The German Girl (2 page)

Mama spent yet another day without going out. Every morning when she got up, she would fasten her ruby earrings and smooth back her beautiful, thick hair—which was the envy of her friends whenever
she appeared in the tearoom of the Hotel Adlon. Papa called her the Goddess, because she was so fascinated by the cinema, which was her only contact with the outside world. She would never miss the first night of any film starring the real screen goddess, “La Divine” Greta Garbo, at the Palast.

“She’s more German than anyone,” she would insist whenever she mentioned the divine Garbo, who was, in fact, Swedish. But back then motion pictures were silent, and no one cared where the star had been born.

We discovered her. We always knew she would be worshipped. We appreciated her before anybody else; that’s why Hollywood noticed her. And in her first talkie she said in perfect German: “Whisky—
aber nicht zu knapp!
”

Sometimes when they came back from the cinema, Mama was still in tears. “I love sad endings—in movies,” she explained. “Comedies weren’t meant for me.”

She would swoon in Papa’s arms, raise a hand to her brow, the other holding up the silk train of a cascading dress, toss back her head, and start talking in French.

“Armand, Armand . . .” she would repeat languidly and with a strong accent, like La Divine herself.

And Papa would call her “my Camille.”

“
Espère, mon ami, et sois bien certain d’une chose, c’est que, quoi qu’il arrive, ta Marguerite te restera,
” she would reply, laughing hysterically. “Dumas sounds ghastly in German, doesn’t he?”

But Mama no longer went anywhere.

“Too many smashed windows” had been her excuse ever since the previous November’s terrible pogrom, when Papa had lost his job. He had been arrested at his university office and taken to the station on Grolmanstrasse, kept incommunicado for an offense we never understood. He shared a windowless cell with Leo’s father, Herr Martin. After they were released, the two would get together daily—and that worried Mama even more, as if they were planning an escape she was not prepared
for yet. Fear was what prevented her from leaving her fortress. She lived in a state of constant agitation. Before, she used to go to the elegant salon at the Hotel Kaiserhof, just a few blocks away, but eventually it was full of the people who hated us: the ones who thought they were pure, whom Leo called Ogres.

In the past, she would boast about Berlin. If she went on a shopping spree to Paris, she always stayed at the Ritz; and if she accompanied Papa to a lecture or concert in Vienna, at the Imperial:

“But we have the Adlon, our Grand Hotel on the Unter den Linden. La Divine stayed there, and immortalized it on screen.”

During those days, she would peer out the window, trying to find a reason for what was happening. What had become of her happy years? What had she been sentenced to, and why? She felt she was paying for the offenses of others: her parents, grandparents—every one of her ancestors throughout the centuries.

“I’m German, Hannah. I am a Strauss. Alma Strauss. Isn’t that enough, Hannah?” she said to me in German, and then in Spanish, and in English, and finally in French. As if someone were listening to her; as if to make her message entirely clear in each of the four languages she spoke fluently.

I had agreed to meet Leo that day to go take photographs. We would see each other every afternoon at Frau Falkenhorst’s café near Hackescher Markt. Whenever she spotted us, the owner would smile and call us “bandits.” We liked that. If either of us was later than expected, the first to arrive had to order a hot chocolate. Sometimes we’d arrange to meet at the café near the Alexanderplatz Station exit, which had shelves filled with sweets wrapped in silver paper. When he needed to see me urgently, Leo would wait for me at the newspaper kiosk near my home, allowing us to avoid running into any of our neighbors, who, despite also being our tenants, always shunned us.

In order not to disobey the adults, I bypassed the carpeted stairs, which were increasingly dusty, and took the elevator. It stopped at the third floor.

“Hello, Frau Hofmeister,” I said, smiling at her daughter, Gretel, who used to be my playmate. Gretel was sad, because not long before, she had lost her beautiful white puppy. I felt so sorry for her.

We were the same age, but I was much taller. She looked down, and Frau Hofmeister had the nerve to say to her, “Let’s take the stairs. When are they going to leave? They’re putting us all in such a difficult situation . . .”

