The German Girl (6 page)

It would have been easier if she’d just told me how I lost my father before I entered kindergarten at Fieldston. But Mom always insisted on saying the same thing: “Your father left one day and didn’t come back.” That was all.

“I think it’s time you knew something. On your father’s side, you’re German as well,” she says with a slight smile, as if apologizing.

I don’t respond. I don’t react.

When the taxi turns onto the West Side Highway, I open the window. The cold breeze from the Hudson River and the noise of the traffic prevent Mom from continuing. I can’t stop thinking about this latest piece of news.

By the time we get home, my cheeks are red and freezing. We bump into Mr. Levin with Tramp; after their walk, they often rest on the stoop.

“Can I stay here for a while?” I ask Mom, who smiles in reply.

“When will the photos be ready?” Mr. Levin wants to know, but Tramp is all over me, tickling me so much I can’t answer. Tramp is a very badly behaved dog, but he’s very cute.

As soon as I reach the apartment, I go straight to my bedroom. In front of the mirror, I try to discover the German traits I must have inherited from a father who up till now I thought was Cuban. What do I see in the mirror? A German girl. Aren’t I a Rosen?

When I ask her later, Mom tells me that the Rosen family left Germany in 1939 and settled in Havana.

“That’s all I know, Anna,” she says. Instead of going to bed, she sits in her armchair to read.

I don’t know why I learned Spanish. German would have been better. I have it in my blood, don’t I?

The German girl.

D
inner was served. The dining room had become our prison, with its dark wood paneling that no one polished anymore. The ceiling, with its heavy square moldings, looked as if it could fall on our heads at any moment.

We didn’t have any staff in the house now: they had all left. Including Eva, who was there when I was born. It wasn’t safe for her, and she didn’t want to see us suffer. Although I thought that, in fact, she’d abandoned us because she didn’t want to find herself faced with the choice of having to inform on us.

Secretly, though, Eva hadn’t stopped coming, and Mama went on paying her as if she were still our maid.

“She’s part of the family,” she explained to Papa whenever he warned her that we had to cut back on our spending or we would be left penniless in Berlin.

Sometimes Eva brought us bread, or cooked at home and came with the food in an enormous pot for us to reheat. She had a key and used to come in through the front door. Now she had to enter through the service entrance, so that Frau Hofmeister could not see her from the window.

That woman was always snooping around; she was the building’s vigilante. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck. Whenever I went out into the street, her gaze followed me and weighed me down. She was a leech who would have given anything to get her hands on one of Mama’s dresses, to get into our apartment and carry off the jewels, bags, and handmade shoes that never would have fit her pudgy feet.

“Money doesn’t buy good taste,” Mama declared.

Frau Hofmeister spent a fortune on dresses, but on her they always looked borrowed.

I couldn’t understand why Mama used to dress and make herself up as if she were going out to a party. She even used to wear false eyelashes, which gave her drooping eyes an even more languid air. She had huge eyelids, “ideal for makeup,” as her friends said. But she applied only a little color to her face: pink and white, with black and a little gray around the eyes. Lipstick was only for special occasions.

Our dining room grew bigger with every passing day. I slumped in my chair and peered at my parents in the distance. I couldn’t make out their faces; their features were blurred. The only light came from the lamp hanging over the table, which gave the white china plates a pale-orange tint.

We were hemmed in around a rectangular mahogany table with sturdy legs. Next to Papa’s plate, I saw an edition of
Das Deutsche Mädel
—
The German Girl
: the propaganda magazine of the League of German Girls. All my friends—or, rather, my female classmates—had subscriptions to it, but Papa would not allow me to bring a copy of that “printed rubbish” home. I couldn’t understand why he had one beside him now. Could we start eating? They both looked preoccupied, their heads lowered. They seemed not to dare talk to me. They silently lifted spoonfuls of soup to their mouths in unison and had trouble swallowing
them. Neither of them even glanced at me. What had I done? Papa paused and looked up. Now he was staring at me. He turned the magazine over and pushed it toward me with suppressed rage.

