How still the night is.
The queen surely sleeps, protected by a lady keeping a faithful, loving watch there
– Libretto from Il Trovatore
It shot out of the sky.
Like a cannon ball, the thing plummeted to earth. It trailed a red and white plume that looked like something being peeled, perhaps ripped, off something else. It had rained the night before. Water pooled in troughs. Just beyond the cowshed, where on clear days outdoor milking was once a joy, the ground it struck was moist. At great speed it whistled down, hissing as it went, like an angry witch.
The impact made a loud plunking sound.
It reminded the girl of cows’ hooves emerging from mud. Instantly, air rushed in, trying to fill the hole, for Nature abhors a vacuum. But the object was not freed. It went in deeper, entering the yielding earth with great force.
Although the girl did not yet realize it, the deadly power of gravity was spurred by conflict.
“Secret, yes. Disguise, no,” Frau Anneke Gluckel, the girl’s foster mother decided on the day that Hester was “given” to her.
When Anneka and her husband lived in the village, before moving to the farmlands, she loved her neighbor, the beautiful Jewish woman with dark eyes and black hair who had only one child, little Hester. Frau Gluckel had no children of her own.
She was my best friend. We shared the delight of confidences . . . love beyond love . . . loneliness . . . longing. . . .Things that women tell each other and nobody else, without fear of betrayal.
“I will save her.”
Those last words passed from one woman to another as a declaration of the deepest reciprocal affection.
Days later, without time for farewell, Hester’s mother disappeared, and her father too. They were put in a cattle car heading “east.” An only child, small and extremely quiet, Hester had become an orphan, even before her parents were exterminated, although mercifully she was too young to know it.
The girl wanted to walk around the small farm before full daylight emerged. Without conscious reason, Hester always liked the...
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