Mrs. Tuesday's Departure: A Historical Novel of World War Two (8 page)

There was a murmur in the crowd. From one corner of the room, a young man raised his first and yelled his agreement.

She shook her head and laughed. “Merely bugs. Ordered about, stepped upon. Destroyed at will!”

No, Anna, I gasped. Please no. I recalled the look in her eyes last night. I saw it again before me now. “No not here!” I whispered.

Her brows furrowed in anger. “The problem with this perspective is that it sanitizes the event. They see an aerial view of a city. Well, imagine that camera drops down through the clouds to a street among the buildings and into a window, and there watches the events of a single family. Mothers standing before dinner tables where there is no more food! Fathers and sons taken off to battlefields and labor camps where they are never heard from again. Children gunned down in streets where they used to play. That is where you will see the real impact of this war.”

“On the streets!” yelled a young girl with braids wrapped around her head. “Where they are killing us!”

Another student stood and screamed, “The fascists! Hitler’s accomplices are turning against their own countrymen!”

The students yelled their approval.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood and I waved my arm to try to attract my sister’s attention. I couldn’t let her go on. The crowd pushed me backwards and I struggled to stay on my feet. The walls of the room closed around me, the temperature rising with the crush of students. The wound on my head ached and I felt dizzy. I grasped the shoulder of the man in front of me afraid I would faint. He turned and smiled, as if I were a comrade in this charade.

Anna raised her voice to shout over the rising chorus. “Yes! There, beneath the slogans of dictators shouted over loud speakers, in between the air-raid sirens, and runs to the basement to hide, the sun continues to rise and set, food must be found, sleep must be had, and just one more day survived…”

The applause began. Anna shouted over the noise. “While we wonder when the nightmare will end!”

A group in the last row began a chant of “When, when, when, when...”

Didn’t she realize what she was doing? In her efforts to speak against what had happened to me on the street, she was putting us in greater danger. Anna’s eyes sparkled as she looked around the room. Her voice rose as she brought her arms into the air.

“It is our responsibility as artists to raise our voices against the war. We must wage a battle with words.”

The crowd roared their approval. I shuddered and tried in vain to yell for her to stop.

“We must speak out against the soldiers who would kill us. We must use our pens as swords against the hate that sends our loved ones away from us!”

A young man standing near me at the door, raised his fist and yelled, “Communists! Traitors!” He shoved against me and I ducked as a scuffle began.

Anna’s bright red cheeks radiated the passion behind her words. “We will not hide from the enemy. We will not be silent! We will tell them that we have had enough of their guns and tanks and bombs!”

The crowd exploded in a chorus. “Yes!”

“To the streets!”

“Down with the fascists!”

Trying to shove my way forward, I failed as students rushed toward Anna and simultaneously began shouting down dissenters. Around the room, arguments broke out and fists raised.

I clawed my way through the hordes, screaming, “Anna! Anna!”

She turned toward my voice and then moved away to the other side of the room.

“Anna! Stop!”

My cries were lost in the melee.

Behind me, the crowd surged forward and I toppled against the rows of desks in front of me. I flung myself into the crowd that moved in the irrational ebb and flow of a tide simultaneously trying to move in and out of the room.

“Anna!” I could see her still at the front of the room. As students pressed against her, she became disoriented. Horrified I watched her face transform as her mind opened and she slipped through a door that lead her far from here. I heard a young woman scream and the crowd surged backwards as someone yelled that the police had arrived.

I heard the
m
before I saw them. Their shouts filled the air, followed by a chorus of screams and curses from the students they beat with their clubs. The air around me was thick with the movement of bodies flung in disarray; panic turned the tide from exultation to self-preservation. Unfortunately, there was only one exit. A doorway filled by the enemy. Many of the triumphant quickly became lambs, grabbing their books, cowering and bowing their heads in silence. A few brave souls continued to rage. They raged as they ducked.

Then there was Anna.

My darling sister.

She stood against the tide. She stood and laughed.

She continued to laugh as the police surrounded her. She laughed as they grabbed her arms and yanked her away from the podium.

“Stay” she laughed hysterically, breaking free one last time, she raised her arms above her head as if conducting her orchestra.

“Stay!” she screamed as they surrounded her and lifted her by her arms and dragged her from the room.

I followed th
e
police escort into the hall. “Wait, I’m her sister!”

They ignored my pleas. My attempts to get Anna’s attention failed in her reverie.

With no other recourse, I followed the police down the hall to the Dean’s office.

Despite my protests, I was not allowed in the room. What would happen to her now? Would they arrest her and put her in jail? Would she be carted off to one of the labor camps? Or worse, to an asylum?

Someone put a hand on my shoulder and I whirled around to see the Dean of the university. “You’ve got to help me,” I cried, grabbing his sleeve. “Anna’s in trouble.”

“What was she thinking?” he said. “She’s caused a great deal of trouble.”

“Can you get me in there? I can explain her illness to them. She didn’t know what she was saying.”

“I’m not sure they’ll believe you.”

“They have to!”

“Let me go in first and intervene.” He squeezed my arm and then left me. When the door opened, I couldn’t see Anna over the coats of the policemen. I cried out for her, but my voice was lost as the door shut in my face.

I turned and hurried down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor. Glass-fronted doors leading to the individual offices of the faculty divided the wood-paneled hall.

