want to sell it, but I promise you I have the portrait of your mutti and I will arrange for you to have that someday. This one, Stephan, you must sell. I know you will want to keep it for my sake, but I will be glad for whomever owns it. It will mean that they will have allowed you to go to university, that they will have allowed you to thrive.
Much love,
Aunt Lisl
Žofie knew what the package contained even before Stephan gently lifted the canvas from the box and unrolled the portrait of his aunt Lisl with her scratched cheeks. Disturbing and elegant. Blush and wound.
* * *
THE PRAGUE GAZETTE
* * *
GERMAN TROOPS MARCH INTO CZECHOSLOVAKIA
* * *
Hitler proclaims from Prague Castle
BY KÄTHE PERGER
PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, March 16, 1939 — At 3:55 a.m. yesterday, following a meeting in Berlin with Adolf Hitler, President Hácha signed the fate of the Czech people over to the German Reich. Two hours later, the German army marched across our border amid a snowstorm, followed last night by a ten-vehicle convoy bringing Hitler himself to Prague.
Hitler was met not with cheering crowds, but rather deserted streets. He spent the night in Hradčany Castle, from which he spoke today . . .
At the Prague Train Station, September 1, 1939
Käthe Perger watched Johanna’s little face in the carriage window until she could no longer see her daughter. With the other parents, she watched the train disappear, then the empty space where it had been. She stood watching as the other parents trickled away, until she was nearly alone, before she went to the telephone booth.
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