The German Girl (8 page)

I’m her baby once more. I hide myself in her, pull her to me, and hear her voice again. Yes, Mom used to sing me this lullaby when I was small and had nightmares.
Don’t stop singing, Mom.
The two of us are still here, waiting for the day when we receive the surprising news that Dad is alive on a far-off island, that he was rescued and is coming back to us.

“What shall we do for your birthday?” She has stopped singing, and I open my eyes.

I can’t remember us ever having a celebration that wasn’t just the two of us, with a chocolate cupcake and a pink candle. Most of my girlfriends from Fieldston live outside the city, so usually I see them only at school during classes.

I’m not really interested in parties. I want something better: a trip. Yes, let’s cross the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s conquer the waves of the Caribbean, glimpse the coast of an island filled with palm and coconut trees, with lots of sun. We’ll reach a port where we’ll be greeted with flowers and balloons, and there will be music. People will be dancing on the shore and will clear a way for us to enter the promised land.

“Cuba! Let’s go to Cuba!”

Her face sharpens: she parts her lips, and a gleam begins to light up her eyes. I want to tell her, “Mom, we’re not alone,” but I don’t have the guts.

“We could meet Dad’s family and the aunt who raised him,” I say, and at first she doesn’t react.

With any luck, his aunt will look after me if anything happens to Mom. Maybe I’ll even find other uncles and aunts or cousins who will take care of me until I’m old enough to decide for myself without some social worker making me go live with some family I don’t know.

Now I have a goal: to discover who my father really was.

“Why don’t we go to Cuba?” I insist.

Mom still says nothing. She smiles and hugs me:

“Tomorrow we’ll talk to your aunt Hannah.”

I
arrived early for our rendezvous at Frau Falkenhorst’s café. I couldn’t see Leo, so I started wandering around the Hackescher Markt Station. It was full of soldiers. There were even more people than usual there that day. Something was going on, and Leo wasn’t with me. More flags. All I could see everywhere was red and black. It was torment. The streets were crowded with banners and men and women, their arms raised to the skies.

Over the loudspeakers, an excited voice was talking about a birthday, the celebration of a man who was changing the Germans’ destiny. The man we were supposed to follow, admire, worship. The purest man in a country where very soon only pure people like him would be allowed to live. The loudspeakers made it impossible to hear the announcements of the train departures and arrivals. A huge banner thanked the chief
Ogre for the Germany we lived in: “
Wir danken dir.
” Then a Bach cantata began to echo through the station: “
Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir
.” “We thank you, God, we thank you.” So now the Ogre was God. It was the twentieth of April.

My green dress blended with the station’s tiled walls so perfectly that I felt like a chameleon. When he saw me, Leo would burst out laughing. I ran to the exit connecting to the café and bumped into him.

“What does the German girl of Französische Strasse have to say?” he laughed, with an irony that made his eyes look even more mischievous than usual. “We’re going to Cuba. And you’ll see how that magazine will open doors for you. The German girl is here!” he shouted and laughed.

Cuba. Yet another new destination. Leo had found out everything. He was sure it was Cuba. It began to rain, so we ran to the sprawling Hermann Tietz department store—which was no longer called that because it was too impure. Now they called it Hertie, so as not to offend anyone. Despite the rain and the time of day, all the floors seemed empty.

“Where has everybody gone?”

We found the central staircase and rushed up it. We bumped into some women who looked at us as if wondering where the adult minding us could be. We passed the floor with the Persian rugs hanging over the banister and reached the top floor under the glass roof, where we could see the rain falling.

“Cuba? Where is Cuba? In Africa, or the Indian Ocean? Is it an island? How do you spell it?” I insisted as I followed Leo breathlessly, wishing I could sit down and stop having to avoid women carrying shopping bags.

“K-h-u-b-a.” Leo spelled it out in German. “They’re talking about buying boat passages. Your father is going to help us with ours.”

It was an island. There was nowhere else we could go. I hoped it was a long way from the Ogres.

“The rain has eased; let’s go.” Leo set off down the stairs without giving me time to catch my breath. Heaven knows where he wanted to go now.

We came out into the main square dotted with puddles. We went to wait for a tram, and Leo bent down and began to draw in the mud: a tiny, round island beneath an outline he said was Africa. He had made a map out of water and mud. Then he drew a city beside another puddle.

“This is where our house will be, by the seaside.” He took my hand, and I could feel how dirty and wet his was. “We’re going to Khuba, Hannah!”

His face fell when he realized he hadn’t managed to make me as enthusiastic as he was.

“What are we going to do on this island?” was the only thing I could think to ask him, although I knew he wouldn’t have an answer.

The possibility that we were leaving was becoming increasingly real; that made me nervous. Until now, we had been able to cope with the Ogres and with Mama’s crises. Just knowing we would soon be leaving made my hands tremble.

Suddenly Leo began talking about marriage, having children, living together, but he hadn’t even told me if we were engaged.
We’re so young, Leo!
I thought he should at least have asked me, so that I could accept; that was how it was always done. But Leo didn’t believe in conventions. He had his own rules and drew his own maps in water.

We were going to Khuba. Our children would be Khubans. And we’d learn the Khuban dialect.

While Leo was crouching to draw at the exit to Hermann Tietz’s, a woman carrying a hatbox jumped and fell into the middle of a puddle, obliterating our map on the spot.

“Filthy kids,” she hissed, glaring at Leo.

I peered up at her from the ground. She looked like a giant with fat, hairy arms, and her fingernails were scarlet-painted claws.

