The German Girl (14 page)

Mrs. Berenson has her mezuzah on the doorpost. When her son opens the door, we are hit by a blast of warm air. He is elderly, too. Their hall is filled with old photos displayed in no particular order. Recent weddings, birthdays, newborn babies. The story of the Berenson family after the war. But nothing from their life in Germany.

In the living room, Mrs. Berenson is resting in an armchair close to the window, and doesn’t move. The furniture is made of heavy, dark mahogany. Everything in the apartment must have cost a fortune. There isn’t much room left among the showcases, tables, sofas, armchairs, and ornaments. I’m afraid that if I sneeze, I’ll break something. And every piece of furniture is protected by a lace mat. What an obsession with covering surfaces! Even the walls are draped in a sad mustard-colored wallpaper.

I’m convinced the sun has never entered here.

“You’ll find she’s rather nervous,” her son explains, maybe so that his mother will hear him and react. But she doesn’t move.

Mom takes her by the hand, and she smiles back at her.

“Smiling is the best I can do at my age,” she says, breaking the ice. I can’t follow what she says very well. She’s lived almost her entire life in New York, and yet her German accent is still very strong.

I’m introduced, and I nod my head from the corner of the room. With difficulty, Mrs. Berenson raises a gold-ringed right hand and moves it slightly to greet me.

“My daughter’s great-aunt sent us the negatives. She traveled in the boat with you. Hannah Rosenthal.”

I don’t think Mrs. Berenson has the slightest interest in our family. When she smiles, her eyes narrow, and she takes on the look of a mischievous child rather than a grouchy old woman who survived the war and now needs help to move.

“Those were very common names back then. Did you bring the photos?”

She’s not interested in chatting. Let’s get down to business: do what you came for, and then you can leave. She doesn’t want to be disturbed. Smiling is more than enough.

In one corner of the room, the model of a building stands on a tall table. It has a completely symmetrical façade lined with doors and windows, and a grand entrance in the center. It looks like a museum.

“Don’t get too close, child.”

I can’t believe she has scolded me. I quickly move to another corner of the room. Perhaps in a kind of apology, Mrs. Berenson explains:

“It’s a gift from my grandson. It’s the replica of the building we used to own in Berlin. It doesn’t exist anymore. It was bombed by the Soviets at the end of the war. Let’s look at the photos.”

Mom lays out the photographs on the cloth covering the table next to the old lady, and she begins to pick them up one by one.

She settles in her chair and concentrates on the photos, forgetting about us. She chuckles, pointing at the children playing on board ship, and then mutters a few phrases in German. She seems delighted at the images: the swimming pool, the ballroom, the gym, the elegant women. Some people are sunbathing, others posing like movie stars.

She looks through them all again and reacts as though this were the first time. Her son is surprised: his mother is happy.

“I had never seen the sea before” is the first thing she says.

She picks up a second envelope of photos and adds, “I had never been to a masked ball before.”

She looks increasingly anxious as she waits for a third envelope. “The food was exquisite. We were treated like royalty.”

She pauses at one particular photograph. It had been taken from a port—the port of Havana? Maybe. Passengers were crowded at the rail on the side of the ship, waving good-bye. Some of them were carrying their children. Others had hopeless looks on their faces.

The old lady clutches the photograph to her, closes her eyes, and
starts to sob. In only a few seconds, her gentle moans grow desperate. I’m not sure if she is crying or simply shouting out loud. Her son goes over to comfort her. He embraces her, but she doesn’t stop trembling.

“We’d better go,” Mom says, taking me by the arm.

We leave the photographs on the center table and don’t even manage to say good-bye. Mrs. Berenson still has her eyes closed and is clutching the photo against her chest. She calms down for a moment; then the wailing starts up again.

Her son asks us to forgive her. I don’t understand a thing. I’d like to know what happened to Mrs. Berenson. Perhaps she recognized her family on the boat. Did they ever disembark in Havana? Perhaps they were shipwrecked; but in the end, she had been saved, so shouldn’t she have been happy?

While we wait for the elevator, her anguished cries are still audible.

We descend without a word. Upstairs, the cries continue.

I can’t fail Dad the way I’ve failed Mom. I don’t want to end up feeling the same guilt toward him. I’m only nearly twelve! At my age, you still want your parents around. Shouting at you, refusing to let you play when you want to, giving you orders and lectures when you don’t behave.

Even though I had wished my mom wouldn’t wake up—that she would remain forever sunk in her sheets in the darkness of her room—I reacted just in time, I ran and asked for help, and I saved her. I want Dad to wake up now, too, to emerge from the shadows, to come and get me and take me away with him, as far away as possible, on a sailboat that will defy the winds. Now I’m on my way to meet his past.

I ask him about the heat in Havana, the city where he was born and grew up.
Wake up, Dad. Tell me something.
I bring his photo closer to the light, which gives his face a reddish glow, and feel that now he really is listening to me.
I confuse you with all my questions, don’t I, Dad?

We’ve been told that the heat in Havana is unbearable, and that’s
worrying Mom. The sun is scorching, it assaults you, leaves you feeling weak at all hours of the day. We’ve been warned that you have to wear lots of sunscreen.

“But we’re not going to the Sahara Desert, Mom. It’s an island where there are breezes, and the sea is on all sides,” I explain, but she looks at me as though she’s wondering,
What does this girl know? She’s never been to the Caribbean!
She refuses to believe that we are properly prepared.

She’d prefer us to stay in a hotel room with a sea view, but my great-aunt insisted that the house where my Dad was born also belongs to us. We can’t offend her, so I’ve convinced Mom to forget all the hotels with names of Spanish cities, Italian islands, or French seaside resorts that she found were available in Havana.

