While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) (25 page)

Clara watched sadly as her friend walked away down the street. For a moment, she had almost given in, run down the stairs, and flung open the door. But it was better this way. If Gerhard came home and found a visitor—and Josephine, of all people!—it would only make him angrier.

Clara tugged the white bedroom curtains straight, then she sat on the edge of the bed with her shoulders slumped. Everything had been fine that morning. She and Gerhard had enjoyed their breakfast and speculated about when the first patient would call to disturb the Sunday peace. Then Gerhard had seen Isabelle’s invitation to the cycle race on the console table. Was she planning to go? Secretly? Without him? Without his consent? Despite knowing that he deeply disapproved of such . . . filth?

She had laughed and taken the invitation out of his hand, intending to throw it away.
Why didn’t I already get rid of it?
she wondered. It had been a simple oversight. Gerhard was right when he said that she was too forgetful.

With the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she rubbed her right wrist, now blue from where he had grabbed her so tightly that she had cried out. He had snatched the invitation out of her hand, torn it into a thousand tiny pieces, and thrown them on the floor. And then . . . Clara closed her eyes. It was best not to think about it. She was sure he was sorry.

“So you see what I think of this nonsense!” he had practically spat at her. He had left the house without another word and had not yet returned.

Where was he? Would he be hungry when he came home? Or had he gone somewhere to eat without her? Uncertain whether she ought to cook something special for him, Clara went over to their medicine cabinet to fetch a cooling ointment for her wrist.

The compartment above the household medications caught her eye. Almost tenderly, she ran her fingers over the pile of books she had stuffed in there.

Handbook of Modern Pharmacology
,
Toxic Diseases of the Skin and Their Treatment
,
Sepsis
—it had been a long time since she had so much as glanced inside one of those books.

She rubbed the ointment into her damaged wrist. Then she dabbed a little on the red area on her right cheek as well.

Chapter Twenty-One

In early May, two things happened that turned Josephine’s life upside down from one day to the next.

One day, when she had finished her shift, weary in mind and body, she was on her way to the dormitory when the clerk stopped her and handed her two letters. One was from Isabelle, gleefully telling her that the other members had approved Josephine’s membership into the club. Though she was unsure how it had happened—she still didn’t own her own bicycle, and she was still just a simple factory worker—Jo let out such a jubilant cry that it made the clerk jump. She wanted to visit the club as soon as she possibly could!

At the sight of the second letter, however, Josephine felt a shudder all the way down to her bones. It was extremely official looking. Langbein and Kompagnon, Public Notary, Dieffenbach Strasse 11. Josephine knew the address, if not the name of the notary. It was a stately, cream-colored building on the edge of Luisenstadt. She opened the stiff envelope with jittery fingers. As the clerk stretched her neck toward her, Jo turned brusquely and marched away.

She sat down on the first landing on the stairs, just outside the dormitory. As she read the letter, her eyes grew larger and larger. What in the world did it all mean?

The notary peered at Josephine over the gold rim of his glasses and frowned. “To be absolutely frank, young lady, I cannot make heads or tails of the following passage in the will. But listen for yourself.
‘My dear Josephine, you have always been the daughter I never had. I will probably never be able to forgive myself for leaving you on your own when you most needed me. Dear child, I can only hope that your unfortunate experiences have not broken you but have instead made you stronger than you already were.’ ”

Frieda’s nephew, Joachim Roth, cast Josephine a sideways glance.

Josephine looked straight ahead. It was the reading of Frieda’s will that had brought her to this gloomy lawyer’s office.

“Of all the places to meet again,” Lilo’s father had said by way of greeting, but he had not expressed any pleasure at the sight of her. His answers to Josephine’s questions about Lilo’s health and well-being had been curt. After that, they sat silently in the wood-paneled anteroom until the notary called them in.

“ ‘I don’t know whether I can make amends for my failures. But I have one great and heartfelt wish upon my death, and I am in the fortunate position of being able to fulfill it—’ ”
The notary paused briefly. He leafed through the pages of the will, the first few of which had covered the terms of Joachim and Lieselotte Roth’s inheritance. Josephine had been astonished to hear the sums Frieda had left to her Black Forest relatives. Did she really have so much money in the bank? Her old friend had always lived so modestly and had taken pleasure in the simplest things.

