The war wasn’t going well. Daddy forbade the radio to be turned on anymore but I gave the delivery boy two marks to smuggle me some newspapers in with our groceries. There was the government paper which talked spectacularly of victories to come, and the looming disaster on the enemy’s front; and there were the thin-membraned free presses which told a darker story. They said our army was daily being pushed back for miles, that the rear guard stuck behind an enormous column of retreating vehicles was being destroyed stock-still on muddy roads. They blamed the government, which gave me a hearty little thrill each time I read it. The seditious libels felt like the imaginings of my future lover setting cool fingers alight on my body. I burned each one in a small glow of my own, kindling the stove.
The servants were all conscripted or run away. My father, laid off from the bombed-out university, could not afford them anyway. I cooked as best I could and kept things tidy while he worked in his study. He wrote translations for the war department and other things on his own. I had to serve him his supper sometimes in the study. He’d pick up a sheaf of papers and walk to the corner of the room. Under the rug was a small keyhole flush in the wooden floor, unlocking which a jagged section of floorboards swung up like a door. Underneath, Daddy’s safe, where he put the sheaf of paper. He closed the safe door gently, like he expected others to hear, and then swung the floor back down, and replaced the rug, and came to his supper and the translation wrung in his typewriter, glasses askew from leaning over. “Thank you my little calla,” he always said. “It smells wonderful. And how did you ever learn to cook like this!”
“You’re too polite, Daddy. All I ever make is simple dishes and peasant stews. Such things as I could remember Grava making for her boys when I was little and ran about the kitchen. What she made for us, I couldn’t do it even if I could get the ingredients. You know I’m a clumsy girl; I have a subtle taste but no grace in the kitchen, nor in anything else.”
“There’s the grace of your mother and more in you,” Daddy would say. “And grace of manner and love, besides. And let us fix your tramping on each suitor’s feet during a simple waltz, we may find you a good husband yet.”
“Oh Daddy, what use do I have for a husband? I have you and this house and a million books.” Which was true but insincere, incomplete. I didn’t want a husband, not in this or any century. But those things were not enough.
“The simplest response is that you will not always have me.” Then his voice darkened, grew quiet: “You will need someone to protect you, always, my little calla.” And though he ate attentively, even greedily, the slops of tubers and small scraps of meat I had brought him, I saw him regard the tyepwriter as a terror, and even lean slightly away from it, so that I was aware even without coming around to read from it some new diabolical thing had happened to our army, and the typewriter’s cold-looking, raspy grey metal case had the look of a rushing storm.
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