A Mind of Winter (29 page)

It’s a wonder with all his comings and goings that no one has spotted my troublesome visitor. But then, he comes only very late at night and is, to his credit, a model of discretion.

I can move quite freely around the town but I’ve been told not to leave the county. It did not occur to me that they would doubt my honor on this point until I noticed, three days ago, on my way to the bank, that a shiny blue car seemed unusually evident wherever I went. Once I made a point of looking out for it I found that the car, driven by a pleasant-looking middle-aged man, was trailing me in the most obvious manner as I went about my business. I have no intention of removing myself, although I suppose they can’t be blamed for thinking that I might.

I must try to remain as unemotional as possible. I need to conserve my energy for the critical task at hand—of conducting my search. Strangely, this unexpected and alarming development has renewed my vigor; whatever happens, I must do my utmost to track down my mother and my sister. I have uncovered several new leads and am pursuing them with all the hope of the early days, which I thought was lost to me forever. The rest of my life—the house, that is—continues to run smoothly.

Now that I am reembarked on my search for Mama and Else, the memories are coming back unbidden. Almost six years of freedom, of having truly
fled
: undone. I find myself back in my childhood home, the redbrick house on Kirchstrasse. Back with my sister and mother, reliving the details, scouring each moment for clues as to how I might have—should have—acted differently. Seeing only, and everywhere, missteps.

After the world performed that peculiar somersault that changed everything forever, I had wanted to ask my mother if Papa had known. I wanted to know if Papa had been as surprised as I was when the soldiers had come to our own door. For months we’d heard of the nighttime arrests—and, some weeks earlier, I’d heard my mother and father arguing about whether to hide our elderly neighbors, the Bergmans, in our attic.

“Absolutely not,” Papa had insisted, his handsome face marred by the thick blue vein that appeared in his forehead when his ire was aroused. “We have the children to think of.”

Mama’s response had puzzled me. “But it
is
the children I’m thinking of,” she said sadly, letting the lace curtain fall back across the window.

Two weeks later, the Bergmans were taken away, with the usual theatrics. Clear across the street we heard the banging on the door, and then the sound of crashing and thudding from within—furniture being toppled, china and crystal smashed. The old woman must have been prepared: I knew that they did not allow people to collect belongings, and yet when she was led away, she was wearing her good felt hat. I pictured her, Mrs. Bergman, whom I’d known since my earliest days, sitting night after night in her parlor, the hat pinned into place on her head. I wondered what it could have meant to her, anticipating that when they led her away, she’d be wearing her good felt hat.

They did not smash our door in, though, and they did not take us all away. Just Papa—
For questioning,
we were told.
Your wife is suspected of being a Jew. It’s a crime to be married to a Jew. We need to establish the facts.

I had long closed my eyes and ears to the awful realities of the new order—including the arcana of details surrounding the laws of racial purity—realities that had not, until now, pertained to me or my family. When they came for Papa, a vague and pertinent recollection seeped back. That while all Jews were considered racially impure, slated for eventual “resettlement” or “special work assignments,” to be married to a Jew was a crime, a treasonous act worthy of immediate action. This was partly a matter of public pageantry; such
criminals
were paraded through the streets wearing signs declaring their treachery. It dawned on me with horror that Papa would be put to such use. And, once
the facts were established
, we—my mother, Else, and I—would be put on the list for a late-night seizure.

My father had not moved with the stunned stillness of the elderly neighbors but had gone in a panic, the blue vein writhing on his forehead. Papa gave us each a hasty kiss as the flax-haired soldier stood silently tending to his military posture. Some minutes later, I watched through the window as Papa descended the stairs. He cast a quick backward glance and I saw a terrible knowledge slammed into those gentle eyes, and something else I could scarcely believe: the strong, square jaw of my father, quivering.

“Your father will be back,” Mama had said evenly, walking to the piano and raising the cover. “He’s only been taken for questioning. Their claim is absurd; they’ll find no records to back it up. They’ll admit their error and things will go back to the way there were.” She pressed a few chords into the keys, slowly, as if the care she took with the notes would ensure Papa’s safety. Else settled next to Mama on the brocade piano stool. Leaning over the belly of the instrument, I watched my mother’s wrists float above the keys.

