Carpathian sun and sky. Helen was relieved to note that she was also wearing green, like the pastures around the pond.
“So I’ll take the baby with me, naturally,” Helen said calmly, “and you stay, Lili.”
“What?”
“Stay in the house and wait for your father and brother to get back. Everything will be fine. Go upstairs to our bedroom and wait behind the wardrobe, and don’t come out until it’s safe.” Lili’s mother picked up the baby and leaned closer to her eldest daughter as the others rushed about. They could hear people running outside, but oddly only the voices of children. “You wear that dress in the best of health,” Helen said. “We’ll be fine, don’t worry.” She looked her daughter directly in the eyes. “And you’ll be fine. Don’t be afraid.” Helen caressed Lili’s cheek. Then she followed the children out.
Lili waited through the day and another night behind the white wardrobe, waited for the muffled sound of gunfire in the distance to pass, for the bark of Hungarian and German soldiers to cease, the running feet to recede. Only once did Lili dart out to take a dress of her mother’s from the wardrobe, then rush back to relieve herself in the soft and generous cotton folds. She even imagined the trouble she’d be in when her mother returned, but would have given anything now for the trouble. The telephone didn’t ring again. The oven had consumed her cake and cooled. Her stomach gurgled and churned, but it, too, rested now.
Lili thought of Mrs. Wasserstein, her teacher for the past three years. She wondered whether Mrs. Wasserstein, with all her knowledge of battles and strategies and the outcomes of war, had managed to elude these latest invaders.
Lili recalled especially the discussion in school in the winter just past, about Pompeii, how captivated she’d become by it, how carried away by the photographs in a book that Mrs. Wasserstein had passed around the room. One was of a pregnant woman lying on her back, her knees up high against her chest as if she were about to give birth—the whole of her grey shape arrested, preserved in lava.
Another was that of Venus in marble, bending over to tie her sandal. Lili finally drifted off to sleep behind the wardrobe with the images in front of her, the warm rock flowing over her.
She awoke to the blue scent of stars, oblivious and comforted, unaware of where she was. It was not yet light, though she sensed the light was near, and to confirm the fact, their rooster, Erik, crowed on the white gatepost. Where had Erik been yesterday? Lost, too, no doubt. And who was there to wake up, now—his own brood, no doubt, sounding the alarm for his own kind, or were the chickens taken, too, for someone’s pot along the way?
After two days, the only other sounds Lili could hear besides the crowing were the honking and gobbling of geese and the occasional bark of a dog in the distance. Hungry, no doubt. No one to feed them.
It was strange that no one had come back in two days, no one in her family, no one she could hear in the town. She could have imagined the worst, just from what she had learned in school. Invading armies sometimes levelled everything in their path, anything breathing. But she had never heard of everyone disappearing. Could this have been a new miracle of God, a miracle of cleansing, an act of retribution, like the Flood? Had any of them made it to the ark?
Lili thought of Ibi twenty doors down, the widow who had taken in Captain Dobo one evening for Sabbath dinner but threw him out in the rain when she discovered he had soiled her cot. She told him never to come back. Lili thought of Lajos Pentek, who cheated on his wife with Evi, the nymphomaniac, and, when he was found out, told everyone in a fit of rage at the temple after services that he wasn’t the first to cheat and began to rhyme off names, even the names of innocent men. Lili remembered Evi’s bottle-green eyeshadow—all the girls wanted to try some—but on this day, Evi cried black tears and left the town for good.
Was this why the Lord had turned “brimstone and fire” on her town, the way He had with Sodom and Gomorrah? There were certainly other examples of wickedness and depravity for God to choose from, even Lili’s. When Helen’s brooch went