The German Girl (7 page)

“My girl, my German girl,” he said, and I let the man I loved most in the world cuddle me.

“We’re going to live in America—in New York—but we’re still on the waiting list to be let in. That’s why we’ll have to go to another country first. Only in transit, I promise you.” My father’s voice calmed me. His warmth spread to my body; his breath enveloped me. If he kept on talking to me in that same rhythm, I’d soon fall asleep:

“Our apartment in the city of skyscrapers is already waiting for us, Hannah. We’ll live in a building on Morningside Drive that has the name of a mountain, Mont Cenis, and is covered in ivy. From our living room, we’ll be able to see the sun rise every morning.”

It’s time for you to send me to sleep, Papa. I don’t want to know your dreams. I want you to sing me a lullaby, like when I was little and used to
fall asleep in your arms, the strongest in the world
. I was a good girl again; I wasn’t going to stand in the way of the grown-ups. A girl who did not want to be separated from you, and clung to you until sleep overtook her.

I would be a child again. I would wake up and think all this was a nightmare. That nothing had changed.

Papa was not suffering because we were going to lose what was ours by right, or because we had to leave Berlin for the far ends of the earth. He had a profession. He could start again without a penny in his pocket; it was in his blood. He suffered for Mama’s sake, because he could see that each passing day added the weight of a year on her.

I didn’t think she could adapt to living outside her home, without her jewels, her dresses, her perfumes. She was going to go mad. I was sure of it. Her life was slowly draining away between walls that had been hers for generations. The only place she enjoyed living in, surrounded by the photographs of her parents; the place where she kept the Iron Cross her grandfather had won in the Great War.

Papa was going to miss his gramophone and records more. He would have to say good-bye to Brahms, Mozart, and Chopin forever. But the good thing about music, as he always said, was that you could take it with you, in your mind. No one could rob you of that.

What I was already beginning to miss were the afternoons I had with Papa in his study. Discovering countries on his ancient maps, listening to tales of his journeys to India or up the Nile, imagining an excursion we would go on together to the Antarctic, or a safari in Africa.

“We’ll do them one day,” he used to comfort me.

Don’t forget me, Papa. I want to be your pupil again, to learn the geography of far-off continents. And to dream, simply dream.

I
close my eyes, and I’m on the deck of a huge ship drifting aimlessly. I open my eyes and am blinded by the sun. I’m the girl with cropped hair on the ship, alone in midocean.

I wake up but still don’t know who I am: Hannah or Anna. I feel like we’re the same girl.

On the wooden dining room table, Mom lays out the black-and-white photos that reached us from an island way down on the map, in the Caribbean.

On the white wall of the hallway, next to the wooden bookcase, is the enlarged photograph of the girl at her cabin porthole. She is not looking at the shore, the water, or the horizon. She seems to be waiting for something. You can’t tell if they’re coming into port or are still at sea.
Her head is propped up on her hand in resignation. Her hair is parted at the side, and the cut reveals her round face and delicate neck. She seems to have blond hair, but the photograph is so contrasted it’s hard for me to make out her eyes or to know if she really does look like me.

“The profile, Anna, the profile,” Mom says with a smile. She, too, is fascinated by these images, especially the one of the girl.

I find the magazine with crumbling pages and faded, worn photos, and check again that it is the same girl on the front cover. I leaf through it, but find no reference to any Atlantic crossing. Nobody can solve this mystery. Mom understands some German, but she doesn’t look much at the magazine because she’s more interested in the photographs we had developed. She has started sorting them: family portraits, indoor scenes, the ones on board the ship. At one end of the table, she puts all those of the same boy.

I can’t believe that a letter from Cuba has managed to rouse Mom from her bed. She’s a different woman. I’m still not sure if it was the envelope or the previous day’s fright. I feel that for the first time she’s paying attention to me, taking me into account. I can see how hard she is concentrating on these images of a family fleeing another continent on the verge of war.

“It’s like seeing a film from the Berlin of the twenties and thirties, a world that was about to disappear. There’s not much left from those days, Anna,” she says after poring over the photos.

She flicks her hair behind her ear, like she used to, and she’s also started using a bit of color again. With any luck, this weekend she’ll let me do her makeup and play with the cosmetics like we used to do before I started going to school and she started staying in her bed.

It’s time for me to do my homework, but I prefer to stay with Mom at the table. A few more minutes and then, yes, I’ll go to the kitchen and make some tea.

Smashed shop windows, the Star of David, glass shards everywhere, graffiti on walls, puddles of muddy water, a man fleeing the camera, a sad old man loaded down with books, a woman with a huge baby carriage, another wearing a hat as she jumps across a puddle that looks like a
mirror, a pair of lovers in a park, men in hats dressed in black. They look as if they’re wearing uniforms. All the men with their heads covered. Crowded trams. And more glass . . . The photographer was obsessed with broken panes of glass on the ground.

Mom also brought home a CD of the photos, so that I can print them as I like, crop them, make them bigger. There’s a lot to discover.

Once the tea is made, I come closer to her. I take advantage of it for a moment and close my eyes, take a deep breath, and smell the perfume of her soap. I pause at the image she has in her hand of a beautiful building, its roof destroyed by fire. I look at her short, manicured nails, her ringless fingers—not even the wedding band—and stroke them. She leans her head back against me. We’re together again.

“What a gruesome night that was, the ninth of November 1938. Nobody was expecting it.” Mom has a lump in her throat.

As I listen to her recount the terrible drama, I cannot feel sad, because I’m happy to have her with me. I’m scared that this sorrow might send her back to bed. Better leave the photos until she has recovered completely.

But she continues.

