CHAPTER 5

ANNIKA

LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA

MARCH 1938

Two aspirin and a piece of toast. Annika placed both beside the percolator of coffee as Vati’s snores rattled down the hall of their cottage, shaking the wood counter, oven, and lump of a refrigerator in their kitchen space.

The snoring thundered louder as she snuck along the hallway and inched open her father’s door, the cigarette smoke in his clothing searing her nose. The key to the castle’s front door dangled from a hook near his bureau, and she quietly swiped it, folding it into her palm.

As she stepped outside their home, she buttoned her woolen sweater over her white blouse and the waistband of her blue coarse-cotton skirt. Her father’s head would be pounding when he finally awoke, like one of his hammers against a nail, and she preferred to be far away when he started shouting her name.

The spring air awakened her swiftly, much more than a cup of coffee ever could, and she heard the song of a bird weaving through the boughs of a conifer. She searched the knobby cone buttons and fur coats of the trees, but the bird evaded her.

Swallows were prevalent in Austria—the one songbird that preferred the sky to the trees or marches. A bird that the local Vogelfreunde—the bird friends of their region—couldn’t catch. But this was a crossbill singing, she guessed. The parrot of the Alps.

The Vogelfreunde prowled through the woodlands and meadows with their nets every autumn in search of the crossbill, goldfinch, bullfinch, and siskin that often roamed low to the ground. During the winter months, these men and women cared for the birds and then sold them at their spring exhibition. Any unsold birds were released into the forest for the summer months.

Had the Vogelfreunde released their catch for the spring, or had this bird managed to maintain its freedom?

A branch rustled, and this time Annika caught a glimpse of the bird, his russet head coloring the winter branches like a cranberry garland on a Christmas tree.

“Fly free,” she whispered. The Vogelfreunde never harmed their prisoners, but still she thought neither the songbirds nor the silent ones should be locked in cages for the winter.

The crossbill’s song of freedom played in her head as she skirted out of the trees and around catkins fringed over the lakeshore, past buildings that housed cows and horses long ago. In the yard beyond her, the medieval Schloss Schwansee towered like a cathedral on the land between the mountain and the shore. Lake Hallstatt mirrored blue below it, its glassy surface broken only by the village’s candy-colored reflection across the water.

Schloss Schwansee was smaller than other nearby castles like Hohenwerfen or Schloss Mirabell, but it was every bit as intriguing with its three turrets, each one topped with a cone of slate. Dormer windows lined the attic with a much taller tower standing at its side, a former bell tower perhaps, and a family chapel linked to the rear through a narrow corridor.

Like most of the outbuildings, the chapel was typically locked when the family wasn’t home, but during this last visit, Herr Dornbach had asked Annika’s father to build something inside the chapel. Or at least that’s what she’d overheard when Vati was talking to her friend Hermann, the youth he hired to help with all the construction projects. When Vati had seen her, he’d asked for lunch.

Between the lake that lapped up against its front lawn and the mountain wall on the other side, the house would have been well protected in centuries past from any warring enemy, but someone in the past generation had cleared a lane through the forest, connecting with a country road that led into the nearby town called Obertraun.

Herr Dornbach and Max had already taken the train that stopped in Obertraun back to Vienna, but Frau Dornbach had lingered here another week. Now that Frau Dornbach was gone as well, Annika would spend her morning sweeping floors, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the porcelain in the bathrooms with Domestos like her mother used to do.

This role of housekeeper was only for a season, but it was a role Annika wore like a badge trying to honor both Max and her mother every day with her work. If God ever allowed Mama to glimpse down from the heavens, Annika hoped that she’d see her taking good care of both Vati and this castle.

One could only polish so much silver, though, sweep and scrub so many meters of floor. In the winter, Annika would go for weeks at a time without cleaning a single room until Herr Dornbach’s secretary sent a message via telegram to say the family would arrive soon. Then she’d air the musty smell out of the house, make all the beds, stock the icebox with food from the grocer.

She unlocked the front door, and inside, the carpeted staircase dipped down into a hall floored with polished marble, the vast space between the walls built to entertain aristocrats from Vienna and local men after a hunting party in the hills.

The staircase split at the landing, and she climbed up to the left, each step groaning as if its back were on the verge of breaking, its joints aching with four hundred years of service to the Dornbachs and other families who’d called this castle home.

Others, like her mother, had spent their lives serving this house—and sometimes its inhabitants. Annika had no intention of giving up her entire life for a house, but each time Max left, it felt as if her heart were on the verge of breaking like these steps. A deep thundering ache that made her tremble on the inside.

A giant portrait of Max hung in the corridor above a wrought-iron tripod empty of its flower vase. She didn’t linger there. His handsome face was so firm in the painting, his lips pressed together in a way that made him look cruel. Like his father could be.

