The Oriental Wife (11 page)

She wept hysterically when he walked in. She had been out of her mind, she said, wringing her hands. She had hardly slept, she had hardly eaten since they’d taken him away. But she did not think to offer him food. He sank down on the sofa, and though its stuffing was spilling out and its carved back was full of gashes, it agitated her to see it soiled by his filthy rags. He had better take a bath, she said, her tears having dried.

The next morning he put on his yellow star and walked to Sigmund’s again—all Jewish telephones had been removed
by order of the authorities some months before—where Trudl told him that Sigmund had died during the night. He stayed with her until her sister could come and then went to the post office, where he filled out a form requesting permission to send a telegram notifying Rolf of Sigmund’s death. After examining his papers, and Sigmund’s papers, and grudgingly stamping the telegraph document in all the required places, the woman behind the counter made him lay the money down before her, unwilling to take it directly from his Jewish hand; she counted it twice to make sure he was not trying to cheat her. As he walked outside, a marching band was passing by, preceded by two men bearing the SA flag. On both sides of the street, people stopped and raised their arms. A bent old woman shifted a string bag full of vegetables from her right arm to her left, so that she could give the Hitler salute, and stepped to the curb, shouting
Perish Judah!
Franz stepped back into the post office vestibule until the marchers had passed.

Back at the house again, he headed for Louisa’s old bedroom. He had gotten into the habit of going there when he wanted to be alone; he would sit, incongruously, on the tufted chair in front of her vanity table, moved by the sight of her powder puff, with a mauve bow on the back, and of the silver heart on its tarnished chain that she had draped over the mirror years before, and by the thought that she at least was safe. In the camp too he had thought of her, insofar as he could think at all. He had not really believed that he would get out alive, but after a while that hardly mattered; the important thing was that she had escaped.

Nothing in her room had been touched since the night the SS came. Among the clothes and lipsticks and books and
smashed trinkets strewn over the flowered carpet was a pale green chiffon dress that quivered slightly at his entrance and then subsided again. He picked it up and went to lay it on the bed, whose mattress, like so much else, gaped open. The wardrobe had been smashed, and tilted dangerously forward. He righted it with an effort and then, one by one, picked up the drawers from the dressing table, which had been yanked out and flung onto the floor. They would not slide in all the way, but still he put the broken pots of rouge and face cream carefully inside them.

Stooping to retrieve a bundle of letters curling inside a rubber band, he noticed, jammed up against one leg of the dresser, the little cameo brooch that his mother, shortly before she died, had wrapped up for him to give to Louisa on her tenth birthday. Unlike all the rest, it seemed unharmed. The girlish profile was as smooth and unblemished as before, the pin on the back still sat securely in its clasp. He fumbled a small piece of tissue paper out of the drawer he’d just replaced and, folding it around the pin, placed it in his jacket pocket.

It was still there, still in its flimsy wrapping, when he and Jeannette boarded the SS
Manhattan
in Hamburg three months later. In December 1938, their visas had arrived from the U.S. Consulate, the affidavits Rolf had obtained being deemed sufficient. At the end of January, in 1939, Franz had been summoned to an interview at the Office of Reichs Emigration above the police station, where the Herr Präfekt, a gloomy man who smelled of schnapps, examined his papers suspiciously, holding them up to the light and peering at the stamps on the visas through a magnifying glass. But finally, as though sick of the whole business, he had produced two
exit permits from his desk, slammed the drawer shut, and handed them over with a grimace.

They were allowed to take two trunks with their possessions. In addition to warm clothing, a German–English dictionary twenty years out of date, two leather-bound volumes of Goethe, and several large envelopes full of photographs, Jeannette had packed the vast lace-edged tablecloth, embroidered with lilies and peacocks, that had been the pride of her trousseau, a set of gold-handled fish forks, and the portrait of her brother.

As the ship pulled away from the dock, a small boy in a fur hat came running up to Franz and pummeled him on the leg. “Now I’m in America,” he shouted, in German. “I’m going to be an American.”

