Let Me Go (4 page)

"Go on," I pleaded.

"She said she couldn't bear to be the mother of an
alte
Schachtel,
an old bag."

"She really said that?" I asked, a little hurt.

She nodded. "Your mother was always a rather . . . a rather vain woman. She didn't want to grow old."

MY MOTHER STARES at the teddy bear with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief.

Then she says slowly, in a whining voice, "This is Zakopane and you must have stolen him. He belonged to my daughter . . . Where did you get him?"

"I didn't steal him," I answer. "He belongs to me."

"He belonged to my daughter!" she protests vehemently.

"I
am your daughter."

She shakes her head, and for a few moments she hides her face in her hands. From the shaking of her body, I assume that she is crying, but she isn't. Uncovering her face, she murmurs, serious and alert, "His name is Zakopane because Stefan and I bought him in Zakopane in Poland. We were on our way to fetch . . . " But she's already having problems. "We were on our way to fetch two people. . . ."

"Your children, that's who you were going to fetch," I say, coming to her aid. "Your children, Helga and Peter."

Berlin, July 1941

THE SECOND YEAR of the war. My grandparents were looking after a farm in Poland, fortunately for them as "annexed Austrians" rather than natives. The Nazis saw the Poles as an inferior race, so much so that they forbade them to bury their dead in consecrated ground. But they were afraid of the awkward local intelligentsia and decided to wipe them out. A dear friend of my grandparents, for example, a politician with radical tendencies, was murdered outside the city hall in Wroclaw.

One day my grandmother paid us an unexpected visit in Berlin, to discover me and my brother being looked alter by a stranger. The woman explained to her that "the lady"—meaning my mother—was always very busy with her political affairs, which was why she often turned to her to look after her two "little angels." It was certainly not the first time that we had been given to strangers to be looked after, and our grandmother, who knew that, went through the roof: She paid the recalcitrant babysitter on the spot and told her she could go to the devil.

All afternoon my grandmother waited for my mother to come home. At about eleven o'clock in the evening there was an air raid. We all went to the shelter, heavy with sleep.

At dawn my mother still hadn't come home. At about nine o'clock Grandmother started making our breakfast: Fortunately she had brought some groceries with her from Poland, because our larder was nearly empty. The milk was powdered, and I complained because I hated it. I vaguely remember my grandmother trying to explain it to me: The war, she said, imposed certain restrictions. More than her words, which I understood up to a certain point, it was her soothing and undramatic tone of voice that calmed me down. At the time, Grandmother, hating the Fuhrer and the Third Reich with all her heart, was still fairly optimistic about the outcome of the war, and she certainly didn't imagine the catastrophic fate that awaited us.

After breakfast she thought she might distract us by reading to us; she took us into my father's study—he was already at the front—in search of a book of fairy tales. There weren't any, but instead, in the middle of the room, there stood a cumbersome bookcase full of copies
of Mein Kampf
It may have been my mother's task to distribute them: At the time the book was being widely disseminated among the German people, and young couples were even given copies as wedding presents from the state.

Grandmother picked up one of the volumes and, turning it around in her strong peasant hands, said, with extreme disdain: "Pfui!" It was a critical reaction that, had it been expressed in public, would at the very least have brought accusations of defeatism down on her head.

When my mother finally did come home, my grandmother greeted her with her face white with rage and her fists in the air. There was a frightening scene that made the walls shake. My mother came out of it as though paralyzed: For the umpteenth time she had been found wanting by her mother-in-law, who had never hidden her aversion to my mother since her engagement to my father. Her attempts at self-justification fell on deaf ears. She tried in vain to explain that as a member of the SS, when the call came from the Reichsführer she had to jump.

Grandmother, who had already made the basic preparations, took Peter and me and brought us with her to Poland.

MY MOTHER STARTS staring at me with a cautious expression. I smile at her, but her face is grave. She actually presses her arm tighter around her chest as though in an instinctive gesture of fear. A tremor runs through her limbs, the muscles of her face stiffen, and her lips curl into a series of grimaces.

