The Baker's Daughter

Chapter Nineteen

ST. SEBASTIAN CHAPEL

CEMETERY

GARMISCH, GERMANY

MAY 23, 1942

Josef had come to the cemetery late in the day. Wild poppies sprung up between slate and granite crosses. The setting sun cast long shadows, giving the flowers height and life. They moved with each passing breeze, reaching their rainbow of petals to some unseen spirit high above.

He was on his way back from an afternoon of Watten cards and raisin kuchen with Herr Schmidt when he saw the sign for St. Sebastian Chapel. Peter’s death still haunted his waking and dreaming, but he’d grown accustomed to the ghostly presence, an aching in his vision that rarely abated. The methamphetamines and weekend holidays to Garmisch helped. The town had become as familiar as his own, but he’d never ventured here before. It seemed illogical when he knew Peter’s ashes had been swept up by the western wind and probably settled in Munich’s Hofgarten’s hemlock and clover. He imagined park visitors walking through the grassy topsoil not knowing their toes gripped the mud of men, not knowing Peter Abend.

That afternoon, he wasn’t sure what drew him to the church. Nonetheless, there he stood above the small marker: PETER KLAUS ABEND, BELOVED. 1919–1938.

A dried daisy chain encircled the dates, and Josef wondered who placed it there—Peter’s sister, Trudi, perhaps. Josef hadn’t any siblings. His father had been hit by an automobile when Josef was too young to remember. Embittered by her loss, his mother had been a strict disciplinarian who believed hard work and diligence might help them find happiness again. She encouraged his participation in the Memmingen branch of the Greater German Youth Movement and lived long enough to see him join the official military ranks. Two years after he moved east to Munich, she passed away in her sleep. A neighbor friend found her, stiff as a log, and stained from neck to navel in blood. The doctors diagnosed it as acute tuberculosis. It’d been so long since he’d returned home, and so infrequently did they speak that he couldn’t recall if she’d even had a cough. Since his mother was a needlewoman known for her meticulous floral embroidery, he’d paid handsomely that her casket be sheathed with every bloom imaginable. That would’ve pleased her, he thought.

A scarlet poppy fluttered against Peter’s slate. Josef wondered who would mourn when he died. He hadn’t sisters to make daisy chain remembrances, nor brothers to carry on the family name. He was well liked by many friends, but his absence would not touch any of them so deeply. Standing in the waning light over Peter’s grave, he tried to imagine his own funeral assembly. The landlady in Munich would surely come out of respect and duty. Perhaps a girl or two he once courted. Frau Baumann would cry for him but not dare show her face—a renowned prostitute at any man’s funeral was inappropriate. It comforted him, however, to know she’d feel loss, probably more than any other. And then the Schmidts, he hoped. He’d become close to Herr and Frau Schmidt and watched as Elsie blossomed from a gangly girl to a young woman. They were genuine people. True to each other and those around. Yes, they’d be there too. He pictured Elsie clutching a bouquet of cornflowers and drying her eyes with a handkerchief. Lovely, even in sorrow.

“You were smarter than I gave you credit for,” he said aloud, then shook his head and laughed, embarrassed to be talking to a dead man—and worse, a dead man who wasn’t even there. But he meant it.

From all he heard, Hazel Schmidt was even more charming than her sister, her beauty only matched by her reputation as a generous lover. He attempted to visit the Lebensborn Program at Steinhöring, not as a companion but with the hope of helping Hazel and Peter’s son in some capacity. His application was rejected on the grounds of inferior health records. The names of the Lebensborn women were so greatly protected that not even a hundred kreppels could convince his archive secretary to pull Hazel’s file. So he stopped trying to reach her directly. His migraines continued, and his shots increased.

He stayed up nights tallying all the pain he’d caused: a widow before a wife, two families’ heartache, a daughter’s banishment, a fatherless son; and he continued to struggle with the part of him that remembered the Hochschilds fondly. However, this in no way interfered with his staunch commitment to the Reich. He turned the Kristallnacht scene over and over in his mind, rationalizing every action, and concluding that while the Hochschilds were Jews, Peter acted recklessly. Josef did not regret his anger, but rather his lack of control. The one thing he couldn’t excuse or deny was that Peter’s death was wrong. “Good care should be taken not to deny things that just happen to be true”—so it was written in Mein Kampf.

But even after visiting Frau Abend two years prior, Josef was unable to shake the heavy guilt he carried. He tried to call on the Abends once again, but Trudi claimed no one home and ignored her mother’s calls from the parlor. He took it as a not-so-subtle indication that his presence caused more grief than consolation. But from whom could he request atonement? On that second visit, he went again to the bäckerei, distressed by the Abends’ rebuff. The Schmidts greeted him as a son returned. They were his only connection to Peter’s life, and through them, he wanted to make right.

He bent down to the headstone and picked the flower. The smell reminded him of poppy seed rolls.