Shortly before midnight she sat up abruptly in bed.
Perhaps she had just been going about things the wrong way. What was so wrong with taking some time to stop and think?
She sprang nimbly out of bed and went to the window. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass and looked out into the night.
Over in Lauscha they would probably see the stars scattered across a clear sky tonight, but she saw the lights in hundreds and hundreds of windows. And that was something, wasn’t it?
Wanda laughed softly.
How did the saying go? If Mohammed would not go to the mountain, then the mountain would have to come to Mohammed!
That was it!
Perhaps she couldn’t go to Germany—not yet. But there was something else that she could do.
It wasn’t quite eight o’clock in the morning when Wanda put her hand, trembling slightly, on the doorknob of a small bakery in a side street off Tenth Avenue. That was where Marie had bought the bread for their picnic, and she had been full of praise. “I’ve never had such good rye bread, not even back home! I can’t understand why your mother doesn’t have them send her bread every day.”
A sturdy-looking woman, busy heaving loaves as big as cart wheels up onto the shelves, turned to look at Wanda as she came in.
“What can I do for you, Miss?”
Wanda cleared her throat. It was now or never. She made an effort to speak in her best German.
“Is there somewhere nearby where the Germans meet, where I can learn more about Germany and its customs?”
2
Marie screamed and sat bolt upright.
“Marie, mia cara, what’s the matter?” Franco asked, sitting up in bed a moment later. He was wide awake in an instant, his eyes roaming the cabin, but nothing appeared to be wrong. He relaxed again.
“What happened?” He shook Marie’s arm gently. “Did you have a bad dream?”
Marie nodded, her eyes still wide with shock, one hand to her mouth as though she had seen something dreadful.
“I don’t feel well. I have such a knot in my stomach . . .”
There was sweat on her brow.
When Franco moved to put an arm around her shoulder, he felt her nightgown clinging to her back. “You’re soaked through!”
He picked up a cardigan from the wooden chair that served as their bedside table and draped it around Marie’s shoulders.
“Thank you.” She took a deep breath. “I’m all right now . . . Good heavens, though, it was such a nasty dream! I was in the clearing over behind the sanatorium. It was flooded with light, like you get when the sun’s shining down onto a white surface. There was a man . . . He had a great flowing beard and was dressed in a long robe. But it wasn’t anybody from here, from the mountain,” she added hastily when she saw the look on Franco’s face. She pulled the cardigan closer around her.
Franco reached over to the chair and pulled out a cigarette, and Marie kept talking as he lit it.
“The man asked me to dance, but I didn’t want to. His hand was ice-cold, and I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t let go and kept on as though he hadn’t heard me. We spun around in a circle and I felt quite sick. I didn’t hear any music, though perhaps I just can’t remember that part. There were other couples dancing there as well, some of them were women dancing with women and men dancing with men.”
“And I—where was I?” Why is she dreaming of other men?
She shrugged. “ ‘I have to go to Franco,’ I kept telling the man, but he didn’t look at me and acted as though he hadn’t heard. ‘Franco doesn’t like it when I dance with other men,’ I told him, but again he ignored me. He held me tight in his arms and we went round and round and round and didn’t stop.” She swallowed. “We danced right on past the other couples. ‘We have to turn around; we’re getting too close to the edge!’ I shouted at him. I pulled at his arm and writhed like an eel, but he held me in a grip of iron. Suddenly the lake was coming closer and closer, not blue any longer; it had turned inky black like some vast chasm waiting to swallow us up. As we took the last step, he looked at me and laughed. Laughed like a madman. And his face was so horrible . . .” Marie began to tremble so violently that she couldn’t go on.
“Marie, calm down! Everything’s fine.” Franco rocked her in his arms. “I know what it’s like to have dreams like that: you fall and fall and fall . . .”
“Then there’s nothing more below you, it’s so awful! And then there’s the fact that it was somebody else dragging me down!”
For a moment neither of them said a word. Then Marie sighed.