Annebet had been a goddess. Tall and blond and voluptuous, she took after her Viking ancestors, with flashing blue eyes and a strong hatred of the occupying Germans.
Like Helga’s brother, Hershel, she had been studying to become a doctor before the Nazis came to Denmark.
She’d still kept studying, like Hershel, but it was harder to do with her frequent trips home to check on her family. Hershel was home more often, too.
Helga often went with Marte after school. Although the Gunvalds’house was much smaller, it was a far happier place, particularly after three years of Nazi occupation.
Marte’s mother, Inger, would give them bread and butter as a snack, and they’d take it into the yard to eat.
And sooner or later Wilhelm Gruber, in his German army uniform, would show up as they played there. Mooning over Annebet, waiting for her to come home, hoping for a glimpse of her.
Helga closed her eyes, remembering the day he’d brought them Swiss chocolate. It was late in the spring of 1943, she had just turned ten, and Marte was twelve. Tensions were rising, food was scarce, and Annebet had moved back home from Copenhagen for good.
“How do we know it’s not poisoned?” Marte had asked suspiciously, giving the German soldier on the other side of the fence her darkest scowl and most deadly evil eye.
“I’m in love with your sister,” Gruber proclaimed. “What good would it do me to upset her by poisoning you?”
He really wasn’t that bad looking a fellow, Helga had to admit. A little stout from too much of that chocolate he always had in such quantities, he had a broad, friendly face, with blue eyes that were made larger by his wire-rimmed glasses.
From the terrible stories she’d heard of Nazis tearing Jewish babies in two, she’d expected him to have horns and a tail.
“Come on,” Gruber encouraged with a smile, holding out the chocolate to the two girls. “What harm can it do to take it?”
Helga never would have considered taking anything from a German. She always ran to the other side of her own yard when German troops marched past. But Marte was Marte, afraid of no one and nothing. And her poppi didn’t have extra money to buy things like sweets. For her, Gruber’s chocolate was tempting.
Marte looked at Helga. And reached for it.
“What are you doing?” Annebet descended upon them from inside the house like an avenging angel. But it was Gruber she was angry at, not Marte and Helga. “Stay away from my sister, Nazi! Stay away from my house! I will never go out with you. I’m not a collaborator—I’d never fraternize with the enemy!”
She grabbed Marte with one hand and Helga with the other, and dragged them with her toward the barn.
“I’m not the enemy,” Gruber protested, following them along the outside of the fence. “This occupation is a friendly one. Your king Christian still sits on his throne. The Danish government still meets. There was no fighting when we arrived.”
“There was, too,” Annebet spun back to fire at him. “Lars Johansen was killed defending the king’s palace!”
Marte looked at Helga and rolled her eyes. This was an argument Annebet and Gruber had had many times before. Now he would make a crack about Lars having been killed by the faulty backfire of his own inferior Danish gun.
But he didn’t this time. He just sighed. “Sooner or later, Annebet, you will understand that the Germans and the Danes are friends. You are one of us—you have many freedoms here that you take for granted, that you would not have if you were our enemy. Even your Jews are not required to wear the yellow star—”
“Oh, yes, Herr Gruber,” Annebet interrupted. “Let’s discuss what you Germans—you Germans, not we Danes, and no, we are not one of you—” She said the word as if she were saying pig shit. “Let’s talk about what you are doing to your citizens who happen to be Jewish. Have you heard of the death camps your Herr Himmler has built? I have. I’ve heard stories from people who were there, who saw it with their own eyes. Railroad cars of people—women and children—being gassed, simply because they are not Aryan.”
Gruber tried to smile. “But you are. You Danes don’t have to worry about—”
Annebet thrust both Marte and Helga in front of her. “One of these two little Danish girls is Jewish. Which one?”
Helga stared up at Gruber, up at the complete surprise on his face, and tried not to be terrified. She was too big to tear in two. Wasn’t she? Marte reached for her hand.
“You can’t tell from looking, can you? So what will you do, try to take them both?” Annebet pushed the two girls behind her. “I would die before I let you take either of these two children. You would have to shoot me right there, right in the street, like a dog.”
Gruber was shaking his head. “Look, I don’t know, I’m not a Nazi. I’m simply a good German. And lucky to be serving my country here instead of Russia.”
“Your good German leaders are murderers and thieves.”
Helga tugged on Annebet’s arm, trying to pull her the rest of the way to the barn. This conversation was getting much too dangerous, and Gruber was starting to get angry.
“It’s treasonous words like that that will force us to take away some of the freedoms you Danes enjoy. If you don’t watch out . . .”
“What will you do?” Annebet’s voice was suddenly very soft. But it was filled with an intensity that made Helga want to cry. “Will you round up all our Jews? Will you take away the rest of our communists? I know—maybe this time you’ll arrest all of us who’ve ever had a single communistic thought. You’d have to take me, Herr Gruber. I still work one day a week at the free medical clinic in Copenhagen for no pay. Quick, call the Gestapo.”
A vein stood out on his forehead. “Don’t make jokes about that!”
“I’m not joking, Nazi. I don’t joke about a Reich that wants to rule the world by oppression.”
She was magnificent, standing there like that, all but shaking her fist at Gruber, but Helga was terrified that he would take his gun and shoot her. Shoot them all.
“Too bad, because it’s our world now,” he taunted.
“Yes,” she said. “That is too bad.”
With a regal sweep of her skirt, she turned and followed Helga and Marte into the relative safety of the barn.
She closed the door behind them and instantly turned to Marte. “If I ever catch you talking to him again . . . !”
“He comes to the gate and calls to me,” Marte defended herself. “Am I supposed to ignore him?”
