The Plum Tree Read Free Page B

to be a doctor or a lawyer; he hadn’t decided which. She’d loved school and had received good grades, as long as she and her fellow students weren’t being pulled out of class to gather a late harvest or pluck potato bugs from the farmers’ fields.
    Looking back, she found it ironic how hard she’d studied. Her foolish hope had been to be a teacher or a nurse. It wasn’t until she was eleven, when she found out that it cost money to go to school for more than eight years, that she gave up on her dreams of being anything more than a good mother and a hard-working wife. Her parents, like the majority of the people in her village, didn’t have the extra ten marks per month for middle school, or twenty per month, plus the cost of books, for high school. Bloom where you’re planted, Oma always said. But Christine’s roots were restless, wondering what it would be like in more fertile soil.
    Isaac talked to her of classical music, culture, and politics as she stood at the ironing board starching his father’s shirts. He talked to her while she worked in the garden, telling her he’d been to Berlin, to see operas and theater. He described the world—Africa, China, America—as if he’d seen it himself, using colorful descriptions of landscapes and people. He was fluent in English and had taught her a few words, and had read every book in the family library, some of them twice.
    And then, there was the fact that the Bauermans were Jewish.
    Isaac’s father, Abraham, was fully Jewish. Nina was half-Jewish, half-Lutheran. It didn’t matter that the Bauermans were nonpracticing. Most of the people in the village saw them as Jewish. And anyone who was a member of the Nazi Party—although it was sometimes hard to tell who was and who wasn’t—considered them Jews. Isaac had explained that, while his father would have liked his children to embrace his religion, his mother wasn’t the type of woman who had the time or inclination to follow anyone else’s rules. She didn’t feel any more Jewish than she did Lutheran, so she wasn’t about to force Isaac and his sister into making choices before they were old enough to make up their own minds. But in the Nazis’ eyes, they were all Jews, and Christine knew that some of the people in her village would look down on the fact that he was a Jew and she was a Christian.
    “Why are you looking so sad?” he said.
    “I’m not,” she said, trying to smile. Then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe.
    After a few blissful moments, he drew away, breathing hard. “I told you,” he said. “Luisa knows how I feel. We laugh about our parents trying so hard to make us a couple. She knows how I feel about you, and she wants me to be happy. And I have a confession to make. The real reason I came to see you today is because my father has given me permission to bring a date to our holiday celebration. And I’ll feel a fool if you don’t say yes.”
    Christine stared at him, wide-eyed, her heart leaping in her chest, making her think of the startled sheep bounding across the grass.
    The Bauermans’ December celebration was an important occasion, the one social gathering where all village officials, dignitaries, and lawyers, along with other influential people from nearby cities, always made an appearance. Christine didn’t personally know anyone who had attended the party as a guest, because the people she knew were factory workers, farmers, butchers, and masons.
    But last year, Mutti had allowed her to help in the kitchen with the caterers, arranging expensive cheese and teaspoons of black caviar on crudités and scalloped crackers. Delivering the food to the servers at the end of the hall, she’d been mesmerized by what she’d seen and heard, the colorful scene reminding her of picture pages from a fairy tale. The sound of violins filled the air, and sparkling champagne overflowed in crystal glasses. Men in their finest tuxedos