A Perfect Madness (46 page)

Anna sat in silence, not wanting to be
drawn into a discussion about the good and bad of a time and war
she knew nothing about; but Elka kept talking, slowly searching for
the right English words that would make better sense of what she
was trying to tell Anna. What came next from her was so unexpected
that it was Anna who sat spellbound, like a child listening to a
beautiful fairy tale. Born at home, Elka’s birth and terrible
deformities were kept secret by Maria from the authorities, who
would have taken her to be euthanized in the same killing wards at
Görden where Maria worked next to a troubled young doctor. When he
was transferred to Auschwitz, Maria returned to Mainz the next day,
never to return to Görden. She had helped the young doctor kill
hundreds of malformed babies and hundreds of the crazies, but
something snapped inside when Elka entered the world as she did.
From then on, Maria believed Elka’s terrible afflictions were God’s
way of combining punishment for her sins with a chance for
redemption. So Maria hid Elka from all eyes until the end of the
war. And even then, she allowed but few of her neighbors to learn
of her existence. Crippled beyond help, she had lived most of her
life in the apartment, except on sunny days, when Maria would take
her to the Rhine River for a joyous picnic. Later she would watch
the boats moving slowly back and forth on the ancient river, loaded
with tourists from America, all waving frantically to anybody who
might look their way. After Maria died, three years back, Elka
never left the apartment again. Instead she became even more a
recluse, existing on what meals the church would bring, reading and
watching an old television through the day and into the night. She
would die soon, too, Elka told Anna, and death would be welcomed.
God’s punishment for her mother’s sins had been with her too long.
There was little Anna could say that would make any sense to Elka
at this time, who somehow felt it was her given purpose in life to
suffer for the sins of her mother, and had reluctantly accepted the
role of doing so.

Anna looked at her watch. She had been
here for over an hour, enthralled by Elka’s unexpected life story,
rather than talking about the reason for her visit, of Julia’s
killing of Martin Drossen, an event that seemed incidental now and
of little interest to Elka. Walking quickly to the kitchen window,
she saw the Mainz taxi still parked by the building, the driver
fast asleep, and motioned to Elka that she was leaving. Elka pulled
herself up on the walker and shuffled slowly alongside Anna towards
the apartment door. As they did, Anna glanced to the right at a
small end table, barren except for a framed picture. From where she
stood, Anna recognized the young woman as Maria, but it was the
man’s face and eyes that captured her.

“
This must be Martin,” she
said, walking over to the table and picking up the
picture.

“
No, that is Dr. Erich
Schmidt, the doctor with whom Mother worked at Görden during the
war. They were very good friends.”

Anna was stunned. Was he her mother’s
Erich? Closing her eyes for a second, her memory brought up the
face of the stranger who had spoken to her a year ago on the
Charles Bridge in Prague. The stranger’s face was old and wrinkled
with years then, nothing like that of the young man in the
photograph. But their eyes were the same. And Elka’s, too, as Anna
now realized for the first time, looking carefully at her faded
listless eyes that once were bluer than a summer sky. Even as old
as she was, the sharpness of her features produced a striking
resemblance to the man, the deep-set eyes and sharp nose. Anna
struggled desperately to understand and accept the truth of what
was unfolding. Who Elka could be and her relationship to Erich
Schmidt overwhelmed Anna, and she asked if she might have a drink
of water. The only thing Anna knew for sure was that Martin Drossen
was not Elka’s father, though she claimed him to be.

“
Are you ill?” Elka asked,
taking a bottle of cold water from the Frigidaire and pouring a
glass for Anna.

“
No, I am tired, I
suppose, from too much traveling. Tell me, do you ever hear from
this Dr. Schmidt?”

“
Not anymore. He used to
call and ask how I was getting along and send a little money to buy
groceries and medicine, but it’s been over a year now without a
call from him. Perhaps he is dead.”

Anna could listen no further to Elka
and all that was being said and walked quickly to the door. Pausing
for a second to look at Elka’s strained and puzzled face again,
Anna thanked her for the time spent and left as quickly as she had
come.

Living through the conflicting
emotions of the long day had left Anna too exhausted to sleep.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she looked at the lonely box
holding all that her mother had been and began to cry softly. The
time was near when she would go to the Old Jewish Cemetery with her
mother’s ashes for burial next to Rabbi Loew’s grave. In many ways,
Anna’s journey to fulfill the promise to Julia seemed almost as
magical as that of Julia’s, because she had lived through the many
stories told by Julia as if they were her very own. But it was the
last story Julia whispered to Anna, the afternoon she died, that
gave meaning to what had happened the night they were in Prague one
year earlier. Julia had said nothing to Anna then, nor wanted to,
shielding her as she had always done from any unnecessary hurt that
might come her way.

From Abram’s last letter to Julia, she
had had great difficulty containing the joy leaping out from his
words that Erich was, indeed, very much alive. There was a
possibility that he too would be going to the medical conference in
Prague that she and Anna were planning to attend. Yet Abram’s words
carried a somber tone when he said there was much they should talk
about before she saw Erich, suggesting they meet privately away
from Anna. However, in her excitement, Julia paid little attention
to such a private meeting—a lost love that had simmered in her
heart for fifty years had grabbed her tired imagination, wiping out
all thoughts of dying. It was not the time to do so, she stubbornly
insisted to Anna, who felt reluctant to travel such a great
distance with Julia so ill. But to see Erich’s face and hold him
close once more warmed her tired body with a gentle love long
dormant in her. They would meet, she fantasized, where they said
their goodbyes fifty years earlier, two old lovers in the Old
Jewish Cemetery by Rabbi Loew’s grave. For many years after the
war, she had written letters to him, sending them to his Dresden
address and the German Medical Association and any other place that
might keep old records, but nothing came of them. No one knew of an
Erich Schmidt. In time, she thought him dead from the war, until
the letter from Abram arrived.

