The German Wife(26)
Over the years, I’d made some kind of peace with Adele’s reluctance to embrace me. I’d also made peace with the reality that I had an obligation to care for her anyway. She had been a godsend to my husband, and that meant I was going to do my best to be a godsend to her, whether she liked it or not.
“How are you?” I asked her, and she rolled her eyes at me, as if the very question were absurd.
“Just fine,” she said, quickly turning her attention to Laura. She tickled Laura’s cheek, and my daughter gave a grin, opening her mouth so wide that the inflamed buds of her new teeth were visible on her lower gum. “Where’s our Mayim today?”
“She seemed anxious. I suggested she go visit with her parents.”
“Ah, that is good,” Adele said, nodding in satisfaction but also surprise, as if it were a great miracle that I’d done something that pleased her. “She needs them, and they need her as we wait to see what the great buffoon is going to do to this country.”
I walked around the table to fill her kettle with water. Once I’d set it on the stove, I turned back to try to reassure her with words I didn’t quite believe myself.
“We’ll probably be back at the polls before we know it and common sense will prevail. We just have to be calm and patient.”
“Don’t you dare come into my house and speak to me like I’m a senile old fool, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes.” Adele gently rested Laura on a rug on the floor beside Georg, then dropped herself heavily into a chair at the kitchen table as she shot me a sharp look. “Even if there were another election tomorrow, those Nazis wouldn’t honor the results. They started as thugs in 1920 and they have done nothing but stir up instability ever since. I am old enough to know that history is not an archive—it is a crystal ball. People don’t change, and political parties change even less than that. From the Party’s very inception, its intent has been clear. They plan to segregate Jews from Aryan society and to strip them of their rights.”
“We just have to stay calm and keep level heads,” I repeated. I had plenty of practice ignoring Adele’s rants and her tendency toward hasty judgment. “There isn’t anything we can do about it now anyway.”
Adele sighed wearily, then turned her attention back to the children, seated on the rug beside her.
“I only care for the sake of you young people, you know. Hopefully God will take me soon and I can be with Alfred and our boys, but you and these babies have a lot of living left to do, and so does Mayim and her family. I just can’t see how a man like Hitler can bring anything but chaos, especially for the Jews.”
“We could talk about this all day and we still won’t solve it. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”
“Actually, there are some other unpleasant matters that you and I must discuss,” Adele said. Then she tilted her head at me. “I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to talk alone. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your artwork and furniture vaporizing over the last six months. I know things are tough for you and Jürgen. He tells me that you are determined to hold on to your family home, and I understand that better than most.”
Like me, Adele had grown up in a family of considerable wealth, and Alfred made a comfortable living for them both. But Adele unexpectedly found herself with a young child to care for right when the hyperinflation crisis began.
She laid off her personal staff, and when that wasn’t enough to stabilize her financial situation, she remodeled, converting her family’s expansive ancestral home into apartments. She kept the smallest of these for herself and Jürgen and rented out the rest. Her apartment now comprised only the back part of the ground floor of her building. Her front living room was a studio apartment occupied by an elderly Bavarian couple, and her entryway and stairwell were common space for all of her tenants.
Adele was left with her original kitchen, a bathroom, and her bedroom—and most importantly, private access to her courtyard. She converted that space into something of a miniature farm, keeping chickens and rabbits, and a small collection of fruit trees, berries and vegetables growing in boxes and tubs. Adele had a network of widowed friends all across the city, and in the worst times, I’d watched a seemingly endless stream of silver-haired women visiting each day, leaving with a basket of produce. I once saw Adele’s best friend, Martha Breuer, holding a box as she waited for the trolley. As I approached her, one slender gray ear appeared from the top.
“Is that a rabbit?” I said blankly.
“Two,” she chuckled.
“Where on earth are you taking those?” I asked her, and Martha shrugged.
“There’s a poor family on my block with a new baby on the way. Adele insisted I take this breeding pair of rabbits for them. They’ll have fresh meat for the babe next summer.”
Adele was savvy, hardworking, stubborn, and compassionate. It stung sometimes that she seemed capable of boundless love for strangers, but she still seemed to have little affection for me.
“Sofie, you and I also know that my nephew is a man of great intelligence...but he is not without his limitations.” Adele sighed heavily. “We both know he’s unlikely to ever find work outside of academia, and even when the economy stabilizes, your family income will be modest. What is your plan for the future?”
“We’re getting by,” I said stiffly. But she wasn’t wrong about Jürgen’s employment prospects. His undergraduate focus was engineering and physics, but he’d focused his postgraduate studies narrowly around rockets—a technology that remained in its infancy. The last time I went to a space society launch, I’d watched the little prototype fly as high as forty or fifty feet, then tilt alarmingly to fall right back down toward the group of men who’d designed it, sending them all scattering in a panic. No one was going to pay him to play with dangerous toys.