Going to Denmark

_ February 475 I.C., Odin _

It was a snowy February, with the weather showing no signs of clearing up even as time ticked well forward into the new year. The doldrums of winter, with the holidays long over, blew through the hallways of Edelweiss Ladies Academy with the cold wind that snuck past the double-paned windows and down the chimney flues. It made all of the girls tetchy and uncomfortable, itching to leave the cold stone hallways, always under guard and observation, and wander at leisure as they might do in their family’s estates during the summer months.

To stem the tide of displeasure, and stop the girls from eating each other alive, a small outing had been arranged on a somewhat impromptu basis: Countess Mariendorf, who taught music, made the rounds at the ladies’ parents’ houses, inquiring if she might avail herself of any family’s season tickets to the Odin National Opera, to see the currently running production of the Ring Cycle, with _ Das Rheingold _ being the show selected for the girls to attend _. _ A fistful of tickets were thus procured, and were distributed among the young ladies as rewards for good behavior. Even a few of the scholarship girls were invited, and it was in the shared double-room of the scholarship girl Annie Barnard (who roomed with Sasha Neff) that Magdalena von Westpfale found herself in the hour before the promised outing.

Magdalena perched on the edge of the narrow twin bed with the starched white sheets, as Annie sat on her desk chair in front of her. Out of the sheer magnanimity of her heart, Magdalena was doing Annie’s hair. The mirror on the writing desk, which doubled as a vanity in the small room, showed Magdalena the look on Annie’s face as she combed her fingers through the girl’s mousey brown hair, from the temple to the nape of her neck. It stirred a funny, possessive feeling in Magdalena’s heart to see the way that Annie’s eyes were opened wide, and the way her lips, onto which, just minutes before, Magdalena had dabbed lipstick with the tip of her finger, were parted. She wasn’t so much doing Annie’s hair, but playing with it— there wasn’t much to do aside from gather half of it into a red ribbon and tie a bow at the top of Annie’s head. It was a childish hairstyle, and any other fourteen year old would have protested the look, but Annie seemed both not to understand how young the choice made her appear, and lacked the will to protest against Magdalena’s ministrations. This, too, delighted something in her, and made her fiddle with the single-stoned necklace at Annie’s throat rather than letting go of her when she was done. She rested her arms on the girl’s shoulders, tilted her head so that they were a single two-headed creature in the mirror, and said, “Charming, aren’t you? Perfectly ready to go out. What do you think?”

“I—” Annie began, but was interrupted by the bedroom door swinging open without so much as a knock. This would have been expected of her roommate, Sasha, but instead the girl standing in the door was Elfriede von Kohlrausch, with her blonde hair tangling in the white fur stole she wore across her shoulders, ready to leave. In contrast to Annie, she looked much older than she was, with an aloof bearing that she had learned or inherited from some relative, and a few extra inches of height from a precocious growth spurt. The only thing that betrayed her age was her face, which was round in the cheeks and a little too large in the eyes. She leaned on the doorjamb and contemplated Magdalena and Annie and the austere scholarship student dormitory room rather dismissively.

“I was told you were in here,” Elfriede said. “I should be jealous.”

Magdalena dropped her hands from Annie, forgetting the other girl immediately and standing up. “Darling, El,” she said, “I thought you weren’t _ coming _ .”

She put her hands on either side of Elfriede’s face, and kissed her forehead theatrically.

“A ticket was found for me,” Elfriede said with a sniff, pushing Magdalena away. “Genevieve has food poisoning, and because it’s my birthday…”

“Food poisoning?” Annie asked, rather nervously. Little struck more fear into the hearts of dormitory dwellers than the idea of everyone getting sick at once from cafeteria food. Both Magdalena and Elfriede ignored her.

“Did Genevieve eat coins, or bills, I wonder?” Magdalena asked, which made Elfriede’s lips turn up in a tight little smile, but she turned out of Annie’s door and walked a little way down the hallway, leaving Magdalena to follow her, neither of them bidding goodbye to Annie.

“She’s very ill, you know,” Elfriede said. Her voice was excessively dry. “If you’re ministering to the scholar girls, you could go pay her a visit while you’re at it.”

“Ministering? I wouldn’t call it that. It’s not like you’re doing charity work.”

“I didn’t spend _ all _ of my birthday money, in case you were wondering.”

“But did you pay more than the cost of the ticket?”

Elfriede just laughed.

“I didn’t think you enjoyed opera quite that much.”

“I need to get out of here,” Elfriede said, leaning on the wall. “I’m feeling like some kind of trapped animal. If the opera is the best I’m going to get—”

“Behaving like one, too,” Magdalena said. “I figured even your most pointed pleas about how you’re older and wiser now that it’s your birthday couldn’t get you out of…” She waved her hand, encompassing too much.

“The lady Mariendorf is very kindhearted.”