Julia met Abram, as he requested, at
the Continental Café, where she found him sitting alone, far back
in the crowded, smoke-filled dining room. He was not smiling, nor
did he try to when Julia approached. There would be room only for
the tears that truth often brings. Julia heard little, nor wanted
to, after Abram simply stated, “Erich was a Nazi doctor at
Auschwitz.” Still blinded by her love for him, Julia tried at first
to offer a feeble defense for such a terrible accusation, arguing
that he was simply one of many swept up at no fault of their own by
the extraordinary time and place they found themselves in. And it
was so long ago.

“
No one, not you or I, can
say with certainty what we would have done had we been there, too,”
she said, fighting back the tears. “It’s too easy to judge fifty
years later.”

“
He was a selector, Julia,
on the ramps at Auschwitz. I watched him for two years, though he
never recognized me, sitting like God choosing who would live or
die each passing day,” Abram responded, reaching to take Julia’s
hand.

Putting her hands to her ears to shut
out Abram’s voice, Julia shook her head back and forth.

“
Stop it, stop it, not my
Erich, he was too gentle and compassionate, we both know
that.”

Abram lit up another cigarette,
ignoring the finality of the harm it would bring to lungs already
ravished by tuberculosis, inhaled once, then looked straight at
Julia.

“
I came to Auschwitz with
your mother and father and was near them when they stood before
Erich and were selected for death by him.”

“
My mother and father and
Erich, together at Auschwitz?” Julia cried, as Abram’s words
crumbled the remaining walls of denial she had built to keep the
truth away.

“
Yes, they went together
to be gassed, immediately after passing him.”

“
Did he know who they
were?”

“
I think so, but he said
nothing to them, not even their names.”

There were no tears from Julia this
time. No thoughts of the terror her mother and father faced in the
moments before their death. Too many had experienced the same to
say one death was worse than another. It seemed so long ago that it
was difficult to imagine what it was like, or if it ever really
happened, by those that weren’t there. But Abram was. And the smell
of the burning bodies was written on his soul like the serial
numbers on his arm. It was the betrayal by Erich of her parents
that thickened Julia’s blood now with a hatred that was as distant
from who she was as the earth was from the sun. This was so because
only those who know love can be betrayed. And he had been loved
beyond reason by her and her mother and father. Julia slid her
chair back from the table to leave. She wanted no more words from
Abram about Erich.

“
I must go. Anna is
waiting and will be worried if I’m too late. Promise me, dear
cousin, you will think long and hard about coming to live with us
in America,” she said, hugging Abram, perhaps for the last time,
then leaving him sitting alone again.

Arriving back at the hotel, Julia
immediately walked to the bulletin board for posting messages and
calls, scribbled out four words, “Rabbi Loew ten tonight,” on a
piece of notepaper, wrote “Erich Schmidt” on the backside, and
pinned it to the board. If he is here, he will come, Julia muttered
to herself, leaving the room.

The time was nine-thirty. She would
walk to the Old Town square and watch the vendors hawk their wares,
especially those offering the brightly painted marionettes with
their joints dangling like wet noodles from a host of strings. She
had done so many times on Sundays as a child, enthralled as a
marionette was brought to life by its owner, only to die again when
he became tired with the play. Then she believed, maybe her life
and everyone else’s dangled from a thousand strings held in God’s
great hands as He looked down on the world’s stage. But as she grew
older, she knew it wasn’t God who held the strings, but a thousand
hands of people whose faces she would never see who set her course.
How many times had she sat here in the Old Town square with Erich
and her father, talking about this very thing. Life was much
simpler then, full of an innocence and wonder few people today come
to know or care to remember.

The medieval apostle’s clock struck
ten, and Julia watched while the hordes of tourists crowding the
square rushed to see the march of the apostles across the face of
the huge clock, a mechanical marvel that still seemed like magic to
her after all these years. Turning away, she hurried towards the
Old Jewish Cemetery, where she would be before the great clock
sounded ten bongs.

Fifty years had passed, and everything
seemed smaller and darker to Julia as she entered the cemetery. But
his voice was the same when he called to her softly from the
stillness that those long buried there demanded.

“
Julia, I am here, by
Rabbi Loew.”

“
I know,” Julia responded
firmly, slowly inching her way through the mass of gravestones to
where he was standing. The dark shadows cast across the graveyard
by the night lights of the synagogue played on his face like small
moving stage lights, adding an eerie dimension to the unfolding
scene.

When she drew near, Julia stopped. And
though Erich reached out to her, she would come no closer to him.
All she could see was his face, but that was enough. With age,
everyone’s face becomes their story, their history, and it was no
different with Erich. All that he had done and all that he became
fifty years ago was there to be seen. Frail and wrinkled beyond
belief, with eyes no longer alive, Erich stood before Julia more
than a broken man because he had no soul. Julia searched his face
for one tiny trace of the noble spirit that had captured her own
soul, but there was none. Only a thousand rivers of sadness could
be seen that once were wrinkles of joy. Though her heart was crying
at what he had become, she would not let him know.

“
You are still beautiful,
Julia. Age has been kind to you. You seem quite well,” he said,
wanting to move closer to her.

“
I am dying, Erich,
slowly, but with certainty from congestive heart failure. Two
years, perhaps less, is my time. It has been a good life, though,
and I am ready when God is. But tell me about all that has happened
in your life. Have you married?” Julia asked deliberately, hoping
Erich would begin to talk about his dark past.

“
No, I never married. And
you?”

“
The same. I was unable to
find you after the war. Where have you been living?”