The Curator's Daughter

by Melanie Dobson

The Gestapo would never find out what she had done.

  20

  LILLY

  SONNENWIESE CHILDREN’S HOME

  The matron wrapped Lilly and three other girls up in pretty blue dresses, red bows in their hair. Then she paraded them in front of the lady who’d visited before except this time the woman was wearing a dark-brown dress instead of green. A branch instead of a leaf in this forest room.

  Sitting beside the brown lady was another woman and a man—a mother and father—both of them drinking from white cups. Both watching the children.

  Lilly squirmed in her shiny black shoes. What was she supposed to do now?

  Adoption, the matron had said, that’s why these people were here, but Lilly hadn’t learned that word.

  The mother studied Lilly’s braided hair, her tight shoes. She muttered words that Lilly didn’t understand.

  Mama had always bent down to speak with her, in a voice that made her heart sing. Never rushed like this.

  The mother stared at Lilly as if waiting for her to speak.

  Had she asked a question?

  “Lilly,” the matron prompted.

  “Don’t wrap the truth in cotton.”

  That’s what Mama always said. Tell the truth, even when Lilly was scared.

  “Nie rozumiem,” she said when the matron nudged her. Very polite. Like Mama would say if she didn’t understand the words.

  The mother’s eyes flashed with surprise, black liquid splashing over the side of her cup, adding polka dots to her dress. “What is she speaking?”

  “German, of course,” the matron said. “She’s garbling it.”

  The mother’s eyes turned dark. “That’s not German.”

  “To a three-year-old it is.”

  The brown lady glared. “Get her out of here.”

  The matron shuffled Lilly away as the lady introduced the next girl in line.

  Lilly sat on a cold metal chair for what seemed like hours, the nurses in their white uniforms passing by as if they didn’t see her. What did she do wrong? She’d spoken the truth, but the truth made the women angry.

  Was she supposed to lie?

  She wasn’t allowed to move, not even to use the toilet, not even when her insides felt as if they might explode.

  The bow slipped off her braid, falling into her lap, and she crushed the ribbon in her hands, trying to pretend she was back home, running through the forest and farmlands with her brothers, hunting mushrooms for Mama to pickle. How she’d loved eating those mushrooms. Loved everything about their little home that always smelled like bigos—her mother’s stew.

  They had a toilet at home, in a small shed out back. Her mama wanted her to use it, whenever she needed to. And Mama never made her wear bows or tight shoes or sit in a chair for saying she didn’t understand.

  Always, she was supposed to tell the truth, especially when she didn’t understand.

  The potty wouldn’t stop, no matter how she tried. It dribbled down her legs, soaking her tights, and she wanted to curl up under the chair before anyone could see.

  The nurses noticed her then, the puddle underneath the seat. And she knew it was wrong.

  A dog, one of the women called her. Another just laughed, making her flush warm. She should have been able to hold it for longer, and now she was wet. A wet, dirty dog.

  If only she could go home.

  The matron was angry. Sweeping into the hall, she grabbed Lilly’s arm, and the woman’s fingers hurt worse than the man who’d taken her from Mama.

  “I’m sorry,” Lilly pleaded, but the matron held up a stick, the wood punctured with holes. A bat ready to swing.

  “Beat the Polish out of you,” that’s what the matron said.

  She cried out for her mama after the first hit. And the second one.

  “You have no mother now.”

  Lilly whimpered at the next swing, the pain rippling down her bare legs. The thought that her mama might be forever gone.

  The matron stopped to wipe the sweat off her forehead. “You are German, Lilly.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Ich bin Deutsche.” Another swing. “Say it.”

  “Ich bin Deutsche,” she whispered. If only this terrible game would end.

  “Louder.”

  “Ich bin Deutsche,” Lilly repeated, wishing she could run away.

  Over and over, the German words, the beating, as if the matron were nailing every word to her skin.

  The woman finally stopped. “From now on, you only speak German or I will bruise every Zoll of your body.”

