Exodus: A memoir (29 page)

There were no stones to be found in that street up to the right, even though I scoured the narrow alley at least five times, eyes glued to the cobblestones. In another square, young men and women in white garb were performing a traditional Austrian folk dance, and a crowd had gathered. I retreated to my cheap hotel on the outskirts of town to grab my suitcase.

I took the next train to Munich, but I couldn’t figure out if Munich was the train’s last stop or if it continued. Because the stops were not announced in advance, I had to be ready to get off
at any moment, as the doors remained open for only a minute or two before the train moved on. As we pulled into each station I checked the monitor on the screen and looked at the platform signs to gauge where I was. At one point, I looked up at the screen to see it read “München Hauptbahnhof” and raced to the door before it closed. The conductor, a thin, older man with a fluffy Bavarian mustache, was just about to lock the door.

“Munich?” I asked.

“Ja, Munich,” he said and urged me off through the half-open door.

Only when I had descended did I realize that the platform sign read “Rosenheim,” not “Munich.” I quickly exclaimed this to the conductor, who shrugged and slammed the train door in my face.

Suddenly I was not in a train station, but in Auschwitz. I had just witnessed an act of unspeakable cruelty. My chest contracted, held, and then burst. I collapsed in a fit of tears on the platform, and in the distance I saw a line of people on the other end of the station, watching silently.

Who was that crazy girl, the only one to get off that high-speed train, standing there on an empty platform on a cold cloudy day, bawling her eyes out?

When I finally arrived in Munich Central Station, having found a local train, it was pouring rain outside, and Markus was late. I made my way to a bar. He was coming all the way from Frankfurt, where he lived, having offered to come show me around while I was in Germany.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I had asked him. “We may end up hating each other. It’s a long drive for you.” I was nervous; I felt that most often these things didn’t work out in real life. What if our words dried up as soon as we saw each other in person?

“I’ll take that chance,” he had said.

At the bar I ordered lentil
Eintopf
in German. The bartender asked where I was from; she said my accent was
zuss
, or sweet. I didn’t know if I should take it as a compliment or condescension, but I was at the very least glad to see my origins were not quite clear.

“Why don’t you guess?” I asked.

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” she said. “Usually, I can tell right away, but your accent is a mixture of many places.”

I smiled into my soup. “I am this way as well. A mixture.”

Two men proposed marriage to me as I ate. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and they were both very drunk. They stood too close to me, their beers sloshing in their glasses.

One said to me, “
Ich habe kein aphange
”—which literally translates to “I don’t have a dependent,” but in Germany was a way of saying, “I’m single.” “Why don’t you come with me to my place?” he offered with a grin.

“Why is this my problem, that you are single?” I asked.

Onlookers told me not to be concerned, that this was Bavarian culture. “We are very friendly,” the guy said, while gripping my hand tightly. I extricated my hand and excused myself from the bar, where my two would-be husbands had already argued over who would pay the bill. I wanted to shout, “I’m a Jew!” just to see what would happen, but I felt hyperaware of how alone I was in Munich at that moment.

I went to wait for Markus by the entrance. He was stuck in traffic. Across the stairs, a group of youths dressed in black, with tattoos on their necks, smoked cigarettes with idle, dismissive expressions.

How is it that you tell apart a Nazi and a punk again? What did a skinhead look like anyway? Were they like metalheads? There were plenty of those standing around. I suddenly realized that I didn’t know how to tell if someone was a Nazi or not. I wasn’t going to delude myself into thinking there weren’t any left. And it wasn’t as if I could feasibly travel under the radar here, not with my nose. So I had planned to stay far away from any Nazis. This did not seem so simple now, in Munich Central Station. Every face seemed menacing, and I felt more and more skittish as the time passed. A random set of eyes met mine coolly, and I cringed and looked at the floor. A tall man smoked a cigarette a little too close to me, and I felt my heart rate speed up. Was I imagining his leer?

Finally, my phone vibrated. “Come to the Starbucks,” he texted. “I’m here.”

I didn’t want to go back into the crowd. “Can you meet me at the exit?” I asked. “I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed.”

He did. I was too afraid to watch for his approach, but inevitably I looked up and there he was, impossibly tall, built like those guys on the cover of romance novels, but with an impish smile instead of a full-lipped pout. He was walking slowly because of a recent knee injury.

I still don’t know how to explain the feeling I had then, which I had never experienced before, of looking into a completely new face with the conviction that it was somehow supremely familiar to
me. I looked at him and felt instantly as if I knew him and had known him always.

It’s like family
, I thought. Nothing about him felt strange or unpredictable.

We argued over who would carry my suitcase in the rain.

“You’re in no shape to carry it. I’m a feminist. Let me do it myself!”

“
Genau
,” he said. “Be a good feminist and hold your tongue.”