I’m curious to see how a German woman with such a soft, melodious voice and who is so careful when she constructs her sentences in Spanish gets along on an island where, according to Mr. Levin, everybody shouts the whole time and sways their hips as they walk.

Maybe my aunt will have a big surprise for us. We’ll be arriving at the Havana airport at dusk, when the sun and the heat have died down. We’ll disembark from the plane, and when the glass doors separating the terminal from the city open, you’ll be there waiting for us, Dad, with your rimless glasses and your half smile. Or, better still, we’ll leave the airport, and when we reach the house where you were born, Aunt Hannah will open an enormous wooden door, invite us in, and you’ll be sitting in the bright, spacious living room. There couldn’t be a greater surprise, could there?

Oh, don’t listen to me, Dad; these are just a young girl’s fantasies. What I want to do is explore your room, the place where you took your first steps, where you played as a child. I’m sure my great-aunt has kept some of your toys.

I’ve already got my suitcase packed. Better to have everything ready ahead of time, so that I don’t forget anything.

I don’t tell Dad about our visit to Mrs. Berenson. Her cries are still giving me nightmares. I don’t want him to worry. I know he must be
pleased that we’re going to Cuba. I think he would have loved to make this trip with us.

I don’t believe my aunt will be like Mrs. Berenson. Maybe she never goes out and wants to forget her past, too. But she doesn’t seem to be resentful or bitter.

At bedtime, I begin to go through the album where Mom has put the photos from the boat. I search for the girl who looks like me and stare at it for a long time. When I close my eyes, she is still there smiling at me. I get up and run along the deck of the huge, empty liner. I find the girl with huge eyes and blond hair. I am that girl. She hugs me, and I see myself.

I wake with a start in my room, with Dad beside me. I kiss him and tell him the news: we’re leaving in a few days. We’ll have a short stopover in Miami and then take a flight that lasts only forty-five minutes.

How close we are to the island. We’ll reach Aunt Hannah’s house by nightfall.

I
t was Saturday. The day of our departure.

I was wearing a boring navy-blue dress that Mama would have said was a little heavy for this time of year. Papa and I were waiting patiently for her in the living room. I wasn’t interested in making an impression when we reached Hamburg, although I could hear one of her favorite sayings ringing inside my head: “The first impression is what counts.”

Nor was I too upset at leaving behind the one place where I had ever lived and erasing twelve years of my life with a stroke. What saddened me was that Leo, my only friend, had abandoned me, and I didn’t know where he had escaped to; what exotic worlds he was going to discover without me. The single consolation I had was to believe he knew he could always find me on the island where one day we had dreamed of
raising a family. And he must have known I would wait for him there until my dying day.

The only good thing since Leo had disappeared was that I had forgotten about the cyanide capsules. By now, I couldn’t have cared less what decision my parents made. At last we were going to escape, and we wouldn’t need them. If I were Papa, though, I would never leave them where Mama could get at them: she was spending one day in bed and the next celebrating.

I asked Papa again about the Martin family. He had to know something.

“They’re safe” was all he told me, but that wasn’t enough, because I didn’t want to be parted from Leo. “Everything is fine.”

His favorite phrases now were: “Nothing is happening.” “Don’t worry.” “Everything is fine.”

He never lost his composure, even in the most difficult situations. He sat on the sofa, staring into space. I guessed that he had become indifferent to everything. The blessed leather briefcase was at his feet. When I asked if he wanted me to make some tea before we left, he was too distracted to respond. He preferred to think we were fortunate and refused to be a victim.

Seven very heavy suitcases stood in the doorway. Papa’s ex-student, who was now a member of the Ogres’ party, arrived and began to carry them to our car, which by the end of the day would be his. On the way out, he cast his eye over the living room: he must have thought that some of the most valuable possessions that had belonged to the Rosenthal and Strauss families for generations would fall into his hands. And who knew if, after he had dropped us at the port and returned to Berlin, he wouldn’t break into our apartment and carry away Grandma’s Sèvres vase, the silver service, the Meissen porcelain.

“The neighbors are down below,” he told Papa. “They’ve formed two lines outside the building. Couldn’t we go out the back way?”

“We’re leaving by the front door and with our heads held high,” Mama declared as she came out of her room, looking radiant. “We’re
not fugitives. We’re leaving the building to them; they can do whatever they like with it.”

As she went by, she left a faint trail of jasmine and Bulgarian roses in her wake. No one except her could have had the idea of traveling by car to Hamburg to board a liner in a full-length gown with a train. A short veil covered the top half of her perfectly made-up face: eyebrows arched to her temples, cheeks starkly white, and bright-scarlet lips. The perfect complement to her black-and-white Lucien Lelong gown, set off by a platinum-and-diamond brooch at her waist.

The dress showed off her slender figure and forced her to take short enough steps so that everyone could admire this splendid vision. That was what you called a first impression!

“Shall we go?” she said without a backward glance. Without taking leave of everything that had been hers. Without one last glance at the family portraits. Even without considering how Papa and I were dressed. She had no need to approve our outfits: her brilliance would eclipse everything around her.

She was the first to leave. The ex-student closed the door—did he lock it?—and picked up the remaining two cases.

It was Mama’s perfume that reached the street outside first. The harpies waiting to shout insults at us were intoxicated—bewitched—by the Goddess’s fragrance.

Perhaps they bowed their heads slightly when we clambered into the car that would soon no longer be ours. I preferred to think they felt ashamed at their evil behavior, showing at least a sliver of humanity. I had no idea if Gretel was among them. What did it matter? Frau Hofmeister would be pleased. From then on, she could use the elevator as she pleased without a filthy little girl spoiling her day.