Springtime of the Spirit (11 page)

Jurgen took the spoon next to her cup and stirred his own with it. “So that is all that’s between you and Christophe? He wanted you to settle things with your family?”

“Yes. Why?”

He smiled again and leaned closer, intimately so. “Let’s just say I like to keep track of how many lions are in the den. If he returns, that is.”

A week ago, if he’d used that tone of voice, summoned the smile he reserved only for women who interested him, Annaliese would have smiled back. Her heart would have fluttered. Instead, she looked away, pretending shyness even if she didn’t feel such a thing at the moment.

“Anya,” he said softly, “you’ve become very dear to me. You know that, don’t you?”

“No less than you are to me.” It was true, after all, even if in the past few days she’d thought less about being in his bed than how to understand—or explain—why she no longer dreamed about getting there.

“It’s difficult for me,” he whispered, “knowing you’re upstairs every night, alone. I’ve often thought about coming to you.”

He took one of her hands in his and she was glad because it steadied her. She hid her free hand in her lap.

She must say something, try telling him how confused she was. “I think—sometimes—that’s what I want too. But I’ve never been with anyone before, and for me it seems to be an important step. More important than I once thought.”

He laughed gently. “Are you worried that I will find you lacking? I expect your inexperience. Don’t be afraid. It’s all perfectly natural. What will happen is a beautiful thing, one I’d like to show you.”

She didn’t doubt that. And maybe he was right; whatever mysteries there were between a man and a woman should be beautiful. It was, after all, the most personal of things to share and would certainly make each vulnerable to the other.

“Come here,” he said, standing and pulling her to her feet too. “Let me go through the day thinking of you. Tasting you.”

Then his lips came down on hers. He tasted of the coffee they’d been drinking, only cooled.

“Until tonight,” he said, pulling away.

And then he let her go.

* * *

Christophe neared the woman pulling in laundry, noticing her attention was clearly drawn to something inside the kitchen. He topped the last step behind her and followed her gaze with his own.

In time to see Annaliese in Jurgen’s arms.

He must be twenty years her senior! Nearly as old as her father!

An immediate notion to barge in crossed his mind, past the woman watching from just outside the door in the chilly morning air. He would demand Jurgen leave Annaliese alone.

But then it all became clear; that embrace, that kiss—they were hardly one-sided. She’d welcomed him.

Christophe backed away, straight into a frigid sheet dangling on the line. Wordlessly, without apology, blindly, he took the opposite end of the material and together, as if by design, he and the woman stretched it taut; then with two steps he handed it to her to finish folding.

She thanked him, but he couldn’t respond, not even a murmur. He left the porch and started walking, barely paying attention to his direction.

12

The women Annaliese met with that day were eager to talk to her. These were workingwomen, some of them supporting their families while their husbands—returned soldiers unable to find a job or others let go from factories still transitioning from war goods to civilian needs—looked for work. Others were unmarried women like Annaliese, drawn to the city from various agricultural villages, enjoying the independence their jobs provided. She knew if the war had afforded any favors, it was emancipation from the few roles previously available to women like her.

She welcomed the diversion, their enthusiasm, the questions and discussions about the privilege of voting for the first time in their lives. The world of politics had never been an option for them, and they were eager to hear her views on fairness and equality for everyone, about the People’s Council who would speak for them so long as they were not dissolved should another party win the election. They were even eager to donate a few coins of their hard-earned wages in support of Eisner, because he’d been chosen by the council.

Working felt natural to her. It was not just a mindless way of escaping from more personal things on her mind. She contributed to the future of Germany by educating women who very much wanted to learn what she had to teach. And she added to the party coffers every time she spoke, no matter where she went.

But escape she must, not only from wondering if Christophe would return to work with their party, but from thoughts of Jurgen and what he expected of her when she saw him that night.

By the time Annaliese returned to the party office, it was late in the day. She’d extended her workday as long as she could, but with each footstep toward the butcher shop came thoughts of Jurgen, waiting.