"Who are you?" she asks finally, in a dark and anxious voice.

"I'm your daughter," I repeat calmly.

With a surprisingly agile movement she grabs the teddy bear out of my hand and presses it to her cheek.

"We bought him in Zakopane," she murmurs after making a slow and laborious effort of memory, "along with . . . something else." She comes to a standstill.

"A toy squirrel for Peter," I say, coming to her assistance again.

She nods as though in her sleep. "Yes, a squirrel. We had gone to fetch the children. My mother-in-law had taken them away, you see. And she sent a telegram to Stefan, that harpy did. And Stefan had to ask for his leave that wasn't due until Christmas, and we went to take the children back. Stefan was furious, but it was all his mother's fault. She hated me and I . . . hated her. And then . . ."

She takes one last glance at the teddy bear and puts it in one of the pockets of her woolen suit, the color of a soldier's uniform.

"Peter's dead," she declares, staring at me grimly.

I decide not to correct her for the moment. Instead I ask, in an almost sad voice, "Do you really not remember me?"

She shakes her head stubbornly, irritably. But a shaky little smile begins to spread around her lips.

"Are you Helga?"

I nod, touched.

I would have liked to be able to answer, "Yes, Mother," but there would have been no point in even trying. We aren't used to it. The last time I called her "Mother" was when I was four years old, and since then I have rarely said the word:
Mutti.
My stepmother was insistent that I should call her that. She would yell, "Now I am your mother and you must call me
Muttil"
I couldn't help it: However much I tried, I couldn't say that word. And she punished me. She sent me to bed without any supper: "You can eat when you've called me
Mutti."
Or else she would lock me up all day in the dark, in my father's study. Or beat me with a stick. She tried everything she could think of, but she could never get me to say
Mutti.
I was stubborn, and I didn't want her. I wanted my grandmother, who had cared for me and Peter after our mother had left. I rejected my stepmother, who from the start had only ever loved cuddly, happy little Peter, and she had never concealed the fact. She wouldn't even show me love when things were at their worst, not even when the situation in Berlin became insupportable and we were forced to spend months locked up in the cellar with all the other tenants of the building, with no drinking water, no light, no running water, and only a small amount of rationed food of appalling quality.

One morning, down in that hell, we all discovered that we were covered with red boils. We found that our straw mattresses were infested with bedbugs. Even in that awkward situation my stepmother demonstrated her rejection, not to say her loathing, of me. In fact, she did everything she could think of to keep me from using the precious ointment that eased the terrible itching: She said it had to do for everyone in the cellar. So, unlike everyone else, I went on furiously scratching myself.

This came to the attention of her father, my grandfather by marriage (I called him
Opa,
grandfather). He registered what was going on and flew into a rage; he furiously attacked his daughter, using, for the first time, very harsh words, calling her "perfidious" and "despicable." My stepmother was obliged to treat me. I was still the last to stop scratching. I had been in serious danger, and
Opa
realized that: In a situation like ours, without medicines and in atrocious hygienic conditions, those wounds could have gone septic and might even have been fatal.

"HELGA'S DEAD TOO," says my mother, but her voice sounds less certain now. She looks at me: "Are you Helga?"

"Yes," I answer for the third time. "I'm Helga, your daughter."

And once again I'd love to add the word
"Mutti,"
but I can't.

The only person I ever addressed that way in my life was Frau Heinze, the headmistress of Eden Boarding School, in which my stepmother imprisoned me while the war was raging on the pretext that I was mischievous and insubordinate. I was permitted to call her
"Mutti
Heinze," and I did so with enthusiasm because she was good to us, even if she was strict. In the evening she sang us Brahms's
Lullaby:

Guten Abend, gute Nacht,

Mit Roslein bedacht,

Mit Naglein besteckt.

Schlupf unter die Deck.

My mother leans toward me and narrows her eyes. I can smell her old woman's smell. Her hair smells of honey; it must be her shampoo. Finally, she slowly brushes one of my cheeks as strange noises emerge from her mouth, as though she was counting or whispering something learned from memory.

