The Extra (2 page)

The ticking of two dozen or more timepieces chipped away at the quiet of their apartment. But there was also one other small sound that could be heard: the
puk . . . puk
as her mother pinned down bobbins of thread on a pillow for a new part of a lace design.

“What are you working on?” Lilo asked.

“Bridal veil.”

Lilo got up from the table, leaving her math book open to the last problem. She walked over to the corner where her mother was working.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, Mama.”

Her mother looked up and smiled. “Thank you, Little Mouse.”

Lilo made a face. “Mama, I am almost sixteen. How can you still call me Little Mouse?”

“It’s a mother’s prerogative. You can be fifty years old and I’ll still call you Little Mouse. So there.”

“So there,” Lilo repeated with a sigh. “Who’s it for? Someone rich?”

“Of course. Someone poor couldn’t afford this. It’s modeled after, or rather, inspired by, the veil that Princess Hélène of Orléans wore when she married the duke of Aosta in 1895,” Lilo’s mother explained.

Lace trading was a popular profession among Sinti women. And lacemaking was an ancient craft, practiced in Europe since Roman times. To know lace was to know history. And Lilo’s mother knew lace. Some lace traders went door to door. Not Bluma Friwald. She dealt with fabric shops and high-end ladies’ seamstresses and clothing boutiques, as well as fine table-linen stores and, of course, bridal fashion designers.

“Can I wear that when I get married?”

“Are you asking me to save some for you?” Bluma lifted her eyebrow as she looked at Lilo.

Lilo nodded.

“You know what you could buy with three meters of this, which is, by the way, a fraction of what Princess Hélène wore?”

“What?”
What will it be this time?
Lilo thought.
A month at the fanciest spa? A season ticket to the Opera House? A Leica camera?
It was a game she and her mother played.

“Maybe a Stradivarius,” her father said with a chuckle as he bent over the watch with his jeweler’s loupe. Her father had a good violin but not a Stradivarius, considered the finest kind of violin ever made.

“Your schoolwork almost done?” her mother asked.

“Yes, almost. Can’t we go out for a walk along the canal or, better yet, to a movie at the Palace?”

“What’s playing?” her mother asked. “If it’s
Morocco,
please no, Lilo. We’ve seen it five times already.”

“No, Mama, just four, and it’s not
Morocco.
It’s
The Holy Mountain.
”

“Ach, your father’s girlfriend, Leni Riefenstahl!” Bluma laughed. “She’s Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Fernand. Are you sure she should be yours?” She winked at Lilo. “It’s an old movie. Why are they bringing it back?” she asked.

“She should stick to those romantic mountain films,” said Fernand. “And stop working for Hitler.”

“No kidding,” Bluma replied acidly. She focused very hard on tying a knot called the double rose, although it was not that complicated. Her jaw was clenched as if she feared she might say more.

“And how was school today, Lilo?” The studied casualness of Bluma Friwald’s voice betrayed her anxiety. Lilo heard her father set down the tiny forceps he used to pick up the ruby jewel bearings for the balance wheels in the watch. A thick tension gripped the air.

“Fine.” Lilo paused and thought of Mila but said nothing.

A year before, the Austrian government had started barring Gypsy students from public schools along with Jewish children. But so far, despite the fingerprinting, no Gypsy children had been barred from the school Lilo attended.

“You see?” Her father rose from his chair and, putting his hands on his hips, stretched back to ease the tension from sitting all day long. “What did I tell you? I’m still playing tonight at the café. They’re not going after Sinti. Street musicians, yes. But a Sinti playing in the most expensive restaurant in Vienna? Not a chance.”

“Be sure to thank Herr Gruniger for the lovely
Zwetschgenkuchen.
” Bluma nodded toward a tart with slices of rosy plums layered on top as perfectly as fish scales. The pastry chef from the Café Budapest often sent pastries home for the family.

Lilo wanted to believe her father’s words. But Hannah’s words came back to her.
Mila sick? Never — she’s healthy as a horse.
And what about Zorinda? Two kids out did not mean that Gypsies were barred from her school. They were just out, absent. But there were always rumors. In a sense, the rumors did as much damage as the ordinances themselves. There were rumors that many Gypsies in Burgenland, Austria’s easternmost province, had been deported to internment camps as part of something called the work-shy program. Work-shy? What a strange term it was. No one could ever describe her parents as work-shy. Herself possibly. Suddenly she no longer was inclined to go out for a walk.

“Are we going out, or aren’t we?” her father asked, rolling his shoulders up to get the kinks out.

“Oh, I just remembered I have some more schoolwork to do.”

She took a book from her bag. But it wasn’t really schoolwork. So she supposed she was work-shy. It was a forbidden copy of a German translation of
Huckleberry Finn
with a different cover on it. Mark Twain and all his works had been banned, even burned at the great book burning in Berlin seven years before. But there was a black market for them. It was actually through Zorinda that she had gotten hold of the book. It wasn’t hers to keep but hers to rent. For a pfennig a day she could have it. But if Zorinda was gone?

The author, Mark Twain, was the funniest writer in the whole world. In this chapter, Huck and Jim, the escaped slave, resumed their raft trip down the Mississippi. Lilo began by rereading her favorite parts, where Huck thinks about how wonderful it is to float down the river:

She skipped to another page and read:

Free and easy and work-shy?
The question hovered in Lilo’s mind as she looked out the window to see the fading light over the canal and wondered if she would ever see the great Mississippi River. Her father said that the Danube might fit in the Mississippi’s back pocket. She had laughed. It was something Mark Twain might say. A sudden harsh knocking on the door shattered her silent musings.

The rapping turned to a pounding. “Who knocks like that!” her mother said, half rising from her lace making.

