The German Girl (11 page)

She bought his favorite red wine. She was going to tell him over dinner: next year everything will change. We’re going to be parents. She wanted to find the ideal moment to surprise him.

Dad had no idea what she was planning. That September day was like any other. Slightly cool, but sunny, with the rush hour traffic steady. Mom watched from the window and saw him open the front door, pausing at the top of the steps to take a deep breath. There were still lingering traces of summer in the air. At the intersection of 116th Street and Morningside Drive, he glanced eastward at the early-morning sun and the still-leafy park. It was seven thirty. At that time, the superintendent always took his dog for a walk. Dad greeted him and turned onto 116th Street, heading west. He crossed the Columbia University campus and took the No. 1 train on Broadway. Mom knew his routine perfectly: just another Tuesday.

When he reached the Chambers Street station, he headed for John Allan’s on Trinity Place for his monthly haircut. He had become a member of a men’s club, when he began his weekly trips to the business district in Manhattan. He felt at ease there. It had an atmosphere of privacy that he enjoyed. His black coffee (no sugar) was waiting for him, and he flicked through the headlines in the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New York Times
, and
El Diario La Prensa
.

Dad never had his haircut. He never reached his office. That much
is clear. I wonder now where he went when at 8:46 a.m. he heard the first explosion. He could have stayed where he was like the others did; the ones who were spared. A few minutes later, and Mom’s litany would have been completely different. Only a few minutes later.

Maybe he ran to see what was happening or to see if he could save someone. The second explosion came at 9:03. Everybody must have been totally bewildered. The telephones went dead. Then the deluge of bodies began hitting the pavement. At 9:58, one of the skyscrapers collapsed. At 10:28, the other one followed.

A thick cloud of dust covered the tip of the island. It was impossible to breathe, to keep eyes open. There was a deafening wail of fire engines and police cars. I imagine that all of a sudden day turned into night. Men and women ran searching for the light in a battle against fire, terror, anguish. To the north; they had to run north.

I close my eyes and prefer to see Dad carrying a wounded person to safety. Then he goes back to ground zero and joins the firefighters and police in the rescue operation. I like to think Dad is safe—that he is still lost, not knowing where to go. Maybe he forgot his address, how to get home. With each September that passed and I grew up without him, the chances of him returning became fewer and fewer. He must have been trapped in the rubble. The buildings were reduced to shards of steel, smashed glass, and chunks of cement.

The city was paralyzed. So was Mom.

She waited two days before reporting Dad missing. I’ve no idea how she could sleep that night, get up and go to work the next day, and then return to bed as if nothing had happened. Always with the hope that Dad would come back. That was how she was.

She couldn’t link him to that terrible tragedy; she refused to accept that he was buried among the debris. That was her defense to keep herself from falling apart. And to keep me from fading away inside her.

She became one more phantom in the extinguished city. Closed restaurants, empty markets, train lines cut off, families mutilated. A zip code obliterated. Street corners full of photographs of men and women who had left for work that day, like Dad had, and never returned. At the entrances to buildings, in gyms, offices, bookshops, thousands of lost faces. Each morning they multiplied; new descriptions appeared. Except for Dad’s.

Mom didn’t tour the hospitals or go to the morgue or the police stations. She was not a victim, much less the wife of a victim. She didn’t accept condolences. Nor did she answer the phone when people kept calling to give her news she refused to listen to, or to feel sorry for her. Dad was not wounded or dead. She was convinced of it.

She would let time go by, and that would sort everything out. She couldn’t fix something that had no solution. She wasn’t going to shed a single tear. There was no need.

My mother wrapped herself in silence. That was her best refuge. She didn’t hear the noise of the traffic or any of the voices around her. All the background music disappeared. Each morning, she roamed the neighborhood that reeked of smoke and melted metal, with dust and debris everywhere. Every streetlamp offered more photos. Sometimes she stopped to peer at them: the faces seemed strangely familiar to her.

She tried to continue her daily routines. Going to the market, buying coffee, picking up her medicine from the pharmacy. She lay down to sleep with the smell of smoke and charred metal sticking to her skin.

Mom left her job and has not been back since. At first, she asked for a leave, but later on that turned into an unannounced resignation. She didn’t need to work. Dad’s apartment had belonged to his family since before the war, and we lived on the trust fund his grandfather had set up many years earlier.

I sometimes think that withdrawing from the world was the only way she found to help her bear the pain. Not just from having lost Dad but also from not having told him I was going to be born. That he would become a father.

I
opened the dining room windows, pulled back the curtains, let in the morning light. Then I took a deep breath. There was no odor of smoke, metal, or dust. When I closed my eyes, I could smell the fragrance of jasmine. I opened them, and tea was served on the dining room table with its delicate lace cloth, standing in the corner closest to the window so that we could catch a little sun. There were the vanilla biscuits that my friend Gretel and I liked so much. I needed a hat. Ah, and a scarf. Yes, a pink silk scarf to receive Gretel and Don, her dog. When we had finished, I would run downstairs with him.

Gretel opened the door and crossed the main living room, but Don was the first one in; he scampered around the table like a mad thing. I tried to pet him and caught him by the tail to calm him down, but nothing would stop him. He was free.

Gretel could not stop chattering: Don had said hello; he was learning to sing; he got her out of bed every morning. Don is a completely white terrier, without a single dark patch or stain, not a single blemish, and perfectly proportioned, like all the dogs of his race. He is privileged: he has even been in Villa Viola, where they train pure pedigree dogs. He was taught alongside its most famous dog, a German shepherd named Blondi.

