The Goddess of Small Victories (18 page)

January 20, 1940

Moscow

Dear Ones
,

We are in Moscow for a few hours between trains. The cold is horrendous. I can’t leave the station to replenish our food. On the platform are a few vendors who will quietly sell us specialty goods at exorbitant prices. Mostly bad vodka. I am entrusting this letter to a Russian musician I met on the train. He has been to the Nachtfalter! I hope he’ll be honest enough not to spend the stamp money on drink. Despite the discomforts of the trip, the atmosphere is lively. People entertain themselves by making lots of music. Some of the carriages look like real drinking dens. Kurt is fine, working a bit when the noise and smoke don’t distract him too badly
.

I think about you so much I can see you, right here on the station platform. Soon there will another platform where we will all be brought together
.

All my love
,

Adele

Even as I wrote these lines I didn’t believe them. I had leaned over toward Kurt. “Do you want to add a word?”

He had refused. “Don’t worry about them so much!” He didn’t worry in the slightest about his own family. He was more concerned about what we would have for dinner.

I left the carriage to smoke away from the others. The perfumed Turkish cigarettes made me nauseous, but I liked the sight of their gold tips between my fingers. The trip was a long one and moments alone rare. Having no intimacy with Kurt was hard on me.

To pass the time, a group of musicians serenaded the indifferent crowd. I examined the passersby, seeing in them familiar figures: my mother, trotting hurriedly about her business; Liesl, always in the clouds; Elizabeth, bawling her out; my father, a cigarette forever between his lips, his Leica around his neck, looking at the world through its lens, hungry for details and never conscious of the whole. I wouldn’t ever see them again. The privations of the war years would take them from me, both my father and Elizabeth. My last image of him is as an old man, red faced and sweating, trying to keep up with a moving train that is carrying me away forever. He leans, old and spent, against a column to recover his breath. Beside him, three women who resemble me are making their handkerchiefs wet. My eyes are dry.

Now, surrounded by a crowd of strangers, I was finally crying, blaming the flood of emotion on the damned Yiddish music that was piercing my heart.

January 25, 1940

Somewhere between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk

Dear Ones
,

I am writing this letter from the middle of Siberia. I hope I’ll be able to mail it when we get to Vladivostok. My fingers are numb, I
have the hardest time holding the pencil. This trip just won’t end. It’s like a long night of insomnia. I have never been so cold in my life. The temperature outside is reportedly minus 50° Celsius. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. The toilets are frozen solid. For washing we use water from the samovars or else my eau de cologne. I’m almost out of it. What I crave is a hot bath, a bowl of vegetable broth, and a real night’s rest under a down comforter. The days and nights are indistinguishable—no light, as if the sun were avoiding this endless flat expanse
.

We spend our days dozing, lulled by the motion of the train. We press against each other like animals. There is nothing to do. I’ve used up my store of wool and handed out a few pairs of socks to the Muller children. Suzanna is sick. She coughs a lot and refuses to eat. I rub her feet to warm her. She is like a tiny bird. No one has the heart to make music anymore. Everyone is quiet, dulled by the cold or by vodka. Even the two Muller boys have stopped running around. At meals we are fed a disgusting borscht whose ingredients I prefer not to know. Kurt won’t let anything pass his lips. My vision of the Trans-Siberian was of something more luxurious! The resupplying of the train is chaotic and we are forced to make many stops. At this rate, we’ll never arrive in time to catch the boat
.

Ugly rumors are circulating through the cars: the United States might now enter the war. Kurt thinks they have no reason to. Muller worries that a Japanese provocation might make the Americans abandon their neutrality, cutting off the Pacific route to us. My normal optimism is struggling. It must be the lack of sugar. What I wouldn’t give for a Viennese coffee and a slice of Sacher torte! Last night I was surprised to find myself praying. I pray for all of you, my thoughts are with you
.

Adele

I couldn’t figure out how to wash even my underclothes. I was so grubby. Only the cold kept us from smelling our own unpleasant odor. Kurt survived by holding a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne over his nose and wrapping himself in blankets, piling all his clothes on top. I debated with myself for hours, as I could see he had his eye on my fur coat. But I decided to give it to the little girl, who was breaking my heart with her bright blue lips. Her parents tried to refuse. Finally they agreed. We swaddled her in the fur and eventually she settled down. I listened to her mother sing a Yiddish lullaby to her, but the husband made her stop. He was pale with fright. Instead, I sang her a German children’s song that I remembered my mother singing to me. The words and melody came back all by themselves, although I’d thought them lost:
Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht, mit Näglein besteckt, schlüpf unter die Deck
. Kurt made me be quiet too. It was as dangerous to be German on this train as it was to be Jewish. I hummed. No one dared say anything.

