Blue Glass

Svetlana

Maybe I should get sick more often.
Lea's been in the most beautiful mood I've ever seen her in. Even more surprising is that she's managed to maintain it for four days straight; even after her mother came home from the hospital. Twice I caught her humming a tune to some sappy love song that had been going around the cafes and dance halls of Vienna before the war in tandem with her chores. She seemed more bubbly and exuberant than her normal melancholy self, peppered with dry humor. I had grown so used to seeing her like that that this change, albeit for the better caught me by surprise. At least her self-deprecating sense of humor wasn't lost on her to say the least.
"If you have ten marzipans, and I take five, what do you have left?" We were sitting at the kitchen table making sure neither of us let the war and all of the domestic hardships it brought with it take away our basic mathematical skills—a game Lea proposed over our breakfast of hard rolls and coffee.
"A black eye and a broken hand, if the marzipans were good enough," she had responded.
I looked down at the back of my hand. The web of it was still red from the scalding hot coffee I had spewed all over it from laughing so hard.
I made my way into the foyer and eased myself into the padded chair next to the phone. Lea was going to be home from work anytime soon now, and her mother would surely have something to say about her good mood, or the long hours she had recently started putting in at the wine firm, or...or...
Her mother.
I jumped to my feet, suddenly apprehensive although I didn't have a reason to be. I hadn't seen her mother at all throughout the day so far, which was strange seeing as she normally came downstairs to smoke her cigarettes on the front porch, or to eat dinner, or to fetch whatever remaining bottles of cognac and brandy we had left in our rapidly dwindling wine cellar. 
But today, Klothilde Schwarz hadn't shown her face in the slightest. And although I was secretly happy about how having to subsequently put up with her racist remarks about my nationality...it was rankling not to see her either.
I didn't need a detective to deduce that Lea's good mood wasn't because of my sickness, but most likely the result of some happening between her and her famous lover, the German fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen. I didn't pry when it came to her little fling—something told me not to, while at the same time, a more maternal instinct told me to keep a close eye on her, to watch out for her. I didn't want her to end up like I had after my short-lived and ultimately tragic romance with Ilya.
As if I had pressed a button, my mind was suddenly flooded with his face: chin-length wavy blonde hair, gray eyes, a beauty mark near the left corner of his mouth, which was always upturned at both sides like he was waiting to smile. That same face that I had, along with so many other girls of my village, so ardently worshiped was the same face that had hovered above me in the grime of the alley where it happened. That same face, ruddy with alcohol, gray eyes clouded and vacant, knowing nothing but the pursuit of his own carnal pleasures. That same face that had looked at me with such guilt on the day of his wedding, silently pleading with me not to give him away, not to expose him for who he really was—a rapist and a drunk.
I thought about this as I climbed the creaky stairs leading to the second floor of the house.
I passed the storage closet and the bathroom, then the laundry room, and finally—
My heart began to pound as I turned the corner. Klothilde's door was wide open, the light from her bedside lamp spilling into the gloomy hallway like an unfurled Japanese fan.
I was confused and uneasy all at once. Klothilde never left her door open.
Furrowing my brow, I poked my head in and looked around, my limbs taut. I was expecting her shriveled, sunken face to pop out at me any second, shouting at me for invading her privacy.
But the room was completely vacant.
Where is she?
I was about to start venture further in and start checking the wardrobe and possibly the ground beneath the window to see if maybe in one of her drunken fits of rage she had thrown herself out when I heard a loud clatter coming from outside, in the hallway. I ran outside and scanned the hallway, my gaze sweeping this way and that, when I heard the sound again. My blood turned to ice when I realized where it was coming from: the door at the very end of the hallway.
That was Lea's room.
I waited for one second, two seconds, three, four, five: silence.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, I backpedaled all the way to the top of the stairs, my eyes trained on the door. A few seconds passed, and then—
Another clatter, followed by a fusillade of thumps.
I swallowed thickly. There was no doubt about it: she was in her daughter's room. What she was doing in there; what had driven her to poke through it, I had no idea, but it was what she might find in the recesses of her daughter's belongings that scared me.
"'Don't let your mother find out about Manfred.'"
Lea certainly knew her mother better than I did, but if there was one thing I could infer about Klothilde Schwarz, it was that 1) she was a social climber, and 2) she would stop at nothing for the sake of money. Even if her knowledge of national heroes and fighter pilots was nil, she would jump at the "Von" in Manfred Von Richthofen's name if she caught wind of any sort of communication between him and Lea, and then, I knew, it would be all over for both of them. I had a her mother detested her daughter's independence, her success, her headstrong mentality, and her inherent dislike of men that had saved her from landing in the same position as her, and she would stop at nothing to undermine her given a chance.
The familiar click of the key turning in the lock to the front door sent my heart into full on overdrive. I stared in horror as Lea flounced in and laid her hat down on the phone table.
"Evening, Svetlana," she said. Then, noticing my stricken expression: "What's wrong?"
"It's your mother," I blurted, stumbling over my words. "She's in your room."
Maybe I should have worded it differently. Maybe I should have taken her aside and broken the news to her in the most watered down way possible. Maybe I should have said something less incriminating, such as "Your privacy is being compromised." But nothing I could have said or done differently would have prevented or even circumvented such an explosive reaction.
Lea came tearing up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Shoving me aside, she sprinted down the hallway, still in her coat and gloves, still clutching her handbag, and literally threw herself against the door, twisting the knob at the same time. I half expected Klothilde to have locked the door behind her, and I supposed Lea did too. Under her full weight, the door flew open with a loud, unceremonious squeal of its hinges. There was a thunderous bang as the other side of the doorknob connected with the wall. It startled Klothilde, who sure enough was kneeling next to an open drawer of Lea's writing desk.