“Remarkable.” Charlotte traces her neatly trimmed fingernail, polished with a pearly white color, under the script on Bambi’s third page. “The print is almost identical to the original text.”
My fingers clench the velvet arms of the chair beside her, my sandals tapping the Oriental rug in time with the classical music playing softly through Charlotte’s speakers. “What does it say?”
She inches her reading glasses closer to her eyes, their rims pressing against her silver-white bangs. Then she checks inside the front cover—a familiar routine for her, this searching for the owner’s name inside a used book.
“A lovely tribute,” Charlotte says quietly after she discovers Annika’s name and the words from her mother.
Even as she says the words, I know she’s thinking about Nadine, her deceased mom. Charlotte’s mother was French, but as a German teacher living on the border between France and Switzerland, Nadine spoke both languages to the daughter she adopted postwar.
There’ll be no magical reconciliation between my biological mother and me, but at least I know my story—our story—as broken as it is. Charlotte doesn’t know where she was born or to whom. Family connections, I’ve discovered, go way beyond blood, but I’ve always wanted to find Charlotte’s biological family for her.
I glance over at the worn blue spine of Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon by Franz Ginzkey on a bookshelf near Charlotte’s piano, the magic balloon book that shaped her childhood and inspired the name of her store. It’s also the one item that Charlotte has left from her early years, the only clue to her past.
The German classic has never been translated into English, but when we were younger, Charlotte translated the story as she read it to Brie and me. Hatschi Bratschi swipes little Fritz from his village in the magic balloon, and in the following pages, they travel the world until the wizard, searching for more children, falls off the balloon. Fritz enjoys the rest of his voyage until he reaches the wizard’s castle. There he discovers more kidnapped children and valiantly returns them all to their homes at the end.
The story is harsh compared to many of the books for American children, but I’ve always been fascinated by Fritz. Not only with his ability to escape from an evil wizard, but his incredible journey around the world.
I look between the Bambi book in Charlotte’s lap and Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon. Both books—one about tragedy and the other about triumph—written by Austrian authors in the same era, except Felix Salten fled from the Nazi Party while Franz Ginzkey joined its ranks.
Charlotte turns to the handwritten text on the third page again, studying the words. “The Germans banned this book during the war.”
I nod. “Felix Salten was Jewish.”
“They thought he’d written this story as an allegory about those who wanted to kill the Jewish people.”
I shiver, thinking about the antagonist called Man, hunting down the innocent deer for sport. I haven’t been able to find much useful information about Felix Salten for my post, so I’ve requested several articles from the National Archives of Austria. The researcher there, a woman named Sophie, said she’d send me one later today.
Charlotte looks up, her short hair combed neatly behind her ears. “Where did Brianna find this?”
“From a seller in Idaho.” I dip my spoon into a bowl of fudge ice cream and savor the sweet chocolate. “She wanted to surprise me for my birthday.”
She turns the page. “My mother read this story to me when I was a girl.”
And then she seems to slip away as she stares at the page.
She’s done this ever since I’ve known her, losing herself in the pages of a book. Once she told me that books were her own magic balloons, the words and stories transporting her to another place, often back to her home in France.
Someone renamed her Charlotte when she first arrived at the orphanage east of Lyon. It means “free woman,” a new birth in a sense. After the war, Nadine had wanted her newly adopted daughter to embrace that name and embark with her on a journey of freedom.
Charlotte loved her mother dearly, bringing her to the United States almost sixty years ago following Charlotte’s marriage to a soldier from Ohio named Marshall Trent.
After Nadine died, the Trents searched for Charlotte’s biological family but found no record of her birth in Lyon or the surrounding towns in France, so they crossed the border to search the civil registrar’s office in Geneva. When that proved unsuccessful, they moved on to Germany. No central registry office recorded German births, so they combed through records in civil registration offices in several of the larger cities.
Later I tried to help Charlotte find her family as well, searching online in the catalog of the Family History Library. Though her biological parents were probably deceased by now, I was hoping to find a brother or sister or even a cousin who remained behind. Someone to fill in the gaps of her story.
But none of us have been able to locate the record of her birth. We need the name of the town or city where she was born in order to find any information about her family.
