The Forest of Vanishing Stars(63)

The taller officer turned slowly, and as he did, time seemed to stop for Yona. In the background, she could still hear the German on the steps, and the rumble of the frightened crowd, but it was as if her field of vision had suddenly narrowed as the man’s face came into view and his eyes met hers.

His face was creased like worn fabric, and though his mouth pulled down at the corners, though his eyes had sunken farther into his face with age, she recognized him in an instant, the sight of him triggering long-latent, milk-scented fragments of memory. A face above her long-ago infant bed. A smile at her first step. A hand slipping into hers, huge and warm, to steady her.

And here he was, impossibly, more than two decades later, more than nine hundred kilometers from the apartment on Behaimstrasse in Berlin where she’d seen him last.

It was Siegfried Jüttner, the man who’d once been her father.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN




His eyes never leaving hers, Jüttner started down the steps toward her, trailed by the officer who’d spoken with her yesterday, and as she stood there, paralyzed, she registered dully that he was a high-ranking officer, his uniform decorated with elaborate, silver-braided shoulder straps and collar patches. He had almost reached her before she snapped out of her shock and began sliding backward away from him, away from this man whose blood she shared. Her whole body was shaking, and her legs trembled as she melted into the crowd, never taking her eyes off him.

Lives are circles spinning across the world, and when they’re meant to intersect again, they do, Jerusza had said on her deathbed. Now, suddenly, Yona understood. The old woman had foreseen a moment like this, a terrible reunion. Perhaps the current had been pulling Yona west after all, to this. But why? We believe in God’s plan, Sister Maria Andrzeja had said just that morning, but how could any of this be it?

Up on the church steps, the angry officer was still bellowing. “So you see? Now you will witness the deaths of these eight nuns!” he barked, and the ensuing panic of the crowd was enough to let Yona slip deeper into the mass of people, hidden from her father, who was now scanning faces wildly as he moved closer. Heart thudding, tears prickling her eyes, Yona made herself smaller and smaller, letting the frantic crowd swallow her. “And maybe you will remember this the next time you consider crossing us!”

The crowd stirred, mothers bending to their young children, old men falling to their knees to pray, teenagers mumbling about rebellion and powerlessness. On the church steps, the officer was beckoning to eight soldiers, one for each of the nuns, to step forward with handguns. Suddenly, Yona stopped in her tracks. She could still see her father, but he couldn’t see her, though he was scanning the crowd desperately. She felt suddenly ill, and though she didn’t have the right vantage point to see the nuns anymore, she could feel their pain radiating out over the assembled group.

And at that instant, before the German soldiers raised their guns, before the order was given, Yona knew that everything in her life up to this moment had been designed to lead her here, to this place, where she might be the one person with the power to halt what was about to happen. She didn’t know why, but she knew what she had to do. As others crossed themselves and cowered, as the nuns raised their eyes to God, she took a deep breath, stood, and turned in the direction of the man who’d given her life. “Stop!” she cried in German. “Siegfried Jüttner! Please, stop this!”

At the superior officer’s name, the stout man on the steps turned, sneering at the crowd as he searched for the source of the voice. But Yona wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at her father, who had finally found her in the throng. He was staring at her, slack-jawed. “Stop this, please,” she said, and now, as he drew closer, she was speaking only to him. “You can do that, can’t you? Please. I am begging you to spare the lives of the nuns.”

“Inge?” When Jüttner spoke, even his voice was familiar to her, so familiar that it tugged at a corner of her heart she thought had been closed long ago. Without looking behind him, he gestured to the officer on the church steps, telling him with a single wave of his hand to pause. Yona had been right: he was the senior officer here. Shaking his head in disgusted disbelief, the officer on the steps signaled to the eight soldiers as Jüttner began to walk again toward Yona, who had to force herself to stand still, though it went against her every instinct. But if she ran, the nuns would die.

The silent crowd parted like the Red Sea as the tall Nazi officer moved through them, stopping just inches from Yona. The other officer, the one who’d seen her yesterday, was scrambling behind him. “You see? It’s just like I told you! Her eyes! Just like—”

“Enough.” The world around them fell silent as Jüttner stepped so close to her that she could feel his breath on her cheek. His uniform was creaseless, his gaze appraising and guarded. He stared directly into her eyes, as if trying to see into her soul, and then, without a word, he picked up her left wrist and gently turned it over. As he stared down at it, she watched him. The dark dove throbbed as he brushed it with his thumb, as if making certain it was real. Something changed in his eyes, a vanishing of doubt. When he looked up at her, his eyes were filled with tears. “Inge?” he whispered. “Is it really you?”

It had been her name once upon a time, before Jerusza crept from the shadows and spirited her away. Slowly, she nodded. “Papa,” she murmured, her first word so long ago, a word she hadn’t uttered in more than two decades. She struggled with how to think of this man before her; he was the father of her hazy memory, but now he was a stranger in a Nazi uniform, a stranger who had allowed the murder of a priest, who had been about to oversee the execution of eight innocent nuns.