“Good for you,” Franz said, but already the boy had whirled away from him, racing up and down the deck. On the shore too, men were running, pointing excitedly at a vast crane lowering a railroad carriage onto a flatbed truck. A gust of wind rippled through the red and black banners lining the pier, making their swastikas dance. Meanwhile the seagulls were circling the ship, closer and closer. As it pulled away, Franz heard a woman sobbing behind him, but having no comfort to offer he went on staring ahead—at the banners, the gulls, the railway car—willing his heart to turn to stone.

T
he army rejected him not, as he had feared, because he was German, although the examining sergeant seemed suspicious about that, but on the grounds of his myopia and the punctured eardrum he had suffered in a football game twenty-two years before. They did not even let him finish the physical, but told him to get dressed halfway through, when he was still holding his arms stiffly by his naked sides and trying to stand straight. It was almost a relief when the navy turned him down, since he had been seasick all the way to New York on the boat. The air corps was out of the question for someone with his eyesight. In desperation, he tried the merchant marine, but even they refused him.

By early 1942 Otto and the others had all enlisted or been drafted, and had scattered to training camps around the country. Alex Starin was working in army intelligence in Washington; even the hysterical Gruenbaum, who had managed to train as a taxi driver in the intervening years, had been taken by the navy, despite his mental imbalance. Drunks on the street accosted Rolf to ask why he wasn’t in uniform; at Rexall’s on Fourteenth Street, where he sometimes went for his lunch, the waitresses, hearing his accent, gave him dirty looks and slapped down his sandwich without speaking. He did not try to defend himself. However much blood he gave, however many war bonds he bought, however many
chocolate bars and copies of
True Detective
he shipped to GIs overseas (the American Legion provided lists of those without families to send them parcels), he would still remain safe, while every other man his age was in danger. For the first time in his life he felt morally compromised.

Even his mother seemed ashamed for him, perhaps remembering his father’s Iron Cross for bravery, though it had not saved Sigmund at Dachau. Her sister’s boy, Hans, having escaped to England with his parents and sister just in time, had been released from internment as an enemy alien and was serving with the British Army in the Middle East. But Trudl, though she spoke of him proudly, seemed to brood about that also. The English had made him anglicize his name—he was no longer Hans Metzger but John Mercer—but she still worried what would happen if he were captured by the Germans.

Three times a week, on his way home from work, Rolf went to visit his mother in her tiny apartment around the corner from his and Louisa’s. These visits always followed an identical pattern: she served him cake and coffee at the little round table in front of the window, on the same blue-and-white Meissen and with the same swift decisive movements he remembered from childhood. She sat with him as he ate and drank, asking how his work was going and telling him any war news she had heard on the radio that day, her voice particularly brisk when reporting battles in the Middle East. Then, after exactly fifteen minutes, she would stand. “I mustn’t keep you any longer. Your wife will be expecting you.” If he suggested that she come back with him for supper, she always shook her head. Not today. Today she was feeling a little tired. Some other time.

Louisa was allowed to pay longer visits, during which they sat at the little table playing Chinese checkers. Louisa was with her on the day the telegram arrived from her sister, announcing that Hans was missing in action; it was Louisa who phoned Rolf at his office and told him. When he got there that evening, the two women were bent over the star-shaped board. His mother let him in in silence and listened in silence as he told her she must not despair; Hans might have been taken prisoner, and the Germans would know him only as John Mercer. Yes, she said, with a flash of scorn, Louisa had mentioned that already. “If he is a prisoner, they will realize soon enough that he is Jewish. They will see that he is circumcised.” Now if he wouldn’t mind she would return to their game.

Two weeks later, a letter came for Trudl from her sister; Hans had been confirmed dead. “At least he died with honor,” Trudl said to Rolf that night. “At least there is that. He died as a soldier. Not as a prisoner in the
Lager
.” And Rolf, whose clearest memory of his cousin was of Hans telling him that his missing cat was probably hanging in a butcher’s shop, felt that she was reproaching him.