“They smashed the windows of all the shops. Maybe one of those ruined stores belonged to your great-grandparents. Who knows. On Kristallnacht, the night of broken windows, they burned down all the synagogues. Only one was left standing, Anna.

“They took the men away, separated families. All the women were forced to call themselves Sarah, and the men, Israel,” she goes on in a rush. “I told my father that if I had to change my name, I preferred to die. Some people managed to escape, others were later exterminated in the gas chambers.”

A horror film. I can’t imagine the two of us alone in that city then. I don’t know whether Mom would have survived. Berlin was a hell for people like us. They lost everything.

“They left behind their homes, their lives. Very few survived. They lived hidden in basements. They fled the country: it was their only chance. They were attacked in the street, arrested, thrown in jail, and
never seen again. Some of them chose to send their children on their own to other countries, so that they would be brought up in another culture, with a different religion, as part of families they didn’t know.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I see Dad in Berlin, Havana, New York. I’m German. This is my family, forced to call themselves Sarah and Israel, whose businesses were destroyed. The family that fled, that survived. This is where I come from.

Mom thinks the saddest photos are the ones of interiors, but they show a well-dressed man and woman, in big rooms in what look like palaces. The woman is tall and elegant, her dress tight-fitting around her waist, and with a broad, tilted hat. She is standing in front of a window. The man wears a suit and tie and is sitting next to an ancient gramophone, with a loudspeaker curved like a gigantic flower. Another photo shows them dressed for a special occasion. He is in formal attire; she is wearing a long silk gown.

“Heaven only knows if they were separated or they managed to die together,” Mom continues, her voice filled with emotion.

My favorite photos are the ones of the boy with huge black eyes. In them he is running, jumping, climbing into a window or up a streetlamp, or lying in the grass. Yes, it’s the same one in all of them. And he’s always smiling.

I get up and stand in front of the blown-up image. We really do look alike. The girl on the ship is the same as the one on the cover of the League of German Girls magazine. I think this weekend, I’ll get my hair cut like her.

“That’s Hannah, the aunt who brought your Dad up,” I hear Mom say behind me. She embraces me and gives me a kiss. “You’re called Anna after her.”

I want to escape from this trap but can’t. I have no idea where I am and try to open my eyes, but my eyelids are sealed. Air! I need air!
Is this another nightmare, or am I awake? The weight of my arms drags me toward the abyss. I can’t feel my legs, they’re freezing. All my strength is gone, and just when my lungs are giving out, I lose consciousness and float off to who knows where. I lift my head and my nose appears . . . on the surface? I straighten up, turn my head to the left and right, trying to figure out where I am, while the wind beats harshly against my face.

My face is soaked. My skin burns. My head is so hot it’s spinning; my body is so cold it paralyzes me. I take desperate breaths, and gulp down air and salt water. I think I’m going to drown and I cough uncontrollably until my throat is scratched. I open my eyes.

I’m drifting aimlessly.

I see the reflection of my face in the surface of the water. I’m the girl on the ship.

I don’t know how I got here, but now I have to see how I get back, if possible. My pupils are dilated, my eyes full of salt water. I start moving my arms to keep myself afloat; the feeling comes back to my legs. I’m awake, and alive. I think I can try to swim.

I rub my eyes and see that the palms of my hands are shriveled. Who knows how long I’ve been in this cold water. Am I on a beach? No: I’m floating in the middle of a dark ocean.

“Mom!” Why am I shouting, if I’m all alone? “Mom!”

No point using up what little energy I have left.
Swim as hard as you can! You’re strong. Swim to the shore, take advantage of every push from the wind, a wave, the current.

The light dazzles me. I have to keep my eyes closed. I’m thirsty, but I don’t want to drink salt water. Now I have even deeper wounds, and the salty water seeps into them. My whole body is burning.

I have to swim to infinity. Away from the sun. I can see the shore. Yes, I can make out the city. There are trees, white sand. No, it’s not a city. It’s an island.

I swim with short strokes. The wind is against me. The waves are against me. The sun is against me. The bright light blinds me.

To the shore! That’s your goal. You can do it.
Of course I can. But I’m falling asleep.

No! Wake up and keep going. You can’t stop!
I let myself be pulled along, tumbling over and over.

Dad is waiting for me. This is the island he reached the day he disappeared; he found shelter here. Maybe he fled in a plane, had an accident, and fell into the sea. Like me, he swam and swam until he reached land.

That’s why I’m stranded in the sea, because I know you’re there and are watching over me. I’ve come to be your Friday, Dad. That’s the only thing that keeps me afloat: thinking I’m going to find you. We’re going to be together like two Robinsons on that desert island, and you’ll protect me from cannibals, pirates, hurricanes.

After many years, after we’ve survived storms, earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, droughts, and attacks, we’ll be rescued at last and travel together to dry land, to the continent. Mom will be there waiting for us. Because she needs you, Dad, as much as I do.

Now I’m no longer in the water. My body is lying on hot sand that sticks to my burning skin. The sun confuses me. I open my eyes and see you. Is it you?

I knew you wouldn’t abandon me. That one day you’d come for me. That we would meet in a far-off land, on another continent, on an island lost in the middle of the ocean. That I would be your girl. Your only daughter, whom you would look after forever.

“Anna!” someone is shouting.

I get up quickly. It’s Mom. I’m wet with sweat, in my own bed, in my room. This is my island. I look for Dad on the bedside table, and there he is, looking at me with that half smile of his, next to the postcard of the ship I got from his aunt.

Mom hugs me, and I start to cry. I’m her little girl again, and I fall into her arms so that she can soothe me, stroke me. She starts humming. I can’t believe it: it’s a lullaby. I close my eyes and hear her soft voice whispering in my ear: “Bye lulu-baby, bye lulu-baby, bye lulu-baby, bye lullaby.”