“And didn’t see it happen,” Magdalena said, which made Elfriede laugh again.

“Maybe she understands that an escape will be good for me.”

“You’ll miss this place in the summer,” Magdalena pointed out.

“It’s February.”

“Time flies, darling.”

“Don’t call me that. I don’t even know where you picked up that affectation from. It’s not cute.”

It was an affectation, and Magdalena knew exactly where she had gotten it from: an Alliance-made film her father had brought back from one of his trips to Phezzan. The clumsy, unprofessional subtitles on the bootleg disk gave the romance an even more foreign feeling than just the action of the film taking place in a land Magdalena would never see. Whatever the lead actor’s term of affection had been for his partner had been originally, it had been rendered quaintly as ‘darling’ in the Imperial language. Magdalena, bored and lonely the previous summer, had watched the film on a daily basis. She was transfixed by the power the word seemed to have over the actresses: when the lead said it, people’s faces softened. She started using it like a spell, trying to mimic the pose and elocution of the handsome, foreign man on the screen. Mouthing his lines in her own tongue. _ Darling, you underestimate me _ . But she would never admit this to Elfriede.

“Elllll,” Magdalena trilled. “Whatever happened to your father coming to take you to birthday dinner? Didn’t he make some kind of ardent promise last year?”

Elfriede cast her a derisive glare. “He’s on our estate. I told you he left weeks ago. Or do you not listen to me at all? I don’t know why I bother saying anything to you.”

“And your dear mother?”

Elfriede’s nose twitched, but their conversation was interrupted by the tolling of the six o’clock bell, which made Annie’s door down the hall timidly open. She stuck her head out into the cold hallway, having perhaps heard the tones of Magdalena and Elfriede’s continued conversation, and not wanted to interrupt. “We’re supposed to meet the bus at five after?” Annie asked.

“Just so,” Magdalena said. “Come on, El.” She draped her arm over Elfriede’s shoulder, nestling herself into the fluffy fur stole, stealing some of Elfriede’s warmth. Her own coat and bag, she had left hanging in her room, and she stopped inside to retrieve them before they went out. Elfriede watched her fish through her purse to make sure she had everything she needed for a night out. Her eyes barely touched the rest of Magdalena’s pleasantly decorated bedroom, with the four-poster bed, just watching Magdalena’s hands.

“I thought you brought me back here to give me your birthday gift.”

Magdalena wasn’t facing her as she shrugged on her own coat. “Will you forgive me, darling?” she asked. “I was planning to get you one tonight. I haven’t had half a chance to—”

“Forget it,” Elfriede said. “I don’t want a pity purchase from the gift shop.”

“You think so little of me,” Magdalena said. “What ticket number do you have?”

“Box nine, seat four.”

“I’m in box five,” Magdalena said. “That’s a little one— it’s my family’s box, and just Marta’s there with me. Trade with Marta.”

“Marta won’t trade with me.” Elfriede was stating the obvious.

“Oh, do I have to do everything myself?” Magdalena held out her hand, and Elfriede obligingly put her ticket into it as they walked out of her room and towards the front of the school and out into the weather.

The girls were all lined up in rows outside, stomping their booted feet in the snow, lit by the yellow lamplight from the imposing building behind them. The bus was late, and Countess Mariendorf was looking down the road for it impatiently.

It was easy to tell the scholarship girls apart from the rest— the four of them who were coming on the trip had neat uniform wool jackets, while most of the other girls wore furs. Elfriede slid to the back of the line, and Magdalena searched out the talkative Marta in the crowd and sidled up to her.

“Are you excited?” she asked, leaning in towards the other girl. Marta, who liked Magdalena, smiled.

“I’m worried the bus isn’t coming. Maybe it slid into a snowdrift.”

“It’ll get here,” Magdalena said.

“You’re lucky it’s late, or you would have missed it.”

“Darling, everyone would wait for _ me _ ,” Magdalena said, which made Marta laugh. With an exaggerated shiver, she rubbed her hands together. “Maybe I should put that to the test— I forgot my gloves in my room. Do you think I have time to run and get them?”

Marta peered down the road. Through the flurry-haze of snow, there were headlights approaching. “Probably not. Frau Mariendorf wouldn’t want us to be late— even for you.”

“Let me borrow some of your warmth, then,” Magdalena said. “I’m going to _ die _ of frostbite.”

Without waiting for permission, she stuck her hands into the deep pockets of Marta’s jacket. “Maggieee,” Marta whined, though it was half a laugh.

Magdalena found, in Marta’s pocket, the coated paper of the opera ticket, and she slid it up the sleeve of her own jacket. When the bus finally pulled up, she pulled her hands from Marta’s pockets, and let Elfriede’s former ticket fall to the ground from where it had been hidden in her other sleeve. As Marta walked away, not noticing the swap, Magdalena picked up the now wet ticket from the ground and said, “You dropped this, darling!”