  She understood enough. “Ja.”

  “You are German,” the matron repeated. “And you should be proud.”

  A black web crawled up the top of her legs. To be German meant everything hurt. To be German meant she could never again speak her mama’s words.

  The matron left her then, and a nurse scooted her off to a bath.

  The woman tsked as she peeled off Lilly’s dress and undergarments. “She shouldn’t have done this to you.”

  “Ich bin Deutsche,” Lilly said, the water burning her skin.

  “What?”

  Lilly spoke louder now. “Ich bin Deutsche.”

  The nurse patted her head. “Of course you are.”

  21

  EMBER

  Water and debris covered the back roads as Ember trekked inland with Dakota, her cell phone charging in his console. The 4Runner cleared all the storm’s damage, including the split pieces of fallen oak.

  Sheep ambled behind the limestone walls, grazing peacefully on the hills as if they’d slept through the storm. In the distance she saw a glint of blue, a panorama of ocean for the sheep and their caregivers to enjoy. Alex once said he’d learned more about God in his years shepherding these animals then he’d ever learned in church.

  A wide porch wrapped around the front of the Kiehl family farmhouse with several rocking chairs turned on their sides, a string of display lights beaming over the hill. Ember had spent only a few months living on this property, but for a moment she felt as if she’d come home.

  Dakota picked up the chairs before opening the front door. “Gram?”

  “We’re in the kitchen.”

  Ember followed him to a long dining room table set with fine china and several pitchers, bowls of fresh berries and whipped cream on each plate.

  “Hello,” Ember said, sitting beside the woman who’d opened up the world to her in high school. Mrs. Kiehl’s hair was short, a stylish pixie of gray, and her green eyes glowed like the light from a firefly. Around her neck, she wore a polished white stone on a silver chain.

  “Ember.” She reached forward, taking her hand. “My eyes are a bit blurry, but my ears are as clear as the day I was born. I’m glad you’ve come back.”

  “It’s been a bit of a journey.”

  “How’s the cottage?” Mrs. Kiehl asked.

  Dakota sat on the other side of the table. “Not a bit of damage that I can see. All we lost were a few branches.”

  “That place has more lives than a cat,” Mrs. Kiehl said. “It should have crumbled years ago, but there’s a whole lot of strength under that gingerbread roof.”

  Dakota grinned. “Sort of like you, Gram. Strong and beautiful.”

  “And old.”

  Ember suppressed her laugh. She’d told Noah very clearly that her former teacher wouldn’t want to be called old.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Mrs. Kiehl smiled, playfully tapping his hand. Clearly she loved Dakota as much as he loved her. “One more chance for all of us.”

  “Where’s Kayla?” Dakota asked.

  “Right here.” The young woman breezed into the room with a teapot. The mismatched squares on her brightly colored apron were sprinkled with flour, and her dark-brown hair tumbled over her shoulders as she poured black tea for each of them. “We were up half the night, praying for you.”

  Dakota kissed her cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Eat some fruit,�
�� Kayla said before turning back to the kitchen. “I’ll get the casserole out of the oven.”

  “That’s a lovely necklace.” Ember pointed at the stone resting on Mrs. Kiehl’s collar.

  “It’s my Schatzi,” Mrs. Kiehl said. “A treasure from Germany.”

  “Did you bring it with you from Nuremberg?”

  “My father gave it to me with a reminder,” Mrs. Kiehl said, fingering the piece. “All King David needed was the stone that God gave him to kill Goliath, and I need to use whatever gifts that God gives me to defeat the giants in my world.”

  “A wise dad.”

  Mrs. Kiehl took a slow sip of her tea. “Dakota says that you are working in Washington, DC.”

  “I’m researching and writing my dissertation about the pattern of persecution in Nuremberg.”

  Mrs. Kiehl turned toward the window, looking at a weathered barn and meadows that rolled behind it, all the way to the ocean. The cabin where Ember and Alex once lived was no longer there. “What do you plan to do with this research?”

