Life Will Have Its Way Read online

  She waved in my direction, then held her palms in the air, tilted her head to the side and shrugged. There was no one there. She crossed the back half of the garden and disappeared into the alleyway that ran behind the buildings. I listened for her feet on the rear steps, for the heavy click of the back door, but didn’t hear either. Perhaps there had been someone outside after all. I strained to listen, the night had become unusually still. From the window Anja was nowhere to be seen. Where had she gone? What was she doing? If someone had been there looking for the girl, wouldn’t she have just brought them inside? I tiptoed into the empty hallway. The distance between the back of the garden where I last saw her and the door was less than 15 yards, just a few dozen steps. I couldn’t imagine how she could have disappeared so quickly in such a small amount of space.

  A stamping noise coming from the back door finally broke the deathly silence, the same noise moved up the stairs and stopped at the top. I ran back to my apartment, feeling suddenly distressed about having left the girl alone inside. Just as I reached my door the latch to the back exit moved down slowly, a dark figure showed through the glass.

  At the other end of the hallway, the neighbor’s dog sprang from behind their door, it raced toward me, whimpering with delight as it approached.

  “Huh-low there, young lady,” the neighbor’s thick, scratchy voice yelled down the corridor. “What brings you out so late?”

  The old man from 1B took a few teetering steps toward me, the dog’s leash hung loosely from his hand. His eyes were large, the whites covered with streaks of red.

  “Oh, nothing. I just thought I heard something out here, but, it looks like it must have just been you!” I called back jovially toward him, hoping it was loud enough for Anja to hear on the other side of the door.

  “Come ‘ere girl, come on!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of shriveled jerky, moaning as he bent to lower the treat closer to the ground. The dog turned and raced back down the hall following the scent of the meat. I pretended to go back inside while 1B continued to fuss with his dog. I knew he would still be watching me. “Have a good night,” I yelled in his direction.

  Once he was convinced there was nothing more to see he connected the leash to the collar and tugged at the curious little dog, dragging her reluctantly to the entrance, the glass shook as the door slammed behind them. At nearly the same time the back door finally opened, Anja stood behind it, she continued to hold the handle for balance while she lifted her foot to examine the bottom of her shoe, she didn’t seem to notice I was standing there.

  “Anja!” I yelled in a whisper, she looked up, nodded toward me, then lifted her finger to her lips.

  “What happened to you?” I asked once we were both back inside. “What took you so long?”

  “Well,” she said, directing my attention to her dust covered shoes. “For some reason the cellar door had been left wide open. And… the lights were on.” She removed her shoes and walked to the trash to finish shaking them off. I’m, not sure that has anything to do with…” she looked toward the couch, “but….”

  “What about the maintenance guy?” I asked. “Maybe it was him.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t him. We haven’t used that old boiler for years and I can’t think of any other reason he or anyone else would need to be down there.”

  “Maybe it was just some kids playing around or something.”

  “Well, I certainly hope not,” she snapped.

  Anja was quite agitated and I couldn’t figure out why she thought it was such a big deal whether someone had been in the cellar. Unless it was the girl’s grandmother, frankly, I wasn’t sure I cared who’d been down there.

  “So, no luck finding anyone in the garden?” I asked, hoping to get her off the subject of the cellar.

  She tossed her arms in the air and looked sarcastically around the apartment, “Obviously not.”

  “Well, maybe we just need to give it more time.”

  Anja didn’t respond. She brought her hands in front of her, tapping her fingertips together while she thought. Her tongue clucked on the roof of her mouth a few time before her fingers abruptly stopped, “I’ll be right back,” she said as she moved toward the entryway. She slipped back into her dusty shoes and disappeared out the door, returning moments later with a small piece of scratch paper, several numbers scribbled across it. She went straight to the phone.

  “Peter, this is Anja,” she spoke quietly, directly into the receiver, which was pressed hard against her face. “Are you free this evening?”

  I couldn’t hear his response, but it must have been yes.

  “Wonderful, wonderful, we’re having a delicious…” she looked anxiously toward me, fanning her hand in front of her as she searched for the right word.

  “Cobbler?” I offered, holding up the can of peaches she’d brought when she first came.

  “Peach cobbler! Yes, peach cobbler,” she shrugged and made a face. “I’ve had the good fortune of getting hold of a can of peaches today and we would love to have you join us for dessert.” She made sure he had the right address and finished up the call before placing the handset carefully in its cradle.

  “What was that about?” I asked with curiosity.

  “Well, I thought we might be able to get some help from an old friend of my father’s. But once I had him on the line I realized I couldn’t just blurt out what I really needed him for.”

  Anja paced the floor by the windows, frequently checking outside. Each time the sound of a car could be heard she would rush to the window and draw back the curtain. When the car in question didn’t stop she would sigh audibly and resume the long rectangular pattern she was making across the edge of room. It had only been a matter of minutes since she’d hung up the phone, I couldn’t understand her impatience. When I suggested we start on the cobbler, hoping it might distract her until Peter arrived, she informed me that he would be well aware of the fact that he hadn’t really been given an invitation for desert. Then she laughed out loud at the thought of him trying to decipher the meaning of the phrase “peach cobbler” while he wondered what he was getting himself into.

