Page 41 of The Girl with a Secret
As autumn had slipped into winter, it had felt almost easy to forget there was a war on at all, save for when someone gave Rosa a suspicious look when they heard her speaking German, or the Rosenbaums and Herzelfelds gathered together to listen to the evening news on the wireless, with its solemn summary of all Great Britain was doing to combat Hitler’s evil.
One night, after the news briefing which had seemed particularly grim, Moritz, without any prompting, had brought out his violin. “May I play?” he’d asked hesitantly, and Rosa’s parents had exchanged surprised looks.
“Yes, please,” Rosa had said. “We’d be glad if you would.”
He had tucked the violin under his chin and then, after a second’s pause, drew the bow across the strings. The first note had been exquisitely mournful, a poignant and beautiful lament. As he’d continued to play, Rosa had felt tears sting her eyes. She didn’t know the piece of music, and yet its sorrowful notes spoke to her soul—of grief and pain, of loss and fear, and yet also of hope, like an ember buried in the ashes, flickering to life.
Everyone had been silent, rapt, and when he’d finished the song, Rosa couldn’t help but clap, softly, because it had felt too sacred for anything else. Her mother, she had seen, had been wiping a tear from her eye, as discreetly as she could.
“That was very good,” her father had said gruffly. “Very good indeed.”
“It is Klezmer music,” Moritz had explained as he lowered his violin. “Yiddish. A song of lament, for surely that is what we should play in these times.”
“And yet,” Rosa remarked, leaning forward, “it felt hopeful too, at the end.”
He had smiled at her, his dark eyes gleaming behind his glasses. “Ah, yes. Even in lament, there is always hope, for ourGod is faithful.” He had held her gaze for a moment. “Even in this.”
Rosa had nodded slowly. And in that moment, the poignant notes of the music still reverberating through her, she had believed him.
As the months passed, Rosa did her best to use the time well; she practiced her English, and saved as much of her hard-earned wages as she could, and hoped for a day when she’d be able to serve her new country and maybe even dream a little bigger, just as Peter had once said.
She went for walks with Peter, or occasionally to the cinema, and listened to Moritz play the violin—other sad laments, but also some rousing folk music they danced to on her mother’s birthday, everyone whirling about and laughing, even dour Zlata and her usually prune-mouthed mother.
Life had, somewhat to Rosa’s surprise, taken on a shape she’d become used to, a form she could accept and even enjoy, in small and hesitant yet surer ways.
Then, in May, it all changed, and those fragile, barely-there dreams evaporated into an ephemeral mist as the grim reality of their situation came right to their door.
Rosa came back from work early one evening to find her mother in a state, pacing the living room and wringing her hands. Her father was nowhere to be seen. Over the last few months, her parents had done little to improve their circumstances; her mother had met a few fellow Jewish refugees, elegant ladies like herself with whom she played cards and drank cocktails on occasion, although they could ill afford such frivolity. Her father still held court at the coffee shop, and talked about sitting his medical exams, although he’d donenothing, as far as Rosa could see, toward that end. They both seemed to be waiting for something to change, but what?
The Rosenbaums seemed far more industrious. Moritz had found a job in a music shop, repairing violins, and Zlata took in extra washing and sewing. Rosa suspected the couple viewed her parents with more mystification than disdain; they could not conceive of how people could be so veryuseless. Sometimes, neither could she.
“Where have you been?” her mother exclaimed, turning away from the window, a spray of pink cherry blossoms brushing the pane, as Rosa, tired and sweaty from ten hours spent in a hot kitchen, came through the door.
“Working, as always,” Rosa replied, a slight edge to her voice. For over nine months, she’d been the only wage earner in their little household, and while she knew there was no point in giving vent to her frustration, the fact of it still rankled, especially when her mother acted so aggrieved that she wasn’t always available.
“I think something terrible has happened,” her mother pronounced, a tremble to her voice as she fluttered around Rosa like an agitated moth. “But my English isn’t good enough to be sure.” Rosa knew her English had surpassed her mother’s some months ago. “Read this,” her mother urged, “and tell me what it says.” She thrust a single slip of paper in front of Rosa’s face, so close its edge brushed her nose.
“Very well.” Rosa took the paper and smoothed it out, fighting her own mounting anxiety at the prospect of bad news. For the last few weeks, ever since Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark, it had seemed to be on the cusp of attacking the Low Countries and France, and Rosa could hardly sleep for thinking about it.
While Rosa had had several letters from Sophie since she’d gone to America, it was only in the last few months that she’d finally heard from both Hannah and Rachel. Hannah wasworking as a secretary in Paris, and Rachel and Franz were living in an apartment in Haarlem. They’d both been managing to eke out an existence for themselves, but that would all change if Hitler invaded… But no, surely, he couldn’t. Poland and Czechoslovakia had been bad enough, butFrance? The Maginot Line would hold. It would have to…
“Rosa!”
“I’m reading it, Mother.”
Rosa would have liked to have sat down first, and taken her shoes off her aching feet, and maybe had something to eat or at least a cup of tea, a drink she had come to appreciate in her ten months on this isle, but she could see how upset her mother was, and it caused a corresponding tightening of anxiety in her stomach. What if something terriblehadhappened? She was thinking of Hannah and Rachel, and the threats they might face, when she saw the insignia on the top of the letter—the Aliens Department of the Home Office. This wasn’t about her friends, or a potential invasion, Rosa realized. It had to be about her father.
The letter was succinct, a mere two sentences, requesting that Friedrich Herzelfeld report to the police station in Rochester Row, London, “forthwith upon receipt of this letter.”
“But why?” her mother exclaimed once Rosa had explained the letter’s contents. “Why? They finished with all the tribunals back in February. Your father was classed C, we all were?—”
“Yes, I know,” Rosa cut her off, her voice tense. During the tribunals, only a handful of Germans in Britain—five hundred or so out of seventy thousand—had been classified A, enough of a threat to intern. But now, with Germany having attacked Norway and Denmark and poised to invade France, maybe even Great Britain itself… Perhaps Germans—Germans like her father—were seen as more of a threat. “It might just be a formality,”Rosa told her mother, although she wasn’t sure she believed it. “Maybe he needs to fill out a form, or re-register, or something.”
Her mother shook her head, a panicked back and forth. “What will we do without your father?”
It was not a question Rosa had ever asked herself. She would get along without her father just fine, she thought with a sudden spurt of bitterness. It wasn’t as if he was providing for them, after all. In fact, they would save money with one less mouth to feed, and a rather substantial and demanding mouth at that. And yet… as much as he aggravated and exasperated her, she knew she did not want to lose him. She certainly didn’t want him to suffer in some forsaken camp, who knew where, while she and her mother struggled on alone.
But she didn’t say any of this to her mother. She merely folded up the letter and put it back in its envelope.