“ ‘In my last letter, I wrote enthusiastically about the great plans I had for you. Unfortunately, it seems my time is running out too soon, and I won’t be there to support you. Now it is up to you alone to create a change in your life. I hope, however, that you will allow me to help you.’ ”
The notary raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Jo couldn’t care less what he thought. She smiled sadly. With every word, she heard Frieda’s loving voice. What had Frieda planned for her?

The notary soon answered her question.

“ ‘To you, my dear Josephine, I leave my house and the attached workshop. I know that both will be in the best possible hands with you. I am being very selfish, but in this case, my selfishness has a good side; now you can finally realize your dreams.’ ”

“An unknown woman is inheriting my aunt’s house?” Joachim Roth erupted. “That . . . that . . .
that
was her greatest wish? That’s nonsense! Can the law even allow such a thing?” He leaned across the notary’s desk.

The notary recoiled. “I have checked everything most thoroughly,” he said, raising both hands in a gesture of apology.

“But . . . the old woman was clearly not in her right mind when she wrote that!”

It was so disrespectful of Lilo’s father to talk about his aunt like that. Josephine frowned. “I . . . I’m sorry,” she said weakly. Nothing else came to mind.

Her own house! Frieda’s house. Though stunned and overjoyed, she also felt uneasy about inheriting such a treasure. How could she possibly be entitled to such a thing? Shouldn’t she turn it down? Tell Joachim Roth that he could have it? Or that Lilo could?

“Excuse me, Mr. Roth, but I must contradict you there. Your aunt was very much in her right mind when she wrote this testament, because she did so here in my office, and there were two people present who are able to bear witness to precisely that fact. We cannot influence—nor would we want to—the content and choice of her words. It is, after all, the final will of a human being.”

“But . . .”

“I understand your anger. Still, I can only advise you to accept the deceased’s will. Keep in mind the substantial sums you and your daughter have inherited. The old house is worth little by comparison. Besides, challenging a will as watertight as Frieda Koslowski’s rarely ends up in favor of the plaintiff.” He looked resolutely into Joachim’s eyes, then he turned to Josephine. “I have something else for you,” he said, taking a brown envelope out of the thick file before him.

The envelope felt heavy in Josephine’s hand.
Please read this only once you are settled in my—or rather your—house,
it said on the outside in Frieda’s distinctive handwriting.

“I’m starting to see how Berliners protect their own.” Joachim Roth stood up abruptly. “I can see I have no additional business here.” He looked darkly at Josephine. “So this is the thanks we get for our hospitality in the Black Forest! I don’t even want to know what you did to creep into Frieda’s good books.” Without another word, he left the notary’s office.

“Please don’t take that too seriously, young lady. I have experienced far worse in such matters. One last thing: the key to the house has been deposited with one Clara Gropius. A neighbor. Mrs. Koslowski assured me that you know each other well,” said the notary.

Josephine nodded.

“Oh, by the way . . .” He cleared his throat. “It is highly unusual, I must say, for a young woman such as yourself to come into such an inheritance. It may well be that you don’t wish to live in the house in question. It is rather run-down, if I may be so bold. If that is the case, my office would be happy to assist you, should you wish to sell it. And when it comes to investing the monies realized, we would naturally be prepared—”

Josephine stood up before the notary could continue. “That is very kind of you,” she said. “But I will accept Frieda’s inheritance as she intended me to.”

Dust motes danced in the May sunshine when Josephine unlocked Frieda’s house. She had turned down Clara’s offer to accompany her. She had to do this alone.

She stood hesitantly in the doorway and breathed in the old familiar smell of the house. The slightly sour smell of the apples stored in the cellar—would they still be any good?—and the moldy odor of old seed potatoes. There was a faint whiff of the violet soap that Frieda had always been so keen on, a thin, pale-purple sliver of which still rested beside the sink. Everything smelled as it always had. Yet everything was different. What was missing was the perfume of Frieda’s life: the smell of pancakes and bacon fat, the spicy aroma of the red wine she loved to drink. The smell of the pieces of liver she fried for Mousie. And the acrid bite of Frieda’s oil paints.

She was surprised to see a large bouquet of lilacs, which Clara had left out on the kitchen table for her, no doubt with the best intentions. Frieda herself had never been able to bring herself to snip so much as a single cluster of flowers from the old lilac bush. She believed that flowers belonged in the garden, not in the house.

A moment later, Jo saw a shadow flit past her along the floor. It was Frieda’s cat, meowing hungrily and arching her back against the old stove. “Well come on, then,” her expression seemed to command.

