Butterfly and the Violin (9781401690601) Read online

  Each night she took the photo out and tucked it up in the cracked brick next to her bunk so Vladimir’s smiling face could look down on her. She’d hold the clip in her hands, running her fingertips over the smooth wings as she prayed. She only hoped her prayers floated up to reach him, wherever he was, and that he was safe somewhere far away from the horrors she’d been forced to endure.

  Oh God. Is he alive? Is he in a place like this?

  Adele lay in her bunk on her side, her face pressed toward the wall, her back tight up against Omara’s. With only the barest sliver of moonlight shining through the tiny window to illuminate the photo, she mostly imagined the tall man with the dashing smile and the tender eyes she knew so well.

  “We never danced. Do you know that?” She whispered the thought aloud, to no one in particular, just so she could hear it and remember that night at the dance hall nearly four years before.

  Omara stirred beside her but said nothing.

  “After everything that has changed, I never imagined that dancing would be the one thing I’d long for.” Adele breathed out the words like a heartbeat, as her mind had them dancing circles round a grand dance floor far away from the stark reality of a concentration camp.

  “She’s talking nonsense.” Marta was a tough-as-nails violinist from northern Poland. When it came to anything Adele said, she seemed to find a complaint easily.

  As Omara had predicted, their little orchestra had grown. They now had twelve women packed in the room rather than the six they’d expected. They were doubled up in their bunks, irritable for sleep after a long week of work and late-night rehearsals. And though she hadn’t repeated the thought very loud, Adele didn’t expect the reception she received floating up from the bunks.

  “It’s not nonsense, is it? To think of a happy memory?” She whispered the words, almost willing them to form an image of a dancing couple whirling around on the fog of a dream in the darkened room.

  But just as before, Marta’s irritation was evident and shattered the memory in an instant. “Someone tell the Golden Girl to shut up and go to sleep.”

  Adele hated Marta’s nickname even more than the one her parents had given her. In Vienna, being dubbed Austria’s Sweetheart had been an embarrassment to her. But once the rumor circulated among the other orchestra girls that she’d had a privileged life in the Third Reich before Auschwitz, they made no attempt to hide the fact that they loathed her for it.

  The obviousness of the cutting nickname referenced more than just her hair.

  Adele expected the rest of the girls to follow Marta’s gibe as they usually did, so she thought to cry herself to sleep. But Omara surprised her by not advising against the conversation. Instead, she turned onto her back and whispered into the night.

  “I danced once.”

  Adele moved her cramped body so that she faced Omara. She saw the moonlight casting a soft blue glow on her features. “Tell me?”

  “It was long ago . . . too long for remembering tonight.” Omara’s attempt at finding a pleasantry was noticeably weak, her voice sounding tired. “But I applaud you for thinking on it. You will need such memories to get you through what is ahead, when you will long for many things.”

  “She has been here four weeks. Wait until she’s been here for months. She’ll pray for moldy bread before she ever does for dancing shoes. They’ll make sure of it. Killer of souls, they are.” One of the other girls spat the words at her from somewhere in the black of the room. Several new faces had come from one of the ghettos in Poland and they were quite versed in starvation. And the actions of soulless SS guards.

  “Go get the guards. Tell them she disturbs sleep for the rest of us,” Marta said, the words cutting.

  Fränze, their little flute player from Warsaw, added a cautious Sshhhhh! to the bickering.

  “Leave her be,” Omara issued sternly, quieting the room. She then spoke more softly. “Don’t listen to them, Adele. They’ll only scare you. And don’t think harshly against the hardened ones. We can’t know what they’ve been through—Marta especially. She was in a ghetto before this and she’s lost her entire family.”

  Adele was chastened. “No.”

  “Yes. It is so, I’m afraid,” Omara said, sighing. “They had no food or water when things got bad in the ghettos. Some people tried to escape through the sewers. They tried to get her to go with them, but she couldn’t leave her ailing mother. Her mother was all she had left.”

  “And what happened?”

  Omara sighed. “She lost her at the train platform.” Which meant she’d been deemed unfit for work. And deemed unfit always meant the same. She’d gone to the chambers.

  The heart in Adele’s chest contracted with the thought of what Marta had gone through. Adele’s parents may not have forgiven her for betraying Austria, but at least she’d not been forced to stand by and watch them die before her eyes.

  “Thank you.” The gratitude was whispered, mainly so Marta wouldn’t hear and think she was trying to win Omara’s favor.

  “Go to sleep now, Adele. Three thirty in the morning will come too quickly for us all.”

  Adele couldn’t stand the thought of the morning counts being mere hours away. But soon they’d all be lined up and playing, ushering the laborers to march forth to their long workday. And though she was exhausted, she couldn’t find sleep. The exhaustion bled down to her soul like water seeking a drain. It made her as tired as the others who had to endure the exhausting fear of death, day in and day out.

  She lay there, photo now clasped between her fingers, staring up at the aged wood ceiling. “What do you do when you’re too tired to sleep?”