It was my idea to move to the attic.

“I suppose it can’t hurt,” Mama had said. “As a precaution, until your father returns.”

We dragged the cot from my room up the stairs. I see Mama in her tan wool dress, which kept catching in the springs of the metal frame. By the time we reached the attic, the front of the skirt was speckled with little brown holes. I managed the small table and chairs on my own; Else and Mama followed with armfuls of clothes. We brought up supplies in the wooden buckets Hilde used when she scrubbed the floors: bread, dried meats, sausage, jars of vegetables and preserves, three enormous cabbages with loose ruffled skin. I remember turning to see Else, a smaller dark-haired version of Mama, straining with the heavy buckets. In the dusky light of a single candle, I could see the grimness in Mama’s face. Pointless, after all, I remember thinking, to move to the attic. No matter how we barricaded it, the door to the attic would yield to the soldiers’ axes like butter.

No records to back it up
. I chewed over Mama’s words and found in them this meaning: that though not provable, the claim itself was true. But that evening, my mother’s face was closed to questions, so I resolved to wait out her mood and broach the matter in a day or two.

Later, Else and Mama knelt by the bed, then looked toward me expectantly, though I did not join them; it had been years since I’d prayed. That smooth Latin chant, a layer of syrup to coat the dread. Mama made the sign of the cross over Else, then rose and did the same to me, her fingers curved like a dancer’s, pausing at my forehead, dipping to my chest, passing slowly across my shoulders. Her lips worked silently. I knew she was whispering to Jesus to protect her
kinde
.

The needle flew in the wavery near-dark. A single taper, placed in the corner of the attic farthest from the window, was our only illumination. I’d never before seen my mother sew yet her movements were expert and unthinking. Where Mama was concerned, I was used to such little mysteries. Once—I couldn’t have been older than five—I was helping Mama in the rose garden. She’d turned and looked into my face, a sudden light transforming her features. The heaviness of the shears in my little boy’s hands; I’d managed to keep them aloft, just the right distance from the coiled bud.

“I tended a garden like this when I was a little girl, just about your age.” The way she addressed me when we were alone: as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

“The nuns planted it, just for me,” she continued, drawing so close I could feel the whisper of her breath on my cheeks. I exerted all of my strength to keep the shears up high against the stem, as if letting them fall would shred the splendid cocoon that had sprung up invisibly around us.

“Before the convent,” I whispered. “Where did you live before you lived with the nuns?”

“In a palace on a diamond mountain, where I took baths in tubfuls of rose petals.” She kissed my nose. The shears dropped from my hands, landing with a thud in the dirt. Mama turned back to her work, the brightness fading from her smooth oval face.

She’d probably learned to sew in the convent; there, in the attic, I watched as Mama’s needle looped through the air. I glanced over to Else. It was then, when I saw my sister’s straight shoulders and closed, numb face, that I knew she would not be coming with me.

“Here,” Else said, handing me a small scrap of paper. “My friend Klara, do you remember her? She has an uncle in England; his daughter and I wrote to each other for a while—
pen pals
, that’s what she called it. I kept her address. Take it.”

The words were barely visible in the weak light.
47 Park Street, Mayfair. London.
I folded it three times into a tiny square and handed it to my mother.

The work done, Mama passed me the jacket. I examined the series of little pockets secreted in the lining at waist level, admiring the tiny, even stitches. I passed the jacket back to Mama, who slipped the gold coins, one by one, into the new pockets, tucked the tiny folded square of paper in with one of them, then set about stitching them shut.

I did not sleep. I sensed the arrival of morning, even before lifting a corner of the oily cloth covering the small window of the attic. Redbrick houses, side by side; a rusted bicycle leaning against a wall. Winter light slanted coldly across the gray length of the street, etching the shapes of naked branches onto rumpled patches of brown grass. I let the cloth fall, walked to where the wooden trunk, fastened with a brass latch in the shape of a lion’s head, sat under the eaves. I pulled up the protruding tongue of the lion and the trunk sprang open, releasing a musky, yellowish breath of cedar. Folded on top was the heavy navy jacket; beneath that, a blue woolen cardigan and navy flannel trousers. I removed each piece and put them on over the clothes I was already wearing. I glanced over to where my mother and sister lay sleeping on the mattress. I stood there, unmoving, for quite some time.