  “Publish it,” she replied. “And then I’ll return to teaching. The more people know about the past, the more we can work together to expose and end this cycle of hatred.”

  “I’m afraid it will never end, Ember. Not if people continue to turn their backs on the love of God for all of His creation.”

  The thought seeped into Ember like the bitter leaves in her tea. “But I have to do something before history repeats itself.”

  Mrs. Kiehl placed her teacup back on its saucer. “You think words can stop hatred?”

  “Words can help curb it.”

  Mrs. Kiehl sighed. “I once thought the same thing.”

  “Why don’t you think so now?”

  “Words will never penetrate a hardened heart,” she said. “The persecution won’t end until people are willing to humble themselves and love their neighbors.”

  Ember eyed the white stone. “This research is the only rock I have to throw.”

  Mrs. Kiehl smoothed her hand over the necklace again. “Then I hope you aim well.”

  “You were the one who inspired all of this,” Ember said.

  “All of what?”

  “My interest in the history of Nuremberg.”

  Another smile flickered on Mrs. Kiehl’s lips. “It makes me immeasurably proud that you are doing this. No matter how people react, it’s a story that needs to be told.” Her voice fluttered away, as if she’d gone to Nuremberg in her mind. “Have you been there?”

  “I’m going next week.”

  “I never went back after the bombings, but I’ve seen photographs of Old Town.”

  Ember had seen the pictures too, the mountains of rubble. It took seven years, she’d read, to clear it all out on what they’d deemed the Rubble Express. Thirteen million cubic meters—enough to fill more than four Egyptian pyramids—relocated with their shovels.

  Mrs. Kiehl scooped more sweetener into her tea. “The reporters said they restored the town exactly how it was before the war.”

  “Perhaps your home is still there,” Dakota said.

  “If it is, I’ll send pictures.”

  “It was an old lodge, above the zoo,” Mrs. Kiehl explained. “I don’t remember the address, but we lived near an abandoned quarry. The rust-colored cliffs reminded me of giant chalkboards.”

  Ember tapped her fingers together, trying to balance the arithmetic in her head, but the mental gymnast fell flat off the beam. If she’d been exploring the cliffs, Mrs. Kiehl must have been born long before Charlie Ward arrived for the Nuremberg trials. Perhaps Hanna and Charlie had known each other while he attended college in Germany. “I’m glad you had some space to play during the war.”

  “The war seemed far away when I was young. I remember visiting the zoo in those years and a crumbling church on the hill by our house. I used to wander around the columns while my mother was praying.”

  “Why did she go up to an abandoned church to pray?” Ember asked.

  “There was a labyrinth nearby.” Mrs. Kiehl’s voice traveled away, as if she was just rediscovering this memory. “My mother would walk in circles, like the sisters might have done long ago. Sometimes she would kneel on the path as if she couldn’t carry her burdens all the way to the end.”

  “Her load must have been quite heavy.”

  “I wish I could remember more . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Ember said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Dakota, could you help Kayla with the casserole?” Mrs. Kiehl asked, taking over as captain.

  He ringed the handle of his cup to take with him. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  “Only for a moment.”

  He kissed his grandmother’s forehead and walked into the other room. Mrs. Kiehl tipped forward, folding translucent hands with lavender-painted nails. “He used to like you a lot, Ember. When you were in school.”

  She froze. “I don’t think—”

  “Had a rough upbringing, but he’s come around just fine. Unlike his dad.”

  “Mrs. Kiehl—”

  “I don’t want to meddle, but . . .” Mrs. Kiehl took a sip of tea.

  “I believe this would be considered meddling.”

  “Dakota’s a good man. My hero.”

  She quickly changed the subject. “I’m trying to find a hero in Nuremberg, Mrs. Kiehl. One man or woman who stood up against the anti-Semitism. One person who swam solely against the tide.”

  “Anyone who swam against the tide there was sent east,” Mrs. Kiehl said. “If they survived the war, they would have had to float along with the surface tide and then double back underneath the current so the Nazis wouldn’t know.”