As if I wasn’t listening, as if it was only my shadow standing inside the elevator. As if I didn’t exist. That’s what she wanted: for me not to exist.

The Ditmars, Hartmanns, Brauers, and Schultzes lived in our building. We rented them their apartments. The building had belonged to Mama’s family since before she was born. They were the ones who should leave. They were not from here. We were. We were more German than they were.

The elevator door closed, it started to go down, and I could still see Gretel’s feet.

“Dirty people,” I heard.

Had I heard it right? What have we done for me to have to endure that? What crime had we committed? I was not dirty. I didn’t want people to think of me as dirty. I came out of the elevator and hid under the stairs so I wouldn’t meet them again. I saw them leave the building. Gretel’s head was still bowed. She glanced backward, looking for me, perhaps wanting to apologize, but her mother pushed her on.

“What are you staring at?” she shouted.

I ran back up the stairs noisily, in tears. Yes, crying with rage and impotence because I could not tell Frau Hofmeister that she was dirtier than I was. If we bothered her, she could leave the building; it was our building. I wanted to hit the walls, smash the valuable camera my father had given me. I entered our apartment, and Mama could not understand why I was so furious.

“Hannah! Hannah!” she called out to me, but I chose to ignore her.

I went into the cold bathroom, slammed the door, and turned on the
shower. I was still crying; or rather, I wanted to stop crying but found it impossible. Fully clothed and wearing my shoes, I climbed into the perfectly white bathtub. Mama kept on calling to me and then finally left me in peace. All I could hear was the sound of the scalding water cascading onto me. I let it flow into my eyes until they burned; into my ears, my nose, my mouth.

I started to take off my clothes and shoes, which were heavier because of the water and my dirtiness. I soaped myself, smeared on Mama’s bath salts that irritated my skin, and rubbed myself with a white towel to get rid of every last trace of impurity. My skin was red, as red as if it was going to peel. I turned the water even hotter, until I couldn’t take it anymore. When I came out of the shower, I collapsed on the cold black-and-white tiles.

Fortunately, I had run out of tears. I dried myself, scrubbing hard at this skin I didn’t want and which, God willing, would start to slough off after all the heat I’d subjected it to. I examined every pore in front of the steamed-up mirror: face, hands, feet, ears—everything—to see if there was any trace of impurity left. I wanted to know who was the dirty one now.

I cowered in a corner, trembling, shrinking, feeling like a slab of meat and bone. This was my only hiding place. In the end, I knew that however much I washed, burned my skin, cut my hair, gouged out my eyes, turned deaf, however much I dressed or talked differently, or took on a different name, they would always see me as impure.

It might not have been a bad idea to knock at the distinguished Frau Hofmeister’s door to ask her to check that I didn’t have any tiny stain on my skin, that she didn’t have to keep Gretel away from me, that I wasn’t a bad influence on her child, who was as blond, perfect, and immaculate as me.

I went to my room and dressed all in white and pink, the purest colors I could find in my wardrobe. I went looking for Mama and hugged her, because I knew she understood me; even though she chose to stay at home and so didn’t have to face anyone. She had built a fortress in her
room, which in turn was protected by the apartment’s thick columns, in a building made up of enormous stone blocks and double windows.

I had to be quick. Leo must have already been at the station, darting all over the place, trying to stay out of the way of people running to catch their trains.

At least I knew that he thought of me as being clean.

T
he day Dad disappeared, Mom was pregnant with me. By just three months. She had the opportunity to get rid of the baby but didn’t take it. She never lost hope that Dad would return, even after receiving the death certificate.

“Give me some proof, a trace of his DNA, then we can talk,” she always told them.

Maybe because Dad was still a stranger to her in some ways—mysterious and solitary, a man of few words—she thought he might reappear at any moment.

Dad left unaware I would be born.

“If he’d known he had a daughter on the way, he would still be here with us,” Mom insisted every September for as long as I could remember.