The door into Herr Dornbach’s bedroom was beside his wife’s, both rooms overlooking the lake and village and rugged Alps in the distance. Max’s room was in the back of the house; the view from his window faced the forest and fortress of a mountain.

She always saved the cleaning of Max’s room until last.

Some nights, when Vati left for the beer hall, Annika returned to the house, though she never cleaned in those late hours. Sometimes she riffled through the clothing and records in Max’s room, as if he’d left part of himself there. Other nights, she’d settle into the library on the ground floor and read one of the many books neatly lined on the shelves. Sometimes she even borrowed a book or two, carefully replacing them before the Dornbachs returned.

Vati would have her head if he knew she snuck in while he was away, pretending to be the lady of the house, but it seemed to her that he often forgot his role as well, propping himself up, in his mind at least, as the king of this castle.

Annika retrieved the cleaning supplies from the hallway closet and stepped into Frau Dornbach’s bedroom. Instead of portraying family members or landscapes, the oil paintings on her walls were swirls of odd colors and shapes, contrasting with the worn chintz curtains that draped over the windows, a marigold-yellow and green design topped with marigold fringe to match the bedcoverings.

Why the mistress pulled these heavy curtains over the windows was beyond Annika, especially with the view of the boathouse in the reeds below and the village of Hallstatt across the lake with its dual church steeples gleaming like two bronze candlesticks.

The Catholic church was posted like an elegant stamp in the right corner, but next to it was the creepy Beinhaus filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of bones, dug up from graves after their ten-year lease expired. Or at least that’s what her friend Sarah Leitner said after she’d visited this house of bones.

Perhaps that was why Frau Dornbach closed these curtains. Perhaps she didn’t like the Beinhaus either.

While Annika no longer laughed about death, it still made her nervous. In fact, it terrified her. After she died, she hoped her bones would stay intact and that someone would bury her near her mother’s grave on the hill.

Annika rested her broom and dustpan by the dressing table and placed her bucket of rags and jar of Domestos on the hardwood that rimmed the carpeted floor. Then she tied back the curtains and opened the windows to flood the room with mountain air, mollifying the remnants of dust and mold that had accumulated over four hundred years. Generations had lived and died in this house, but mold clung to the place like the salt buried deep in the mine above Hallstatt.

A Victrola stood near the bureau with dozens of vinyl records in a case beside it. Annika selected one of Bruno Walter conducting Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and let the music permeate the room as the crossbill’s song had the forest. Along with the sunlight, the melody brightened the room, and she wished she could stay here all day.

Her duster in hand, she stepped toward the bureau, but the shoe boxes in Frau Dornbach’s dressing room seemed to call out to her. Dozens of them packed neatly into an antique armoire, many acquired during Frau Dornbach’s trips to England and France.

The cleaning, Annika decided, could wait.

The orchestra playing in the background, she began unloading and neatly restacking the boxes in a separate pile near the door, so she could put each one back where it belonged. Frau Dornbach’s shoes were beautiful, but Annika didn’t spend time opening all the lids. She only wanted the one at the bottom, the pale-green box striped with ivory and stamped with Georgette of Paris.

Even a box seemed more glamorous when it was from Paris.

Instead of shoes, the box now housed ten envelopes stuffed with photographs. She shouldn’t know this, of course, but over the years she’d learned plenty of things about the Dornbach family that were supposed to be secret.

Annika carefully thumbed through the contents of the box, careful not to disturb the order or leave smudges on the pictures. Sometimes she wondered why Frau Dornbach kept these photographs in a shoe box, but she could never ask. Neither the Dornbachs nor her father could ever find out exactly how nosy she’d been.

Some of the photographs inside the envelopes were taken on a vacation to the Mediterranean coast while others were of the Alps. One was of Max on snow skis when he was about ten. He’d wavered over the years about things like music and books, but he’d never wavered in his love of skiing, whether it was cross country through the valleys or down the groomed slopes.

But these photographs left her empty, teasing her with Max’s presence when she couldn’t speak to him.

One of the envelopes contained several sepia-colored photographs that she’d never seen before, each about twenty centimeters long. One showed an older couple standing beside a carriage, the woman pretty but stern looking, her dark hair pulled back in a knot. The man beside her held a top hat close to his waistcoat, his long beard cascading down over his chest. Relatives, she assumed, from decades back.

Max never talked about his extended family except for an uncle who had immigrated to the United States and an aunt who’d moved to Paris with her French husband. Then again, Annika never talked about her family either. The grandfather on her mother’s side had died in the Great War, and her grandmother followed soon after. The grandparents on her father’s side lived in Linz, but the Knopf family never visited. Vati had some sort of falling out with them when he was younger.