Gretel liked to drink ice water in champagne glasses, closing her eyes coquettishly and pretending the bubbles made her feel giddy. I had such fun with her. She came to the house twice a week to have tea and champagne without bubbles.

“What are you doing sitting there in the dark?” Mama had arrived home and put an end to my daydream: my memories of afternoon tea with Gretel.

I followed her into her bedroom and was overwhelmed by the scent of 10,600 jasmine flowers and 336 Bulgarian roses. She used to explain that all this went into concocting the perfume as she subtly let a drop of it fall onto the nape of her neck and another on her wrists.

When I was little, I used to spend hours in that room, the largest and sweetest smelling in the whole apartment. Its huge chandelier, with long arms fanning out on all sides, resembled a giant spider. Frightened, I’d shut myself in the huge closet, where I used to try on pearl necklaces and parade about in voluminous hats and high-heeled shoes. That was back when Mama would laugh to see me play, smear me with bright-red lipstick, and call me “my little clown.”

Times had changed, even though the rugs that no one looked after anymore, and the batiste sheets nobody ironed, and the dusty silk mesh curtains, were all still impregnated with the essence of jasmine, mixed now with the sickening smell of mothballs. Mama insisted on preserving a past that was evaporating before our eyes as we looked on helplessly.

I lay down on the white lace bedspread, peering up at the chandelier that no longer scared me, and sensed that she had come into the room. My mother headed straight for the bathroom without saying a word. She was exhausted.

It was obvious from her face and movements that this frail woman, who used to pose like the languid Greta Garbo, had somehow recovered the strength of the Strauss family from some unsuspected, remote place. She responded to Papa’s disappearance with a vigor that surprised even her. I was the one now who found it hard to leave our prison. If I didn’t meet up with Leo at Frau Falkenhorst’s café today, he was capable of appearing at the apartment without warning, running the risk of bumping into the dreaded Frau Hofmeister and silly Gretel.

Without makeup, her hair wet, and her cheeks pink from the hot water, Mama looked even younger than she was. She walked across the bedroom to wrap a small white towel around her head and then closed the curtains so that not the slightest ray of sunshine could enter.

She had still not said a word. I had no idea if she had heard anything about Papa, what steps she was taking. Nothing.

My mother sat at her dressing table and began her beauty ritual. She could see in her mirror that I had gone to sit in her bergère à la reine armchair that was almost two hundred years old, without her even asking first if I had washed my hands. She no longer cared about getting stains on her cherished antique piece designed by someone named Avisse. She took a deep breath and, as she was examining the first signs of a wrinkle, told me gravely:

“We’re leaving, Hannah.”

She avoided looking at me. She spoke so softly, I found it hard to understand her, although I could sense her determination. It was an order. I didn’t count, and nor did Papa or Leo. We were leaving, and that was that.

“We have the permits and the visas. All that’s left is to buy our passages on the boat.”

What about Papa? She knew he wouldn’t be coming back, but there was no way we could abandon him.

“When are we leaving?” was the only thing I dared ask. Her answer was not much help.

“Soon.”

At least it wasn’t going to be that day or the one after. I had time to work out a plan with Leo; he must already be waiting for me.

“Tomorrow we’ll start packing. We’ll have to decide what we want to take.” She spoke so slowly I became worried.

I needed to go out and meet Leo, but she went on.

“We’ll never come back here. But we will survive, Hannah. I’m sure of that,” she insisted, brushing her hair with controlled fury.

Mama switched off the main light and left on just the one over her dressing table. We sat in the semidarkness. She had nothing more to say to me.

I slipped out of the room and ran downstairs without even a thought for the neighbors who were so anxious to see us go. If only they knew how eager we were to finally get out of our absurd confinement.

I reached the Hackescher Markt out of breath and ran to the café. Leo was enjoying what was left of his hot chocolate.

“It’s spelled C-u-b-a,” he said, stressing each letter. “We’re going to America!”

He stood up, and I followed him, although I still hadn’t caught my breath. I was choking from having run so much. But he’d said, “We’re going,” and that was the only thing that mattered to me. Not our destination, but the plural
we
. I asked him again so that there would be no misunderstanding.

“We’re going to America. Your mother paid a fortune for the permits.”

By then, we must have completely run out of cash. We were convinced that Papa had helped pay for permits for Leo and his father. This possibility had arisen for a lot of people in Berlin, and those who could benefit would be safe and sound. Both families, theirs and ours, were among the fortunate ones.

The best news of all was that Papa was alive:

“They’re going to let him leave.” Leo said it with such authority that I fell silent.

Papa was lucky, not like Herr Schemuel, who never came back. We
were undesirables, but the Rosenthals were also fortunate. The conditions they had imposed were that we hand over the apartment building, all our other properties, and that we leave the country in less than six months. As soon as Mama could guarantee the transfer, they would let Papa go free, and we could get his visa and the tickets for the three of us. That was why we hadn’t bought them already. Now I understood.

We would have to go listen to the radio in the Ogre’s stinking passageway; we needed to be aware of all the latest regulations. They were inventing new ways of making life impossible for us every day. Not only did they not want us here, they were trying all they could to get everybody else to refuse us. If we were rejected on every continent, why should they be the only ones to bear the burden? The perfect move: the triumph of the superior race.

Except that someone had already accepted us. An island in the middle of the Americas was going to take us in and allow us to live there like any other family. We would work, become Cubans, and that was where our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would be born.