  Chapter 5

  Even though she had never so much as mentioned his name before, Anja and Peter greeted one another warmly. He was an imposing figure wrapped heavily with winter clothing, much too heavily for the weather. He set to work right away removing his many layers, once he’d stripped himself down to street clothes, he tossed his things in an enormous pile on the back of the chair. Anja introduced us and explained to Peter that I was the one that had found the girl in the garden. He looked at me suspiciously and produced a cold, weak handshake. I couldn’t help but feel there was something amiss. For one thing, he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Anja, which made the claim that he’d been one of her father’s friends a bit suspect.

  She began to give Peter details of the things we knew about the girl. His eyes wandered in my direction, then he quickly pulled her into the kitchen. They spoke in whispers and I watched as Anja interspersed her comments with gestures that brought Peter’s attention to the girl, her little blue coat, her bag. Anja left him at the counter while she retrieved one of the girl’s boots. He took it from her and held it in front of him, his hands cupped the sole as he moved it into the air, holding it delicately in front of him as if he were appraising a priceless piece of art. His enormous eyes grew even larger, his lips became flat and wide. He shook his head up and down earnestly, and as if knowing exactly what he was thinking, Anja nodded in agreement. I wasn’t sure why they’d decided to exclude me from the conversation. I tried to listen to what they were saying but could only pick up fragments and couldn’t properly piece them together in a way that made any sense. I was quite offended at having been left to feel like a child that had suddenly, without cause, been sent out of the room.

  Anja sat the boot down, she made motions out to the garden, she pointed her finger along to the back of the apartment, the
n down to the floor. I couldn’t imagine what she would be saying about the floor. I watched her lips closely, trying to read them. She repeated the same word several times before I made the connection to the cellar. She was talking about the cellar. She held her hands up in a showy gesture. Peter nodded enthusiastically, then looked suddenly toward me, as if just remembering I was still there. Our gazes met, his eyes narrowed reflexively, then suddenly and without cause, his expression changed, he smiled, raised his chin in a bit of a reverse nod then turned away.

  When their discussion finally wrapped up, Peter eased himself slowly back into the living room, at first his movements seemed awkward, apologetic, he reminded me of a parent that had wrongly scolded a child and wasn’t sure how to say he was sorry. He asked me how long I had known Anja, where I’d grown up, where I’d gone to school. Once he was actually making eye contact and engaging me in conversation, some of the suspicious air that had surrounded him earlier began to dissipate. I started to wonder if I’d simply misjudged him. Who knows? Sometimes people just rub you the wrong way for no good reason. Maybe there was something about the way he looked, his body language, the sound of his voice, or perhaps it was nothing more than his completely unnecessary pile of winter clothing that had bothered me.

  Peter reached for the can of peaches still sitting on the counter. “So, this is what passes for cobbler these days, eh?”

  Anja laughed, I laughed to humor him. He set to work re-applying his layers, then stepped slowly toward the couch, he took a long, thoughtful look at the girl, I could see his cheeks rise, as the edges of his lips pulled upward. A peaceful, satisfied expression crossed his face. He turned to leave, Anja tried to make him take the peaches with him, he waved her away saying that he’d made the trip for cobbler and wasn’t willing to settle for anything less. They had another good laugh and said their good-byes. Once I was sure he was gone I launched into a series of questions about Peter that Anja didn’t seem eager to answer.

  “He was just an old friend of my father’s.”

  “From the war?”

  “As a matter of fact…yes, yes they were friends during the war.”

  “Why did you have him come?”

  “Well, I, I just thought he might be able to help us if the grandmother doesn’t return.”

  I nodded slowly, but wasn’t sure how I felt about letting someone else, someone I had never even heard of, in on our secret. She must have sensed what I was thinking.

  “Peter is someone I’ve known for years. He can be trusted.”

  “Does he know where she came from?” I asked. “Do you?”

  She waited a second before answering. Her teeth were clenched tightly and I could tell she was trying to control the urge to say more than she should. Her eyes blinked rapidly while her lips held firm. She looked as though she might explode if not soon given the chance to say something. I could tell she was pained with conflict, unable to decide what she could say, how much she could say, whether or not she should say anything at all.

  “It’s okay, Anja,” I said a little dejected, “you don’t have to tell me.”

  Anja exhaled, “It’s not that I don’t want to dear, it’s just that you might think I was crazy if I did.”

  Chapter 6

  Anja took the tea from my hands and looked up through the steam rising from the cup, “I once had a coat made by Bremer-Klein. They were very popular in the thirties, and quite expensive.”

  “So, you’re trying to tell me you were a spoiled child?” I asked with a laugh.

  “Oh no, I was far from spoiled. But I suppose my father did have a fairly good job compared to most.”

