Crossing the Borders of Time (52 page)

Pursuing her interest as best she could, Janine thus resigned herself to becoming a physician’s aide and attended a medical trade school. It was a place, coincidentally, where one of Alfred Dreyfus’s granddaughters turned up as a classmate, her father Pierre earning a living by lecturing to American audiences about the Dreyfus affair. For Janine, a scholarship helped pay tuition, and she worked after class as a secretary in the school office. But the daily drudgery of school, bologna sandwiches at a lunch counter, work, and evenings with her parents left her eager for change, especially after Trudi became seriously involved with a man, Heinz Rawitscher, whom both sisters remembered from Freiburg.

Two years older than Norbert, Heinz had first met the girls in the 1930s as members of the Bund Deutschjüdischer Jugend, one of the social groups organized for young German Jews excluded from joining their Aryan classmates in mesmerized ranks of Hitler Youth. The sisters recalled Heinz as a very good-looking fellow—a dapper dresser with regular features and a friendly, placid demeanor. His family had owned a department store, the Kaufhaus Modern, at the center of town. But during the Reich, the family store was Aryanized, Heinz’s father died, and in 1944 the Nazis murdered his mother and sister.

Heinz had saved himself by leaving Freiburg for nearby Basel at age sixteen to learn the trade of an auto mechanic in Switzerland, hoping a skill would speed an American visa. Three years later he bravely moved to New York on his own, adopting a new name, Harry Rawlings, for his new country. One of the few eligible men not caught up in the war, having been spared the draft for medical reasons, Harry visited the Gunzburger girls shortly after they came to the city. A few days later he sent a postcard saying that he had enjoyed seeing the sisters again and eagerly hoped to continue their friendship. That Saturday at eight p.m., he wrote, he would be waiting under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel.

“
Here’s hoping that one of you will show up!
” Harry invited indiscriminately. In response, Trudi opted to meet him—just as well for Janine, who found his inclusive approach to them both unappealing. For her, romantic interest required a challenge. It was not in her nature to value a man too easily won, and this, by the time she met Len, made him all the more intriguing to her. As with Roland, her desire was piqued in direct proportion to her efforts to win him. If Len was soured on marriage—he never intended to marry again, he frankly warned—well, she would work to make him want to propose! The fact that he was uncommonly handsome and irresistible to other women only added zest to the chase. He was forceful, witty, and insatiably curious, and he gave the impression he could conquer the world. He was a man to rely on, a take-charge guy who would always protect her.

After all she had learned in Europe of evil and madness, she found appealing his soaring trust in human achievement and the boyishly optimistic idealism that he seemed to claim as an American birthright. Moreover, for Janine, the fact that Len was American born carried its own significant value. The person she always met in the mirror still felt—as Hannah Arendt similarly grumbled to her former lover Martin Heidegger in Germany, years after
she
had fled to the United States—like a “girl from a foreign land.” By the time Janine considered marrying Len, she was determined to shed her foreign accent, along with the hated refugee label. If she couldn’t return to France and Roland, she wanted to
be
American, to be married to an American and cultivate American friends. She wanted finally to begin her life, to claim her role as a citizen and belong where she lived. She was suddenly sick to death of waiting for an impossible dream. And if Leonard’s modest
ostjüdischer
background displeased her parents, as she knew it would, part of her relished the prospect of retaliating for their rejecting Roland strictly because he wasn’t a Jew.

As she balanced her fantasy life with Roland against the idea of marrying Len, Janine made the selfish mistake of telling her new suitor about his past rival, a confession with permanent impact on the course of their marriage. Even now, she cannot explain her motive beyond that she thought making him jealous would only help to stoke his desire. But after hearing enough about the first man in her life and about the pain she had suffered when forced to leave him behind, Leonard wanted to see his rival’s picture. Then he decreed a “tearing-up party” aimed at expunging Roland from her heart. It was an event so traumatic, so engraved in her mind, that Janine never forgot the tan skirt and green turtleneck sweater that she wore on the night of the ritual destruction, five months after they started dating.

They were sitting on the couch in her parents’ living room when Sigmar emerged from the kitchen with a knife and an apple. “I always eat an apple right before going to bed,” he observed, signaling Janine that the hour had come for her guest to depart. But after Sigmar retired to the bedroom, Len insisted she bring out the box in which she’d saved Roland’s pictures, as well as the letters he’d sent her in Cuba. Inspecting them all, Len then demanded that she destroy them. Perhaps he was right, she reflected. Perhaps now, almost five years since leaving Roland, it was time to wrest free of the past and move on. This would hurt, but it also might help.

“Are you in bed yet, Hannele?” Sigmar called out from the bedroom. But she ignored him, her eyes fixed upon Leonard as he began to ravage the box on the coffee table. One by one, he had her tear up all reminders of the man she had loved since her first teenage years. What she did with regret at first slowly caught hold, providing at last the relief of catharsis. Fueled by years of unexplored rage and pent-up desire, she ripped through the face she adored and silently cursed him for every day she had rushed for the mail without ever finding the letter she needed.
Assez
,
genug
, time enough, she thought fiercely. Rip.
Bastante
. In every language she’d learned on her travels. Enough, enough. Rip. Too late now. She tore straight through his face and stared at her hands as if they belonged to somebody else. Here, the dark eyes. She remembered his habit of blinking them both tightly shut, as if looking for some interior peace, and how that had felt like rejection to her. Now her own eyes were welling with frustrated tears. Rip. She tore that piece in half one more time and studied the ragged fragment in her left hand, just a flattened shred of his magic smile.