It was times like this she missed Nitsa. Though Annaliese had known Nitsa all her life, they’d only become close friends shortly after Annaliese had caught her stealing money from the payroll office at the factory. She’d made Nitsa return it but had promised to give her something from her parents’ home that would bring nearly as much on the black market as the puny sum Nitsa had managed to steal. Her parents had never missed the silver candlesticks they’d stored in the back pantry.

“Why would being alone with Jurgen be unpleasant now,”
Nitsa would ask Annaliese if she were here,
“when only a week ago you thought you wanted to be with him? to give yourself to him? What’s changed?”

Nothing, absolutely nothing.

The whole situation reminded Annaliese of a painting her father once owned, one Annaliese wanted to give to Nitsa to sell. But for some reason on the very day Annaliese had planned to remove it, her father had taken it from the closet where it had been stored. Everyone thought it had been the work of a minor artist from right here in Munich. While mildly respected, the painter’s work had never garnered the attention he would have liked, not even upon his death. The artwork her father owned had been appealing enough, a nice use of color, which was why Annaliese thought it might sell on the black market. But when her father took it to an art critic who recognized it as the work of a famous Flemish artist, the price had leaped to the sky.

What had changed? The painting?

No, only its perceived value. Her father sold it immediately, pocketing a hefty profit.

She shook her head, refusing to compare her present dilemma to a capitalistic phenomenon. This was far more personal than that.

And yet what had caused the value of being with Jurgen to do just the opposite—to plummet? Had he changed? Had he done anything to make her see him differently? She’d known he had flaws since the day she met him. Like his pride. It had never bothered her much; she knew it took confidence and self-assurance to draw others to a vision.

But what he wanted to do involved her, and so personally . . . though it was almost as if he thought it had only to do with him.

And then there was Christophe.

His face often came to mind. Even if she’d been wrong about the letters he wrote to Giselle, even if they’d been written on the heels of battle fatigue or some kind of shell shock–induced hatred that had long since faded, he was still judgmental and rigid. Even if Giselle had been wrong to be inspired by what must have been a whim of passion in him, he was still responsible. He also thought her wrong to ignore her family.

His presence had brought with it a reminder of every rule she’d been raised with, about virtue and fidelity and the bonds of matrimony every good girl ought to long for. Worse, he reminded her of all those childish dreams she once had about falling in love and then having a wedding, the kind of wedding her father could afford. Jurgen might compose unforgettable poetry about women and love, but not a single verse would he write about marriage; she knew that well enough.

Annaliese rounded the corner near the butcher shop and all thoughts abandoned her. There was a crowd outside the door, and from the clamor she knew it wasn’t just a busy day of recruiting. Too much noise for that, and an undercurrent of tension in the shouts.

She hurried her steps and pushed through the crowd into a room full of chaos. Neither Jurgen nor Leo was in sight. The uneasiness was tangible. A crowd several layers deep huddled around what she knew must be someone sitting at the typewriter, perhaps one of their writers eager to get copy off to their press.

“What is it?” she asked Ivo, who towered above most others. “What’s happened?”

He reached out to her, then pulled back, as if shy of his deformed hands. She caught him, though, because she’d once held his hand in a march and knew such contact didn’t hurt him.

His palm closed around her hand. “One of the foremen at the tool works factory was thrown over a bridge. He hit his head on a piling and drowned. It happened after Jurgen’s visit.”

“Oh no!”

“The police are holding Jurgen for questioning.”

“But he’s a member of the council! He would never incite violence. How can they hold him against his will?”

“They say they’re holding him for his own good,” Ivo told her. “To protect him in case some of the bourgeois blame him for the death.”

Jurgen couldn’t go to jail, no matter why they said they were holding him. Not again, not after he’d spent so many months in the hands of the government. It had been a government under a different name when he’d been imprisoned the first time, but that would hardly matter. Not if he was to be deprived of his freedom.