The day Dad never returned, Mom was going to prepare a dinner for the two of them in our spacious dining room, by the window from where you can see the trees in Morningside Park lit by bronze streetlamps. She was going to tell him the news. She still set the table that evening because she refused to admit the possibility that he was gone. She never got to open the bottle of red wine. The plates stayed on the white tablecloth for days. The food ended up in the garbage. That night, she went to bed without eating, without crying, without closing her eyes.

She lowered her gaze as she told me this. If it were up to her, the plates and the bottle would have still been on the table—and, who knows, probably also the rotting, dried-out food.

“He’ll be back,” she always insisted.

They had talked about having children. They saw it as a distant possibility, a long-term project, a dream they hadn’t given up on. What both of them were sure of was that if they did have any children one day, the boy had to be called Max and the girl, Anna. That was the only thing Dad demanded of her.

“It’s a debt I owe my family,” he would tell her.

They had been together for five years, but she never managed to get him to talk about his years in Cuba or his family.

“They’re all dead” was the only thing he’d say.

Even after so many years, that still bothered Mom.

“Your father is an enigma. But he’s the enigma I loved most in my entire life.”

Trying to resolve that enigma was a way to unburden herself. Finding the answer was her punishment.

I kept his small silver digital camera. At first, I spent hours going through the images he left on its memory card. There wasn’t a single one of Mom. Why bother, when she was always by his side? The photographs were all taken from the same spot on the narrow living room balcony. Photographs of the sun rising. Rainy days, clear days, dark or misty ones, orange days, violet-blue days. White days, with the snow
covering everything. Always the sun. Dawn with a horizon line hidden by a patchwork of buildings in a silent Harlem, chimneys spewing out white smoke, the East River between two islands. Again and again, the sun—golden, grand, sometimes seeming warm, other times cold—viewed from our double glass door.

Mom told me that life is a jigsaw puzzle. She wakes up, attempting to find the correct piece, trying all the different combinations to create those distant landscapes of hers. I live to undo them so that I can discover where I came from. I am creating my own jigsaw puzzles out of photos I printed at home from the images I found on Dad’s camera.

From the day I discovered what had really happened to Dad, and Mom understood I could fend for myself, she shut herself in her bedroom and I became her caretaker. She converted her bedroom into her refuge, keeping the window overlooking the interior courtyard always closed. In dreams, I would see her falling fast asleep from the pills she took before going to bed, engulfed by her gray sheets and pillows. She said the pills helped ease the pain and knock her out. Sometimes I would say a prayer—so silent that even I could not hear or remember it—that she would stay asleep, and her pain would go away forever. I couldn’t bear to see her suffer.

Every day before I leave for school, I take her a cup of black coffee, with no sugar. In the evening, she sits at supper with me like a ghost while I make up stories about my classes. She listens, raises a spoon to her mouth, and smiles at me to show how grateful she is that I am still there with her, and for making her soup that she swallows out of duty.

I know she could disappear at any moment. Where would I go then?

When my school bus drops me off outside our apartment building each afternoon, the first thing I do is pick up the mail. After that, I prepare dinner for the two of us, finish my homework, and check if there are any bills to pay, which I pass on to Mom.

Today we received a large envelope with yellow, white, and red stripes and its warning in big red capital letters: DO NOT BEND. The sender is in Canada, and it is addressed to Mom. I leave it on the dining
table and lie down on my bed to begin reading the book I was given at school. A few hours later, I remember that I haven’t opened the envelope.

I start knocking on Mom’s bedroom door.
At this time of night?
she must be thinking. She’s pretending to be asleep. Silence. I keep knocking.

Nights are sacred for her: she tries to fall asleep, reliving things she can no longer do, and thinking about what her life might have been like if she could have avoided fate or simply wiped it away.

“A package came today. I think we should open it together,” I say, but there’s no answer.

I stay at the door and then open it gently so as not to disturb her. The lights are off. She’s dozing, her body seems almost weightless, lost in the middle of the mattress. I check that she’s still breathing, still exists.

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” she murmurs, but I don’t budge.