From the crease between the cushion and the frame of the chair, Edith excavated Max, the ragged, stuffed dog that had belonged to Edith as a child. Now, Max was her father’s constant companion, its white fur matted and stained irreparably.
“It’s all right, Papa,” Edith said, putting her palm securely on his forearm, with its thin, lined skin marked with darkened spots. With his other hand, her father grasped the ragged animal tightly to his side. Behind them, the Swiss clock ticked loudly. Messy stacks of art books lined the walls, slips of paper haphazardly sticking out of each volume. Dusty, yellowed pages of scholarly catalogs and journals her father had once devoured now stood abandoned.
“Shall we get you cleaned up? I have a feeling that you might have a visitor.”
Her father’s eyes lit up as he digested her white lie, and Edith felt a pang of guilt slide across her gut. None of her father’s friends were coming to visit. When her father no longer recognized their faces and could not recall their names, one by one, they dwindled away. Edith had watched wordlessly, powerless to stop it.
Her father no longer tracked time, but Edith knew that months had passed since their last visitor, with the exception of Edith’s fiancé, Heinrich. And even that was about to stop. Heinrich would soon be boarding a train for Poland, assigned to a newly formed infantry division of the Wehrmacht. As soon as the invasion of Poland had been broadcast across the radio and newspapers less than two weeks ago, Edith had held her breath and begun to pray, but Heinrich’s official orders had come anyway.
But Edith didn’t want to think about that now.
In the bathroom, Edith ran her hand under the tap until the water warmed. She would never have dreamed that the barrier of modesty between father and daughter would have fallen away so completely. What else was she to do? When the caregivers she hired inevitably gave up trying to wrangle her stubborn father, who else but his only daughter would care enough to loosen his trousers, to blot a damp cloth across his shoulders, to carefully run a razor across his jaw? Edith’s mother had been gone nearly five years now, and in moments like these, she missed her more than ever.
“Guten abend!”
Edith poked her head out of the bathroom doorway long enough to see Heinrich enter the apartment, greeting Elke as the stout nurse departed in a blur of blue raincoat and hat.
As much as her heart surged to see her fiancé, it also sank at Elke’s abrupt departure. Tomorrow there would be a visit to the agency and another search for a nurse so that Edith could continue her work at the museum and put food on their table.
Heinrich pecked a brief kiss on Edith’s lips. “What happened in here? It smells like a farm.”
Edith pressed her face into Heinrich’s neck and drank in his scent for a long moment. “I’m going to get him cleaned up now. I’m sorry. I don’t know whether Elke ever got to preparing dinner. Have a look in the kitchen.”
The voice of his daughter’s fiancé in the hallway had lured Herr Becker from the front room. Now, the old man braced himself against the doorjamb, his trousers sagging, a sideways grin on his face.
“Greetings, soldier!” Heinrich smiled at his future father-in-law and rushed to steady him. Edith watched her father endeavor to give Heinrich a firm handshake. “Looks like you’re in for a good shave from this lovely lady. Lucky man!” With gratitude and relief, Edith watched Heinrich steer her father successfully to the bathroom door.
Edith did her best to clean up Herr Becker, showing him as much patience and compassion as she could muster. When they emerged from the bathroom, her father dressed in clean pajamas, Edith saw that Heinrich had moved the soiled chair to air out by an open window and had brought a bowl of fruit and bread from the kitchen to the dining table. He was picking up the papers and books that she had spilled by the apartment door.
For a moment, she watched Heinrich kneeling over her satchel in the dim light of the entryway, a calm beacon in the storm. He was wearing the gray cotton collared shirt that brought out the sky gray of his eyes. She could hardly bear the thought of standing on a station platform, watching him wave to her from a small train window in a newly pressed field tunic.
“I’m sorry there is no dinner,” she said, kneeling beside him to pick up the last sheets of paper from the floor.
“We have bread. We have fruit. We have muesli, reheated from this morning, but healthy all the same. More than many people have, surely.”
Edith helped her father sit in his usual chair at the dining table and put a piece of bread in front of him. Finally, she took a deep breath and relaxed. She sat at the table and began peeling an apple with a worn knife.
“What’s all this paper?” Heinrich asked.
“Research,” she said. “They’ve asked me to compile a dossier of old master paintings in Polish collections. You remember I was telling you about all the library visits I’ve made in the past weeks? I had to give a presentation today to the director.”
“Herr Professor Dokter Buchner?” Heinrich raised his eyebrows.
“Yes.” Edith felt her stomach constrict as she thought about the room full of men, the Führer’s museum, the news that she had no idea how to break to Heinrich and her father.
“I thought they kept you locked up in the back storerooms with a paintbrush and chemicals,” Heinrich said.
She nodded. “Yes. It’s not my usual place, but Herr Kurator Schmidt asked me to do it. He said I have special knowledge of Italian Renaissance paintings. You know I am happy to stay hidden away in my little scientific department, not standing before an audience.”
Heinrich leaned back in his chair and thumbed through one of the large illustrated volumes that Edith had brought home from the museum library. Edith watched him nervously, wondering how to find the words to tell Heinrich and her father. How on earth would she break the news? When Heinrich reached a bookmarked, full-page color facsimile of a woman holding a small white creature, he stopped.
“Leonardo da Vinci,” Heinrich read the caption. “Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine.” He looked up at Edith. “What’s an ermine?”
Edith shrugged. “Ladies in the Italian Renaissance kept a variety of exotic pets. An ermine is something like a ferret.”
“No,” her father interjected, raising a crooked finger. “There is a difference. Ferrets are domesticated. Ermines are wild. Their fur turns white in the winter.”
Heinrich and Edith looked at each other, then laughed aloud at Herr Becker’s assessment. Edith’s heart surged whenever a spark of clarity flickered in the fog, when her real father came back to her, if only for a fleeting moment.
“Bravo, Papa. I had no idea,” Edith said, but the flicker was gone, and her father had returned to spooning watery muesli into his mouth. “That’s one of my favorite pictures,” Edith said. “Da Vinci painted it when he was still a young man, before he became well known.”
“A strange creature,” Heinrich said, tapping the picture with his finger, “but a beautiful girl.”
This was what she would miss most, Edith thought, sitting with her father and Heinrich, talking of art. She wanted to hear her father’s lessons again, random shards of information he pulled from the dusty corners of his brain, left over from years of teaching art history at the university, volumes of historical facts that he had transmitted to his daughter along with a passion for art. Was it too much to ask? She just wanted a laugh with her father and to eat a meal with the man she loved. She did not want to have to cobble together yet another caregiver to help her nearly helpless papa. And above all, she did not want to count the days left until Heinrich boarded a train. She pushed it to the back of her mind, stood, and began to clear the table.