Kurt’s complaining had finally stopped. He watched the endless countryside, raising an arm occasionally from his woolen sarcophagus to wipe the window clear. It was so dark out that nothing could be seen. He examined his own reflection, as if it might give him an answer. I drew an ∞ in the mist. He smiled before erasing it. To cover my embarrassment I drew a Russian doll for the little girl, then another inside it, and another inside that. She laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh.

I wrongly took his silence for jealousy, as he never liked me caring for others. Nor was he particularly haunted by the secret that the physicist Hans Thirring had told him in Berlin to pass on to Albert Einstein, that Nazi Germany would soon be capable of nuclear fission. He didn’t really believe it. Not right away. Kurt knew that others, too, carried the message. From all over
Europe, the identical information was crossing the ocean and converging on Princeton.

While I was wondering whether the trip would ever end, he was thinking of the infinite. He queried his double in the night while other men, his peers, fought against time. Not just to get the damn bomb but to get it before anyone else.

February 2, 1940

Yokohama, Japan

Dear Ones
,

We’ve reached Yokohama and feel a great sense of relief. Finally we have air, water, heat! We arrived too late to take the Taft, for which we had reservations. We’ll have to wait more than two weeks to board another ship, the President Cleveland. In happier circumstances I would have been delighted: Japan is so amusing. Especially for me, never having traveled farther than Aflenz! The country is not as medieval as I thought, we have all the commodities we need. The streets are every bit as busy as the Ringstrasse: shiny cars, bikes going in every direction, horse carts and rickshaws, a kind of bicycle taxi drawn by poor wretches. I spend hours watching the people go by. Men in smart raincoats share the sidewalk with workers wearing funny shoes and even stranger hats. The women are mostly in traditional costume. I’ll try to bring you back one of these extraordinary silk confections. I have to be careful, though, because our reserves of cash are limited. Kurt has been trying for several days to get a money order from the Foreign Exchange Service but with no success. I need a new wardrobe, as we left with so little. Unfortunately, I find all the imported products much too expensive
.

The Asiatics are not lemon yellow, as I had thought. Actually,
they are pale, with elongated eyes and no eyelids. The workers are even quite dark, tanned by the sun. Some of the women, supposedly of ill repute, walk down the street with their faces painted white and their teeth blackened. I’d like to talk to them but we have no language in common. Yesterday I tried to explain to two lovely creatures that their kimonos were magnificent—they fled, laughing behind their sleeves
.

The Japanese are polite, but very distant. They don’t really like foreigners much. We are staying in a comfortable hotel with plenty of hot water. I only emerge from my boiling hot bath to poke around in the neighborhood, but I never stray very far. There are men in uniform everywhere. They let us know that “long noses” (Westerners) are not allowed to wander like that. Yokohama is a very large port, and meat is scarce. The people make do with rice and fish drowned in that horrible brine whose stink pervades the streets and even gets into our clothes. At a street vendor’s stall, I tasted a wonderful fried food called tempura. I stuffed myself with these vegetable fritters, which are as light as clouds. Kurt looked on disapprovingly: he doesn’t trust the local hygiene. But the boiling oil must kill everything off … He eats only rice and tea. This diet is kind to his stomach, which suffered from the food on the Russian train. He rarely leaves the hotel room, where he works
.

We are in good health. I don’t know how we managed to come through all that cold without catching pneumonia. We said goodbye to the Mullers in Vladivostok. I hope they manage the crossing without any problems. The city, which is very close to the Chinese territory annexed by the Japanese, was full of armed men. It was terribly chaotic there. I often think of little Suzanna. The sight of a uniform always terrified her, even when it was only one of the train staff. She was so feverish when we reached Vladivostok that her parents decided to wait several days before resuming their trip, in order to find medicine for her. They have family in Pennsylvania, and I’m
hoping to hear from them once we get settled in the United States. Kurt sends a kiss. I smother you under a great load of kisses. I miss you all so much
.