Travellers in Magic (24 page)

“Was it us?”

“I don't think so.” I thought of our father, an American soldier she had met after the war. Did she ever regret marrying such an ordinary man? “Maybe it was—maybe it's Dad. She felt she made a bad marriage.”

“Maybe it was something about the war,” Sarah said.

We had asked, of course, what had happened to her in the war. She had been born in Germany, but her parents had managed to place her with a Christian family and get her forged papers saying she was not Jewish. She looked like what the Nazis had considered Aryan, tall and blond, so the deception had not been difficult. She had worked in a glass-blowing factory, making vacuum tubes. Her parents had been sent to a concentration camp and had died there; we had never known our grandparents.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Do you ever think—I sometimes wonder if I could have survived something like that. When I was twelve I thought, This is the age my mother was when she went to live with the foster family. And at sixteen I thought, This is when she started at the factory.…”

“No,” I said, surprised. She had never told me any of this.

“And what happened to our grandparents. I think about that all the time, that something terrible is going to happen. That's why I don't have any furniture, because at the back of my mind—at the back of my mind I always think, What if I have to flee?”

“To flee?” Perhaps it was the unusual word that made me want to laugh, and that, I knew, would have been unforgivable.

“She hardly told us anything. I used to imagine—the most horrible things.”

“You shouldn't think of things like that. She had it better than most.”

“But why didn't she tell us about it? Everything I know about her life I heard from Dad.”

“Because—Because she had to be secretive in order to survive, and she never got over it,” I said. I had never spoken about any of this before, had not known I knew it. “Once when I was a kid, and we were in some crowded place—I think it was an airport—I tried to get her attention. I kept calling, ‘Mom. Mom,' and she wouldn't look at me. And finally I said, ‘Hey, Margaret Jacobi,' and she turned around so fast … I thought she was going to hit me. She said, ‘Don't ever mention my name in a public place.' ”

“I know. And she would never fill out the census. She hid it away that one time, remember, and a man came to the door.…”

“And she wouldn't talk to him. He kept threatening her with all these terrible things—”

“And then Dad came home, thank God, and he answered it.”

“I thought they were going to take her away to jail, at least.”

I was laughing now, a little nervously, hoping I could make Sarah forget her terrible thoughts. But then she said, “Why do these things happen?”

“What things?”

“You know. Cancer, and concentration camps.”

But I had no idea. Why did she have to ask such uncomfortable questions? The best I could do was change the subject and hope she would forget about it.

The next week my father called and told me that my mother had asked for me. I hurried to the hospital and met him and Sarah at her bedside. But by the time I got there her eyes were closed: she seemed to be asleep.

“They had to give her a shot—she was in a lot of pain,” my father said. “They told me she was getting better.” He seemed barely able to contain his anger at the doctors who had given him hope. I could see that he needed to hold someone responsible, and I understood; I felt the same way myself.

My mother stirred and said something. “Shhh,” I said to my father.

“Did you feed the dog?” my mother asked softly.

We hadn't had a dog in years. “Did you—” she said again, her voice growing louder.

“It's okay, Mom,” I said. “Don't worry.”

“Good,” she said. “Sit down. I'll tell you a story if you like, but you'll have to be quiet.”

We said nothing. Her eyes opened but did not focus on any of us. “The princess came to the dark fortress,” she said. Her accent was very strong, the “th” sound almost a “d.” “It was locked, and she didn't have the key. Did I tell you this story before?”

She had told us so many over the years that I couldn't remember. “No, Mom,” I said softly.

“I'll tell you another one,” she said. “They went to the woods.” She stopped, as if uncertain how to go on.

“Who did?” I said.

“The children,” she said. “Their parents took them to the woods and left them there. Their father was a poor woodcutter, and he didn't have enough to feed them.”

To my amazement I realized that she was telling the story of Hansel and Gretel. She had never, as I said, told us conventional fairy tales; I think she considered the Grimms too German, and she avoided all things German after the war.

“The woodcutter's wife had convinced him to leave the children in the woods. But the children had brought along stones, and they dropped them as they walked. The woodcutter told his children that he and his wife would go on a little ways and cut wood, and they left the children there. The children went to sleep, and when they awoke it was dark. But they followed the stones back, and so they came home safely.”

I hadn't ever heard this part. The way I knew it Hansel and Gretel had dropped breadcrumbs. But all fairy tales were hazy to me; I had trouble, for example, remembering which was Snow White and which Sleeping Beauty.

“The woodcutter was pleased to see his children, because he had felt bad about leaving them in the woods. But his wife, the children's stepmother, soon began to complain about not having enough food in the house. Once again she tried to convince her husband to take the children to the woods. And after a while he agreed, in order to have peace in the house.

“The children overheard their parents talking, as they had done the last time, and they went to gather stones again. But this time the door to the back was locked.”

She closed her eyes. I thought she had fallen asleep and I felt relieved: her story had made me uncomfortable. “The door was locked,” my mother said quietly, one last time.

When I think of that summer I see my sister and me in her apartment in the hills, sitting on her couch and sipping tea. She was an elementary school teacher on vacation for the summer, and I had taken a leave of absence from my job to be available to my mother. By unspoken agreement we started going to her place whenever we left the hospital. We were trying to understand something, but since we weren't sure what it was, since our parents had chosen to reveal only parts of the mystery at a time, we had long circular conversations without ever getting anywhere. It was the closest we had been since childhood.

“What happened to Hansel and Gretel?” I asked Sarah. “The children drop breadcrumbs instead of stones the next time, and the birds eat the breadcrumbs so they can't find their way back, and then—”

“Then they meet the witch,” Sarah said. “I've read it to the kids at school hundreds of times.”