  When Anja was young, her family lived in a small town in one of the more rural parts of the country. Their house was on the main street, directly across from the city hall, one of many in a string of homes that went on for blocks. They lived in difficult times, the economy was painfully depressed and the rate of unemployment was incredibly high, both of which caused men by the thousands to travel from town to town desperately searching for work. The men would start coming around early in the day, working their way from the top of the street and stopping at each house along the way, asking if they might do chores to earn a bit of food. They kept at it until they got something, then they might move along. Anja said her neighbors were good people and they tried to help where they could but more often than not the men were sent on without anything.

  “So there I sat in the front garden playing with my dolls. Oh, how I loved that garden,” she closed her eyes and tilted her head to its side. A sweet, enchanted look covered her face. Her eyes opened slowly, she seemed to be looking both at me and through me. I could tell she was still in the garden, surrounded by lilac trees heavy in bloom, dancing undetected under the pink flowing vines of the Elm trees as they moved gently in the slow summer breeze. I knew she didn’t want to come back and felt bad that she had to. She took a long slow sip of her tea and continued.

  “Sometimes I found myself watching the beggars, and I suppose that sounds rather callous now, but remember, I was just a girl. Anyway, there was a time when I started to notice that the men that came along our street were no longer stopping at the first house, they didn’t stop at the second house either, and they didn’t stop at the other houses in between. But do you know where they did stop?” She looked at me expectantly.

  I shook my head.

  “They stopped at our house.”

  “Why?”

  “Well don’t you see?” she asked with obvious frustration. “They knew to come to our house. Someone was telling them to come to our house. Someone told them they would be given food if they came to our house.”

  I nodded, “Oh, okay, now I see.”

  She seemed upset that I hadn’t been more impressed.

  “Well,” she sulked, “maybe that doesn’t seem so strange to you because I said my father had a decent job, but all that meant was that we had enough to feed our family, it didn’t mean we had enough to feed every hungry person wandering through town.

  She lifted her cup to her mouth, and placed her lips on it, pulling it back before she took a sip. “I never saw my mother turn anyone away, not one person, somehow she managed to stretch whatever she had. You know, for some reason she just had a certain weakness for people that needed help.”

  I nodded thoughtfully and tried again to give Anja the reaction she had originally been hoping for. “Your mother sounds like a wonderful person, I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned anything about her before.”

  She shrugged her shoulders casually, “My mother? Oh no, I’m sure I must have.”

  “No… I think I would remember if you had.”

  “Hmm,” she replied indifferently.

  There was a distance in her eyes, she looked across the room as if she were in a theatre watching a giant screen, allowing the images to simply come and go without any thought or effort on her part.

  “Where is your family?” I asked, cringing as I heard myself say the words out loud.

  She stood up slowly, walked over to the couch and straightened the covers on the girl, “My parents have both passed on and my sisters live in the West.”

  “Really?” I asked. “They went to the West?” I was surprised that Anja had never mentioned anything about that before either.

  “Yes. Yes they did,” she replied with an unusually straightforward tone.

  “Why on earth didn’t you go with them?”

  She sat back down and resumed her blank stare in the direction of the imaginary screen across the room. “We woke up one morning and the border was sealed. It was sealed… just like that.”

  “But then how did they get out?”

  “Oh, early on, if you knew the right people, you could still find a way, but, for me, well, I was married by then, and Nikolaus thought we should stay put. He was convinced the situation was only temporary.” She fiddled with her bracelet, spinning it around her wrist and twisting the clasp until it was tight. “Of course my
parents were hopeful that I’d come to my senses, they even made arrangements for me to leave.”

  As it turned out, Nikolaus was quite wrong, the border closure turned out to be anything but temporary. By the time Anja finally decided to leave, it was too late. Her father’s connections were no longer reliable.

  “So then what did you do? What did you do when you realized you couldn’t leave?”

  “At first, of course, I panicked, it was dreadful, I felt miserably trapped.”

  A few years passed before Anja learned she might be allowed special permission to join her family in the West. When she discussed her plans with Nikolaus he was adamantly opposed to the idea of trying to leave and he hoped she would drop it altogether, warning that it would only bring them trouble.

  “At that point, believe it or not, I actually became torn about what to do,” she said, “Nikolaus was very persuasive. He had a way of talking me into things I didn’t really want to do. And talking me out of things I did.”

  Nevertheless, Anja finally decided she had to apply for an exit visa just to see where things might lead. She intentionally kept Nikolaus in the dark about what she was doing, in the end, it didn’t matter anyway, her permission to leave was denied. And in a strange twist of fate, before she had a chance to fully recover from the disappointment of not being able to leave, Nikolaus was arrested along with most everyone else on his staff.

  “Of course they were arresting people left and right in those days. They tried to tell us that spies were everywhere and Niki was accused of sympathizing with the enemy or some other ridiculous such thing like that.” She waved her hand in the air as she spoke, furrowing her brow, trying to recall the exact details, before giving up and brushing the thought away. “I knew he was innocent. I knew he would never do or say anything to jeopardize himself or anyone else. He was much too smart for that.”