Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(71)
Rather than repair to the parlor, they sat across the kitchen table from each other, as if they were longtime neighbors. The sugar cookies were rich with vanilla. The dark-brown tea, almost as black as coffee, might have been bitter if it hadn’t come with a choice of either honey or peach syrup as sweetener.
“Delicious,” Bibi declared. “Both the cookies and the tea. The tea is…formidable.”
“Thank you, dear.” Leaning forward with apparent curiosity, Halina Berg said, “Now tell me, who is this Dr. Solange St. Croix?”
Puzzled, Bibi said, “But I thought you knew her. When I said she sent me, you brought me right into your home.”
Smiling, waving a hand as if to dismiss the misunderstanding, the old woman said, “Goodness gracious, I brought you in for tea because you’re Bibi Blair.”
A sense of familiarity with the house returned, and Bibi looked around the kitchen, wondering.
“I read your novel,” said Halina Berg, with those four words resolving the mystery. “You’re that rare thing—an author who looks even better in person than in her book-jacket photo.”
Having published only the one novel, Bibi was not accustomed to being recognized as a writer. She explained that Dr. St. Croix was the founder of a renowned university writing program.
“How perfectly boring,” said Mrs. Berg. “It’s you I’m interested in, dear.”
There followed a few minutes of considered and articulate praise for Bibi’s writing that gratified and embarrassed her at the same time.
As if in recognition of the discomfort occasioned by her guest’s modesty, Mrs. Berg said, “But we can talk more about that later, if you’ll indulge me. One of the secondary characters in your book, the Holocaust survivor…I am intrigued by the insights you achieved with her, given your youth. But first, Dr. Solange St. Croix. I don’t want to be mean, dear, but that’s such a pretentious name. I wonder—is it the one she was born with? Ah, but that’s neither here nor there. Why on earth did this woman I don’t know send you to me?”
Bibi almost said, I don’t know, which would have been awkward, but fortunately she said instead, “Research. Maybe she’d heard about your enormous book collection.” That sounded peculiar if not totally lame. A comment Mrs. Berg had made a moment earlier, considered with her slight accent and her age, suddenly gave the old woman a possible historical context that inspired Bibi to say, “Research about the Holocaust.”
Mrs. Berg nodded. “Many people know of my…background. Perhaps this Dr. St. Croix was aware, I survived both Terezin and Auschwitz.”
When she spoke of the ghetto at Theresienstadt, now Terezin, and of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Halina Berg’s appearance changed. Her true years became evident in the plump planes of her face, and amusement neither gathered around her mouth nor dwelt in her eyes as before. The music went out of her voice. She spoke with neither anger nor sorrow, but with a steely resolve, as if she could not speak of it at all if she allowed herself stronger emotions.
In 1942, when Halina was eleven, the Nazis forcibly transported tens of thousands of Europe’s most privileged and accomplished Jews to the fortress town of Theresienstadt—scholars and judges, writers, artists, scientists, engineers, musicians—there to await transferal to one of the death camps. Halina’s parents were musicians with the symphony, he a bass clarinetist, she a violinist. Consequently, due to the courage and will to live of its people, Theresienstadt had a rich cultural life in spite of the oppression, the threat of death, and the continuous dying all around. Crowding was terrible, food scarce, sanitary conditions unspeakable, and communicable diseases rampant. Halina’s mother died in a typhoid epidemic. Half starved, her father was transported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered with many thousands of others, but Halina was not sent with him. Mere weeks before Auschwitz was liberated by the Allies, she was taken there with other girls and boys, many of whom perished. Of fifteen thousand children who passed through Theresienstadt, no more than eleven hundred survived, perhaps fewer than two hundred.
“Humanity is capable of any atrocity,” she said. “But when you understand the extent of this cruelty, the unprecedented viciousness, the immense scale of the horror, it seems beyond the power of mere people to conceive and execute. It seems demonic.”
When the old woman fell silent, Bibi took it upon herself to bring the teapot to the table and refresh their cups. As she did so, she was overcome by a feeling of having performed this act before, not just the pouring of tea, but pouring from this same pot, in this very kitchen. The moment of déjà vu quickly passed. Because she didn’t know what to make of it, she could only put it aside for consideration later.
By the time Bibi returned to her chair, she thought she knew what Dr. St. Croix would have come here to ask. Perhaps she shared with the professor a need to know what supernatural power it was that the man called Terezin possessed.
“I’ve heard that Hitler was into the occult,” Bibi said. “In all your reading, in your experience, have you found that to be true? Is there any book in your collection you could show me, that might—”
Raising one hand to indicate that there was no need to prowl the extensive shelves, Halina said, “I’ve been blessed or cursed—I’m not sure which—with an eidetic memory. Whatever I dump into my mind stays there, and I have perfect recall. That sounds neat and orderly, but it’s definitely not. Everything is stuffed in there everywhichway. Sometimes I need a minute to sort through it….”