Read The Plum Tree for Free Online

hill and turned the corner, so she ran back to the top of the street and looked both ways, searching the length of the main thoroughfare for other flat surfaces: buildings and high fences, any stone, wood, or stucco façade. Then she put her hand over her heart, certain it was turning to lead. Every hundred yards or so was another poster, but she’d been too busy thinking about Kate and Stefan to notice.
    She returned to the announcement on the barn and examined the shaded figures again, trying to clear her mind long enough to remember the lineage of Isaac’s family. According to the notice, a second-degree Mischlinge was a person with one Jewish grandparent. A first-degree Mischlinge had two, but didn’t practice the Jewish faith or wasn’t married to a Jew. Isaac had three Jewish grandparents: a full Jew.
    But Herr Bauerman was an important lawyer. Surely that would matter. Just the other day, Isaac had told her how upset he’d been that his father had no choice but to do legal work for a Nazi officer from Stuttgart. Would these same people tell him that he and his family weren’t allowed in banks and restaurants? Then she remembered Isaac telling her that some of his father’s Jewish friends—doctors, lawyers, and bankers—had already left the country. Icy dread settled in her chest. What if Isaac and his family left too?
    She scanned the wooden fence that surrounded her family’s vegetable garden. On this side of the road, after the weathered barn and starting with her house, the row of homes and barns sat back from the street, leaving a rectangle of open space that allowed for front courtyards and sidewalk gardens. Her parents’ garden filled the corner created by the end of the weathered barn and the length of their woodshed and house, and took up their entire front yard. It wasn’t a tenth as big as the Bauermans’, and there were no steppingstones, hidden statues, or stone fountains, but it provided the produce necessary for her family’s survival. Besides that, it was a source of pride to her mother, the patches of orange marigolds, yellow strawflowers, and blue snapdragons neatly planted between leafy rows of turnips, beans, potatoes, and leeks. Her father had even built a stone walk down the center and hung a bell on the garden gate, which was directly across from their front door and flanked on either side by plum trees.
    To her relief, there were no warnings hung on their garden fence. She didn’t want ugly posters to spoil her family’s hard work, and she was certain her parents wouldn’t want them either. Her parents’ home was a three-story fieldstone and half-timbered house, handed down through the generations by her mother’s family. Once a week, the stained-glass window in the upper half of the front door was washed and polished, the three hallways and two sets of wooden stairs between each floor brushed and mopped. The sidewalks were always swept, the garden always weeded. Even the winter storage room off the first-floor hallway was impeccable. Empty glass jars, waiting to be filled with produce or homemade jam, and cans filled with homemade liverwurst were neatly arranged on paper-lined shelves. In the small cellar, wooden bins, used to store apples, potatoes, turnips, beets, and carrots, lined the whitewashed walls.
    A barn shared the roof and south wall of their house, which shared a roof with another barn, which shared a roof with their neighbor’s house. The timber and stone façades on this side of her block were bare, devoid of Nazi propaganda, but across the street, the church sat on higher ground, and another poster hung on the stone retaining wall, next to the stairway opening.
    Breathing hard, Christine scanned the windows of the surrounding houses, trying to decide if she should run across the street and tear down the poster. But an elderly gentleman, Herr Eggers, was leaning out his window, smoking his pipe and watching her. Not knowing if he was a member of the Nazi Party