Swap thus completed, Magdalena slid to the back of the line with Elfriede, and stuck her hands in _ her _ pockets, chin on Elfriede’s shoulder, as they tromped up the bus stairs together. The older student at the front of the line in charge of shepherding everyone in, Susanna von Benemunde, rolled her eyes at Magdalena’s antics. Magdalena just grinned at her.

She didn’t speak with Elfriede on the whole bus ride, all forty minutes of it, as they jerked and slid their way away from the school, over river bridges and into the city proper. Elfriede, grim on her birthday as usual, stared out the dark bus window— looking past Magdalena at her own reflection. It was only when Magdalena stopped trying to meet Elfriede’s eyes in the glass that she finally relented, and rested her head on Magdalena’s shoulder for the penultimate five minutes of the ride. Magdalena had an almost unbearable itch to reach up and tangle her fingers in her hair, but resisted the urge, knowing that it would make Elfriede pull away.

During the ultimate five minutes of the ride, as they passed through the theater district, Countess Mariendorf stood, swaying, at the front of the bus to preach to the listening choir about expected behavior at the show. Elfriede pulled a face and slid down in her seat, pressing her knees to the back of the chair in front of her and causing Annelise to grumble at being jostled.

The bus pulled up outside the theater, interrupting a long line of honking cars and yelling valets, and it was a frantic scramble to get the girls down and off the bus so that it could pull away. The resulting chaos, in which one of the youngest of the girls began crying that she had forgotten her ticket on the bus, left the whole group standing outside on the snowy marble steps.

“Should we just go?” Elfriede whispered in Magdalena’s ear.

“Not yet.”

It would be easier to escape after tickets had been checked, when no one would be taking a headcount any longer. The countess Mariendorf was frantically counting and re-counting the heads of her various ducklings. Susanna von Benemunde, as her self-appointed helper, yelled at the younger girls to stay in line. Magdalena only took note of her when her voice, and indeed, all the sounds of chaos on the snowy steps, fell to a strange hush. It took a moment for her, pulling her attention reluctantly away from Elfriede, to identify what the cause of the change was.

Down below, at the foot of the stairs, Kaiser Friederich IV emerged from a black limousine, one with the eagle-headed flag fluttering from the front antenna. He was accompanied by a few other men and women that Magdalena couldn’t identify, which probably made them Phezzani, or at least not frequent denizens of the court in the summer. The girls on the steps obediently shuffled out of the way as the Kaiser walked past, curtseying as he did. He spared them a glance, but only a glance, until he got to near the top of the line where Countess Mariendorf and the older girls were standing. He stopped, very briefly, to say hello to the countess, and Magdalena strained her ears to listen to the conversation.

“Good evening, Lady Mariendorf,” the Kaiser said.

“Good evening, Your Majesty,” she replied with a courtesy as delicate as possible on the slippery stairs.

“I saw the count earlier this week— I didn’t know we would be here together.”

Lady Mariendorf laughed. “I’m afraid he’s not here tonight— I stole his seat for one of my girls. It’s a little treat for everyone who’s been doing well in their music classes.”

“I see. You and your husband both keep yourselves busy.”

“I try to set a good example for the next generation. I feel like it’s my responsibility— my parents always did for me.”

“Of course. You should be commended.” It was at this point that the Kaiser swept his cold gaze over the girls, several of whom at the top of the steps froze in surprise rather than curtseying. “Susanna von Benemunde?” he asked, looking directly at her.

Susanna, usually composed, flushed to the tips of her ears. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“I’m glad I remembered correctly— I know we’ve spoken, but I don’t remember when…?”

“My father brought me to dinner at Neue Sanssouci and introduced me to you last summer. I’m— Your Majesty has a good memory, to remember me from so long ago.”

“You’ve grown,” the Kaiser said. “A very beautiful young woman.”

Susanna’s flush only became more pronounced, but she clung to the Kaiser’s words like they were a life buoy tossed to a drowning man, leaning towards him. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“Would you care to join me in my box tonight?” the Kaiser asked.

“I—”

Lady Mariendorf stepped in. “I’m afraid not, Your Majesty,” she said, voice polite but cold. “I do have a responsibility to keep an eye on my charges while we’re away from school.”

Susanna’s eyes narrowed and her shoulders squared up— quicker to anger than even to respond to praise— but she realized that she was making a poor impression. “My mother wouldn’t mind, you know, Lady Mariendorf,” she said to the countess. “It’s an honor.”

“I’m afraid not,” Mariendorf said again.

“You take your responsibilities seriously,” the Kaiser said. “Commendable.” But it was clear that he was irked— and unused to any refusal. He gave one further glance at Susanna, who stared after him with wide eyes, and then walked up the rest of the steps into the opera house, vanishing into the warm yellow light and crowd inside.