She remembered his lips in the Lyon movie theater, where their own hushed adventure was far more exciting than anything flickering on the screen—hiding in darkness, finding each other. How she had thrilled to the touch of his hands on her skin! She remembered his kisses, kisses that drifted slowly and gently and others that were hot and demanding, that seared her neck and traveled along the curve of her cheek toward her own waiting mouth, wanting him and waiting for him.
Always
waiting—waiting and waiting for far too long. In Mulhouse and Gray, Lyon and Havana, and now in Manhattan. Rip, rip, rip, rip, rip. The pile of torn paper and photos mounted before her, a scattered mosaic transformed into love’s funeral pyre.

Len’s dark, shining head was bent over the box as he rummaged through the shards of her past like an antiques dealer at a second-rate tag sale. But then she spotted her dear and final shot of Roland adrift on the sea in his small rented boat, snapped from the
Lipari
’s deck on that last unbearable day she was pulled from his arms. Still in the box, too, was the twelve-page letter Roland had slipped in her pocket—her arms already so full of mimosas—at her anguished departure from the quai de la Joliette in Marseille. No! No! That precious picture, that beautiful letter, both were treasures she had to preserve.

“Would you like something to drink?” she suggested offhandedly, occupying herself by picking up bits of paper and snippets of photos that littered the carpet. “There’s juice, or I think Father might even have an open bottle of white wine in the icebox.” But uncharacteristically, she made no move to get up and serve him, so Leonard stood, hesitated, and then went to the kitchen. In his absence, she wiped her eyes, took the snapshot, and dropped it behind the brown brocade couch. “There are glasses in the cabinet across from the icebox,” she called toward the kitchen, hoping that Len wouldn’t detect the catch in her voice. Then she seized the thick envelope, Roland’s promise for their future together, pushed it behind the couch as well, and sighed with relief as she heard it graze the wall and slip to the floor.

“
Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it
.” She had long since memorized Roland’s predictions and sacred pledge. “
I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt …
”

That March, Janine clipped a Dorothy Dix column from the
Daily Mirror
and sent it to Leonard, stapled to a sheet of white typing paper on which she had inked only three words: “
BEWARE!!! Brother BEWARE!!!
” The columnist offered guidance on marriage that Janine passed along:

Son, when you think about getting married, how much serious consideration do you give the matter? Do you try to use as much intelligence in picking out a wife as you would in buying an automobile? Remember this: That the success of every marriage depends more upon the husband than it does upon the wife, for the man does the picking and he is responsible for the kind of a girl he marries; whereas the woman has to take what she can get, and very often he isn’t her taste at all. So give as much real thought to selecting your wife as you do to buying your new car.

The answer Len sent back to her on March 27 was written as if to the columnist, care of the newspaper’s “
Eros Department
.” It began by confessing, “
Your provocative article left me in a state of considerable dilemma
,” and wound up expressing veiled concern over Janine’s prior broken heart:

The model I expect to get this spring is very nice and I think it can be looked upon as a great bargain. It has many interesting gadgets which although not new or of radical design seem to be in properly functioning order. It is neither a sport model nor fancy or luxurious but seems to combine those features of solid comfort, stability, graceful contours and simplicity that appeal to sane judgment.… She takes the bumps beautifully and eliminates all fears of possible dangerous roads ahead. The motor purrs like a kitten when idling languorously, the transmission goes into high gear without difficulty and the brakes are almost too good.

The other day, however, I learned from the creator of this wonderful device that before going completely nuts over it, I should consider carefully the effects an accident has had upon it. Closer, more deliberate scientific examination revealed that it had suffered extensive damage.… It is necessary that I come to a decision soon as someone else may take up my option but I find myself agonized into a state of despondent perturbation, as is evident from the foregoing considerations. I appeal to your sage advice in the hope that you will be able to assist me in the expedient solution of this pressing problem.

In response, Janine concocted a scheme designed to encourage Len to propose. I was shocked as a child when she told me about it, as was he, in fact, when eventually she confessed it to him. In the long run, my mother later concluded, “I fooled myself also by acting so rashly. I didn’t know the man I married.”

The trick made use of the fact that Aunt Marie had arrived from Lyon that spring to spend several months in New York. Still mourning the deaths of Mimi, Bella, and her three grandchildren in the slaughters of Auschwitz, Marie had sailed to the States on the SS
Mauritania
yearning for solace from her brothers Sigmar and Heinrich and her sister Sara in Cleveland. When Janine asked to borrow her return steamship ticket to play a little joke on her boyfriend one night, Aunt Marie was amenable, if somewhat surprised.

“I’ve booked passage back to France,” Janine announced to Leonard, coyly flashing the ticket in the hope her unexpected plans to leave the country might prompt a proposal. She counted on him to remember Roland.

“You would go without me?” Len asked, every bit as taken aback by the news as she had intended. He reached for her hand.

“Yes, why not? There’s really nothing to keep me here,” she replied.

“Well, I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’ll get some time off.”

“Out of the question. Can you picture what Father would think of our traveling together, not being married?” She shook her head and laughed at the prospect.

“Okay, then let’s get married.”

“You’d better take awhile to think about that,” she advised, her conscience getting the better of her.

“No need. I’ve decided.”

“Well, in that case, I guess we can stay right here,” she said, placing the ticket back in her purse. “We’ll need to find a place to live, so how would we pay for that kind of travel?”