We bantered like that all the way to his car, on the drive to the hotel he had booked, and in the supermarket we visited to buy groceries. We teased and argued and laughed, stopping only for necessary conversations with the cashier and the hotel receptionist. There was no question then that something had conspired to bring the two of us together. Those phone conversations that had seemed so engaging then were banal in comparison to the electricity that now held us in thrall. We couldn’t look away from each other’s eyes.

We ate hastily in the room, stuffing slabs of dark brown bread with creamy goat cheese into our mouths. We had been sitting on the edge of the bed, and inevitably we fell into it after the last crumb had been brushed off our laps. I remember not being able to contemplate doing anything else. He was enchantingly corporeal; I felt like I had conjured a golem of sorts, a lightning rod for my projections and complexes.

Here was a real German, 100 percent authentic, descended from Nazis. And he didn’t hate me. That story that I had grown up with, the one I had believed for so long, that there was an entire nation of people on the other side of the Atlantic who still burned with hatred for me because I was Jewish . . . well, here was a pin in that balloon. The heat of his skin on mine, the smile in his eyes,
his shy movements—these made him human in a way I never could have grasped intellectually. I felt instinctually that there was no real line between us, racial, cultural, or emotional.

He was nervous but trying to hide it. Only I felt, for first time in my life, unafraid. Once, he faltered, and I said without knowing I would say it in advance, “Come on now, be a good Nazi and put it in the Jewish bitch.”

He made a sound that was half laugh and half cry of pain.

“I’m sorry, was that inappropriate?” I couldn’t help laughing at the ridiculousness of this, of the cliché I knew I was participating in. “I’ll stop talking now.”

“Good,” he says, laughing, putting his hand on my mouth. “Let me do my job, yes?”

We rolled around on that bed for what felt like hours, our energy ebbing and flowing but our bodies never disconnecting.

It was late in the evening when we finally managed to shower and make upstanding human beings of ourselves. He wanted to go out. I would learn soon that Germans are perpetually hungry, whether or not it’s mealtime. We wandered out into the cool, rainy night. He draped his sweatshirt around my shoulders.

“It’s okay, I’m fine,” I said. “You wear it. You’ll be cold without it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Do what I say. After all, I’m the
Herrenrasse
.” That was German for “master race.” He was following up on my joke from earlier. I checked myself internally—was I all right with that, or did I feel a twinge? Was it okay for him to make jokes about it, too?

“I have to admit I do get a kick out of this a bit, but at the same time I feel guilty for doing so.”

“Guilty?”

“I’m joking about something that shattered my grandmother’s life, that was responsible for the gruesome murder of most of my ancestors. How good can that feel, do you think?”

“
Ja
, of course, I understand. We don’t have to joke about it then if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t really know how I feel. The part of me that’s still a product of my past kind of wants to chop your head off.”

He grimaced. “Great. Good to know.”

I had this sensation of a very old wound starting to close, to heal over, in my spirit. Nerves tingled and came alive, muscles twitched and shuddered, and my body throbbed from the sweet pain of it.

“Let’s not do any Holocaust stuff just yet,” I said. At that point in my trip I was already tired of what had started to feel like an expedition to dig up a trail of anti-Semitism that ran through Europe.

“That’s fine with me,” he said with a smile.

We drove south into the heart of Bavaria in his little stick-shift hatchback. About an hour from Munich, the Alps loomed into view, more impressive than they had seemed from a distance on the way from Salzburg into Germany. We settled into a small bed-and-breakfast in the sleepy town of Murnau am Staffelsee, perched just at the foot of the mountains. The owners, Gina and Frederic, were a charming couple; she was a painter and he was a cook, and together they had created an artistic retreat, one which also served sumptuous meals at the attached Cantina. The property had numerous nooks and crannies to hide in, with sculptures and plants and cozy seats. A plump gray cat sunned himself in the driveway.
Markus went to pet him, crooning and cuddling the now purring cat with almost childlike enthusiasm. It made me smile.

“Look,” Markus called to me where I stood with the luggage. “He’s rolling over on his tummy, look how happy he is. Isn’t he the cutest?”

I went over to scratch him behind the ears.

“That’s Max,” Gina told us. “He lives here. Let me show you to your room. I hope we’ll see you at dinner later?”

I nodded. “I’ve read rave reviews about your restaurant,” I said. “We’re really looking forward to it.”

Our room was a charming alcove suite on the second floor, with a porch that faced west, where the sun was already setting behind the sloping, tiled roof. Amber light striped across the bed and on the floor. It was as if we had found a place where time stopped and held its breath, just so we could discover each other in that sacred space between inhale and exhale, before we had a chance to think about how this would work when the moment inevitably came to an end, and breathing resumed.

We took a walk around the picturesque town. Outside the church, I saw an enormous memorial, cast from granite, with fresh roses and daisies laid at its base. It was titled
“Unsern Helden”
—“To Our Heroes.” It consisted of the names of local citizens who had died fighting for Nazi Germany.