Immediately, the girls broke out in excited, gossipy chatter, but Lady Mariendorf called out, “Enough! Take out your tickets and form a line. When we get inside, follow the ushers directly to your seats.”

For all that she had seemed calm during her refusal to the Kaiser, it was clear that Lady Mariendorf was shaken, and she leaned on the snow-covered railing, freezing her un-gloved fingers as they gripped the marble, knuckles red and white, as she watched the girls file inside. Magdalena noticed this; Elfriede did not. Elfriede was watching Susanna, who was so angry that she was rubbing her eyes to dash away tears, ignoring the other girls as they filed in.

“What did she hope to get out of that?” Elfriede whispered to Magdalena, just loudly enough for Susanna to hear as they passed by. “‘Oh, my father introduced me to you last summer,’” she quoted. “And what’s _ he _ getting out of it?” And a laugh, though it wasn’t clear if Elfriede’s derision was aimed at the Kaiser or Susanna’s father.

Magdalena said nothing, and just pulled on Elfriede’s sleeve to get her to come inside the sweltering opera house. She was oddly disconcerted by the scene they had watched play out, though she couldn’t place why, and tried to focus on the fact that Countess Mariendorf would surely be more worried about keeping an eye on Susanna for the rest of the evening than she would be on keeping track of Magdalena and Elfriede. Indeed, the one thing that Magdalena had been worried about— Marta discovering her ticket swap when she went up to the usher, and complaining about it (“Lady Mariendorf! I wanted to sit with Maggie!”) was shushed with a perfunctoriness that was unusual for the countess, and Marta was shuffled unhappily off to box nine as her swapped ticket indicated.

Elfriede and Magdalena settled in to the tiny box five, and listened to the orchestra tune. Both of them peered over the box’s railing and looked around, though where Magdalena waved across the room to her fellow students, Elfriede ignored them, and looked instead at her own reflection in the shiny brass-framed mirrors that lined much of the hall, her image tiny from so far away. In that mirror world, made of rippled and smoky green glass, hundreds of years old, and twinkling with the dim yellow house lights in chandeliers overhead, the two of them appeared much older than they were. Their faces were too small to be captured, and so only the silhouette and vague impressions of color remained: Elfriede’s bare arm draped casually over the railing, the flutter of Magdalena’s red fan that she pulled from her purse. For all that it had been snowing outside, the opera house was a furnace. This image of the two older women that Elfriede saw, or imagined, seemed to capture her attention completely, so much so that she didn’t respond immediately when Magdalena spoke.

“We’ll leave as soon as the house lights go down,” she said. “I’ve seen this one before. It’s about a two and a half hour show— usually— but they put an intermission in even though there isn’t usually one. So we probably have three hours, and—”

Elfriede just shushed her by putting her hand on Magdalena’s arm. Magdalena obediently stilled— not only because Elfriede would pinch her if she spoke again. She turned her gaze around the large room, looking for Susanna, the Kaiser, Countess Mariendorf, and finding nothing of interest. The Kaiser was out of view, in a box somewhere below theirs, such that the balcony floors obscured him from their sight, and Susanna and Countess Mariendorf were nowhere to be seen, having vanished into the shadows. The tuning of the orchestra swelled to a crescendo, then abated, and the house lights dimmed to nothing, leaving the whole room in shuffling, hushed darkness.

“What do you want for your birthday, darling?” Magdalena whispered, leaning towards Elfriede but still looking at the stage. “Anything you want, I’ll get it.”

Elfriede did pinch her, but when Magdalena jumped and looked over at her, in the dimmest emergency exit light, her eyes were glittering, and there was a funny smile on her face, one that Magdalena matched with a sincere grin.

As the orchestra swelled and the blue underwater light of the opera’s start illuminated the stage, the two girls slipped out of box five together, fumbling their way through the darkness, trying not to giggle or trip over their own feet as they headed for the well-lit hallway out behind the boxes.

An opera house while the opera is playing is a strange place to be in the back halls of. Where the corridors had been full of people trying to find their seats before, now they were totally empty. Distantly, the sopranos and the strings sang, as though underwater, as they ran through the hall arm in arm, under yellow light, over red carpet.

Before they entered the lobby, Magdalena swung out her arm to stop Elfriede from charging through headlong. There, standing by the bar, a drink in her hand but seemingly forgotten, and with her phone pressed to her cheek, was Countess Mariendorf. She seemed lost in her own world, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t see the two girls if they tried to slip out the door of the lobby and onto the street. She hung up the phone without saying anything, then tried a different number. This one, too, rang as she pressed it to her ear, and she hung up when it went to voicemail without saying a word. She dialed a third number, and the person on the other end seemed to answer right away. The lobby was too far away to carry the words of the countess’s conversation, but the relief on her face and in her posture was obvious— her eyes softened, and she held her cold glass up to her flushed cheek as she spoke, trying to cool down.