Under the photographs were other mementos. A lock of blond hair, probably from Max. She brushed her fingers over it and then cradled it for a moment against her cheek. There was a piece of blanket in the box and white booties with pink strings. Those she assumed to be from the baby girl Frau Dornbach lost in the early 1930s. If they’d given her a name, Annika didn’t know what it was. Max only talked of his sister once, and then he seemed to bury the memory with his animals.

Max loved well, but then he let go. Annika, on the other hand, clung to the people she loved as the Vogelfreunde did with their prized birds. Except she never released them.

Perhaps her clinging was more like the salt in the mines. Once hardened, it remained until someone flooded it from the chamber with water or broke it away with a pickax.

At the bottom of the box, she found something else new. A star necklace, the six-pointed gold pendant ringed with diamonds. It reminded Annika of the necklace Sarah wore. The golden Star of David. Though Sarah referred to it as a shield instead of a star.

She’d seen this symbol in the papers as well. The Jewish athletes in Vienna, they stitched the shield to their uniforms.

But why did Frau Dornbach have this symbol of the Jewish people in her box?

She pressed the necklace into her palm, her back against the armoire. Perhaps one of Frau Dornbach’s ancestors had purchased it from a Jewish jeweler. With its gold and diamonds, the worth of it must be . . . She couldn’t imagine how many schillings one might pay for a necklace like this.

The chain dangled down her sleeve, the gold threading the forest green in her sweater.

One day, would Frau Dornbach pass this down to Max’s wife?

Annika lifted the necklace to her throat, clasping the chain around her neck, closing her eyes. In this quiet space, she could see Max in Vienna, his gaze wandering out of his classroom window. Was he thinking about her as well?

“Annika?” It was Vati calling her name, the sound muffled in these walls.

She gasped, reaching for the necklace clasp underneath her braid, trying to release its hold before her father found her with it. When the clasp finally gave way, she dropped it back into the shoe box, but before she slammed the lid, the stench from cigarette smoke filtered through the door. And then her father was in the dressing room.

She shoved the Georgette of Paris box away as if it were an ember that had leapt out of its fire. Unfortunately, Vati watched its flight across the dressing room floor. Then he surveyed the rest of the shoe boxes stacked beside the antique bureau.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Nothing, Vati.”

His voice escalated. “You’re rummaging through their things?”

She shivered. The photographs, even though they left a void, were her only connection with Max when he wasn’t here. Her father must never find out about those. “They are shoes, Vati, nothing more. Some of the prettiest ones I have ever seen.”

“You are not to touch Frau Dornbach’s things.”

She nodded furiously. “I won’t ever look at them again.”

“You’re supposed to be cleaning the rooms. Like your mother . . .”

“I know.” Her voice sounded small, like the squeak of a squirrel, and she wished she were stronger like Max or even Sarah. Neither of them were scared of their fathers. “I will clean now.”

“Hermann has arrived. We need your help in the chapel as well.”

She’d known Hermann Stadler since they were children and liked him well enough, but she hated the chapel. The walls felt as if they were smothering her. “I’ll come, after I clean—”

“Now, Annika.”

The Georgette box was sitting on its own, under the canopy of hanging clothes. She lifted another box to return to its original place, hoping to distract her father, but he stepped over her and snatched up the Georgette of Paris box. Then he opened it and dumped the contents onto the carpet.

“What is this?” he whispered, lifting the star pendant.

She shrugged, trying to calm the pounding in her chest. “Just a necklace.”

A dangerous necklace with all its diamonds, the symbol of a people who increasingly needed a shield.

Vati’s eyes changed before her. Angry at first, turning wild and gray like a wolf’s, and then narrowing with greed. As if he’d found a trunk filled with gold. “In Frau Dornbach’s room . . .”

She scrambled to her feet, following him out of the dressing room. He held the necklace up to the window and the diamonds and gold glistened in the light.

Was her father planning to sell it? Surely not. The Dornbachs would release him from his position for thievery, and he and Annika would lose everything. The cottage and the milk from the goats. The samlet from the lake. The birds that sang to her in the spring.

Unemployment, she’d read in the papers, was already rampant in Austria. Her father would never be able to get another position.

Annika held out her hand, her voice gaining strength. “Give me the necklace, Vati.”

A strange smile crawled across his lips—the most awful smile she’d ever seen. “I knew it,” he muttered more to himself than to Annika.

Her hand dangled in the air like the hook at the end of a fishing rod. “What did you know?”

Instead of answering her question, he dropped the necklace into his shirt pocket, and she feared this necklace would find trouble in her father’s greedy hands.

“Please, Vati.” She reached out her hand. “Frau Dornbach will find out that we went through her things.”

He glanced out the window again; then he turned back toward her, the eerie smile still pasted on his lips. “She’ll never ask about this piece.”