Chapter Text
“Darling he’s just a boy!”
“Yes and I’m just an Austrian.”
“Dear we don’t know what’s going to happen. But surely it’s better to get along—“
“Elsa, please tell me you know what they believe about the Jewish people. Please tell me you would be appalled if they brought their Krystallnachs and their disappearances and their slobbering hatred here? To your beloved Vienna? Where so much of the art and music you admire and adore is patroned by Vienna’s Jews?”
“Georg,” Max interjected, “what’s going to happen is going to happen. You just have to make sure it doesn’t happen to you.”
“No. You mean to tell me—“
“My people have faced this before. Many times before. The Nazis are just another pogrom we will get through as we always do.”
Georg looked at his friend. Whose experience in this matter couldn’t match his but he still knew it was wrong.
“Max, it’ll be as wrong now as it was then. You are my friend. Your family has always been dear to me. While you are a guest in my house you will not face any inane prejudice like you might face out there.”
Max smiled fondly at him, “and I thank you for your protective streak but I assure you I don’t need it. If I let a boy, waving his hand stupidly about some little rooster of a man, frighten me…well I would never set foot in most houses in Vienna or street corners in Salzburg.”
Elsa turned to him. She had only vaguely conceived of him as Jewish. Like many of the Jews she knew in Vienna you could only tell by the decorations—or lack there of—in their homes and typically a slightly swarthier complexion.
She hadn’t realized Max had faced any sort of problems at any party she had seen him at. He was forever charming everyone he came across.
“Max I didn’t realize—“
He chuckled uncomfortably, wishing to change the subject sooner than later, “—because it’s not an issue! Now please can we move onto more pleasant subjects? Like how delicious your cook’s strudel is? How does she get the crust so flaky, I must inquire.”
Elsa laughed and Georg shook his head, letting Max take the lead but holding onto his knowledge that he would leave Austria before bowing to the fascist madness of the Nazis.
He turned back to face where that damn telegram boy had been.
He felt Elsa’s arm on his.
“Hello…”
He sighed in acknowledgement.
“…anything I can do to bring you back—“
He heard children laughing.
“—to the world I’m in?”
He didn’t hear her, his ears full of his children singing. Laughing. Yelling. From the lake? What the hell?