The German Girl (9 page)

Occasionally a film reminded her of the man with whom she had decided to have a family that he never knew. It was thanks to him that Mom had discovered postwar Italian cinema. Dad was fascinated by Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica. But he also enjoyed Madonna. Those were his contradictions. When they started going out together, one of their first dates was at the Film Forum in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, to see the original version of De Sica’s
Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini
, one of his favorite films. Dad always left the cinema in a state.

“I saw his eyes brimming, and he said I looked like the heroine in the movie,” recalls Mom. “It was such a romantic thing from someone
who said so little that I thought,
I can live with this man
. Your father never showed his emotions, but at the movies, he was always weeping.”

Dad found refuge in his work, his books, and the dark theaters where stories were told through moving images. He didn’t have friends. I used to imagine him as a superhero who came to rescue the oppressed and those who had nothing. Mom would laugh at my wild fantasies. But she never criticized them because she knew that, to me, he was still alive.

Mom is all alone. She was an only child, and her parents died, one after the other, when she was about to finish college. Then Dad appeared. They met at a concert of baroque music at Columbia University, where she taught classes in Latin American literature.

The day she announced she was getting married, none of her friends asked if Dad was Hispanic, Jewish, or a foreigner just passing through. His origin wasn’t important: he spoke good English, and that was enough. He had a job in a center for nuclear studies, as well as a nice apartment he had inherited from his family.

Dad worked outside the city but had an office downtown where he went every Tuesday. Those were the only days he arrived home later, but she never questioned him about it. My father wasn’t someone you could question, or even feel jealous about. Not because he wasn’t handsome, but because he didn’t like complications or anything that would disturb his space, which was already well-defined.

She never introduced him to her faculty friends, and so had no need to explain. All she knew about Dad was that his parents had died in an airplane crash when he was a young boy and that he had been brought up by an aunt. That was enough. He never spoke about his past.

“It’s best to forget,” he would tell her.

I go into Mom’s room. She is kneeling in front of the dresser, rummaging through papers and books. She pulls out an old shoe box. I can see a pair of cuff links, a pair of men’s sunglasses, several envelopes.

When Mom hears me at the door, she turns around and offers me her best smile.

“Some of your father’s things,” she says, closing the box and handing it to me.

I run back to my island with my new treasure, and shut myself in to examine it.

“
Look how many treasures I have. I’m sure you remember them,
” I whisper to my father so that Mom won’t hear. “
There are documents, bank statements—but not a single photo. I thought I would find another photo of you. I’ll keep your cuff links and glasses in my bedside drawer.
”

At the bottom of the box, I find a blue envelope. I open it carefully: inside is a small sheet of paper the same color. It’s Dad’s handwriting: an undated letter addressed to Mom. Suddenly I think I ought to mention it to her before I read it, but then decide not to. She gave me what she had kept packed away for twelve years, so it belongs to me now.

All at once, I feel hungry; it’s always the same when I’m nervous
. I need to calm down, because I’m about to read one of your letters. I don’t want to discover any secrets; there are more than enough secrets awaiting us in Cuba.

I’ll read it for you, Dad. So that you’ll remember Mom, who never forgets you however many years go by.

Ida my love,

Today is the fifth anniversary of our life together, and I remember as if it were today the moment I first saw you, in the back row of that autumn concert in Saint Paul’s Chapel at the university.

You were speaking Spanish with your students, and I couldn’t stop looking at you. You became lost in the music, and I can still see how you flicked your hair behind your ears, and I could see your beautiful profile. I could have traced it with my fingers, from your forehead to your eyebrows, nose, lips, cheeks.

You still remember the concert, the music, the orchestra. I remember only you.

I never tell you I love you, that you’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. That I enjoy your silences, being beside you, watching you sleep, wake up, having breakfast with you on the weekend at sunrise. Have I ever told you that those mornings together, when sometimes we don’t even say a word, are my favorites because you are by my side?