Her father made his way to the door, his magnifying glass still in his hand. Opening the door, he gave a courteous little bow as uniformed men flooded in, their batons raised ready to strike. Fernand Friwald, though a fairly large man, seemed to shrink before Lilo’s eyes. She looked around frantically. Her gaze fell fleetingly on the yards of lace fit for a princess, her father’s violin, which was most certainly not a Stradivarius, the
Zwetschgenkuchen.

Their boots are so shiny.
The air was striped with the dark polished gloss. There were only four men, but it seemed as if there were three times that many. Three of them weren’t ordinary policemen at all but the dreaded SS, the
Schutzstaffel,
the paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. One officer was barking something, but the words made no sense to Lilo: “In accordance with the decree issued on December 8, 1938, concerning the fight against the Gypsy plague . . .”

1938? It was 1940. And plague? What plague? Plagues were caused by rats and filth, Lilo thought. One could still smell the cedar scent from yesterday’s floor waxing. The silver tea set gleamed. The windows sparkled.
We’re Sinti. This is not supposed to happen. . . . My father is a member of the Imperial Clockmakers Guild. . . . You can’t do this to him. To us. Papa . . .
Lilo wanted to scream the words that ricocheted through her head.

She wanted to say to these jackbooted SS men, “Look at this tart. It is from the finest restaurant in Vienna. They love us so much, they send home pastries every night Papa plays. Look at this lace — the lace of princesses, not dancing bears!”

The head jackboot, the one who seemed to be giving orders, was not from the SS. He wore the uniform of the local police. Lilo’s eyes fastened on the tart. One of the SS men ambled over to the table and, sticking a fat finger into the center of the tart, scooped up a glob.

“Umm!
Zwetschgenkuchen
— ha, ha!
Zwetschgenkuchen
for the
Zigeuner.
”

She was yanked from where she stood, then shoved through the door. They were allowed to take nothing. But the fat-fingered man followed them down the stairs with a fistful of tart in one hand and a nightstick in the other. Lilo inhaled sharply when she saw the blood oozing from her father’s brow. Why had she not heard the whack of that stick? Yet she was oddly aware of the most infinitesimally small details — a scuff mark on the stairwell hall she had not seen before, a jewel bearing caught in the cuff of her father’s shirt. Everything came to her with a startling, surreal clarity. It was as if she were meant to register every detail, even the smallest ones, as from that moment on, her life would change irrevocably and forever. Fat Finger was still laughing about his joke. “Ha, ha!
Zwetschgenkuchen
for the
Zigeuner.
”

“T
ogether —
miteinander.
” That had become their prayer, their chant, their hymn. “As long as we are together, everything will be all right.” Lilo’s father said this at least thirty times a day. And they
were
together, with about five hundred other Gypsies, Sinta and Roma alike, in a barbed-wire enclosure at the Rossauer Lände police station and jail in Vienna.

“A quarter mile, no more, from the Café Budapest,” her father also said even more often, perhaps fifty times a day. “If only I could get a message to Herr Gruniger.”

“A pastry chef is no use in this situation,” her mother had answered the first time her husband said this. But Lilo’s father wouldn’t give up. She noticed him now, studying a pigeon that had landed on the top of the barbed wire. She could almost read his mind. As a boy, her father had raised carrier pigeons. In their old apartment, the landlord had allowed her father to keep some on the roof. She had helped him tend to the pigeons, cleaning their cages. She had even learned how to attach the tiny canisters with the messages to their legs. Was he thinking of that now — of sending a message? she wondered. She felt a glimmer of excitement. Her father was resourceful, so full of ideas. He could fix things — watches, clocks — get them running again. She watched his face. He was thinking, thinking hard.

He sees that pigeon as a savior, a potential angel of deliverance. He must be wondering,
Lilo thought,
if there is any way he could capture it, train it, and make it fly to the Café Budapest.
Could there be the slightest possibility? Her father turned away from the pigeon.
Don’t! Don’t turn away!
His face reddened with frustration, he kicked a small rock with his foot. That single gesture sent a shudder through her heart. Her father was such a patient, meticulous man. One had to be to do his kind of exacting work. It was as if at last he could no longer hold in the despair.

As it grew dark, floodlights came on.

“Oh, my God, look over there!” her mother said.

“Where?” Lilo asked.

“To the right, beyond the fence, up high.”

Lilo gasped. How had they missed it? It was a huge billboard, and on it, floating eerily in the night, was the luminous face of Leni Riefenstahl. It was an ad for
The Holy Mountain,
the movie they had talked about seeing.

“Good God, there she is!” Lilo’s father said, walking up to them.

The face was beautiful, almost unearthly, her mouth glossy and just partway open to reveal perfect teeth. Her eyes were dark and smoky and closely set, which gave her a somewhat beady look, almost feral. Yet there was a lovely delicacy to her face. Her high prominent cheekbones, the generous mouth, it all added up to a stunningly gorgeous movie star. There was something almost transcendent about that face, as if it belonged on Olympus with the gods. Her roles certainly reinforced this notion of a divinity. Her face loomed now in the night as bright as any moon. It was profoundly weird and discomfiting.

“I can’t look at her!” Bluma Friwald said. Her voice was shaking. Fernand put his arm around her shoulders. They turned and walked to a shadowy corner of the enclosure. Lilo followed them. But there was no escaping. Other prisoners had begun to point at the huge billboard. “Ah! Leni . . . Leni Riefenstahl . . . I saw her in that movie . . .
Holy Mountain,
and then the other . . .”

Every day, more Gypsies were brought in, and every day, the conditions at the police station worsened. They all tried to stay as far away from the corner with the latrines as possible. The air was so foul, it was difficult to breathe. The rumors as to what might be in store for them multiplied.