Heinrich moved another armchair near the window and settled Herr Becker so that he could watch the lights begin to flicker from the apartment windows lining the edge of the park. He retrieved Max from the floor and pressed the old, ragged stuffed dog into Herr Becker’s lap. Then Edith heard Heinrich talking softly to her father, telling him about something funny that had happened at his father’s grocery market, just off the Kaufingerstrasse. She knew her father wouldn’t remember any of it after a few minutes, but no matter. The next time Heinrich visited, his kind, familiar face would be enough to lure her father from his chair.
Not long ago, Edith would have sat with her father after dinner, listening to his impassioned opinions of current events, his critique of the greed and corruption of government officials. Edith wondered if her father had any inkling of what was happening beyond the walls of their apartment now. Continued reports of corruption. The dismantling of synagogues. The confiscation of businesses and apartments belonging to Jewish neighbors. The heightened surveillance by their apartment block leaders, who seemed to record her every move. The swift, unexplained departure of two staff members from the museum. Non-German books pulled from libraries and burned in the streets. New laws that would punish anyone who listened to a foreign radio broadcast.
Most of all, she worried about the disappearance of the little boy at the bottom of the stairway. Edith used to look for the Nusbaums’ son every morning as she left for work. She’d find him sitting in the hallway with his pens and paper. She would stop to greet him and he would show Edith what he’d drawn that day. She would compliment him and tell him to keep drawing. But one day, he was gone, along with his innocent face and his fastidious drawings. The rest of his family were gone, too, simply walking away with the coats on their backs and a wobbly, wheeled cart.
While she did her best to stay focused on the details of her work and home life, Edith felt deeply troubled about how Munich had changed in recent months. More than that, she missed her father’s commentary on current events, which might have provided her with a compass to help navigate her way through the disturbing events that swirled around them.
“Edith?”
She turned to see her father’s wide, shiny eyes set on her, as if he had just recognized her face after not having seen her for a long time.
“Yes, Papa!” she said, laughing.
He held out Max the dog. “I believe this is yours.”
Edith stared down at the button eyes that her mother had sewn and resewn many times over the years. Max had occupied her bed as a child, then was cast aside as Edith grew into a young woman. When her father had rediscovered Max one day, shortly after her mother died and he began to decline, he had latched on to it like a beloved pet.
“Max,” she said, stroking the stuffed animal’s matted fur. “But I wouldn’t want to lose him.” She pressed him back into her father’s hands. “Will you take care of him for me?”
Her father settled the ragged stuffed dog back in his lap. “All right,” he said, deflated.
“I love you so much, Papa,” Edith said, squeezing her father’s hands. She tried hard not to let her voice crack.
When her father began to doze off in his chair, Edith joined Heinrich in the kitchen. He dried the dishes with a frayed rag and stacked them on the wooden shelves above the sink. “She’s not coming back, is she? The woman in the raincoat?”
Edith sighed. “I’m afraid not. I have to call the agency first thing in the morning. The problem is that he has become so stubborn! They are supposed to be professional nurses, but they don’t know how to coerce him into doing the most basic things! I don’t know what to do.”
Edith felt Heinrich’s hand on her back. She stopped and bowed her head, pressing her forehead to Heinrich’s chest. She felt his hands go to her hips and rest there. For a few long moments, they stood there, holding each other.
“I have no right to burden you with this when you have bigger things to worry about,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Edith pressed her face into his cotton shirt and felt his lean, hard chest under her forehead. She inhaled his clean, male scent as she listened to the clock tick loudly in the hallway. How would she break the news that he was not the only one with official orders?
“Edith . . .” he began softly. “They have given me a date. I have to report to Hauptbahnhof Station in two weeks.” He must have felt her body freeze under his grasp; he paused. “I just want you to know that, whatever happens . . .”
“Shh,” she said, pressing a finger to his lips and shaking her head, her light brown curls hitting her cheeks. “Not yet. Can we just make this last for a bit longer?”
4
Cecilia
Milan, Italy
December 1489
“THERE IS A LIVE ONE. I CAN FEEL IT CRAWLING.”
“Where?”
“Just there. Behind my ear.”
Cecilia Gallerani felt her mother’s thick, calloused fingertips slide through her dark strands, unraveling the twists. Her mother pinched her frayed fingernails along the length of one hair, yanking so hard that Cecilia bit her lip. She heard her mother swish her hand through the small bowl at her side, a mixture of water and vinegar with small, white nits floating dead on the surface.
“Did you get it?”
An exasperated cluck. “It was too fast. Will you sit still?”
A slow ache was working its way across Cecilia’s forehead. How many hours had they been sitting by the light of the window? Through its frame, Cecilia’s almond-shaped eyes scanned the layer of cold fog that had settled in the inner courtyard. She watched a dove flutter from the bare branches to a high windowsill overlooking the empty, symmetrical footpaths below. Such a strange place, this hard, wintry stone palace, with its fortified towers and armsmen pacing the upper galleries. So far away from the blindingly sun-filled squares and raucous, bustling streets of home.
As their carriage had rolled through the streets of Milan the afternoon before, Cecilia had watched the flat, vapid landscape suddenly turn to a jumble of fine buildings and crowded streets. The slow crawl through the crowds afforded momentary views of the spiky white spires of Milan’s cathedral under construction. She had caught fleeting glimpses of the city’s women, their long braids wrapped in silk and transparent layers of veil, men with fur-lined leather boots reaching to the knees and their breath sending vapors into the cold air. Cecilia had marveled at their odd Milanese tongue, a dialect that sounded clipped and harsh, at the same time that it flowed from their lips like a song. She grasped a few familiar words, but they spoke too quickly for her to understand the meaning.
At long last, they had reached the Castello Sforzesco on the outskirts of the city. Guards armed with spears and crossbows had lowered the bridge over the moat, and their horses’ hooves had echoed through the tunneled gatehouse into the fortified inner courtyard.
“Aya! I feel it moving again.”
Another tsk of exasperation. Her mother ran the comb roughly through a tangle. “Honestly, Cecilia, I hardly see the point. All this hair will be shorn within a few days.”
“That is not decided.” Cecilia felt the familiar squeeze of discontent across her stomach.
It made perfect sense. Of course it did. Her eldest brother, Fazio, their mother’s greatest pride, as well as their father’s namesake and successor, had laid it out in clear, logical terms. He had already made arrangements with the Benedictine sisters at San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. Cecilia should consider herself fortunate to have such an opportunity, they told her. It was only through her brother’s position as a Tuscan diplomat to the court of Milan, a position that their father was never able to reach even after years of service as a petitioner at the ducal court, that the possibility was open to Cecilia at all. It’s what had brought them to this wintry palace in the first place.