So many conversations about leaving. Always the same, my mother’s tightly drawn mouth, her unshakable resolve. “I am not leaving without your father. He’ll expect me to be here when he comes back.” And Else’s girlish optimism: “It’s all a dreadful mistake. We’re Catholics, after all. Mama, isn’t that so?”

I knew what they would say: “Go,” the two voices one. “We’ll see you when it’s over.”

When I had finally summoned the courage to ask Mama about her background, she answered cryptically, though her meaning, in the end, had been plain.

“I have no memory of any of the nuns ever telling me this story,” she’d said. “Although they must have, perhaps when I was a very little child. The image has been plaguing me since they took your father away. I always thought it was simply a very odd dream. It never occurred to me there was any truth in it.”

I walked over to where Mama and Else lay sleeping. I leaned over my sister: the warm imprint of her cheek on my lips. Then I placed my own cheek against the face of my sleeping mother.

The hallway, cold and wide after the confinement of the attic, was softly aglow with early-morning light. I stayed close to the wall as I took the stairs, ducking beneath the window at each of the three landings.

I descended the last flight to the maid’s quarters and turned the glass door handle with care. Hilde’s room was as she had left it—the crocheted bedspread drawn tightly across the bed, a half-drunk glass of water on the windowsill. Four stockings dangled from the mantle, each describing the shape of Hilde’s short thighs and muscular calves. An open book lay spine down on the table by the window, splattered with faded rose petals, and beside it, in a glass vase filled with murky green water, a half-dozen stems stood with drooping puckered heads. Hilde’s familiar odor lingered in the air, a curious mixture of molasses and slightly rancid milk.

Through Hilde’s room and into the adjoining workroom, used for storing wood, which opened onto the garden. Out and across the little vegetable garden Hilde had tilled for so many years, now dormant under a cover of sackcloth.

The gray stones of the alley collected my footsteps into echoes, which sounded dangerously loud. The leaves, the sky, the occasional crop-haired bullfinch—all were startlingly vivid, unnervingly still, as if everything around me was readying to pounce. I felt something brush up against my leg and started to run. I swiveled my head back to see a small white dog with a wounded expression on its face. I slowed back down, attempted a casual gait.

Walking. A welter of streets. I was aware of an alarming, invisible shift that had taken place in the world. I’d had no reason, before this moment, to question my place in the order of things as I walked down the street. But now, the world vibrated with awareness, bristled with the threat of being seen.

I found myself taking the familiar route to my school—I would have graduated with honors in the spring, only days shy of my eighteenth birthday, and therefore of the draft. I came to a halt before the building. Flashes of my life there: crouched on the tarmac of the schoolyard, shooting marbles, lining up when the bell rang to file into class. Always a crowd of boys in boisterous motion. It was here that the world of art and artifacts had been opened up for me, through the person of Professor Eisensdtadt, a junior curator from the Zwinger who taught several afternoons at the school. The darkened classroom, the procession of illuminated slides beamed onto the wall, the feel of slipping into a new dimension. Sometimes, in that brief moment before the lights flickered back on, I’d feel almost drunk, my imagination reeling with these images in their slow-motion brilliance.

More recent events at the school were bleached out and unreal, like overexposed photographs. There were the gradual disappearances—senior boys pulled out for the draft, the day they came of age—and the other empty chairs about which no one spoke, the age of the boys in those cases irrelevant. I had now joined them myself: one of the vanished. Were my friends alarmed? Agitating to find me? Or doing what we’d all done before: simply taking this latest disappearance in stride?

The building was locked; no one was yet about. I looked up at the curved inscription on top of the tall iron gates. Light pulsed behind the steel-gray fabric of the sky, turning it to a sheer funereal veil. Standing there before the school, I counted my own breaths, one through ten then back again. A flutter, inside, of recklessness. I turned in the direction of the city center. I wanted to put to the test that new feeling: to see whether there really were eyes everywhere—in the coats of the birds, in the street signs and buildings and lampposts.