“Not at all,” Max said.
Anna peeked in the bag and smiled. “This is for you, Max. Hold out your hands.”
Max accepted what felt like an elaborate candlestick holder, until he explored it with his hands.A nine-branched candelabrum. “Menorah?”
“Ja,” Norbie said. “Anna thought that you might want to celebrate Hanukkah, so I paid a visit to an old friend who is the rabbi of the Oldenburg synagogue. According to the Jewish calendar, tonight is the lighting of the first candle.”
“This is incredibly thoughtful and generous,” Max said. “How can I repay you?”
“You and Nia can join me on a trip to the forest to bring home a silver fir tree for Christmas,” Norbie said. “And you can continue playing the piano. This house hasn’t sounded this beautiful since my wife, Helga, was alive.”
Max nodded. “It’s an honor to play Helga’s piano.”
Norbie drew a jagged breath. He sniffed and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.
After many years, his heartache is still raw. Max wondered, although briefly, how long it would take for his own heart to heal from the death of hismutterandvater.And if he would ever experience the boundless, unconditional endearment that his parents had. He shook away his thoughts and said, “I’ll make dinner tonight—I insist.”
After a meal of turnip latkes, containing egg and black bread crumbs, they settled in the living room. For the first time in days, their bellies didn’t ache with hunger. Anna inserted two partially used candles into the menorah, which she placed on a table near the window. Max lit the candle in the middle, the shamash. He said a silent blessing, and then used the shamash to light the candle on the right side of the menorah. Max—rejuvenated by nourishment and, even more, Anna and Norbie’s warmth—took a seat at the piano. For two hours he performed classical concertos and suites, as well as a several folk songs—including “O Tannenbaum”—which Norbie sang until he grew tired and went off to bed.
Alone with Anna, Max made room for her on the piano bench, where they sat thigh-to-thigh. Beneath the bench, Nia curled at the heels of their feet. With his mind and heart on Anna, Max began to play “Prelude” from the piano suite calledLightthat they’d worked on the night before. Bar by bar and with much repetition, Anna recorded the composition on the new staff paper. The process was tedious and slow. But Anna didn’t seem to mind, and neither did Nia, given the occasional swishes of her tail from beneath the bench.
As the candles on the menorah burned low, Anna leaned her head to Max’s shoulder and yawned.
Max paused, resting his hands on the keys. “Tired?”
“A little.”
“You should go to bed.”
“Not yet,” she said, her voice soft. “I was wondering—do you know what the second movement of the suite will sound like?”
“I think so.” He inhaled, taking in the scent of her hair. “Would you like to hear it?”
“I’d love to.”
Nia’s tail thumped the floor.
Max reflected on his time with Anna and Nia.I feel alive, he thought. Drawing upon the flurry of emotions swirling inside him, he positioned his hands over the keys and played.
CHAPTER24
LILLE, FRANCE—JANUARY14, 1917
At the front—twenty kilometers from Lille—Bruno conducted an inventory of phosgene gas artillery shells, identifiable by a green cross, that were stacked like cords of wood. Fifty meters away, German artillery cannons exploded, again and again, sending shockwaves through his body and filling his nose with an acrid scent of smokeless powder propellant. Behind the artillery line was a vast dump containing thousands of discarded shell casings. As he counted the armament, using a clipboard and pencil to records the results, it became increasingly clear that he had influenced Kainz, the general of artillery, to escalate the usage of phosgene.One out of every three shells fired upon the enemy contains poison gas, Bruno thought, scribbling a tally on his paper.Haber will be pleased.
General Kainz hadn’t been hunkered in a dugout on the front line during the Allied bombardment, as Major Brandt had led Bruno to believe. Instead, the general had been in a reserve line bunker planning an offensive attack with a group of officers. The major had been intoxicated and ill-informed, but Bruno had only himself to blame. He was a fool for thinking he could reach the front line under heavy Allied shellfire. In the time since his senseless mission to contact the general, Bruno carried the wallet of the fallen French soldier—whom he drowned in knee-deep rainwater of a shell crater—in his coat pocket. The man’s identification, as well as the water-stained photograph of his family, was an incessant reminder to Bruno of his sin, and the promise he’d made to do something for the man’s wife and baby after the war.If I hadn’t tried to reach the front during the bombardment, he might still be alive, somewhere on the other side of no-man’s-land,he’d often wondered.But if he was alive, more German soldiers might be dead.
It was strange, Bruno thought, to be haunted by the act of suffocating one man in self-defense when he’d killed hundreds or, more likely, thousands of men due to his role in the Disinfection Unit and the Imperial German Army’s escalating chemical warfare program. In an attempt to rationalize his actions, Bruno resorted to repeating Fritz Haber’s mantra silently in his head.Death is death, regardless of how it is inflicted. But the affirmations did little to lessen Bruno’s guilt. Instead, it deadened his denial that he, Haber, and the German Empire were the ones who’d broken the Hague Convention treaty, which prohibited the use of chemical weapons. And in doing so, they’d opened Pandora’s box.
The Allied forces had not only retaliated with creating their own chemical warfare capability, they’d also begun to master its use. The French and British were now estimated to be producing many thousands of tons of chlorine and phosgene. And Bruno had witnessed the devastation of the Allies’ capability when he was called upon, two days ago, to examine a section of the front line where infantry troops had suffered a large loss of life.
Bruno had been met at the front line by an inexperienced infantry officer, Hauptmann Fischer, who feared that the enemy had unleashed a more advanced chemical weapon. Thehauptmann’s concern was based on the fact that all of the men had died before they could reach their respirators. The forty-meter section of trench was littered with scores of corpses, which were awaiting transport to a mass grave. The men were young, new recruits, given their lack of facial hair and the untattered condition of their uniforms.They’re barely older than boys, Bruno thought, staring at a dead, blond-haired soldier with a contorted mouth and skin the color of eggplant. “Chlorine gas,” he’d told the infantry officer. Unlike thehauptmann, Bruno had seen this tactic performed by Allied artillery before. In the first attacks, the Allies sometimes used lachrymatory gas shells or clouds of harmless smoke. And hours later, the Allies performed a second attack with lethal chlorine gas, designed to surprise complacent German soldiers who’d removed their respirators. Bruno—sickened by the preventable loss of life—schooled the officer on Allied tactics, then squelched his way out of the corpse-filled trench.
Due to the escalating death toll of battle-hardened officers, the training for German soldiers had deteriorated in the years since the war began, leaving many units ill-prepared to fight. Additionally, the military’s once plentiful food supply had plummeted, although senior officers and special roles, like Bruno’s assignment in a chemical warfare unit, continued to have access to better rations. Front line soldiers had gone from eating hearty bread with savory pieces of saveloy, to bits of boiled turnips, turnip stew, and dirty carrot tops. And with the men’s hunger came fatigue, which was soon followed by poor morale. He’d watched young, bright-eyed men arrive at the front eager to fight for the Fatherland. But within a year of experiencing death and terror, the men—if not killed or maimed—had grown old, their eyes dark and void of spirit.
As Bruno recorded his final tally of shells, a runner, his boots and coat spattered with mud, approached him.
“Oberleutnant Wahler?” the runner asked, his breath producing a mist in the cold air.