“And the witch tries to—to cook them—”

“To cook Hansel. Oh my God, Lynne, she was talking about the ovens. The ovens in the camps.”

“Oh, come on. She'd never even seen them.”

“No, but her parents had. She must have been trying to imagine it.”

“That's too easy. It was the children who were threatened with the oven in the story, not the parents. And just because you try to imagine it doesn't mean everyone else does.”

“I used to think they looked like those ovens in the pizza parlor. Remember? They took us there a lot when we were kids. Long rows of shelves, black and hot. I wondered what it would be like to have to get into one.”

I thought of the four of us, sitting in a darkened noisy pizza parlor, laughing at something one of us had just said. And all the while my little sister Sarah had been watching the ovens, imagining herself burning.

“Don't tell me you never thought of it,” she said.

“No, not really.”

“You're kidding. It happened. We have to face the fact that it happened.”

“Yeah, but we don't have to dwell on it.”

“How can you ignore—”

“Okay, I'll tell you what I think. If I had survived something like that, the camps, or having been in hiding, I would be grateful. I would think each day was a miracle, really. It would be a miracle to be alive.”

“And what about the people who died? The survivors feel guilty just for being alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I have books about it. Do you want to see what the ovens looked like?” She stood and headed toward her bookshelves, and I saw, alarmed, that she had a whole shelf of books on the concentration camps.

“No, I don't.”

She stopped but did not sit back down. “What must that be like, not to have a home?”

“She does have a home. It's here with us.”

“You know what I mean. A whole generation was wiped out, a whole community. All their traditions and stories and memories and customs.”

“She has stories—”

“But she made them all up. She doesn't even have stories of her own—she forgot all the ones her parents told her.”

“Come on—those were great stories. Don't you remember?”

“That's not the point. She'd lost everything. Dad was always having to tell her about Jewish holidays and customs. She'd forgotten it all.”

“She remembered Hansel and Gretel,” I said, and for once Sarah had no answer.

A few days later my father called to tell me that my mother was better. She would stay in the hospital for more tests, but he thought that she would be going home soon. I was surprised at the news; at the back of my mind I had been certain she would never return. Perhaps I had absorbed some of Sarah's pessimism.

The day she came home I invited the family over for dinner. My place was larger than Sarah's, with a dining table and dishes and silverware that matched. Still, when I looked around the apartment to make sure everything was ready, I realized I had pared down my life as much as my sister had. I had no close friends at the software company where I worked, I had never dated any man for longer than six months, and I had not lived with anyone since moving away from my family. I never discussed politics or gave my opinion on current events. In Berkeley, California, perhaps the most political city in the United States, I had never put a bumper sticker on my car, or worn a campaign button, or come out for one candidate over another. These things were no one's business but my own.

I had even, I saw now, started to drift away from Sarah. My sister's words came back to me, but they weren't very funny this time: What if I have to flee?

My parents had dressed up for dinner, as if they were going to a party. My mother wore an outfit I remembered, a violet-gray suit, a gray silk blouse and a scarf of violet gauze, but it was far too large on her. Her skin was the gray-white color of ashes, and her blue veins stood out sharply on her neck and the inside of her wrists. I had seen her in the hospital and was not shocked at the changes; instead I felt pity, and a kind of squeamish horror at what she was going through.

I don't remember much of that dinner, really, just that my mother ate little, and that we all made nervous conversation to avoid the one thing uppermost in all our minds. And that my mother said she wanted to hike through Muir Woods, a favorite spot of hers. Sarah and I quickly volunteered to take her, both of us treating her request as the last wish of a dying woman. As, for all we knew, it was.

It was sunny the day I drove my sister and mother across the San Rafael Bridge to Marin County and up Mount Tamalpais. The road wound up past the dry, bleached grass of the mountainside. Then, as we went higher, this began to give way to old shaded groves of eucalyptus and redwood. Light shot through the branches and scattered across the car.

We parked at the entrance to Muir Woods. It was a weekday and so the place was not too crowded, though the tourists had come out in force. We went past the information booth and the cafeteria, feeling a little smug. We did not need information because we knew the best places to hike, and we had packed a lunch.

There is a well-worn circular trail through the woods that brings you back to the parking lot, and there are paths that branch off from this trail, taking you away from the crowds. We chose one of these paths and began to hike through the trees. Squares and lozenges of light fell over us. The ground was patterned in the green and brown and gold of damp leaves and twigs and moss. We could hear a brook somewhere beneath us, but as we climbed higher up the mountain the sound faded and we heard only the birds, calling to one another.

After a while my mother began to lag behind and Sarah and I stopped, pretending we were tired. We sat on a rock and took out the sandwiches. When I gave my mother hers I brushed against her hand; her skin was as cold as glass. We ate in silence for a while.

“There's no good way to say this, I suppose,” my mother said. Sarah and I stopped eating and looked up, watchful as deer. “You children had an uncle. My brother.”

Whatever revelation we were expecting, it was not this one. “You would have liked him, I think,” my mother said. “He loved children—he would have spoiled you both rotten. His name was Johann.”

Uncle Johann, I thought. It sounded as distant as a character in a novel. “What happened to him?” Sarah asked.

“We were both adopted by a Christian family,” my mother said, and I saw that for once she would not need prompting to tell this story, that she had probably rehearsed it over and over in her mind. “You remember, the one I told you about. And then when we were old enough we began to work in the factory, making the vacuum tubes. Once I dropped some of the liquid glass on my foot—molten glass, is that the right word? I still have the scar there.” She pointed to her right foot. The scar, which I had never noticed, was hidden by the hiking shoe.