“Who’s she talking to?” Elfriede asked.

“She should be in there,” Magdalena said, annoyed. “She was the one who wanted to come to this in the first place. She lo-o-oves Wagner.”

“I bet it’s her lover. Look at that…” The countess walked away from the bar and over to a more private corner by the lobby window, and she put down her drink on the sill so that she could play with her own hair, pushing it back behind her ear and then tugging on her earring idly as she spoke, looking out into the middle distance. Magdalena supposed that she was so distracted that she and Elfriede could walk right by without the countess taking any notice of them— at least until she hung up the phone.

“It’s probably just her husband,” Magdalena said. She felt uncomfortable watching her teacher like this— it was peering into a world that she could see the vague outline of, but not fully understand. This awareness of a lack of knowledge made her desperate to leave, to drag Elfriede away from the scene, back to a world that Magdalena was in control of. But instead Elfriede stepped out of their shadowy hallway corner, and made her way for the bathroom entrance between them and the countess. Magdalena had no choice but to follow.

The countess paid them no attention as they both slipped into the empty bathroom, and even less attention when Elfriede kept the door ajar so that they could hear her conversation, in low tones.

“Didn’t you once say that you married me for my social graces?” the countess asked.

“Her husband,” Magdalena mouthed. Elfriede rolled her eyes.

“You might not think it’s a problem but—… I’m concerned for _ you _ , not for me… No, I have to worry about these things…What do you mean, ‘what else could I have done?’ … There’s always something else… I tried calling her parents, but… I’m afraid it is… I’ll try not to worry. I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy the show, thinking about it… I’ll try. Yes.” She laughed, a little strangely. “No, I’m glad he didn’t come. I wouldn’t want him to see this… I don’t think I’m a particularly good role model, no.” She shook her head and brushed her fingers through her hair. “Like I said, you think more highly than I do… Very generous of you… No, it was for your money… Is Hilde asleep? … No, don’t bother… Around midnight. Don’t wait up for me.” And she laughed again, some of the tension in her voice gone now.

The conversation was boring Elfriede, who let the bathroom door slam closed. “We’ll just wait for her to be done,” she said. “And then we’ll leave.”

Magdalena leaned on the door and listened to the tones, but not the words, of the rest of the countess’s conversation. It reminded her of nervous little Annie Barnard, waiting for Magdalena and Elfriede to leave the hallway, or waiting for the bell to toll before she stuck her head out. She didn’t particularly enjoy the mental comparison, so instead she looked at Elfriede and said, “You should have told me that you were coming— I would have helped you do your hair.”

“My hair is fine,” Elfriede said, annoyed and self conscious, glancing into the bathroom mirror, and that was the end of that.

Frustrated, Magdalena walked away from the bathroom door, down the brightly lit, long and narrow bathroom. Past all the stalls, through the door back into the other hallway entrance, past the service closet, was an emergency exit door, the glowing sign above, and a warning not that it would set off an alarm, but that the door only opened from one direction, and that if one left, one would not be able to re-enter.

“Let’s just go out this way,” Magdalena called back into the bathroom. “I’m tired of waiting.” She opened the door onto a swirl of darkness, snow blowing in, and waited for Elfriede to appear. She did, and they slipped out of the opera house.

They found themselves in a steeply sloping, dark alley. , and then back out of the opera house, running down the stairs slippery with snow without a care for their own safety. Ignoring the valets standing in the pools of streetlight to smoke, they ran for the street, and Magdalena hailed the first taxi that passed by, waving her arm and laughing the whole time.

Being outside felt like freedom, and leaping into the back of the cab felt very adult. “Where are we going, darling?” she asked Elfriede, who suddenly didn’t have an answer.

The cabbie was annoyed at their indecision, and turned around in his seat to tell the pair of children to get back out, but Magdalena held out some cash to the driver and said, “Fine, I’ll choose— the corner of Power and Hope Street, please. There’s good restaurants there, you know. And some shopping.”

The cab swung out into traffic. Sliding around on the leather bench in the backseat, Magdalena draped her arm over Elfriede’s shoulders, pulling her close. The fur of their jackets pressed together like animals huddling for warmth, one white and one black. She wanted to whisper something to Elfriede, something that the cabbie wouldn’t hear in the front seat, but she had nothing of importance to say. “What _ do _ you want for your birthday, darling?”

“It’s not very fun if you ask me that.”

“But I don’t know.”

“That’s because you don’t pay attention.”

“Oh, El, come on, how am I supposed to pay attention if you won’t tell me?”

“What do you _ think _ I want?”

“I don’t know!”

