Exodus: A memoir (31 page)

We walked around the city for a bit after that, stopping at every gelato stand until we had stuffed ourselves silly. Then we embarked on the long drive back, stopping at Hall-in-Tirol for an aperitif and then Seefeld-in-Tirol for a very late dinner.

On the way home, I brought it up.

“You know, you may not have realized it, but that story with the birds was kind of a metaphor for the whole idea of survival of the fittest,” I said. “You singled out the intelligent birds as the ones
deserving of being fed, and then made them dance for their crumbs. Kind of fits with your whole
Übermensch
thing, doesn’t it?”

“
Ja
,
of course. I’m a Nazi after all, how can I help it?”

“I think it’s funny that I’m the one who is looking out for the underdog, trying to feed the ones that can’t feed themselves, and you clearly expressed with your behavior an idea that you don’t necessarily agree with consciously or intellectually. What does that say about how our culture is ingrained in us? I clearly have a persecution complex after the way I was raised, but I wonder if possibly you were affected by the Nazi side of your family more than you realize?”

He shook his head impatiently. “We already agreed on this, no? That’s why I’m with you, for some
Wiedergutmachung
—reparations, right?”

“I don’t even feel that that’s funny anymore.”

“I should stop joking about it?”

“I remember reading about Katrin Himmler, who married an Israeli Jew, the son of Holocaust survivors, and she used to say that everything was great until they argued, and then she was a Nazi and he was a Jew who couldn’t get over it.”

Markus’s face showed no expression. His hands remained on the wheel as we sped down dark roads.

“Of course I don’t see you like that, as Himmler’s descendant. I know you’re not like that. Otherwise I wouldn’t even talk to you. It’s just that sometimes the voice in my head that screams
All Germans are evil
,
that voice I grew up with, it just kind of takes over.”

“
Genau
.
Understandable.”

I leaned over and kissed him, and stroked his neck. He had the most beautiful face. How could I really be so horrified by my
relationship with him in these odd, random moments when my whole body seemed to thrill in his presence?

The next day I felt a bit off. It was raining again. We decided to nap after lunch. I fell asleep for thirty minutes and awoke in the midst of what felt like the peak throes of a panic attack. I had never woken up in such a state. Before I even opened my eyes, I could feel my heart racing, my body trembling from the force.

I lay paralyzed with fear and shock for a few minutes before I was able to whisper to Markus, who was lying next to me reading a book. He had not noticed I was awake.

“Markus.”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Can you feel my pulse?” I asked. I didn’t want to seem crazy. I assumed that I must look ordinary on the surface, as I was lying still on the bed. One couldn’t see a racing heart.

“
Ja,
natürlich
,” he said and took my hand, looking at his watch.

After a minute, he looked over. “Quite fast,
ja
, especially since you’re lying in bed, no?”

“Markus, I, I—” I faltered. “I feel really sick.”

He sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just woke up in the middle of what feels like a heart attack.”

He looked at me with concern and immediately my anxiety let loose like a racing horse at the sound of a pistol shot. My heart was pounding even harder, and now I could feel my hands and legs getting numb. I started to hyperventilate.

He got up and came over to my side of the bed.

“I’m scared, I’m so scared,” I cried as I thrashed under the sheets, trying to shake off the sensation.

“Calm down,” he said, holding my arm and looking into my eyes. “What are you feeling?”

“Everything’s numb. Why does it feel so bad? What’s happening to me?”

“Just breathe,” he said.

I followed his breathing, deep and slow, even though it didn’t feel like it was helping. After about ten minutes I started to feel a bit more like myself, although still woozy. I sat up.

“You’re okay?”

“Yes, I think so. I need some air.”

He went back to his side of the bed and resumed his reading, as if nothing had happened.

Outside on the patio I reflected that no one had ever seen me panic like that except my ex-husband, who never understood what I was going through. No one had ever looked at me when I felt my craziest and made me feel that normal.

What had frightened me so much, I wondered? I knew only that it was time to leave. No matter how many beautiful visions I had encountered here, I was too uneasy to really enjoy them. Perhaps the fact that it was so lovely was the very thing that was disturbing me—did it have any right to be such a picturesque, fairy-tale-like region when it had been the birthplace of one of the greatest horrors in the world? As if I were looking through the lens of a Grimm brothers’ tale, I wanted the forests to turn dark and gnarled, the sky to be an angry purple, the brittle leaves to cut like glass. This place, I thought, should reflect what happened. To appear so innocent and calm was a wrongdoing on its part, an unforgivable betrayal.

