Lauren Fox - Send for Me

Of course he hasn’t been sleep-baking, but time does disappear for him, and he is, in that way, an artist, a man whose work is, by coincidence, his calling. He is fortunate, has always been fortunate, except for the great moment in his life when he was profoundly unfortunate, and maybe that’s how luck works: perhaps there are some men who balance the ledger sheet every day, who work at jobs they neither like nor dislike, who come home to families they are tolerably fond of; who wake, in the morning, neutral about the day’s prospects and fall into bed, hours later, depleted. And then there are men like Julius, who are given great full buckets of good luck in their lives: married to a woman of tender patience, father to a daughter who shines like the sun, owner of a prosperous business; he takes so much satisfaction in the emotional and tactile pleasures of his life and his work that sometimes he has to stand still just for a moment in the middle of the day, in the midst of the chaos, and pause for what would be, if he were a different kind of man, a prayer.

Deep down Julius harbors the secret and unreasonable hope that his quantity of bad luck has already been meted out to him, that Paul’s death, when they were very young, was his portion.

When, on the first day of April, 1933—a chilly, sunny Saturday, typically the sort of day on which the bakery does a brisk business—the men stand outside the front window, he almost pities them. Feldenheim is a small city, and these three young men, decked out in their paramilitary finest as if for a costume party—high black boots and those foppish little brimmed hats—might very well be sons of his neighbors, or classmates of Annelise (they are just the right age), or children of his loyal customers, boys he has fed, with warm bread that he made with his own hands.

And now here they stand, shivering, their wisps of breath visible in the crisp spring air, acting like fools, like bullies, warning people to stay away, singing, chanting, trying to intimidate his regular customers. Succeeding, sometimes. But Julius doesn’t have it in him to hate these boys. He just doesn’t. In fact, he has half a mind to step outside and offer them warm brötchen, a vanillekipferl or two, a bit of nurturing. They want to belong to something, and so they belong to this, but maybe his kindness could suggest another option.

Their low, urgent chanting carries in from the street, music without melody. Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews! His head bent over a baking sheet, he feels the humiliation suddenly crash into him. He’s not going to alter their hateful opinions by offering them warm pastries; he’s not going to change the world with a cookie. The bell above the door rings to announce an entrance, and, for the first time, his heart jolts with fear at the sound of it, and he braces himself.

But it’s a customer, a man he doesn’t recognize who has pushed past the boys outside and stepped into the warmth of his bakery. He is middle-aged and polite, impersonal, takes off his hat, peers for a minute at the baked goods, just going about his morning errands. Julius feels so grateful to this stranger that his eyes fill and he has to turn away for a moment to collect himself. He adds a few extra buchteln to the order. The man nods at Julius, turns, and leaves.

The day brings few customers. At the end of it, after these boys have gone home (to their mothers? to dinner?), so much is left over, brötchen and brezeln and mohnkuchen, an entire käsekuchen Berta Baumann ordered but did not pick up. There is so much goodness—beauty—in these breads and pastries; Julius still thinks that. They are sustenance and pleasure, his gift. He gathers them, wraps the cake, packs everything into a paper bag to give to the beggars he’ll pass on his way home.

Alone (he heard the rumors and told everyone else to stay home), he closes the shop in the dim light, under a pall of unease. He walks home for dinner, head down, hurrying as if through a foreign city.

Klara greets him in the doorway. Her hands shake as she takes his coat. There were beatings in the streets. They stayed inside all day, she tells him.

That night Julius dreams about his brother. When Paul appears to him, facedown in the creek, a tiny boy in shallow water, Julius wakes up, as he always does, his heart pounding, his breathing shallow (almost as if he is the drowning one). Paul’s death was a shattering. Julius was too young to make sense of it, and grief, even after all this time, is still a lonely surprise. He wakes and knows without touching it that his face is wet.

Klara, who has been his witness for twenty-five years, draws her husband closer in half-sleep.

I was terribly upset in Frankfurt when we said good-bye.

A thirty-one-year-old man will come with some history, and Walter’s is named Johanna.

Johanna is another in the endless parade of tall, finely featured women who stride through Annelise’s life, a marching band of beauties—Katarina; her best friend, Sofie; and now this one, Johanna, stunning and aloof. Next to them, Annelise feels like a shrub.

She knows Walter and Johanna Goldmann the way she knows everyone else—they’re regular customers at the bakery. They come in several days a week at 4:00 on the dot for Kaffee und Kuchen. Walter has the formal good manners of someone who has never had cause to doubt his worth.

On their first day in the neighborhood, he introduces himself and Johanna, solemnly and with unexpected sweetness. “We’re new to this area, and I think we’ll be coming here often,” he says, and he makes a gesture toward the glass case, to the selection of cakes and pastries; and, possibly, although neither of them knows it, that sweep of his arm extends up, above the counter, all the way to her.

Johanna stands next to him, gazing at him, silent, her little Mona Lisa smile a full suit of armor.

You can serve some customers every day and never notice them; others make their indelible mark immediately, for no clear reason, except that maybe you are, by some strange magic, paying very close attention.

Walter orders—schwarzwälder kirschtorte for him, bienenstich for her—and he pulls out a chair at one of the little round tables in the corner, makes sure his wife is seated, that everything she needs is right in front of her, before he sits down. They stay for just over an hour, taking their sweet time at the table. It’s a Tuesday, not very busy. Annelise watches them discreetly. They lean into each other as if their conversation is a jewel they’re forming together, as if they’re alchemists.

Some days, Johanna hurries in in the morning by herself, full of purpose, and buys the bread she needs for the day. Annelise wraps her package and thinks with a little pang that this means that she won’t be seeing Walter later, although, really, why should she care? Johanna is friendly enough when she’s with her husband, but alone, she looks past Annelise, searching for more interesting people who might be behind her. (But of course only Annelise’s parents are behind her, bustling about in the kitchen, preparing cake batter and kneading bread dough and arguing companionably about how much salt to use, or the freshness of the milk. Their arguments are melodies; fifty years later, Annelise will still be able to hear them.) Sometimes Johanna taps her round red fingernails on the glass counter if Annelise is taking too long to wrap her brötchen or make change. She is one of those women whose husbands bring out the best in them; their trick is that everyone knows that except the husbands.

*

Walter was in the habit (slightly disconcerting, he was aware) of staring at Johanna while she slept. He knew if she woke up and found him lying there, as still and unblinking as a reptile, studying her beautiful face, she’d be annoyed, possibly even angry, but he couldn’t help it. She was glorious, ethereal, a Weisse Frau. Her face invited scrutiny—no, required it! She was a goddess, and he, Walter Goldmann, was nothing but mortal. He was affable, certainly, but he considered himself relentlessly average: on the short side, myopic, prone to worry. He had always felt that his ears were too big. He was a shoe salesman with a primary school education, for goodness’ sake. Johanna had landed in his lumpen life, shimmering and bright, and he could not believe his good luck. He memorized her face so that, if she ever left him (he worried; he was a worrier ), at least her image would remain.