Quest for Anna Klein, The by Thomas H. Cook Page B

glanced back toward the house. “No more training today?”
    â€œNo, there’s more,” she answered.
    She added nothing else, her silence like a cloak around her shoulders.
    â€œYou may be going earlier than we’d thought,” he told her.
    She nodded, and an errant strand of hair broke free from the scarf and curled at the side of her right ear.
    â€œNo second thoughts?” he asked.
    She shook her head.
    With that, she turned away from him, and for a moment continued to face away, her features now in profile, her attention focused on the stone bridge in the distance.
    â€œDo you want to walk over there?” Danforth asked.
    She nodded, and together they made their way out of the grove and into the wilder woods, with its newly sprouting undergrowth, and finally to the bridge.
    During the awkward silence that followed, he made a point of not looking at her.
    At last he said, “What are you thinking about?”
    She stared out over the stream. “Ellis Island,” she said. “The view from my window.”
    â€œYour window?”
    She nodded. “I had trachoma, so I had to stay on the island for a while. My bed was near a window. I could see thebig buildings. It was like a make-believe city. Especially at night. The lights fell like fireworks, only frozen.”
    â€œVery different from where you came from?” Danforth asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy did you leave your native country?”
    â€œTo escape the killing,” Anna said.
    Danforth imagined the smoldering villages of the Pale, a half a million Jews crowded into small-town ghettos where they periodically fell victim to renegades of every sort, bandits and gangs of deserters. It was a vast region through which he’d traveled with his father as a boy and through which he would pass again as a man, after the war, those same crowded villages now emptied of their Jews.
    She faced him. “How about you?” she asked. “Clayton says you went everywhere when you were a child. What was the most beautiful thing you ever saw?”
    He told her about Umbria, the village of Assisi, the valley that swept out from the terraces of the town, how beautiful it was, almost unreal.
    â€œWhen I remember it, I see it more as a painting,” he said at the end of his description.
    Anna’s gaze fell toward the swiftly flowing water. “And what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve
never
seen?” she asked.
    It was an odd question, Danforth thought, but he had an answer for it.
    â€œAccording to my father, it’s the Seto Sea from Mount Misen,” he said. “He saw it, and said it was like a dream.”
    â€œWhere is it?” Anna asked.
    â€œJapan,” Danforth answered. “On a little island called Miyajima.”
    â€œThen you must go there,” she said. She glanced toward the house. “I’d better be getting back. LaRoche is waiting.”
    They turned and together walked to the house; in the distance, Danforth could see LaRoche standing on the porch, watching them.
    â€œWe still have a lot of work,” LaRoche said to Anna when they reached him.
    Danforth saw that LaRoche had already been told that Anna was to leave quite soon, though there was no hint that this speeded-up schedule disturbed him. And yet in the following days, small cracks began to appear in LaRoche’s otherwise granite exterior. Danforth noticed it in the way he grew more tender toward Anna during their sessions, and in the way his voice lost its coldness, a change in manner that made him appear almost fatherly in regard to her. He might have been teaching her to ride a bike, Danforth thought, or erect a tent, or any of a hundred other innocuous skills, and he sensed that LaRoche had come to fear for her and so had grown more gentle, as a parent might be more gentle with a child stricken by some dread disease.
    Some two weeks later, Danforth and LaRoche sat alone in the front room,