On the morning the Allies took Cologne, Louisa went to Trudl’s apartment and, getting no answer to the bell, used her key to let herself in. She called her mother-in-law’s name several times before opening the door to the bathroom, where she found Trudl, her hair neatly covered by a hairnet, lying in the tub, wearing her wedding ring and the pearls her father had given her when she was married, the skin of her narrow body shriveled and puckered from the bathwater in which she had drowned.

“I didn’t want you to see her like that,” Louisa said, when Rolf asked that evening why she hadn’t called him
right away. Instead she had managed somehow to lift Trudl up, carry her to the bed, dry her off, and cover her with her robe and a blanket. After she phoned Rolf and told him to come, she had also phoned the doctor, even the funeral parlor. When he got there, she was waiting for him in the doorway and led him by the hand into the apartment; she made him sit down on the couch. “She was so unhappy,” she said. “At least now she won’t be unhappy any more.” But he could not accept this as consolation. His mother had never spoken of being unhappy. Only later, when he could not sleep, did he wonder if Louisa had meant something else. Maybe Trudl had drowned herself deliberately. Maybe she had left a note, and Louisa had hidden it. When he asked Louisa, the next morning, he thought she hesitated for a moment before she said no.

“What did you talk about with her? You can’t just have played checkers all the time.”

“Once,” Louisa said, smiling at the memory, “she told me about the first time she met your father. About how she was strolling with her sister in the park, and he rode up beside them on a chestnut horse and doffed his hat to her.” Rolf tried to remember if his mother had ever told him that story; he thought not. She had never been demonstrative with him; he and she had been alike that way. His father had been the emotional one. Even as a child, he understood that Sigmund, and the effort to keep him calm, required too much of her attention for there to be much left over; he himself had better not trouble her too much. Now he wished he had found more for her to do in New York; he should have encouraged her to find some outlet for her energies, her organizational skills.
He had bought her German books sometimes, from the stalls on Broadway, near his office, but she never gave any sign of having read them. Louisa brought her American ones from the library, but she never spoke of those either. He saw that as the war had dragged on, and especially after the telegram about Hans, she had spoken less and less, as though speech itself were an effort for her.

At the funeral, in the unfamiliar synagogue on Dyckman Street, the young rabbi, who had never met Trudl, tried to compare her to the children of Israel. Like them, he said, she had been forced to leave her homeland and wander in the desert before arriving in the promised land. Then, as though realizing that the analogy would not hold, he hurried the eulogy to its end.

A dozen of the refugees who had known his mother were in attendance, seated on the opposite side of the sanctuary. After the service several of them came up to him to offer their condolences. A small lean woman with bright blue eyes, whom he could not place for a moment, approached him. She had spoken to his mother only the previous week, she told him.

“Our apartment is very near here. Will you come back and have some coffee and cake? Then we can speak truthfully of your mother.” He must have looked startled, because she clucked her tongue. “I do not mean I am going to tell you ugly secrets. I meant to remember her. After a funeral one should remember the dead.” At this she nodded swiftly, with a birdlike motion of her chin. He had remembered by then who she was: Sophie Joseftal, the doctor’s wife. He had seen her once or twice at his in-laws’ place over the years. And so
he and Louisa, with Louisa’s parents, went back to the one-room apartment on Inwood Avenue where she and the doctor lived, with its neat rose-colored couch that served as their bed at night, the furniture unadorned except for photographs of their two children. Their son, whom Rolf had helped get out of Czechoslovakia, was in his U.S. Army uniform. On the wall was a single painting, of a dark, gingerbready-looking house in the Black Forest.

“That was my family’s summer home,” Sophie said. “Your mother visited us there one year, when we were at school together. She sketched all the scenes in the vicinity, and painted them too, she was very artistic.” He had never known that, Rolf said. “Oh, yes, even my father, who knew something about art, thought she was quite talented. We used to tease her that she would be famous one day. But her father would not permit her to attend art school; that was something young ladies didn’t do then. And then she was married, and the war came, and Sigmund became very moody. Perhaps she had no more time for such things.”