Evergreen (61 page)

“After that, there was a change in Liesel, as if—I think she actually did put it into these words—as if it was a delusion to think you could ever straighten out such lives as ours, to go back again to normal living; that it was simply too difficult, too hard to believe in hope.

“Anyway, the boat came. It was a miserable old tub, scarcely seaworthy, but that was the least of our worries. The real one was the British blockade. We had to sail at night without lights. On deck we whispered.

“So we crept across the Mediterranean toward Palestine. The ship was crowded and filthy. People were seasick. Children were bored and crying and so many of the adults
hadn’t strength enough to be patient. Still they tried. And everyone was so afraid, so tense. We watched and strained for the sight of ships, the nearer we got.

“One day during one of our interminable talks, a man mentioned an encounter he’d had with a German-Jewish refugee, a solider in the American army. This man had a letter with a list of names from a certain Dr. Weissinger who had gone to America from Vienna in 1934. The list was of others from Vienna who were in New York, and Theodor Stern was on it. You see, in those times, it was important to write everything down, to bring people together, to know who might still be alive. You must know Dr. Weissinger, Theo?”

“He died a few years ago. Yes, he was one of the smart ones. He came here at the beginning when nobody believed how it would turn out.” Theo’s voice was unfamiliar to his own ears. It was a false, artificial voice. The true one would have howled and cursed and beaten the air.

“This man had copied the soldier’s list. And we saw your name, with the address where you had lived in Vienna, although none for New York. Still there could be no doubt.

“I told Liesel that as soon as we got to Haifa we could write, that it would be simple to find you. I myself could have traced you after she died. I don’t know why I didn’t. Perhaps because someone told me the authorities had informed you. Yet a lethargy comes over a person when there’s so much confusion and uprooting. One doesn’t know where to begin. And then one has to start making some kind of a living.

“We talked a great deal together, she and I. We sat on the deck until late at night. It was so hot and noisy below.”

“Tell me everything she said.” He thought he couldn’t bear to hear any more. Yet he knew that if he didn’t hear it all, afterward he would not be able to bear that, either.

“It’s hard to remember. One speaks of so many things in the course of days. And still, one doesn’t really say very much, does one? She did say several times, she said: ‘I hardly remember Theo. I remember things we did: the day
we walked down
Mariahilferstrasse
and bought the wedding rings. Theo wanted to buy them right away and I asked whether he wasn’t going to speak to Papa. He said of course, he was, but since we knew Papa was going to say yes, we might as well buy them now. I remember that,’ and she laughed. ‘But I can’t remember his face,’ she said.

“Oh, and she talked sometimes about skiing. She said she remembered especially a day in the Dolomites, how you skied all day and then played duets for everyone in the evening after dinner at the hotel. Things like that she remembered. And she said, ‘We were so young; how could we ever have been so young?’

“That’s how she talked. Often she would be silent for a long time. And I was too; I had my thoughts. We all did. It was a ship burdened with thoughts. Strange, all those heavy thoughts, on those marvelous, mild nights with the air like warm water on the skin.

“Except that last night. It began to rain, and the ship wallowed through a slow, heavy swell. A lot of people were sick, more than usual. We went up on the covered deck, she and I. The rain blew on us in a mist.

“‘It’s so clean up here,’ she said. ‘And I’m so filthy, Franz.’

“I remember protesting, saying the things one would say, and her arguing, ‘Why would anyone want to touch me again?’ and I arguing back as one would.

“And she said, ‘I wonder how many people have just slipped over the side of a moving ship at night?’

“ ‘What a morbid thing to wonder about!’ I told her. I was alarmed.

“She said that it wasn’t really, that it would be a pure way to die, going down into clean water … she used the word ‘clean’ so often … she said it would be like coming into a room waiting for your comfort, the covers turned down on the bed and the lamps low.

“I wasn’t sure what to think. After what we had endured such talk was common enough. We were all given to it at times. It was a pattern from which, as our hopes rose, we
gradually emerged. Still, I wanted to be cautious. I urged her to come below because it was late. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s stifling and dirty down there. At least up here in the air it’s clean and free.’ I said I would stay with her, then, and she protested, but I stayed.”

Franz raised his eyes. “Only, I fell asleep. Theo, I fell asleep. And when I woke up, she was gone. And that’s all there is.”

Beneath the shirts in the middle drawer he had laid the double photographs of his parents, still in the leather traveling folder that he had taken to Paris so long ago on his way to America. What impulse had, at the final moment, caused him to put them in the suitcase? If he had not done so, there would now be no record of their faces, except in the minds of those who had known them, and for as long as those minds survived.

Iris was still downstairs. They had driven home in silence; she had not even tried any words of comfort, and he was grateful for that, because there could be none.… He supposed, as he opened the folder, that she must have seen these when putting his clothes away. But she had never remarked on them and for that, too, he was grateful.

The photos of his parents had been taken in that time when youth turns gracefully into the pride of early middle age. His father wore the officer’s elegant uniform of the First World War, and with it the appropriately stern expression. His mother was dressed in the limp silk of the era, her overskirt edged with lace, her pearls waist-length. She was slender and stood tall. Young girls of her time were taught to stand that way, she always said. Had she walked straight and slender to the freight car, the van, or whatever vehicle had taken her to her death?

He studied them. For some time now he had been able to look at them. Then he slid his mother’s picture out of the case, removed what he had hidden beneath it, what he had not been able to look at, all these years.