I couldn’t believe it. What was going to become of me? Leo would hate me. I would have to forgo our daily meetings at midday in Frau Falkenhorst’s café. Nobody would drink hot chocolate with me anymore.
The baker’s boy had been right, Leo. You should have left me. Don’t come looking for me.

On the cover of this magazine for pure young girls—the ones who don’t bear the stains of their four grandparents, the ones with small, snub noses, skin as white as foam, blond hair, and eyes bluer than the sky itself, where there is no room for any imperfection—there I was, smiling, my eyes fixed on the future. I had become the “German girl” of the month.

The dining room seemed empty. Not even the sound of spoons dipping into the wretched bowls of soup could be heard. No one spoke to me. No one reproached me.

“It wasn’t my fault, Papa! Believe me!”

The photographer we had thought was an informer had turned out to be an Ogre who worked for
Das Deutsche Mädel
. I’d thought that even though that day I had scrubbed myself so hard my skin had peeled, he had discovered my stain, and that was why he had photographed me.

“How could he have got it wrong?” I asked, but nobody answered.

“You’re dirty, Hannah. I don’t want to see you like that at the table,” said Mama, and for the first time, to hear myself called dirty was like a caress. Yes, I was, and I wanted the world to know I didn’t care about being dirty, stained, rumpled. I wanted to tell my parents that but couldn’t, because, in the end, we were all dirty. Nobody was saved. Not even the smart, haughty Alma Strauss, who now was just another Rosenthal, as dirty as the undesirables who lived crammed into rooms in the Spandauer Vorstadt quarter. Not even Papa, the eminent professor Max Rosenthal, who was now pacing up and down sadly, staring at the floor.

I left the table and went to change clothes to please my mother.
I put on a short-sleeved white dress that had been perfectly ironed.
Is this what you like, Mama? I won’t wear this dress the day we have to leave everything behind
. I couldn’t move. If I did, it would stretch. If I sat down, it would get creased. Even a single tear could stain it. And I soaped my hands so much, they still smelled of sulfate when I returned to the dining table. As I was sipping another spoonful of soup, Mama looked me up and down, but without any bitterness.

Papa sighed. He picked up the magazine and put it in his briefcase.

“Perhaps your face on the cover of that magazine will be useful someday,” he said resignedly. “The damage is done.”

“Can we eat in peace now?” said Mama.

Now there was the sound of the delicate scrape of the spoons on the Meissen china that Mama had begun using only the day she realized she would soon have to relinquish it, and it would pass into the hands of a vulgar Berliner family.

“Porcelain that has been in the Strauss family for more than three generations,” she sighed, and took another sip.

I didn’t touch my dish. I thought that if I broke anything, they would be sure to send this “German girl” on a train to heaven knows where. And woe betide me if I made any noise sipping the clear, insipid soup, with barely a couple of potatoes floating in it and a badly cut slice of red onion—then they would send me straight to bed on an empty stomach.

“Madagascar,” said Papa. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Mama lifted another spoonful of by now cold soup to her mouth and forced it down. Silence. I waited for Papa to go on. Madagascar.

“Which continent is Madagascar in? Africa? Are we going so far away?” I asked, but they ignored me.

In spite of her best efforts, the Goddess could not prevent a tear from rolling down her cheek. Hastily drying it on her white lace napkin, she smiled and brushed my hand to try to show me that the tear meant nothing to her. The sadness passed. We had to emigrate: it was our only choice.

“The farther away we go, the better,” she said, confirming her
approval with another spoonful of soup. Raising her snowy-white hands to her neck, she stroked it with an aristocratic air.

“Ethiopia, Alaska, Russia, Cuba”—Papa went on listing our uncertain destinations.

Mama looked at me and smiled. She began a speech that seemed to go on endlessly.

“Don’t cry, Hannah. We’ll go wherever we have to. We know several languages. And if need be, we’ll learn others. We are different, even if they want to treat us like all the rest. We’ll start again. If we can’t have a house opposite a park or a river, we’ll have one next to the sea. Let’s enjoy our last days in Berlin.”