“You’re very self-centered, you know, Maggie,” Elfriede pointed out. “It’s a flaw of yours.” There could have been rancor in Elfriede’s voice, but she was just teasing Magdalena. It seemed likely that she herself didn’t know what she wanted for her birthday, and so was enjoying the refusal to give an answer.

Magdalena disentangled herself from Elfriede, crossed her arms, and looked away. “If you say so.”

“You can’t imagine what _ I _ might want. It’s a lack of imagination. Speaks badly of your character.”

“If I tried and guessed wrong, you’d be mad at me.”

“And you’re not generous,” Elfriede said. “If I asked for something that you wanted, you’d be annoyed at giving it to me, rather than keeping it for yourself.”

“Now that isn’t true!” Magdalena said. “You’re just being mean to me.”

“Hm,” Elfriede said. “Prove me wrong, then.”

“I don’t know how I could,” Magdalena said. “Come on, El…” She turned back towards her and reached for Elfriede’s hands, resting on her knees. Elfriede let her take them, and Magdalena twined their fingers together. “How can I prove it to you?”

Elfriede looked away, out the window. “Get me what you’d want _ me _ to give you for your birthday, then,” she said. “If you don’t have the imagination to figure out what I want. And if you want to prove you’re not jealous to the point of ungenerosity.”

“Darling, I don’t want for anything,” Magdalena said.

“Then neither do I.”

The driver jerked the cab to a stop on the street corner, where even dim restaurant windows seemed bright against the utter blackness of the winter night. Magdalena and Elfriede disembarked, and Magdalena chose a restaurant at utter random, pulling Elfriede along inside.

In the darkness of the restaurant, dim with candlelight and just a single lamp illuminating the host station at the entrance, maybe they looked older than they were. That was the hope, but the host at the front gave them a strange look as Magdalena asked for a table, one which she tried to ignore the feeling of.

They sat across from each other in a shadowy corner of the busy restaurant— it was late for dinner, which seemed to be the only reason they were able to get a table. Neither of them said anything for a while. Magdalena wanted to watch the snow fall outside the windows, but they were too steamed up to see anything. There was a singer just finishing her set at the other end of the room, near the bar, and this was where Elfriede’s eyes stayed, until the waiter came over to ask for their drink order.

“Would you ladies care for sodas?” the waiter asked.

“Wine,” Magdalena said, which made Elfriede pay attention to her. “This one.” And she pointed at a random bottle on the drinks menu. “The Castrop Pinot Noir.”

The waiter stifled a laugh. “Ladies, can I see ID?”

Elfriede flushed with annoyance, but Magdalena simply opened her purse, poked through it, and pulled out her ID and a hundred Reichsmarks bill, and handed both to the waiter. “I’m sixteen,” she lied, in a flat and dry voice.

The waiter looked at her for a moment, fingered the thick paper of the bill, and then said, “Very well.” He handed Magdalena her ID back. “And are you ready to order your meal? Or would you like some more time to look over the menu.”

They ordered— salads, both— and the waiter vanished.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Elfriede said.

“No, I really shouldn’t have,” Magdalena said with a laugh. “Paying for dinner will be the last of my cash.”

“Then how will you buy me a birthday gift?” Elfriede asked.

“I’ll have to borrow money from you. I’ll pay you back later.”

“Oh, you are shameless.”

“I know, darling,” Magdalena said. “That’s why you love me.”

“I hate you,” Elfriede said.

“I know.” Magdalena was laughing, but Elfriede fished in her coat pocket and pulled out a two Reichsmark coin. She passed it to Magdalena across the table.

Magdalena took it and turned it over in her hands. “What’s this?”

“All I have to loan you,” Elfriede said. “I’m afraid you won’t have much to spend.”

“I thought you said you didn’t spend all your birthday money on the ticket,” Magdalena said.

“I didn’t. See.” And she pointed at the silver coin in Magdalena’s hand.

Magdalena laughed again, this time with a tinge of mania in it. “We won’t even have enough to pay for the cab back,” she said. “We’ll have to walk.”

“It’s almost four kilometers,” Elfriede pointed out. “In the snow.”

“I know.” For some reason, the idea of this made her almost happy. She pictured picking Elfriede, taller than herself, up and carrying her on her back, marching like a soldier across the miles of distance, the snow and cold and grim determination of walking isolating them into a world of their own. It was a silly thought. “You could call your mother to give us a ride.”

Elfriede just sneered. “We’ll have to walk quickly.”

“It will make the time pass more slowly until we have to go back,” Magdalena said. “That, I suppose, will have to be your present. Stretching our freedom for all it’s worth.”

Elfriede sniffed and looked back at the singer across the room. “A poor one.”

“Maybe so.” Magdalena put her chin on her hands, and leaned on the table to study Elfriede, very closely. “You are older than me.”

“By a few months.” Elfriede still wasn’t looking at her.

“You have to be the wise and mature one.”

