Marlene Read Online Free PDF Page B

not, no girl can be allowed such insubordination.”
    She marched us directly to the headmistress’s office. While Hilde and I endured a severe tongue-lashing followed by a week of extra study and no free time in the courtyard, just outside the gates, our entire nation plunged headlong into disaster.

V
    M ust I?” My fingers were freezing; as I looked down at my feet at the basket of wool unraveled from old sweaters, which I must convert into mittens and scarves and caps, despair overwhelmed my permanently ravenous stomach.
    “Would you have our brave men suffer frostbite or chilblains because you are tired?” said Mutti. “This is what we must do, our sacrifice for theirs. Cease your moping and finish that scarf. I must convey these to the front with the auxiliary nurses.”
    I resisted rolling my eyes at Liesel. She, too, sat sewing in the cavernous living room of the von Losch residence in Dessau, where we’d moved after the kaiser declared war.
    To my relief, we’d barely interacted with the colonel before he had to depart for duty, but from the little that we had, I found him a prim, humorless man who invariably addressed Mutti as “Frau” and gave us a vague appraisal, as though we were extra suitcases she’d brought. We had taken care in those first weeks to avoid getting in his way, adhering to his rigid schedule for meals that required all of us to sit at the table and say as little as possible while he pontificated about Prussian honor and our need to defend it. Mutti, in turn, deferred to him as if she was still his servant, notthe woman he intended to wed. To my surprise, when he left they still had not married. I wondered why Mutti had insisted on moving us here, even if I did not dare ask. How could Josephine Felsing reside with a man before the banns or church blessing? But then, she wasn’t really residing with him, was she? He was gone, fighting for the empire, and to all outward appearances, she was his housekeeper, only she now oversaw his house in Dessau. Money, I thought, must be the reason, even if she’d die before she admitted it. We couldn’t afford our flat without her employment, so we had to go wherever Herr von Losch ordained. I did not like it. I found Mutti’s joyless subservience disturbing, as though I’d inadvertently caught her desperately mending her worn underclothes. I now began to understand what Liesel had said about a woman alone: Despite Mutti’s extolling of our family name and the exacting propriety for it, we were not privileged at all, but rather, dependent on the whims of her employer.
    And in truth, Mutti didn’t have much to manage in Dessau. Besides a cantankerous Catholic cook, there was one anxious maid who dwelled in daily terror of Mutti’s inspections and a lame coachman who, as far as I could tell, had nothing useful to do, as the stables were empty. All horses had been requisitioned for the war, and if the rumors were true, were now being slaughtered for the soup pot.
    It was dismal and boring. I missed Schöneberg, even my school, for here we lived like prisoners, with mourning bands constricting our arms as we knitted, sewed, and assembled care packages, even as our own rations dwindled. Meat, milk, and flour had become impossible to obtain, so that our bread was mostly made with sawdust and entire menus revolved around turnips. My enrollment in Dessau’s parochial academy got me out of the house every day, but between the obligatory studies, we performed much the same tasks as at home, supporting the war effort with our sweat and bleeding fingertips, along with weekly visits to city hall to sing patriotic choruses as the mayor read out names from the interminable lists of the fallen.
    “When are Uncle Willi and Oma coming?” I ventured after another half hour passed and the clicking of knitting needles gnawed at my nerves. “Didn’t you say they would visit soon?”
    These days, my sole reprieve from the monotony was my relatives. Mutti’s