  Omara seemed to understand the meaning of the question and paused before her answer. When they barely ate and struggled to practice the eleven hours that were sometimes required of them, they couldn’t possibly wish for anything but to close their eyes in sleep. It seemed wrong somehow, didn’t it, not to be able to find it now?

  “Sleep for him.”

  The suggestion so surprised Adele that she felt emotion rise up in her throat.

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me, child. Do you love the man in your photo?”

  She nodded once, her eyes wishing they could produce tears.

  “Then close your eyes in sleep for him. Stay strong. Fight to survive.”

  Adele ran her finger over the edge of the photo, pretending it was the side of his face. “I remember the first night he walked me home. He asked if he could court me. Can you believe that? He was such a gentleman that I almost laughed. He didn’t even try to kiss me that first night, though in truth, I would have let him. He gave me a gift—a butterfly clip,” she remembered, smiling through the darkness. The memory of his face warmed her. “He stood under a streetlight and told me he intended to ask my father’s permission. He wanted to do things right. He said I deserved it.”

  When she paused, Omara exhaled, “Yes? And what did your father say?”

  Adele pressed the photo in her palms, as if to hide the secret of her love for him. “He said what any well-bred father would say. Vladimir Nicolai was a gifted musician. But as a suitor for Adele Von Bron, he was nothing better than a common laborer with dirty hands.”

  “He put a stop to your relationship then?”

  “Only the relationship he knew about,” Adele whispered, remembering the harshness in her father’s voice when he advised that she not see the merchant again. “We met in secret after that, in our garden whenever we could. And by then, I already loved him.”

  “If you want to dance with him in the future, then live today. Pray for God to give you the strength to endure each day, for it will be called upon in this place. It will be called upon for all of us,” she said louder, her voice obviously carrying to the ears of all the girls in the room. “Strength? That begins with sleep.”

  Adele hadn’t thought past the momentary for weeks.

  In the camp, you never dared to think about tomorrow. You lived
in the here and now. It had all become clear. She’d expected to find an end to her reeducation in the hellish place. Yet something told her that reeducation was not as simple a thing as walking out the front gate when one’s calendar said it should be over. Had Adele owned one, the date would have been boldly circled in red.

  What did it matter now where, or even how long, she slept? She’d never see the world from outside the barbed wire walls of Auschwitz.

  “I’m never going home, am I?”

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Omara’s words registered surprise.

  “I was nearly killed upon arrival. Do you not remember that?”

  “We’re all nearly killed on arrival.”

  There was no veil of innocence anymore. Adele asked and Omara could always be counted upon to give her a truthful answer, even when the truth stung.

  “How did you get in such a position of power?”

  “I have no power, Adele. Not here. I do what they tell me. I keep their musical pets in line.”

  “And if I’d not known how to play, if I’d been a frightened young girl who had walked in here and begged for mercy because of a lie, they’d not have given it. So what if I had walked in here and couldn’t play?”

  Omara looked at her with a stony constitution and admitted, “Then I would have taught you quickly.”

  Adele couldn’t believe her ears. Did this woman actually mean that she would have lied? To the German SS? If anyone would have found out, it likely would have meant instant death. Would she have risked that for a violinist from Vienna? Her own parents would not have risked so much.

  “Why?”

  “Why what, Adele?”

  She needed to know the truth. No matter how gruesome the details might have been, Adele needed to know why she’d been saved. “Why would you have not sent me back outside to the officer that day?”

  She answered on a breath laced with feeling. “Because I believe that this too shall be used by God. Somehow, this story He is writing will live on.”

  “How does He tell the story?”

  Water dripped in the background, punctuating the question. And though no one stirred around them, Adele knew the other girls were also waiting for Omara to offer some shred of hope in her answer.

  “He tells it through the art of creation. His creation. He tells it through each one of us who survives.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nice tan.” Penny tossed the comment out the minute Sera walked through the office door on Monday morning.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where were you yesterday?”

  Sera dropped her handbag on the desk. “Flying home.”

  “Uh-huh. So . . .” The girl twirled her swivel chair around to face Sera’s desk and allowed it to roll partway across their shared office. She leaned forward, elbow on her armrest, and dropped her chin into her hand in the fashion of a bubbly middle school cheerleader. “How was California?”

  Sera was not about to get into any of that, not first thing in the morning.

  “It was sunny,” she said, and took a sip from the salted caramel mocha in her to-go cup. She set it on the desk and went about her normal routine—turning on her monitor, hooking up her laptop before switching on her desk lamp. She did anything to act as busy as possible.

  “Sunny.” Penny didn’t appear to be accepting the brush-off.

  Sera shrugged off her jacket and hung it on the antique iron hook behind the office door.

  “Yeah. California is sunny in April. A little cold along the coast, though. I had to borrow his jacket.”

  Penny hopped up from her chair and nearly tackled her when she turned around, playfully grabbing her by the shoulders. “You can’t leave me in suspense like this! What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Penny shot her a disbelieving look. “I don’t buy it.”