She was so serene, she frightened me. She spoke stressing every word, extending the vowels like a litany. She paused for breath and then went on. I sensed that she might suddenly burst into tears, blame Papa, curse her terrible existence, her past, her inheritance.

She looked so fragile that I was certain she wouldn’t be able to survive a journey to Madagascar. Or even a simple outing to the Hotel Adlon; or to see the Brandenburg Gate one last time; or to say farewell to the Siegessäule, the monument to the fallen in the Great War that we used to visit on autumn afternoons.

“We could go to the Adlon, Hannah. We ought to say good-bye to Monsieur Fourneau, who has always been so kind to us. And to Louis, of course.”

My mouth watered at the thought of the sweets that Monsieur Fourneau served us. I remembered how when he unfolded my napkin for me his pointed nose came so close to my face I could feel his breath. Louis was the owner’s son, and had now taken charge himself. He was delighted with Mama and the distinction she gave the hotel. He used to sit with us and tell us which celebrities from German high society, and even from Hollywood, were staying there at the moment.

Mama found it hard to accept the fact that she was no longer welcome in the hotel she considered her own. She used to like to boast that it was the symbol of German modernity, of elegance. It had a sober
façade, but inside there were tremendous marble columns and an exotic fountain with a sculpture of black elephants.

Her parents had even been invited to the hotel opening in 1907. That day Grandpa gave Grandma the Tear—a flawed pearl—her favorite piece of jewelry, which would one day be mine, as Mama used to remind me every year. When she was twelve, the Tear passed down to her, and she wore it only on very special occasions.

Now, however, Louis was welcoming Ogres. They were the ones who gave his hotel lustre, who represented high society and power, rather than a mere heiress who thought she was more mysterious than the goddess Garbo, married to a down-at-the-heels professor. We were now the filthy ones who spoiled the reputation of a legendary institution.

Once, while the huge Persian carpets at home were being cleaned, we had stayed in two rooms with a view over the Brandenburg Gate. My room was enormous and connected to the one my parents were in. Each morning, I would pull back the red velvet drapes and open the windows to let in the noise of the city. I loved watching people running after trams, the traffic chaos on Unter den Linden. The cold air of Berlin smelled of tulips, candy floss, fresh
Pfeffernüsse
.

I would disappear among the feather pillows and the brilliant white sheets that were changed twice a day. I was brought breakfast in bed, and the maids greeted me with: “
Guten Morgen Prinzessin Hannah
.” We would dress up for luncheon, change to take tea, and wear a third change of clothes at night.

“Yes, Louis’s sweets, filled with cherries,” I said enthusiastically, putting on the expression of a greedy child just to humor her.

I studied her closely: her slow movements, the effort she made to raise a simple spoonful to her mouth. I wanted her to look at me, to realize I existed. I went back to my room on my own.
Mama, please, go back to reading me those romantic French novels from the last century. Tell me about Madame Bovary, that bored woman so desperately in love. You nearly named me Emma after her, but Papa wouldn’t permit it. Out of that story of romances and betrayals, all I could remember was Emma taking spoonfuls
of vinegar so that her husband would think she was sick and haggard. One morning I got up early; I was very sad, although neither you nor Eva realized it. I went to the kitchen and drank vinegar, trying to make my face reflect what I was feeling. I also wanted to have a cotton handkerchief with drops of vinegar on it like Emma’s, ready all the time, just in case somebody fainted. But in our family, I was the only one who ever passed out, as soon as I saw a single drop of blood.

You weren’t to expect me now to be the clever little girl who knew how to behave and who could discuss literature and geography in tearooms. With you, I wanted to behave badly, to run, shout, jump, cry. It was the moment for a typical young girl’s tantrum. “I’m not going! I don’t want to come out of my room! You two go, and leave me here with Eva!”

I took the doll in a red taffeta dress to bed with me. Mama gave it to me last year, and I hated it. I was playing at being a little girl again and blamed my parents for everything, but deep down I knew my fate wasn’t in my hands or theirs; that they were simply trying to survive in the midst of a collapsing city.

There was a knock at the door. I hid beneath the sheets, but could sense somebody coming over and sitting down beside me. It was Papa, gazing at me with a look of compassion.