The faint scent of the pale-pink peonies in my hand perfumes our walk to the cemetery. Ella holds my other hand as we follow her dad up stone steps, seventy of them total before we crest the hill.
Metal and wooden crosses mark dozens of small gardens in this cemetery, each person commemorated with a cross and a unique array of flowers on their grave. Life springs from this soil that buried those who’ve gone before us, beauty unfolding from the depths of sorrow.
It’s a strange concept for Americans, but the residents of Hallstatt rent graves instead of purchasing them. When the ten-year lease expires, Josh told me, the grave is usually reoccupied, but someone—Max Dornbach, I assume—continued renting this grave almost eighty years after Luzi died.
Even if her body isn’t here, I want to remember her life as well.
Josh glances over at me and then down at Ella’s hand, secure in mine. In his eyes, I see something new, and I wonder if he would have taken my hand if Ella weren’t clinging to it.
He stops first in front of a garden plot for Annika’s mother, Kathrin Knopf. A woman who died five years before the war began. Tiny white flowers bloom across the garden plot as if the dirt has been glazed with snow. At the base of the wooden cross are two coral-colored asters towering over the kingdom of white, and a red candle hangs in a wrought-iron lantern over the grave, the glass sides blackened as if someone has burned a candle often in her memory.
Does Annika tend to this plot for her mother, or do her children help her?
Josh motions me ahead. He doesn’t have to point out Luzia’s grave on the next aisle. The carpet of white blossoms and twin coral asters are identical to Kathrin Knopf’s.
Confused, I search the other plots nearby, but no other two are alike.
Does Annika tend both of these graves?
Kneeling beside the cross, I read the epitaph. And my eyes fill with tears.
Luzia Weiss
1921–1939
Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends.
“You okay?” Josh asks me, his hand on my back.
“I will be.”
“Come on, Ella,” Josh says, reaching for his daughter’s hand. Ella squeezes my fingers, and they continue wandering down the aisle of garden plots without me. I know this is a gift he’s offering me, an opportunity to process this by myself, but oddly enough I don’t want him—them—to leave.
I place the bouquet of peonies near the base of the cross and step back. My own gift feels cheap somehow, this leaving of flowers bought from a florist instead of lovingly planting and tending flowers to grow as a legacy. But it’s the only gift I have.
Tears escape from my eyes like they did yesterday, flooding my cheeks. It’s so wrong what happened, this separation of families who longed for one another. Charlotte’s mother, I assume, sent her child away to protect her like so many desperate parents did. The parents who realized, before it was too late, that letting go was the only way to save their children. The parents who lost their lives.
I reach up to wipe my tears but decide to let them flow like I did in Vienna.
“Grüss Gott,” a voice says behind me.
I turn abruptly, not realizing that someone besides Josh and Ella is in the cemetery. It’s an older gentleman dressed in a green folk jacket, matching trousers, and a red tie.
Beside him is an elderly woman stooped over slightly, one hand resting firmly on his arm while her other hand carries a tin watering can. Her gray hair is trimmed short, and turquoise-blue earrings dangle from her ears. She’s wearing a yellow blouse and gray dress slacks with hiking shoes that just trekked up seventy steps. I can’t see her eyes—they are covered with silver-rimmed sunglasses—but I admire her resolve.
For a moment, I feel as if I’m intruding on someone else’s story, but then again, Charlotte has invited me into her life, her world. If Luzia is her mother, then I am here as an ambassador of sorts.
The woman stops beside the cross and takes off her sunglasses, her green eyes—the color of jade—studying me. Each wrinkle on her forehead, the tiny lines that spray out from her eyes, are like chapters, I think. She wears part of her story on her face, in a sense, both the hardship and the beauty. If I open the cover, I wonder what I’ll find inside.
“Do you know of Luzia?” she asks, her English as good as mine.
This time I swipe the tears away. “Only a bit of her story, but I think I know someone who cared about her very much.”
She pats the man’s arm, a signal between them, and he moves away with the watering can. And I stand here beside this beautiful Austrian woman and wonder.
“Sigmund is my oldest son,” she says, nodding as he fills up the can from the spigot on the chapel wall. “I call him my anchor.”
“Are you typically adrift?” I ask.
She sighs. “Some days it feels that way.”
“My name is Callie Randall.”
She shakes my hand but doesn’t offer her name. Josh and Ella have turned back toward us now, and she nods at them. When Ella waves, the woman waves back. “Is that your family?”
“He’s a friend,” I say, much too quickly. “A friend and his daughter.”
“Ah,” she replies. “It is good to have friends.”
Numbers shuffle in my head, the places where lines from stories usually reside, as I try to calculate her age. “Are you related to Luzia?”
Her gaze falls to the grave. “She was a dear friend to me.”
I hear pain from almost eighty years past, the loss still fresh today.
“She never should have died so young,” I say.
When I look for Sigmund, I see that he’s joined Josh and Ella at the other end of the cemetery. And I’m grateful for these extra moments.
“Do you tend both Luzia’s grave and the one for Kathrin Knopf?”
Another flicker in her eyes, something I can’t read. “Why do you ask?”
“We’ve been trying to contact a woman named Annika Stadler, Kathrin’s daughter.”
The woman hands me her trowel, and I clutch the metal handle, warmed by her glove. “Will you pull the weeds for me?”
And so I kneel and begin to extract the green intruders that have overtaken the white petals, the sunbaked dirt caking on my hands. I pull each weed slowly, and this act of purging feels more honoring than my offering of the peonies.
When I stand up, I hand the trowel back to her, and she nods her approval at my work. “Luzia would like knowing that you cared for her.”
The church bells ring out, echoing across the cemetery and lake, keeping time for the people on this hill who still care about such things.
“A legacy, it’s like a song, isn’t it?” I say when the church bells fade. “The musicians may change, but we can keep it alive.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and I apologize for upsetting her.
She waves away the apology. “Who is this person who still cares about Luzia?”
“Her name is Charlotte Trent,” I say. “She’s been like family to me.”
“How does she know Luzia?” The tremble in her voice returns with the question.
My gaze falls to the white-petaled grave. “I believe Luzia might have been her mother.”
Breath catches in the woman’s throat, and a pale film glazes her eyes before they close. When she teeters forward, I catch her, and she leans into me like a rag doll, limp and worn from years of play.
Sigmund, the anchor, has noticed as well. When I glance over my shoulder, he’s rushing toward me with Josh and Ella close behind.
“Mama,” he whispers softly, holding her in his arms. And another word, fainter yet. Meant for her ear alone.
He calls her Annika.