  “I sent you an e-mail with details of everything.”

  “Oh, I got that. I’m used to receiving work e-mails from you on a Sunday. And I read it. I admit I almost fell over when I did. It said you were coming back a day later than expected, with a hundred-million-dollar problem, I might add.”

  Sera felt a surge of nervousness blast her veins. She wasn’t quite ready to talk about what had occurred between William and her. Talking about it might make it seem more real.

  She glanced around the empty gallery. “Isn’t there something that needs to be done around here?”

  “Nope.” Penny shook her head and dropped her hands down to her hips in a domineering fashion. “Not until you spill, Sera.”

  Sera sighed and wiggled out from under her friend’s intense glare. “There’s nothing to spill,” she said.

  “Oh yes, there is—you called me from the guy’s bathroom. His mansion bathroom, I might add. And you just happen to leave out the part where we’re hired to find a painting that’s wrapped up in his family fortune. That phone call was telling. You’ve never cracked like that, and I’ve known you for, what, three years?”

  “Four.” Sera settled into her wooden swivel chair and dove into a rather listless tapping on the keyboard. She could feel Penny staring a hole through her and finally looked up. “Four years.”

  “Fine. Four.” Penny sat on the edge of the desk and looked down at her with expressive eyes. “And in those four years, I’ve only known you to act this way about one other guy.”

  “Michael.”

  Penny seemed to realize she’d brought up a painful memory. “Look, I didn’t mean to bring it up. But I haven’t seen you like this in so long. I almost dared to be happy—”

  Penny broke off as the office phone rang.

  They both glanced over at the phone in unison. It was barely nine o’clock on a Monday morning. Who could be calling that early?

  Who else?

  Penny picked up the handset. “Sera James Gallery, Penny speaking.”

  Sera had hoped, at the very least, for a few days to prepare herself for the next time she’d hear his voice on the other end of the line. It was strange to think the same lips that would speak from miles away had brushed a butterfly’s kiss on hers just a day ago.

  She touched her fingertips to the pout of her bottom lip, lost in the memory.

  “Yes, just a moment, please.” Penny pressed a button on the phone, then held it out to Sera. “It’s him.”

  “It is?” The him part required no explanation.

  Penny gave a long, exaggerated nod and pulled a chair up closer to the phone. She plopped down in it, fully intending to stay through the conversation.

  “So?” She nudged the phone closer to Sera, giving her a gleeful smile. “Do you have any idea what time it is in California?”

  “Don’t you, uh, have some work to do?”

  Penny shook her head. “Not a thing. This gallery practically runs itself.”

  Luckily for her, the brass bell above the front door chimed and an elderly couple walked in off the street. Sera’s heart leapt. Customers! She could have kissed them. Given them a free painting. Anything to show gratitude for their absolutely perfect timing.

  She tilted her head toward the door, raising her eyebrows at Penny.

  Realizing her plans at listening in had been conveniently thwarted, Penny rose and playfully mumbled, “By all means, Madame James. Allow me.” Her heels clicked against the floor as she walked away. Her hand rested on the antique knob of the glass-paned office door.

  “Open or closed?”

  Sera almost rolled her eyes. Did she really have to ask? “Closed, thanks.”

  “Six o’clock in the morning. That’s what time it is in California.” She winked and closed the door behind her, almost trotting away on a cloud. Sera knew why. Penny was practically gleeful to think that a man had any kind of effect on her love-starved boss.

  Penny disappeared around the corner and Sera stared at the phone, the continually blinking red light toying with her already frayed sensibilities. She tapped a pencil on the tabletop while
she debated answering.

  The prospect of speaking to William was nearly as bad as the prospect of him not having called at all. But she had no clue how to formulate words on her lips.

  She picked up the handset and pushed the button to answer the call. “This is Sera.”

  “Good morning.”

  A softness was evident in his voice and that, along with the easy way he greeted her, brought an instant familiarity that warmed her cheeks with a blush. The fact that William hadn’t felt the need to state who he was said more than she’d expected.

  In hearing his murmur in the phone, she could tell he was smiling. It was one of those things a woman knew—a smile could never be hidden in a voice.

  “You must be busy there in your Manhattan office. I’ve been waiting for a while.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yeah,” he said on a pause. “Almost two minutes.”

  She heard the teasing in his voice and played along. “Well, I’m sorry about that, Mister Hanover. I’m sure you’re not accustomed to such outrageous waiting.” She fumbled through the file folders at her desk, sticking a pencil in the chignon at her nape, and fluttered around for Adele’s case file. “But I’ve got my file right here. I was reading on the plane and found something that might help. I know it’s around here somewhere.”

  “Would that something you found be his name?”

  Her hands froze. The young musician in the photographs? “You know his name?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “How? I mean, I just left California and—”

  “And you think the only thing this businessman can do is sit behind a desk and issue orders all day. Or rake leaves in the yard.”

  Sera leaned back in her chair, the antique wood creaking with the action. “And?”