She gazed up at him: smiling or not smiling? It was hard
to tell about the mouth, which turned up naturally at the corners. But the eyes smiled. They seemed, unless he imagined it, unless it was just the way the flesh happened to be molded, they seemed to hold mirth even when she had been quite serious or even angry. They were hazel eyes: cat-colored, he had used to tell her. The little boy was on her lap, holding a felt polka-dotted ball. He remembered the ball. He had bought it one afternoon on the Graben. Fritzl had rolled it under the sofa and they’d had to move the sofa to get at it. One leg was tucked out of sight; the other dangled from his mother’s lap. There was—Theo bent closer—yes, you could see a dimple in the round knee.

Liesel, darling Liesel, what did you ever do to anyone? And I thought you had died quickly. My God, how did you manage to live so long?

The bedroom door opened and the light from the hall filled the opening. Iris’ steps had made no sound. She came beside him and for a long minute examined the photograph. He saw fear in her face, as if she knew that something had changed and would change. He was sorry for her: wasn’t that crazy? To be sorry for Iris, who was alive?

“I swore at poor Franz,” he said.

“It’s all right. He understood,” she answered quietly.

Then he began to weep. She put his head on her shoulder and stood there holding him, and was very gentle, and did not speak.

Theo had been mourning for more than half a year. It was too much for Iris to endure. He was distorted and crippled with grief and she felt all the pain of his crippling.

That first night when they had left Franz Brenner on the sidewalk at Fifty-seventh Street she had offered to drive the car home, but Theo had walked to the driver’s side. She could still see his mouth, set like a gash or a scar upon his face; she could remember her own awful fear, not so much that they would have an accident, the way he drove, but that this night had done something to him that was irrevocable. And why shouldn’t it have done so?

The family gathered, encircling Theo. Papa had come to their house the next day and silently put his arms around him. Mama had cried—of course, she never restrained her tears—cried all over again for her brother and his family.

“Oh, that lovely child!” she said when they were alone. “I can see her now in the garden of Eli’s house. She had a velvet band around her hair, like Alice in Wonderland.” And she whispered in recollected horror, “I saw a girl raped in Poland.”

“You never told me!” Papa exclaimed.

“One wants to bury a memory like that,” she answered.

Eric was stunned. Of course he had known about the atrocities of the Nazis, but somehow, he admitted, they had always sounded a little exaggerated. Somehow.

Theo went back to the office on the second day. All that
first day or two Iris feared for him. She couldn’t have said specifically what she was afraid of, but she feared. She kept telephoning his office on pretexts, not asking to speak to him, but just to find out from the secretary in some oblique way whether everything was normal there.

At night she felt him lying awake. She heard him swallow a sob. But after that first night he wanted no comfort.

“I have a cough,” he said clumsily, and this foolish deception touched her almost more than anything.

With the children he became exceptionally gentle. His voice was tender even when he said the most ordinary things at table. “Steve, are you sure you washed your hands? Jimmy, you have to finish your milk before you may have dessert.”

Once she found him sitting with Laura on his lap and his arms around the two boys as if he were guarding them all. There was such an expression on his face! Something so resolute, fierce and sad! When she spoke to him he started; she had to repeat her words and she saw him blink, shaking his head to bring himself back to the room from wherever he had been.

Every evening now, although not in Iris’ presence, but when she was having her bath, she heard the drawer being opened and after long minutes shut again; she knew he had been looking at the photograph of Liesel and their child. Sometimes, coming down the hall and entering their bedroom unexpectedly, she could tell by his swift movement that he had just taken it out again. One day, for some reason, the action evoked in her not shock and pity, but irritation: “He’ll wear out the paper, handling it so much.” Immediately she was ashamed of herself and wished with utmost penitence, truly wished, that it were possible for her physically to lift his anguish and take it on herself.

She was deeply alarmed. How long could a human being carry such a heavy load? With all that he had to do at the office and the hospital? With a wife and three children, and now this other thing clouding his mind?

And she raged against the rotten world that had savaged such good and gentle people.

At what actual moment her sorrow began to turn toward resentment Iris could not have said. Was it in the third or fourth month, or the fifth, that she knew she could no longer stifle or deny the resentment? Perhaps it was the morning when one of Theo’s secretaries telephoned. Somehow, Iris had no idea how, the people at the office had learned the story.

“We’ve just heard what happened to the doctor’s wife,” the woman said. “It’s not believable in the twentieth century! We’re all so terribly sorry, and we want you to know that we’re trying to make things as easy as possible at the office for the doctor.”

Iris had thanked her with proper gratitude and hung up.
What happened to his wife
. Horrible, horrible and true. But now I’m his wife and I’m here. How long will this grieving go on? Everybody tiptoeing around Theo—my parents, Eric, those few of our friends who have been cold. An atmosphere of mourning, a house of mourning.

He had developed the habit of staying up late. Very well, she could understand his sleeplessness. She had tried staying up with him but her eyes had fallen shut and he had told her to go to bed, that he’d come up soon.

One night she had peered downstairs to see what he was doing. He was sitting in a chair staring at nothing, just sitting. Then she saw him get up and go to the piano. He began to play, very softly, so as not to awaken anyone.

Night after night she heard him playing. The sound of it drifted up the stairwell; mostly Chopin nocturnes, nostalgic music of summer gardens, of love and stars.

One night she raised herself on her elbow and looked at the radium dial of the clock: one-thirty. For two hours she had been lying there alone while her husband was lost in the music of another time and place, with another woman.

When he came upstairs and found her still awake, he moved toward her. She felt that he expected from her as
always an eager, quick response. But her desire struggled with humiliation. All the times of their lives when she had been so absolutely uninhibited, so free in expression of her passion for him, had he perhaps not been thinking of
her
, not wanting
her
at all? Had he been thinking of—