“Hah.” Elfriede was silent, but she felt the weight of Magdalena’s continued stare. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing, darling,” Magdalena said. “I’m just thinking.”

“About what?”

“You should have let me do your hair…”

Annoyed, Elfriede smoothed her hair down. “There’s nothing wrong with my hair.”

“I never said there was.”

But Elfriede’s annoyance, and Magdalena’s inability to find something else to say that would repair the strangeness of the conversation, meant that they couldn’t say anything to each other. The drunk patrons over at the bar hollered and clapped for an encore from the singer, and so she came back out for one last song, crooning: “ _ Wouldn’t it be nice, wouldn’t it be nice? _ ”

Their food came out a few minutes later, and the waiter placed them down in front of them with a smile. “You ladies enjoy.”

Magdalena had almost forgotten about the wine, but Elfriede hadn’t. “Our drinks?” she asked.

“Of course, they’ll be right out.”

They ate their salads as they waited for the wine, and they were most of the way through their food before Elfriede started to get very antsy about it. She leaned to the side of the table to look into the deep blackness where the waiters emerged from the kitchen, the double doors swinging open to reveal heaven-like brightness whenever one passed through with a tray on his arm.

A younger boy, bussing tables, happened to notice Elfriede’s disturbance, and asked, “Fraulein, is there something you need?”

“Our drinks,” Elfriede said. “We’ve been waiting for them.”

“I’ll let the kitchen know,” the busboy said.

“I appreciate it,” Magdalena said, and handed him the two Reichsmark coin.

“Thank you, fraulein.”

It was Magdalena’s turn to crane her neck to look backwards at the kitchen, her food now mostly forgotten before her. The singer’s set was long over now, and the restaurant had forgotten to turn back on the sound system’s recorded music, or even turn off the singer’s mic, so odd shuffling sounds emanated from the speakers at the front of the room as the still-running live audio picked up random background noise. The mic was too far away to get snippets of conversation, but the floors rattled enough when someone stomped by that the drumset reverberated, and it picked up the odd shaking of drumheads and cymbals. Magdalena realized that she was sweating.

Their waiter emerged from the kitchen, wreathed in that hard white light, carrying a tray with two glasses on it, heading for their table. “Oh, good,” Magdalena said.

He set them down before the two girls, and with a smile said, “Enjoy.”

“Took long enough,” Elfriede said, and the waiter left.

“To your health, on your birthday,” Magdalena said, raising her glass.

“We’re going to catch cold walking back, you know. Toast to something else.”

“To getting out for the night.”

Elfriede laughed, and drank. But she made a face and pulled the glass away from her lips. Magdalena was too slow to notice her reaction, and drank, too. Grape juice: cloyingly sweet, childish, artificial.

Elfriede’s face was red with embarrassment and anger, but Magdalena was cold with it. She drank her grape juice without making a single indication that something was wrong, but she stared into Elfriede’s eyes, begging her not to get up and make a scene. “Well, darling, we had better get going. Give me a moment to finish my drink and pay the bill.”

She fished in her purse for the last of her cash, that she had earmarked for paying for dinner, and she dropped it on the table after draining her glass. “Keep the change,” she said to no one.

She took Elfriede’s elbow, though she was still fuming and red-faced, as they walked out of the restaurant. When got outside into the blustering wind, where snowflakes glued themselves to cheeks and eyelashes and the ruffled fur of their coats, Elfriede stomped down the street, beginning the long walk to the opera house without a word. It seemed like she was silent to keep from screaming. Magdalena let her walk along ahead for a while, following doggedly five steps behind her. She realized after some time that Elfriede’s ragged breathing wasn’t just due to her quick pace over the difficult terrain of the slippery sidewalk— she was crying, wiping tears away from her eyes every few steps.

Magdalena caught up behind her, just behind her shoulder. Elfriede couldn’t see her, but she could hear her.

“Someday, El, you know, three years, I guess, we’ll be out of here. We can— we can get a place together. I don’t think my mother would mind, and yours wouldn’t care. And we could— we could— whatever you want. We have the money, it doesn’t matter. Just a little place. You and me. In the city— or, my dad wouldn’t care if we went out to the country estate. And we’ll stay up and go out and— whatever you want.” She was rambling. “Three years— it’s really not that long. And you’re getting older before me. I’m sorry for ruining your birthday— El—”

“Stop treating me like a child.”

“I’m not.” She stopped. The street was very empty, no sane person out in this weather this late. “I want it, too.”

Elfriede was a few steps ahead of her, but hearing Magdalena’s voice fall back, she stopped and turned. The pair faced each other in the darkness of the street.

“It was a bad birthday present. You’re not very good at picking out gifts,” Elfriede sniffed, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. “If that’s what you would have wanted— you’re very stupid, you know.”

Magdalena thought about an actor in a foreign film. “I want what you want.”