You came into my life when I was resigned to the fact that nobody would accept my solitude. One day we must travel the world, lose ourselves among other people. Just you and me. Promise?

Ida my love, I’ll always be here for you.

Louis

T
here were mornings when I woke up feeling as if I couldn’t breathe, days when I sensed a tragedy was coming ever closer, and my heart began to beat wildly. Then very rapidly and suddenly, it seemed to stop altogether. Was I still alive? One of those days was a Tuesday. I hated Tuesdays. They should have been erased from the calendar. As soon as we got to Khuba, Leo and I would decree: “No more Tuesdays!”

When I woke up, my body was feverish, but I didn’t have a cold or any pain. Papa, with his tie in its Windsor knot and already holding his gray felt hat, took my temperature. He smiled and kissed me on the brow:

“You’re fine. Come on, get out of bed.”

He stayed with me for a while, gave me another kiss, and then left me in my room. The sound of the front door slamming startled me. Now it was just Mama and me in the apartment. Abandoned.

I knew I didn’t have a temperature and that I wasn’t ill, but my body refused to get up. I had even lost all desire to go out and meet Leo to take photographs. I had a premonition but could not say of what.

That day, Mama was wearing light makeup but not her false eyelashes. She had on a dark-blue long-sleeved dress that gave her a slightly formal look. I put on the brown beret she had brought me from her last trip to Vienna and shut myself in my room with the atlas, hoping to find our tiny island, which still had not appeared.

We were on the verge of going somewhere. Papa couldn’t continue keeping our final destination a secret. I was ready to accept anything. Nothing more could happen to us: we were living in a state of terror in an as-yet-undeclared war; I didn’t think many things could be worse than that.

Leo said Papa had even bought a house in Khuba.

“If we’re not staying there long, why will we need a house?” I asked him. As ever, Leo had the answer.

“It’s the easiest way to obtain an entry permit. Having a house shows you won’t be a burden on the state.”

I didn’t know where Papa went every morning; he had been banned from the university. He must have been going to the consulates of countries with strange names to get us visas, refugee papers. Or he was with Leo’s father, hatching some plot or other that could have cost them their lives.

I imagined Papa as a hero coming to save us, in a soldier’s uniform and with a chest full of medals like Grandpa, who’d defeated the enemies of the German people. I saw him confronting the Ogres, who were powerless against his might and surrendered to his valor.

I was starting to get confused by all these disturbing thoughts when Mama put a record on the gramophone. That was my father’s treasure, his most precious jewel. His territory.

One day, as he was placing the shellac disk in the polished wooden box, Papa had explained the workings of this marvel that kept him in ecstasy for hours. It was a real magic trick. The sound box of the
RCA Victor—which he called simply Victor, as though it were a close friend—had a moveable arm ending with a metal needle that followed at a perfect rhythm the grooves in the black disk that went around and around until I felt dizzy just looking at it. The sound waves changed into mechanical vibrations and came out of a lovely golden speaker shaped like a trumpet: an enormous bell. The first thing you heard was a whirring sound, a kind of metal sigh that lasted until the music started to flow. We would close our eyes and imagine we were at a concert at the opera house. The music poured out of the trumpet, the whole room shook, and we let ourselves be carried away. We rose into the air, an incredible experience for me.

Then I could hear the words of her favorite aria: “
Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix, comme s’ouvrent les fleurs aux baisers de l’aurore!
”

So there was nothing for me to worry about. Mama was carried away by the music of the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the records Papa used to look after carefully, cleaning them before and after he put them on Victor. It was a recent recording, with his favorite mezzo-soprano, Gertrud Pålson-Wettergren. He once went to Paris with Mama just to hear her sing. I could see the nostalgic look on Mama’s face. By now, yesterday was a distant notion for her. I on the other hand, while listening to the desperate woman’s aria, imagined myself running through meadows with Leo, climbing mountains and crossing rivers on the island where we would live.