  “Was your mother an archaeologist?”

  Mrs. Kiehl glanced toward the kitchen door. “After I was born, she worked as a curator at the German National Museum.”

  “But before your birth?”

  “She never spoke much about her past.” Mrs. Kiehl steepled her fingers as if to breathe a prayer. “It was a complicated time, Ember. My mother loved history and she loved telling me the stories about the nuns who lived in the convent. She did not love the Nazi Party, but I was raised to be a model of the German people in my early years. Certain people . . . they were cruel to my mother and me.”

  “I wish we could mend all the wounds in our past.” Make the memories go away. None of them should define themselves by their childhood. “Dakota said your father left Nuremberg at the end of 1945.”

  “That’s correct.”

  She didn’t want to insult the woman and her memories, but no matter which way Ember tried to maneuver the facts, it didn’t make sense. Mrs. Kiehl would have been much too young to remember anything about Nuremberg if she’d been born after the war.

  “So you would have just been born before Charlie returned to America.”

  “I was born a few years before the war began,” she said. “My certificate was lost in the aftermath, I’m afraid, but my mother said I was born in 1936. The Germans were meticulous with their paperwork, but their storage was no match for the Allied bombs or the subsequent fires.”

  Ember took a long sip of tea before she asked the inevitable, the same question that had been pressing down on her. “Was Charlie Ward your biological father?”

  Mrs. Kiehl lifted the tea bag from her cup and wrapped it over her spoon, wringing out the last drops of tea. “I believe so. He attended Columbia University and did an academic exchange for a year at the University of Berlin. But my mother never told him about me until the end of the war.”

  “So Charlie brought you back to the States . . . ,” she said, confirming what Dakota had been told.

  “Yes. After my mother disappeared.”

  Ember could smell baked cheese and ham wafting out of the kitchen door. “You don’t know what happened to her?”

  Mrs. Kiehl shook her head. “I’ve searched for information over the years to no avail.”

  She’d traveled here to sort out the kno
ts in this story, but they seemed to be tightening. “I can ask about her while I’m in Nuremberg.”

  Mrs. Kiehl lowered her hands. “Anything you can find would be a gift to my family.”

  “You once told me that no one could force their identity on me,” Ember said.

  “And I still believe that. You must choose—we all must choose—how we are going to live our lives. No matter what someone else did in our past, with God’s help, we choose how to move forward.”

  “I’ll try to find out what happened,” Ember agreed. “In the article, you said your mother was a friend to the Jewish people.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that to the reporter.” Mrs. Kiehl blinked. “You understand how complicated family can be.”

  “A bit.”

  “I thought you might, because of what your husband did . . .”

  Ember fell back against the chair, the word husband ringing in her ears. “I’m not married.”

  “Your ex-hu—”

  “Gram!” Dakota set the bubbling casserole dish on the table, a reprimand in this word.

  But Ember barely heard him, her vision shriveling. “You know about Lukas?”

  Mrs. Kiehl shook her head, the stone wobbling across her neck. “No—”

  Then Dakota was beside Ember, reaching for her arm. “Let me show you the farm.”

  She didn’t move. “What do you know about Lukas?”

  “I’m sorry.” Mrs. Kiehl waved both hands in front of her. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a long time ago.”

  No one on Martha’s Vineyard was supposed to know about Lukas. He belonged to a different life, one she’d put far behind her.

  The trembling in Ember’s legs traveled up to her voice. “Please, Mrs. Kiehl . . .”

  The woman shook her head again. “These lips of mine, sometimes they speak out of turn.”

  Dakota was tugging on Ember’s arm now, pointing her toward the back door.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Kiehl said again as Ember stepped out into the sunshine, her shoes sinking in the muddy grass.

  She’d spent all this time searching for information about others, even as she’d tried desperately to forget what was behind her, especially this man who’d been her husband in the eyes of the Aryan Council, if not the state—