“Well it’s not something you can give.”

Magdalena took a few steps forward. “Are you sure?”

Elfriede spread her hands, gesturing to the whole world— the restaurant behind them, the school a bus ride away, themselves standing there small in the snow. “Yes.”

“Darling, you underestimate me.”

The man in the film puts his thumb underneath the woman’s chin and tilts her head upwards. Elfriede was taller than Magdalena, so instead she stepped forward and put her cold hands on her cheeks. And she leaned on her toes and pressed her lips to Elfriede’s.

Elfriede stood stock still under Magdalena’s touch and kiss, but shivered when Magdalena pulled away.

There wasn’t much to say, was there? “Happy birthday, darling.”

Elfriede said nothing, but then she nodded, just once, and when Magdalena started walking again, they were side by side. When Elfriede stuck her hands in her pockets, Magdalena snaked her arm through the crook of her elbow, and they walked together in rare silence, with the snow cooling or excusing the flush on their cheeks. They didn’t say anything as they walked. It was a new kind of silence for the both of them.

The opera house could be seen from a long way down the street, brightly lit, and with cars lined up down the street, servants waiting to collect their masters. The Kaiser’s limo was nowhere in sight— it seemed that he had left the show early.

Depending on perspective, Magdalena thought, this was either fortunate or unfortunate. As they approached the opera house, though she was hidden from view of the building front, Susanna von Benemunde clearly stood waiting in the shadowy alley. She wasn’t paying any attention to Elfriede and Magdalena: her eyes were focused on the marble steps, watching for the Kaiser who would not be coming. Her eyes were clouded by hope, and so missed his absence.

It seemed that the two girls were right on time to get back, despite their long walk. People began bubbling out of the opera house doors in a mass, the show ending and everyone rushing to go home. Magdalena grabbed Elfriede’s arm, urgently, before they reached where Susanna was inefficiently hiding.

“Darling, do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Go inside— you should be able to get in without anyone seeing— and go into the bathroom. Wait by the emergency exit. When I knock, can you let me in?”

Elfriede pursed her lips. But the bus was pulling up in the line of valeted cars, and that convinced her. Whatever Magdalena was doing, it was likel y more interesting than going directly home. She nodded, then joined the flow of the crowd in the street, snaking her way up the stairs and vanishing inside the opera house.

Magdalena, smiling, slipped into the alleyway where Susanna was hiding.

“Hi, Susanna,” she said, making the older girl jump, and slam the opera glasses that she was using to examine the exiting theater crowd with against her own eyes.

Susanna whipped towards Magdalena, scowling. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Darling—”

Susanna’s scowl was so fierce that Magdalena was forced to change tactics. She stood up straighter, stuck her finger out, and, with as much authority as she could muster, said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, His Majesty’s car isn’t here. He left. He’s gone.”

This only made Susanna angrier, her cheeks blotching, but she turned her opera glasses to the street. It wasn’t as though Magdalena was lying— the Kaiser’s limousine was distinctive, and distinctively absent.

“And, I’d bet you money that the Countess has been looking for you everywhere,” Magdalena said. “If you’ve been out here for— oh, how long? You’re covered in snow.”

Susanna didn’t answer the question.

“Well, she’s looking for you. She’s probably in the lobby right now, so she’d catch you if you snuck in the doors. And you’ll never see the light of day if she finds you out _ here _ , will you?”

“Shut up,” Susanna said. “Has anyone ever told you that you are the most annoying creature—”

“Of course they have.” Magdalena smiled. “But I’m going to help you.”

Susanna was silent.

“If you go to the other side of the building, the opposite alley from this one, there’s a door— the first one you come to. It’s green, doesn’t have a label. Elfriede is waiting in there for me to give her her birthday present. Knock on the door and she’ll let you in. You pretend like you’ve been crying in the bathroom for however long the countess has been looking for you.”

Susanna didn’t look at Magdalena for a minute, just watched the now-thinning crowd stream out of the opera house.

“And what are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’ll be your sacrificial lamb and distract the countess,” Magdalena said. “Three people hiding in the bathroom is a few too many, I think. If she’s yelling at me for sneaking out and back in again, she’ll be less worried about you.”

“And what do you want?”

“Nothing, darling,” Magdalena said. “I’m helping you out of the pure generosity of my heart.” She tilted her head at Susanna. “After all— you know— we’re all in the same boat around here.”

Susanna scowled, but without saying another word, turned down the alley to go backwards around the building to where Elfriede was waiting for a knock on the door. Magdalena waited another minute, until she saw a frantic-looking Countess Mariendorf on the opera house steps, surrounded by a gaggle of her fellow students, and Magdalena stuck her hands in the pockets of her coat, plastered a grin on her face, and with an exaggerated cheerfulness in her step, strode up to the opera house to take the fall.