“I’m not far away.”
“I guess.” He’s breathing heavily as we walk, pausing to cross Kirchplatz. “What’s your new place like then?”
“Just wait till you see it.” I laugh. “After the flat, you won’t believe . . . Come on,” and I break into a run, a bubble of excitement rising inside.
Our vast new house on Fritzschestrasse has a pointy roof and two chimneys sticking up like thick fingers toward heaven. There are four layers of windows. We could have a whole floor each.
“It’s the biggest house in the street,” Tomas says as he stares up in awe at the handsome building, all sandy brick and trimmed with black. His tawny hair is disheveled and his eyes insect-big through the grubby lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. He screws up his nose as he surveys its vastness.
I stand taller.
“Does it have a garden out back?”
“Of course it does! That’s my room.” I point up at the window with the balcony overlooking the road on the second floor. There’s a beautiful old cherry tree growing beneath it. Its branches extend over the iron railings and the pavement on one side and under the balcony on the other. From my special seat in the window, I can see the junction with Berggartenstrasse and nearly the whole of Fritzschestrasse until it bends around to the right, near Walter’s flat. I watch him come and go.
“It must be very grand inside.” Tomas presses his face right up against the iron railings. “Bet it’s got two staircases. And a cellar. Maybe it’s even got a dungeon with prisoners’ bones in it!”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Can I come in?” asks Tomas.
I steal a sideways look at him. Even though it’s only been a few weeks, it feels like a different lifetime when he and I played in the street behind the flat we used to live in. It was the old me who kicked a ball around and slid down the muddy embankment to watch the trains puffing in and out of the station.
“Not today,” I hear myself say. “Sorry. Maybe another time,” and I push my way through the sturdy iron gate. It opens with a creak and when I let go, it shuts Tomas out with a loud and satisfying clunk.
In the echoey, wooden-floored hall I put down my satchel and remember the day we moved here in June.
“I’ll need a cook, and full-time maid,” Mutti had said, standing in this very spot, looking around in wonder. I can almost still smell her flowery wafts of Vol de Nuit. “I can’t possibly manage this house without help,” she’d said, her hand on her chest.
Vati, cool and relaxed, dressed casually in slacks and an open-necked shirt, had tousled my hair and said, “The most desirable residence in the whole of Leipzig. Or at least one of them.”
“I love it,” I remember saying, smiling into his baggy face.
“Who would have thought it, eh, Schnuffel? Who would ever have dreamed it?” he’d said, as he picked up a box, kicking open a door off the hallway with his foot. “My study,” he’d said in a satisfied voice and disappeared inside.
“Can I pick a bedroom?” Karl had asked, eyes gleaming at the thought of a room all to himself.
“Why not?” Mutti replied, and I’d followed her as she’d carried out an inventory of the furniture and artwork the previous people had left in the house.
It’d be hard to forget the first time I saw the red-gold dining room; the bright afternoon sitting room with big patches of sunlight on the carpet and the grand piano; the pale-blue morning room with a gramophone in one corner; and the glass-domed garden room filled with wicker furniture and jungle plants. Our old flat would have fitted neatly into the hallway alone, with room to spare around the edges.
A surge of happiness now fills my chest like a swelling balloon and I run across the hall, my footsteps reverberating, through the stone-floored passageway, past the big kitchen and washroom, and out into the glorious sunshine of our triangular-shaped garden with its grass in the middle, flowers around the edge, and huge oak tree at the bottom. There’s no railway line here like there was behind the flat. I won’t miss the trains that shook my bed as they rattled and screeched their way to who-knows-where in the middle of the night.
I walk to the end of the garden and stare up through the dappled leaves and branches of the giant, old oak tree. Even though we no longer go to church—Vati says it detracts from our greater cause, and besides, Herr Himmler wouldn’t like it—I know that God has smiled on me. He has given me this, because I’m special: a treehouse. Real. Solid. With a proper roof and walls. A narrow rope ladder dangles down from a hole in the middle of the wooden floor.
Just wait until Tomas sees this. He’ll be mad with envy. I picture his face and laugh out loud.
Two
September 17, 1933
From my window seat, sitting in a nest of comfortable cushions, I keep watch on Fritzschestrasse. With luck, Walter might appear, hands shoved in his short-trouser pockets, scuffing his shoes, looking for Karl. But the road stays resolutely empty. Through the branches of the cherry tree, I see an old couple emerge from one of the elegant white town houses across the street. They have a shaggy-haired black dog with them. His tongue lolls from his mouth, giving the impression he’s smiling. In the flat, we had no room for a dog, but Mutti can’t say that anymore. I go in search of her.
Bertha is in the kitchen, wiping floury hands on her apron. “Your mother has a headache,” she explains. “She went to lie down.”
“How can anyone want to go to bed in the middle of the day?”
“I certainly wouldn’t mind.” Bertha sniffs, kneading a mound of dough. “Anything I can help you with?”
“We should get a dog. A big house like this needs one.”
“I see. Well, that can wait until your mother gets up. Besides, she might not want a dog.” She stops kneading and pounds the dough on the board. The muscles of her forearms flex beneath her mottled skin.
“Shall I wake her, do you think?”
“No, Fräulein Herta. I don’t think.”
I sigh and wander out onto the street. The old couple are shuffling across the road in the distance. I catch up with them.
“Good morning. May I stroke your dog? My name is Hetty. I live in the big house across the street from you.”
The old man is dressed in a brown day suit and tie with a Homburg hat perched neatly on his head. The woman, tiny and frail, in a thin coat despite the warmth of the day, flickers her eyes at her husband.
He clears his throat and says quietly to her, “She’s just a child, Ruth.” He turns to me. “Of course. His name is Flocke, and I am Herr Goldschmidt.”
Flocke wags his tail so hard that his body snakes and twists.
“Aren’t you friendly?” Crouching down, I giggle as he jumps his two front paws on my knees and tries to lick my ears.
“Perhaps I could take him to the park for you?” I look up at the Goldschmidts. They really are very old and Flocke can’t ever have a proper run. “I’m good with dogs. I shan’t lose him or anything.” I stand and look responsible.
Frau Goldschmidt answers this time. “You can’t take the dog.” Her tone is hard and sour, as though she has just swallowed lemon pips. “I won’t allow it, after what happened.”