“Yes.”
“No.” They all looked up in surprise. Helga’s brother stood just inside the door. “There’s no point in making him angry.”
Annebet straightened up, her eyes flashing. “I suppose you’ll next recommend I have dinner with him.”
It was funny. Helga had never seen Hershel like this, so stern, so . . . strange. Something about him was different. And he was looking at Annebet as if Helga and Marte had ceased to exist.
“I would never recommend that,” he countered softly.
Annebet had a flush of pink on her cheeks now, as if . . .
Helga looked at her brother. Really looked.
He wasn’t handsome. Not like Jorgen Lund who sometimes came by the Gunvalds’to take Annebet to a concert or for a walk in the park. Hershel’s hair was a plain shade of brown and his nose was big and his face was just a face. Not ugly, but nothing special either.
He was tall and skinny. Except as Helga looked at him, she realized he wasn’t so skinny anymore. His shoulders were broad, and with his shirtsleeves rolled up, she could see that his arms were strong—muscular, even.
But that wasn’t the thing that was so different about him today. No, the difference was in his eyes.
Helga had always thought that her brother had pretty eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses. A rich shade of hazel and usually warm and brimming with good humor, they truly seemed to be the window to his good-natured soul.
But as he looked at Annebet, his eyes were intense, as if his soul had suddenly become heated to an extreme temperature and was about to explode.
“It’s good to be friendly, even just polite,” Hershel said to Annebet. “The Germans will relax and never suspect . . . anything. I’m Hershel Rosen, by the way. I’m here to fetch Helga home.”
How did he even know she was here? He hadn’t looked away from Annebet, not even once, since he’d entered the barn.
“I know who you are,” Annebet told him. She was looking at Hershel in the same way. As if Helga and Marte had vanished off the face of the earth. “I’ve seen you at university.”
“Really? I mean, well, I’ve seen you, of course, but I didn’t realize you were Inger Gunvald’s daughter.”
Marte leaned close, cupping her hands around Helga’s ear. “Look at them. They want to kiss.”
Hershel and Annebet? Helga looked at her brother. At Marte’s sister.
She tried to imagine them kissing. Not the way her mother and poppi kissed—as if they didn’t want any part of them but the very tips of their lips to touch—but instead the way people kissed in the movies. As if they wanted to swallow each other whole and wrap themselves around each other until they turned inside out.
She wasn’t sure Hershel would know how to kiss like that. He had always been so polite.
Annebet smiled at him. “I’m hard to miss, huh? Always ranting about the Germans.”
“You should be more careful,” Hershel warned her.
“Helga and I are going out to play,” Marte announced, dragging Helga with her to the back door, behind the horse stall, past where Frita had just had her litter of puppies.
She banged the door, but didn’t go outside. Instead she held her finger to her lips and led the way up the stairs to the loft.
Marte loved playing spy, and Helga, too, had learned how to move soundlessly out of necessity, to keep up with her friend. But it didn’t seem right to spy on Hershel and Annebet.
“It seems funny that you should warn me to be careful,” Helga heard Annebet say to her brother.
She tugged on Marte’s shirt, shaking her head no when Marte turned to look at her.
Yes. Marte shook her head the other way.
“No,” Helga whispered fiercely.
“I’m not sure why your family hasn’t gone to Sweden,” Annebet continued. “I worry about Helga. Sometimes I just want to get on a boat and take her there myself.”
Marte pulled her close, cupped her hands around her ear, and breathed, “If they get married, you and I really will be sisters. Forever.”
Marte as a sister. Annebet as a sister-in-law. It was a wonderful dream.
Marte continued almost silently into her ear, “But how will we know if they’re going to get married unless we watch to see if they’re going to kiss, huh?”
It made sense in a Marte kind of way, and despite her misgivings, Helga found herself following her friend silently up the stairs.
“My father won’t leave his house, his shop,” Hershel was saying. “He says what’s happened in the rest of Europe won’t happen here—not in Denmark. He doesn’t let himself truly believe the news we hear of the ghettos and camps.”
“I’ve seen postcards,” Annebet said. “With messages written in invisible ink. No one could make up those stories. The camps are real.”
From their perch in the loft, Helga saw that Annebet had sat down on the edge of the Gunwalds’wooden wagon. Hershel had come farther into the room, but he still stood with his hat in his hands.
“I don’t know how to make my father believe that.”
“If there’s any way I could help . . .” Annebet slipped down off the wagon and moved toward Hershel.
“Here it comes,” Marte breathed.
But Annebet stopped an arm’s length from Hershel.
“Thank you,” he said. “But . . .” He shook his head. Looked away from her, looked at her again with a laugh. “You know, our sisters are such friends, I can’t believe we haven’t met before this.”
“But we have,” Annebet said. “I’ve been to your house many times.”
He shook his head again, incredulous. “I can’t believe that—”
“I’ve helped my mother serve food at your parents’parties,” Annebet explained. “At least twice while you were home for the New Year. As a servant, I made sure I was properly invisible.” She smiled at him. “No diatribes against the Germans with the creamed herring. No impassioned pleas for my Jewish friends to get themselves to safety as soon as possible with the dessert course.”
Hershel laughed. “You could never be invisible.”
“Yes, I could. In fact, your parents are having a party for your mother’s birthday next week. I’ll be there, but you won’t even see me.”
“Except now I’ll be looking for you,” Hershel countered.
Annebet smiled up at him, almost shyly.
Somehow they’d moved so that they stood closer together. Close enough now to kiss.
“Come on, Hershel,” Marte whispered almost silently from their perch in the loft. “She wants you to, so kiss her. . . .”