Josephine finally stepped inside the house and began searching for something she could feed the cat. She found a half-full bottle of milk on the floor beside the sink, undoubtedly Clara’s doing as well. Jo dribbled a little into the food bowl, then went over to the sofa, with its long-faded wine-red velvet cover. Frieda had tossed a crocheted blanket over it. The blanket consisted of gray, brown, and beige squares, and Jo had watched the blanket grow as Frieda had added new squares whenever she had wool left over from her knitting.

With a melancholy sigh, Josephine pressed her cheek to the blanket. It smelled dusty and old. And a little bit of Frieda . . .

Apart from the sound of the cat greedily lapping up milk, all was quiet. Josephine could not remember ever having experienced such a silence. No droning machines, no gossipy, garrulous women sharing her living space, no beating of hammer on iron. Would she ever grow accustomed to such quiet? Would she ever! She smiled. Then she took out the letter the lawyer had given her.
Please read this only once you are settled in my—or rather your—house.
Josephine nodded. All right, she was here. She carefully opened the envelope. But before she could begin to read, the cat jumped up onto her lap as if it were the most obvious thing in the world to do and began cleaning itself.

Dear Josephine,

I would so love to be with you right now. I would make you a cup of tea and something good to eat. But the dear Lord had other plans for me. Who am I to question that? And nor should you. Rather, you should look ahead. There is a great deal to do! The house, the garden, Robert’s old workshop—all of it is waiting to be brought back to life. Feel free to do what you like with them! Throw away whatever you don’t like. Or better yet, give it to the needy. Berlin has more than enough of them, after all. Don’t worry, you have enough money to buy whatever you need new—and lovelier and better things at that. From now on, you will not want for anything. You are a well-to-do young woman, Josephine! There is money that no one knows anything about—not Langbein, the notary, not my nephew, Joachim. I wanted it that way. You will find your starting capital in the fat vase on the mantelpiece. You know it, the one with the broken handle. When you were a child, it was the one you loved the most, because it is so colorful.

Josephine gently lifted the cat from her lap and stood up.

The vase left behind a dust-free circle on the mantelpiece when Josephine took it down. She hesitated for a moment, then reached into the dark interior of the vase and pulled out a rolled-up bundle of bills. And another. And another. Hundreds of marks. Jo stared numbly at the money. She looked frantically toward the door, then to the window. What if someone was watching her and tried to rob her? She hurriedly stuffed it all back in the vase and set it back exactly where it had been.

Then she crept back to the sofa and sat down beside the cat, which had curled up into a small ball. For a while, she simply sat, as if paralyzed. Finally, she stood up.

Like a marionette dangling on stiff strings, she went to the heavy wooden door that separated the house from the workshop. She paused, her hand on the door handle. In all these years, she had never once entered the workshop. But why not? Perhaps because she had not particularly liked Frieda’s husband, Robert?

Josephine had to try out several of the keys on the key ring Clara had given her before she found the one to the workshop. The door creaked loudly when Jo opened it.

The room was pitch black and cold, much colder than the house. Josephine felt her way over to a window, opened it, then pushed the shutters open. A square of bright-yellow sunlight fell across the room, flooding the old tools, which hung in perfect rows along the walls, in a golden glow. Josephine looked around, mesmerized.

Hammers, wrenches, pliers, files, a few pairs of shears. Boxes of nails, rolls of wire, sandpaper and sanding blocks in different sizes. Several folding rulers. A pair of diagonal pliers. A fretsaw and a fine handsaw. An enormous chisel. Boxes of iron clamps and clips and other bits and pieces. A crate full of rags and bandages and a bottle opener.

In one corner at the back, she even found a black, sooty forge, where one could heat metal for smaller welding work.

Josephine felt her knees grow weak, and she began to tremble all over. She was soon shaking so much that she could no longer stay on her feet. With no consideration given to her clean skirt, she dropped onto the grimy linoleum floor.

She had landed in paradise. It was a dusty, old-fashioned paradise, to be sure. But that didn’t matter. What was it Frieda had written?
The house, the garden, Robert’s old workshop—all of it is waiting to be brought back to life.

Josephine took a deep breath. Her lungs expanded, and her heart pounded with delight as it never had before.

Until this moment, her plans had always been vague. She knew what it was she wanted to do, just not how to do it. But here on this cold, wax-yellow linoleum, all the big questions were gone.