I couldn’t bear how rude everyone was. Good manners were disappearing with each day that passed in a city where everyone was intent on smashing windows and kicking anybody who crossed their path. Good manners were no longer necessary. Nobody spoke anymore; they all shouted. Papa complained that the language had lost all its beauty.
For Mama, the German pouring from the loudspeakers all over the city had become a vomit of consonants.

I looked up and saw that the skies were about to open. A gray mass of clouds, heralding a storm. All around us, people were running toward the Brandenburg Gate to watch the parade the loudspeakers were announcing. Today was a holiday: the purest man in Germany was fifty.

How many more flags could the city bear? We tried to reach Unter den Linden but couldn’t force our way through. Children and young people were thronging along windows, walls, and balconies to see the military procession. They all seemed to be screeching, “We are invincible! We will rule the world!”

Leo poked fun at them, imitating their salute with his right arm, once again bending his hand upward to signal “Stop!”

“Are you crazy, Leo? These people don’t take that kind of thing as a joke,” I said, tugging at his arm. We launched ourselves into the crowd again. Now the odyssey would be to get home.

A deafening noise came from on high. An airplane streaked overhead, and then another, and another. Dozens of them filled the Berlin sky. Leo suddenly turned serious. As we were saying good-bye to each other, a detachment of mounted cavalry rode past. They stared at us in amazement, as if to say, “Why are you here and not at the parade?”

The first thing I did when I arrived home was to look for the atlas. I couldn’t find Khuba on the pages showing Africa, or in the Indian Ocean, around Australia, or near Japan. Khuba did not exist, it did not appear on any continent. It wasn’t a country or an island. I was going to need a magnifying glass to examine the smallest names, lost in the dark-blue blotches.

Possibly it was an island within another island, or a tiny peninsula belonging to no one. It could also be uninhabited, and we would be the first settlers.

We would start from scratch and make Khuba into an ideal country, where anybody could be blond or dark-haired, tall or short, fat or thin. Where you could buy a newspaper, use the telephone, speak whatever
language you wished, and call yourself whatever you wanted to without bothering about the color of your skin or which God you worshipped.

In our watery maps, at least, Khuba already existed.

I always thought there was nobody more courageous and intelligent than Papa. In his prime, he had a perfect profile, Mama said: a Greek sculpture. Nowadays she no longer celebrated him. She no longer ran to his side when he came back tired from the university, where they held him in high esteem. Her face no longer lit up as it used to when they called her “the learned doctor’s lady” or “the professor’s wife” at society events where she looked divine in her pleated ball gowns created by Madame Grès.

“No one can touch French dressmakers,” she boasted to her fans.

Papa loved to see her like that: happy, sensual, elegant. The gift of mystery so many film stars cultivated seemed to come naturally to her. Anyone seeing her for the first time could not rest until he or she had been presented to the ethereal Alma Strauss. She was the perfect hostess. She could talk expertly about the opera, literature, history, religion, and politics, and without offending anyone. She was the ideal complement to Papa, who, wrapped up in his own ideas, sometimes bewildered people with incomprehensible scientific theories.

He’d changed. His suffering, and the concern he felt about finding a country that would take us, had devastated him. This invincible man became even frailer than the leaf from the most ancient tree in the Tiergarten that Leo had given me and which I kept in my diary. Papa had a fresh complaint every day.

“I’m losing my sight,” he told us one morning.

I watched him die little by little. I realized this and was prepared. I would be an orphan who had lost her father and would have to look after a depressed mother who never stopped weeping over her days of lost glory.

I had no idea how to overcome the inertia all three of us fell into when we met at home. We were not getting anywhere. I was unable to predict the path we would take, but I could sense a surprise was in store for us. And I hated surprises.

It was time for us to make a decision. It didn’t matter if we made a mistake and ended up in the wrong place. We had to do something. Even if it meant going to Madagascar or to Leo’s Khuba.

And I kept thinking to myself,
Where is Khuba?

M
om says my great-aunt is a survivor, like Mr. Levin. She must be full of wrinkles and spots, with sparse white hair, and be hunched and stiff. Maybe she can’t walk, or uses a stick, or is in a wheelchair. But her mind is sharp enough, and she has a very special sense of humor and a gentleness mixed with a touch of bitterness that has captivated Mom. She was surprised after she talked to her. Mom says she speaks very clearly, slowly and carefully, and that her voice makes her sound younger than she really is. She switches between English and Spanish with no problem. Mom is sure we’re not going to find a crushed old woman.

“She’s so calm and serene,” she says, as if thinking out loud. “She’s not sad, Anna. She’s resigned to her situation, but she wants to meet you. She said she needs to.”

To me, Cuba means nothing. When from my bedroom I hear Mom chatting to Mr. Levin about our trip, they always talk of a country where everything is lacking. But I imagine a desert island surrounded by furious waves, swept by hurricanes and tropical storms. A tiny dot in the middle of the sea, with no buildings, streets, hospitals, or schools. Nothing—or, rather, emptiness. I don’t know how Dad could have studied there. Perhaps that’s why he ended up in Manhattan, a proper island, one step away from dry land.

Dad’s family arrived in Cuba on a ship, and that was where they stayed. But he grew up and left, like almost all those born in Cuba. “You have to leave islands,” he would always tell Mom. “That’s what you think when the endless sea is your only frontier.”

Dad was shy. He didn’t know how to dance, he didn’t drink, he never smoked. Mom used to joke that the only thing Cuban about him was an old passport. And the Spanish language. He spoke it without any harshness, pronouncing the
s
’s and without swallowing the consonants. English was his second language, which he spoke fluently without an accent, thanks to the aunt who brought him up after his parents’ death. He obtained American citizenship because of his father, who had been born in New York. That was all the information Mom had been able to gather during the few years they were married; she verified it with the great-aunt in a phone call that was constantly cut off.