Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/83

care of the Berger household. She cooked, cleaned, bathed the children, attended to Gertrude's wants, and brought a spirit of liveliness into the room. She might bring a little gift of candy, or sing a jolly street song, and the peacocks on the red-papered wall would seem to flutter in response.

When the children were asleep and the room became quiet, it was as though the day's cares were also retiring to slumber. Like a neglected child at the bedside of a sick mother, the past would plead softly and insistently, and offer its embrace of sweet remembrance. Fragments of the past swam into the memory and rose to the surface, like torn strips of film, rubbed and creased, paled by time; bending to them in love, smoothing out its creases, and by the light of their souls bringing to view a familiar street, a beloved face.

"Have you heard anything from home?" Gertrude asked. Her fingers softly stroked the worn cover on the bed.

"I had a letter." Anna's fingers followed the pattern Gertrude's hand was describing.

"A fine man, your father." Gertrude spoke quietly. "I remember how good he was to me back in the village. What wonderful days they were. The river, the forests. . .

"And do you remember our garden?" Anna asked eagerly.

"How could I ever forget!" Gertrude kept her eyes fixed on the blanket. "The tall golden sunflowers and the cherry tree near the barn. I even remember the sloping path to the cemetery, and old Zatchuk's hut on the mountain-I remember that too."

Gertrude's vision leaped a thousand miles to see again the straw-thatched hut on the side of the mountain, the window nailed up with boards, the couple of withered trees, gnarled like the hands of an old crone. She even relived the terror she felt each time she passed the spot.