Charlotte remained at the orphanage near Lyon for about five years until Nadine rescued her, and then she emulated Nadine’s kindness when she met Brie and me. Not orphans exactly, but two girls who desperately needed a mom. Or at least an auntie who could help guide us across the mountains and valleys of life. Charlotte filled in these missing gaps for us.
When Charlotte looks up at me again, her dark-green eyes are confused. “It seems to be a list.”
“What sort of list?”
She shakes her head. “I’m not certain.”
Brie and I have found plenty of forgotten lists tucked between a book’s pages—usually cataloging groceries or things to do—but none inscribed in the copy. This list, it seems, was meant to be remembered permanently by either its author or the recipient of the book.
“Can you translate any of it?” I press.
Charlotte pats my leg. She’s known me since I was eight and knows very well that sometimes I push too hard. This tenacity, she once told me, was also a gift, but not everyone appreciates it as much as she does.
How Charlotte saw my determination all those years ago as a child empowered me in a sense, making my grit a blessing instead of a curse. Even today, my perspective on myself often evolves to match the view from her eyes.
She reaches for the bowl of cherry cordial that I brought her from the ice cream shop once owned by her husband and digs her spoon into one of the three scoops. In all these years, I’ve never known her to waver on books or ice cream.
After taking two bites, Charlotte returns her bowl to the glass coffee table and looks at the book again. The words come to her slowly as she scans the lines on one of the first pages. “Gold necklace, ruby brooch, and six silver teacups with—” it takes her a moment to translate the last word—“saucers.”
I glance over her arm, studying the script again. “Perhaps someone recorded their family heirlooms.”
“There are two initials at the end of the line,” she says. “R. L.”
“Strange.”
“Maybe Annika was trying to hide her secrets in plain sight. If she didn’t want an adult to find it . . .”
“No better place to hide than in a children’s book.”
She nods, pushing her reading glasses back over her short hair. We’ve commiserated over the years about how few adults actually open books written for younger people. The older population, we both think, would learn a lot about children by reading what intrigues them. And while I’m admittedly biased, some stories written specifically for children are light-years more entertaining than what’s marketed toward their parents.
The author of the list certainly valued precision in her script, taking the time to do her work well. She seemed to care deeply about what she was recording, and I wonder if it was Annika Knopf trying to hide something between these pages or if her mother wrote this list for her.
I glance again between the two books—one on the shelf and one in Charlotte’s hands—and wish they could both tell me about their journeys.
“I can’t read any more today.” Charlotte lowers the book to her lap.
This time I pat her leg. “It’s okay.”
“My mind is still sound, just not my recall.”
“Your mind is even sounder than mine.”
Charlotte continues flipping through the pages, scanning the illustrations of Bambi playing with his cousin Faline, hiding with his mother in the forest. Some of the illustrations are printed in bright colors, others in black-and-white. Then she looks back up at me. “Did you see the picture?”
I scoot toward her. “What picture?”
She slowly rotates the book, and I see a yellowed photograph, torn from a newspaper and attached to a page near the end of the book with about a dozen pieces of clear tape. It’s a picture of a young man, seeming to gaze into the eyes of a woman cut from the photograph, though her gloved hand is resting in his. He’s striking, with light hair and a smile that must have stirred the hearts of many young women in his day.
The caption’s missing as well, but I can read the name of the newspaper and the date above the photograph.
Neues Wiener Tagblatt. 6 May 1938.
“The Vienna newspaper,” Charlotte says.
“Perhaps Annika was from Austria as well.”
Charlotte closes the book, staring down at the cover. “I was baptized in 1938.”
Elbows on my lap, I wait silently. She rarely speaks about her memories from the orphanage or the tragedies of a great war that spared no one, including the children.
“I wish I could find your family for you, Charlotte.”
She reaches for my hand; her skin is so soft, so thin, that I worry about bruising her. “It’s much too late for a reunion now.”
“Do you still want to know what happened to them?”
“Sometimes I do.” Her voice shakes. “Other times, I’m afraid to find out.”
“Everyone should know their story.”
Closing her eyes, Charlotte rests her head against the chair. “Hopefully this Annika left Europe long before the war began.”
Charlotte’s hand nestled inside mine, I allow her the space she needs to drift away. I would never do anything to hurt her, but I wish I could gift her with something good from her story.