And what would this do to the election? To have one of Eisner’s most prominent supporters thrown in jail, no matter the reason, was surely a disaster.

“Where is Leo?”

“He’s there, at the typewriter. Getting out a flyer defending Jurgen.”

“Anya? Is that you?”

She pressed through the crowd and found Leo just pulling a page from the typewriter carriage.

He handed it to Ivo. “Get this to the printer right away. And you—” he looked at Annaliese—“you’ll have to address the crowd outside the jail. I saw them; they’ve already formed.”

Leo took her hand, pulling her along to the back of the room as he spoke. “We must make sure they know Jurgen is as grieved as the rest of us over what happened. And label those really at fault—the capitalists are the ones who continue to suck the blood and hope out of each one of us. That foreman who died knew nothing of freedom; he was hard-pressed by his capitalist bosses to force those under him to reach a certain quota. He was as much a victim as the rest of us. And now they want to make a victim of Jurgen.”

He pushed open the door, and she followed him outside. “Do you understand? It must be made clear that Jurgen in no way condones what happened, and the man who died must be made a victim, too. If the crowd can be made to see that he would have flourished with freedom and fairness, we might gain some new voices to join ours instead of losing any. Come with me.”

The truck waited at the end of the block, and Leo coached her as he had when she first joined the party. Along the route to the municipal building, she heard each word, but his advice matched the assumptions she had already. A man had died today, a man whose identity she did not know, though he represented another loss of German life. She might not be able to put a face to the man who was lost, but she could define the grief and make sure Jurgen himself was absolved of any guilt.

There, in the street before the building where Jurgen was being held, was the crowd Leo had spoken about—and a speaker already on a platform above.

Her heart thudded as she heard accusations labeling the men who’d attacked the foreman a mob. And Jurgen as the one who’d inspired that mob.

The words might as well have been bullets aimed at him, but she could be his shield.

Annaliese fairly sailed from the back of the truck, Ivo scrambling after her with the sturdy wooden platform on which she could stand to grab the attention she needed.

“Don’t add Jurgen to the wrong side!” she cried, and the crowd seemed startled to hear another voice from a nearby corner. The other speaker, a man she did not know, was startled too. His silence gave her time to cry out again. “The victims today are those trapped in a capitalist system that degraded the foreman to a slave driver. If he’d had a taste of the fairness Jurgen offers through our council, nothing like this would have happened.”

“Then why did it happen during one of his speeches?” the other speaker said. “Because he incited it!”

“No! We want peace. If you knew anything about Jurgen, you would know that. He spent a year in a prison just like this for protesting the war, for refusing to respect an antiquated monarch. Jurgen hates war! And violence! There would be no wars without the greed of others. Greed that made a foreman the victim of a senseless crime.”

If not for the strength of her voice against his, Annaliese doubted she could have won the crowd over. But win them she did, offering volley after volley of discourse. These were Germans before her, war-weary, death-weary, just as she was. She knew that and reminded them Jurgen knew it too. This was an entirely new audience to her, one who hadn’t come expecting to hear her message of peace and fairness and equality. Few were dressed as she was, in the worn clothes of the lower class; most of the clothing in this crowd represented the middle class. Seeing that made her all the more impassioned, because if she could win new voices to their way of thinking, then Jurgen’s imprisonment would almost be worth it.

She saw them reluctantly come around to her, warm to her logic, her passion. This crowd, like so many before them, soon let her define the truth, because her vision of the world was simple and clear. A world in which the weak were cared for, the exploiters revealed for what they were. She longed with them for a better world.

One in which Jurgen would not—could not—be part of any violence.

Let the blame fall where it belonged: on the capitalist system exploiting those who had no choice but to offer the strength of their backs, the dexterity of their hands, the test of their will in order to survive on what few scraps the bourgeoisie thrust their way. She was quick to reveal it was the system that failed, not the people—after all, who would knowingly set out to thwart another? It was a system that demanded greed, one that people could abandon in light of their love for others.