But the only one to feel betrayed was me. Only I didn’t belong here.

We checked out the next morning and drove to Frankfurt, stopping only for lunch in a tiny town in Hesse. I had to move on to Berlin very soon, but I had decided to stay in Frankfurt for a day or two because Markus had arranged for me to meet his mother. I was curious to meet her because she had been raised by real Nazis. Although Markus had told me that she had always had a very troubled relationship with her family and their beliefs, I still wondered if I might detect any trace of her background imprinted on her character, the way mine was no doubt imprinted on me.

Ada had recently been widowed and was now living in the small apartment she had used as her private sanctuary throughout her marriage. It had a lovely garden out front and another in back with a little terrace, and that’s where we sat. Young pink climbing roses were carefully tied to the railing of the terrace; the plants were immaculately tended in attractive ceramic pots. Ada had pure white hair, large pale blue eyes, and very fair skin. Her home was perfectly tidy, and pretty objects and collectibles were displayed throughout. This reminded me instantly of my grandmother, and as we made small talk on the porch, I realized for the first time just how much I missed having an older person in my life, the way I used to.

“I wanted to ask you about your parents,” I said eventually, after we had licked clean a bowl of strawberries and cream. “I’m really curious what it was like being raised by them, and how you were able to turn out so differently and raise a son like Markus.”

“My parents hated everyone who wasn’t German, not just Jews. Even on his deathbed my father expressed no remorse. My mother could never stop talking about the time she kissed Hitler’s hand. Come, I’ll show you a picture of them.”

We walked into her little office, and there was an old sepia photograph taped to the side of a curio, showing a surprisingly diminutive couple walking their German shepherd in the rain, smiling from underneath their shared umbrella. His face seemed to disappear under his squashy hat and large, thick-rimmed glasses, but I could detect a decidedly prominent nose. He looked like the average middle-aged Jewish man buying a bagel on the Upper West Side. She was no different, with a narrow forehead and thick, dark eyebrows.

“They look more Jewish than most Jews I know!” I said.

“Right?” Ada laughed. “And with their German shepherd, so proud of themselves. They looked nothing like the ideal Germans they had in their fantasies.”

“But you do,” I said before I could help myself. “You’re so blond and blue-eyed. It’s interesting—Markus looks nothing like that.”

“Markus looks like his father.” Indeed, he had a tall, broad forehead but a large nose and dark hair. His eyes were hazel, but his smile was distinctly Bavarian, the upper lip coming out slightly over the lower, which lent him a look of perpetual bemusement.

“My generation was different. Back then, everyone was rebelling against their parents, against what they had done. We didn’t want to be anything like them. It didn’t help that my parents were brutal to me as well. My mother used to give me electric shocks as a way of disciplining me. I tried to accuse her of it when I was an adult, and she wouldn’t even discuss it with me. It was clear she
knew it was sick, that she was sick and compulsive and couldn’t stop herself from committing brutality.”

I remembered seeing all those photos of Hitler cavorting with children, reading how Nazis would go home and hug their wives. It never occurred to me that some of them might have been as cruel to their own offspring as they were on the job.

Markus drove me around the city for a short tour. I asked him if any of his siblings had turned out anti-Semitic, wondering if these patterns were in any way genetic, skipping generations and then popping up again out of context.

“My younger brother went through a phase when he was a teenager, but I think he’s mostly grown out of it.”

“What do you mean by ‘mostly’?”

“It’s how young people do their rebellion here. You know it’s against the law, and it’s considered politically incorrect, so of course that’s the issue that young people will pick as a way of showing they are going against the grain. It makes them cool. But it’s abstract for them; it’s not like they actually know any Jews. My brother is not an anti-Semite; he just makes an offensive joke once in a while.”

“I would say that’s an anti-Semite, Markus.”

“Every teenager in Germany is an anti-Semite then, because that’s what they do now, to be cool. They make politically incorrect statements, to show they don’t give a fuck, and since Jews are a sore topic here, they like to pick at the wound.”

“Would your brother disapprove of you being with me?”

“I don’t think so,” Markus said. “But it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“It would matter to me.”

We slept together on our last night in his narrow bed, neither of us moving from the position we fell asleep in, with his arms wrapped around me, and the humid summer air cooking us like chickens on a rotisserie. My head swam when I awoke. I had a train to catch to Berlin. He kissed me on the forehead. “Call me when you arrive,” he said. I nodded.