Nothing bad was going to happen. Papa would come home for dinner. I would go out to meet Leo, and in my atlas we would find the lost island in the midst of some unknown ocean.

I knew what I had to take in my suitcase. The camera, with lots of rolls of film, of course. Only a couple of dresses; I didn’t need any more. I would have loved to see Mama’s luggage. She would be happy only if they let her take her jewels. The perfumes. The creams. We would need a car just to take all her baggage.

Suddenly there were two loud knocks on the apartment door. No one had paid us a visit in months. Eva had the key to the service entrance.
Mama and I stared at each other. The music went on playing. We both knew the moment had arrived, even though no one had prepared me for it. I looked at her for some answer, but she was slow to react; she didn’t know what to do.

She rose from her bergère armchair and lifted the Victrola’s moveable arm. The disk stopped turning, and silence filled the living room, which now seemed as vast as a castle. I felt like an insect in the doorway. Two more loud knocks followed. Mama shuddered. Her lips started to quiver, but she stood very erect, lifted her chin, stretched her neck, and walked slowly toward the door—so slowly, there was time for not just two but four loud bangs that made the room tremble.

Mama opened the door, genuflected, and gestured with her hand for them to come in, without asking who they were looking for or what they wanted. Four Ogres entered the living room one after the other, bringing with them a blast of cold air. I couldn’t stop trembling. The freezing draft chilled me to the bone.

The chief Ogre reached the center of the room and came to a halt on the thick Persian rug. Mama stepped to one side so as not to obstruct the view of this man who had come to change our lives forever.

“You do live well, don’t you?” he announced, without bothering to disguise his envy. He began to study the room in great detail: the coppery drapes, the silk net curtains to filter the light from the courtyard window, the imposing sofa with yellow Pompeii cushions, the oil portrait of Mama with her flawed pearl hanging around her neck and bare shoulders.

The Ogre inspected every object with the precision of a ruthless auctioneer. It was obvious from his eyes the things he liked most and he was planning to keep for himself.

Our living room was filled with the smell of gunpowder, burnt wood, smashed windows, ashes.

I placed myself as a shield between the Ogres and Mama. When she laid her hands on my shoulders, I could feel her trembling.

“You must be Hannah,” said the chief Ogre in a cultured Berlin accent. “The German girl. You’re almost perfect.”

He pronounced
almost
with such spite that it was as if he had slapped me.

“As far as I can see,
Herr
Rosenthal isn’t at home.”

When he said Papa’s name, I thought my heart would burst. I took deep breaths to try to calm it, to prevent them from hearing my blood pumping so loudly. I began to perspire. Mama still had the fixed smile on her face. Her cold hands were making my shoulders numb.

I had to think of something else, to escape from the room, my mother, the Ogres: I started to peer at the brocade on the silk wallpaper. Strands of fern leaves ending in bunches of flowers that were repeated endlessly.
Go on, Hannah, follow the trace of your roots and don’t think about what is going to happen,
I kept telling myself over and over. One, two, three leaves on each stem.

I lost concentration when a drop of sweat started slowly to roll down my temple. I didn’t dare stop it, so I let it drip onto my front.

I sensed that Mama was about to break down.
Please don’t cry, Mama. Don’t let them see how desperate we are. Don’t lose that beautiful, cold smile of yours. Tremble all you like, but don’t cry. It’s Papa they’ve come for, and we knew this moment would arrive. It was high time we heard the banging at the door.

The chief Ogre went over to the window to check which side of the street our living room faced and possibly also to calculate how much our apartment was worth. Then he crossed to the gramophone. He picked up Papa’s fragile record, examined it, and looked straight at Mama.

“A key piece for every mezzo-soprano.”

I could sense Mama was about to offer them tea or some other drink, and I stiffened to try to convey to her not to do it.
Stay as you are, proud and erect. I’ll protect you. Lean on me; don’t let yourself collapse and don’t offer the Ogres anything.