Under the Same Blue Sky: A Novel by Schoenewaldt Pamela

Author:Schoenewaldt, Pamela [Schoenewaldt, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

EACH WEEK OF war brought new complications to our work. When Italy joined the Allies, our agent in Venice refused to work with Germans. The tightening British blockade complicated every shipment from the continent. Even moving work out of neutral Sweden was “a job for Harry Houdini,” the baron said grimly. More and more, we bought and sold for American collectors.

In late September, I was preparing a file when the baron stood so suddenly that I looked up. He dropped a newspaper on his desk and left the office, the polished shoes dragging as if he pulled a great weight.

What had he read? I crossed to his desk. The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung was reporting on the Battle of the Somme, now in its third month: “Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.” The corpses couldn’t be retrieved quickly enough; they piled in trenches and carpeted No Man’s Land, attracting rats. Half a million German soldiers might die in the mud of the Somme, the writer declared, and as many Allies. A million casualties. All for a tiny slice of the Western Front.

The baron’s desk was private; that went without saying. But I saw correspondence regarding clandestine food shipments across the Baltic Sea and into Prussia attached to a list of items I recognized from his private collection. There was an early Rubens, a Roman bust of Alexander the Great, a Paul Gauguin lately acquired, and two Ming vases. Would these be sold for Prussian food? What pain he must feel for the land that expelled him and yet starved as he ate, destitute as he lived in comfort behind an ocean. Was some of this food for his own family? I carefully replaced the newspaper and returned to my desk. When the baron hadn’t returned by noon, I went downstairs for lunch.

In the kitchen was another letter from my mother. “He’s so worried that new customers will hear his accent and go away that he hired an American clerk named Frank.” My father spooled between home and store as if under fire. He gave extra weights in nails and screws and tested every item, as if he might be arrested for a bent nail. “Dr. Edson says it’s like he’s shell-shocked, even if he’s thousands of miles from the front. What can we do?” Looking up, I saw Tom and Anna watching me with anxious concern. I translated the scrawled page.

“Invite them here,” Tom suggested.

“I already did. My father won’t leave the store.”

“Ask again, or have the baron invite him. This Frank can manage for a week. And since the baron’s in his library and you don’t have anything to do right now, you can come apple picking with me.”

“Go on, Hazel,” said Anna. “I need the apples and you’re working too hard.”

I went. It was a warm afternoon with the slightest hint of cool in puffs of breeze. We filled baskets with windfalls for cider, applesauce, and apple butter. I climbed a ladder into the dappled shade and passed down perfect red globes for eating.

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