At the end of the hall, there was a cul-de-sac of three offices. I knocked on the one to my left. My knock was answered by an invitation to enter. With trembling hands, I turned the knob and opened the door.

The overhead ligh
t
shadowed his face as he sat bent over his desk. When I entered the room, he looked up and then sighed and then returned to the book he was studying. He looked the same as I’d remembered him, though as I stepped into the room, it became clear that creases above his brow and around his eyes softened his chiseled features. Sprinklings of silver frosted his dark hair.

“It’s me Natalie, not Anna,” I said, stopping before his desk.

He leaned back in his chair and his frown became a hesitant smile. “I know. It’s been a long time.”

I kept in mind that they had not broken up easily. Anna had fought his rationalizations that the affair had come to its natural end with painful, sometimes hysterical entreaties that had lead to embarrassing arguments in front of other faculty. I often wondered if their breakup had precipitated Anna’s descent into her imaginary world, or whether his recognition of her decline caused him to seek an end rather than watch her fall.

“Deszo, I need your help.”

“It’s good to see you, Natalie.”

His voice. I’d forgotten the effect his smooth masculine voice had on me. I shook off the start of a memory. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to be polite. Anna’s in trouble.”

“I don’t think I’m the right person for you to see.”

I leaned forward and placed my hands on his desk. “Deszo, please, they’re holding her downstairs in the Dean’s office.”

“What’s she doing here?” he asked.

“Please, come now,” I said reaching for his hand. “I’ll explain it as we go.”

“I don’t want to get involved...”

“Deszo, she came here believing she was still a professor. She gave an enflaming speech. They’ve called the police!”

“But...”

My fists pounded the desk. “Damn it, this has nothing to do with your affair. I’m asking you as a friend.”

“Whose friend?”

“For Max,” I cried.

Deszo’s eyebrows arched and he looked at me without comment.

“Then do it for me.”

He stood and walked around his desk. I grabbed his arm in mine and hurried him down the hall. As we moved down the stairs, I explained my confrontation with the soldiers last night; the event that I believed had precipitated her actions this morning. Deszo stopped on the landing under the light from a window and touched my forehead. “Natalie.”

“We don’t have time.” I said, brushing his hand away.

The crowd around the Dean’s office had subsided when we reached the door. A policeman answered Deszo’s knock, we explained our relationship to Anna and the officer stepped aside. Deszo went first and I followed behind him.

I looked around the room, “Where’s Anna?”

The Dean nodded towards his office. “I had them put her in there. I felt it would be less stressful for her.”

“Thank you,” I said, heading for the door.

I entered the room quietly. My heart skipped as I looked around the room and found it empty. Then I heard the chair behind the desk squeak on its castors and it rolled a little closer to the window.

Walking over to the chair, I saw Anna. Her palm, splayed against the cold glass left a moist impression.

As I reached for her, she spoke, leaving my hand in mid-air.

“It’s colder than usual this winter.”

I nodded and looked at the barren trees in the courtyard outside the window. “Yes.”

“I was looking for the birds.”

“Anna, don’t.”

“There aren’t any people in the park to feed them.” Her voice took on a singsong quality. “To throw breadcrumbs on the sidewalk for them.”

“People are starving, Anna.”

“But who will feed the birds?” She whispered in a childlike tone.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They’ll die if someone doesn’t feed them.”

“Is that why you came here this morning?”

She shrugged, bu
t
refused to turn away from the window. “Do you remember when we were little, how Marie would let us put breadcrumbs on the windowsill in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering how Anna’s demeanor had so drastically changed. Her hair had come loose from the neat bun at the nape of her neck, releasing wisps of blonde curls. She swayed in her seat, keeping rhythm to a song I couldn’t hear. Her voice slipped between the ebullient authority I’d heard only an hour before and the childish banter of the dementia of the day before, as if the two warred within her for authority.

“And when we came home from school in the afternoon, we would go to the window and see that all the breadcrumbs were gone. Marie said that the birds had come while we were at school.”

I smiled and touched the collar of her jacket, letting my fingers run along the nubby tweed, wishing I could join her in this innocent reflection.

Anna continued without me. “So one Saturday I put out the breadcrumbs as we did every morning. This time, I sat by the window and waited for the birds. But they never came.”

Anna’s voice broke. “When I asked Marie why they wouldn’t come, she just laughed and said, ‘faith is the evidence of things not seen.’”

“I don’t understand your point, Anna.”

“It’s a crazy verse isn’t it?”

“No not that.”

Her voice changed again, taking on the stern authority I’d heard in the classroom. “I’ve thought about it a great deal. ‘The evidence of things not seen’, it contains an inherent contradiction doesn’t it? How can there be evidence of things not seen?”

I looked out at the steel gray sky, pregnant with unreleased snow, and felt the desperate frustration of my sister. But I felt no sympathy. “It’s describing the mystery of faith. I think it describes how difficult it is to believe in God’s presence even when we can’t see Him, even when we feel so alone and need His presence.”  I sighed, exasperated. Wasn’t it enough to save Mila? “Anna, some birds will live and some will die. We cannot save them all.”

Anna shook her head and then pressed her forehead against the glass. “If not us, who will save them?”

“Is that why you came here this morning?” I repeated.

“Someone has to feed the birds,” she whispered. “If not us, then who, Natalie? Will God save them? Or are we meant to be His helpers?”