"Helga!" she shouts all of a sudden.

She leaps backward. "It's Helga! My daughter's here! It's really her, look!" she announces at the top of her voice.

Leaning forward, she fidgets and gesticulates disjointedly like a crazed puppet.

"Come here!"

Now she is screeching in an undignified manner; a number of curious onlookers come discreetly over to us.

She nods to me and sobs and laughs, and is stunned and confused, and the onlookers smile with some amusement and a little unease.

Suddenly she falls silent, leans her head on her forearm, and starts crying her heart out. Her whole body shakes. She weeps with the naked, oblivious abandon of a child. The faces of the people watching us are a picture of perplexity and embarrassment. I try to distract her.

"You remember Eva?"

My mother lifts her head and immediately stops crying, as though someone had pressed a button.

"Eva?" she repeats.

"My cousin," I explain.

"Your cousin?" Her hands wave around in disbelief.

"Exactly," I reply. "Eva from Berlin."

My mother fixes her eyes on Eva. There isn't a trace of benevolence in her expression. With a note of hostility in her voice, she remembers, "They were very rich people." Then, almost with respect, she adds, more thoughtfully this time, "He was in the Party."

She reflects, then floors Eva with a question: "Is it true that your father was in the Party and belonged to the SA from the time of the Stahlhelm?"

Eva is thrown. She would never have expected such a direct assault. But she replies, with admirable presence of mind: "No, my father was never in the SA."

"But he was in the Party!" my mother insists.

Eva makes a barely perceptible nod of assent

"And he co-owned a factory with a Jew!" my mother proclaims triumphantly. "What was the Jew's name?"

I don't like the turn that the conversation is taking; I try to change the subject.

"You remember Eva's mother? You know that Eva has a photograph with you in it too, wearing a wonderful hat, in the garden at their villa?"

"Am I standing next to Margarete?" she asks with a frown.

"Yes."

"Margarete never liked me much," she declares resentfully. "But you know . . . in those days people were suspicious about Party activists."

She's clearly thinking of herself but decides it would be indulgent to dwell on the subject and asks, "But how are you? You must be very old by now."

Eva says nothing, taken aback. And in any case, how could she be expected to reply? By telling my mother that immediately after the war, in Berlin, her own mother was raped by four Russians in front of her? That her mother had been left with permanent psychological damage, and shortly afterward had taken her own life with forty Veronal tablets?

"So," my mother insists, "how is old Margarete? Wrinkles and false teeth?"

She cackles cruelly, and I feel a sense of disgust. A moment later she strikes a hand to her forehead and shrieks: "Silberberg! Silberberg was the name of the Jew your father owned the factory with, the factory that produced . . . wait— I can't remember. But am I right?"

I'm repelled by her insinuating and malevolent tone.

"And after the Nuremberg Laws, your father threw him out of the factory, isn't that right?"

Eva has turned white.

"I wasn't born at the time," she manages to reply. I admire her self-control.

"But he did throw that fellow Silberberg out, didn't he? Your father must have spoken to you about it at one time or another. He was a loyal member of the Party, don't ever forget that, my dear."

She is agitated now—she wants to get to the heart of the matter. I am growing exasperated. My hands start itching, and then I remember I'm still holding those damned flowers in my left hand. I hand them to her.

She seems to explode with joy: She erupts into a series of little sobbing cries and displays the bouquet to the curious spectators, of whom there are now many. I feel as though I'm at the center of a stage, the involuntary protagonist of an inferior melodrama. The scene strikes me as vulgar and absurd. Nothing is as I had imagined it. I wish I was somewhere else; I wish I'd never come here. This woman, my mother, doesn't deserve the trouble I have taken; she's not worthy of my good intentions.

I look at her: Now she is pulling some of the flowers from the bunch and throwing them to the onlookers; senile and pathetic, cruel and romantic. That was how Himmler's Blackshirts were, including women like herself, the SS in skirts.

A dull sense of unease grips the pit of my stomach. The air is stale; I need oxygen.