Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel (40 page)

Read Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel Online

Authors: Thaisa Frank

BOOK: Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel
10.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Elie never found a way to take Dimitri to Denmark. She went to a safe house in Berlin and stayed there until the city began to burn. For a few moments Elie and Dimitri saw preternatural brilliance from their window—an unholy illumination of roofs. Then flames leapt over chasms as if they’d lost each other and were reaching to reunite. A few days later when Berlin surrendered, Elie left the safe house, and she and Dimitri saw Berlin in a haze—not the filmy haze of the Compound, but the smoky haze of dust and rubble. Elie found an apartment someone vacated long ago—a four-room apartment with bombed-out windows and dead plants. The building had seven other apartments with new residents in every one, all of them living among artifacts of lives they hadn’t known, ranging from unfamiliar photographs to upright pianos. And since three of the residents spoke no German, they never asked Dimitri questions but played him songs, taught him dances, gave him extra food from their meager rations. Perhaps this was why Dimitri began to talk more and more—about his parents, about his favorite foods, about walks he liked to take.
In early autumn, Elie found a job as a translator in a hospital, an apartment with intact windows, another calico cat, and a school for Dimitri, who had developed a surprising gift for making friends. And all during this time she searched for Lodenstein. Berlin was an eerie switchyard where sometimes showing a photograph to a stranger led to a reunion.
Men and women whom Elie met—in restaurants, in banks, walking in the park—looked at Lodenstein’s photograph and nodded. She’d been to beer halls, apartments, offices, and looked through hundreds of files—files with names of people in the 19th century, files of pardoned officers. She even knocked on doors of tenants with the last name
Lodenstein
. Nothing.
The hospital where Elie worked was near the center of Berlin, and a few times on her lunch hour she walked through the Brandenburg Gate. Dust rose through its columns. They were pocketed with holes from grenades. Elie walked on to Wilhemstrasse and the burned, bombed hulk of the Reichstag: Here was the jail where Lodenstein had been thrown. And Goebbels’s office where Lodenstein had bargained. Elie watched birds fly around beheaded statues on the roof and sometimes went close to the boarded-up buildings, as if she must pay homage to Lodenstein and might even find him. Then she walked back through the befuddled city, smelling of lilacs and dust, lush with arching linden trees. Every cobblestone street had been blown to bits. She tripped over rose-colored shards.
Elie kept looking for Lodenstein—dragging Dimitri to the border of West Berlin on weekends or to different neighborhoods after school. No matter what their route, they saw houses with windows that opened to the sky, empty doorways that led to rooms without floors or smoky halls and shattered furniture. A few had only one side standing, as though they’d been amputated.
Elie looked at every house, as well as every man on the street. One was as tall as Gerhardt. Another had his blue eyes. Another his shambling walk.
Tonight a man with brown hair waved, and Elie waved back. She knew him because they’d been in the same safe house. But strangers waved, too, because they assumed they’d met in a dark basement during a bombing. The long hours in the shelter—the dark, the anonymity—had compelled strangers to confide secrets. It was not that different from the Compound at night.
Elie stopped a neighborhood policeman to give him an illegal order for a
Brotbaum
—bread tree—the only way Berliners could get enough food. Tonight she’d written:
chocolate, fresh bread, potatoes in exchange for translation of Polish, French, Dutch, German, English, Russian, Czech, as well as expert advice about finding missing relatives.
As always, Elie walked slowly, hoping that when they came home, Lodenstein would be waiting on the steps. She imagined him in his rumpled green sweater—tall, tense, looking in her direction. But the steps were empty. They were always empty.
She began to search for her keys and heard excited voices inside the foyer. They were male voices and spoke with urgency.
Elie rummaged through her purse, found her keys, dropped them, and waited while Dimitri found them in the dark. She worked the lock and clamored to the landing as though she’d been trapped in ice, racing—as she always did—with anticipation. She was sure one of the voices had Lodenstein’s pace and timbre—the way he emphasized words when he was making a point, or talked quickly when he sensed danger.
But all she found were her landlord and another man, a man who was not Gerhardt Lodenstein, talking about the price of potatoes.
Two months later, Elie took Dimitri to the least bombed out place she could find—a neglected city park where grass had begun to grow in patches. It was a damp spring evening; the air was filled with the smell of lilacs and moist earth, and she and Dimitri passed through a rusted wrought-iron gate to an enclosure. Dimitri carried two fresh roses, and Elie carried—with some difficulty—a rough piece of granite. She put the granite in the earth and placed a white rose on top of it. She had tied her frayed red ribbon around the stem of the rose. Engraved on the stone were the words:
Gabriela. You are always with me. Your loving sister, Elie.
Is she really dead? Dimitri asked.
Yes, said Elie. Why?
I don’t know. I just wondered.
Elie knew why Dimitri wondered. He lived in tenuous hope because he didn’t know if his parents were alive. It was the hope of imagined reunions, and Elie lived with this hope every day, knocking on doors, going to beer halls, looking through files and letters that would have delighted Stumpf. The dead and the missing still haunted her: except now they were above the earth. Sometimes she wondered what had happened to the crates. Sometimes she thought about the Scribes: what had happened to
Dreamatoria
; if Gitka and La Toya were still together; if Maria and Daniel were writing each other. She remembered the twilit room, the pounding typewriters, the kerosene lamps, the cold. But she always returned to Lodenstein.
Now she lit incense by the grave. It smelled cold and sweet, reminding Elie of childhood cathedrals in Poland, where Gabriela poked her during Mass when she fell asleep. It was unthinkable that she had been killed—something she couldn’t tell Lodenstein or even Asher. For this was the truth about her sister, told by a friend who had seen it ten years before the war:
Gabriela had been marched to a small town square near Berlin and shot almost seven years before the Reich came into office. Her head rose up again and again in a pool of her own blood, and her body had been carted off in a wagon and dumped somewhere in a field.
She had been in the earliest part of the Resistance—intercepting messages and sending them to England, starting to forge passports.
You should help too
, she’d told Elie more than once. As soon as she heard the news, Elie had gone to the town to look for Gabriela’s body, not believing her friend who said it was dragged off in a cart. But all she saw was a rust-colored stain in a town square surrounded by linden trees. A few months later she left Freiburg, with only a note to Asher and the university. She began to go to Party meetings. She charmed her way into the inner circle of the Party until she found Goebbels, who needed a linguist. She was driven to rescue as many people as she could—an impossible, insatiable penance for Gabriela’s death.
Are we done? said Dimitri.
Not quite, said Elie. She handed him the fresh red rose.
But she’s not my sister!
It’s for all the people you love.
What if I don’t love anybody?
I love you enough for both of us, said Elie.
She leaned down and hugged Dimitri. He hugged her back. Now give this to my sister, she said.
Dimitri put the rose on the grave.
Do you remember how you found me? he asked.
I’ll always remember, said Elie.
And how you brought me to that place?
I’ll always remember that too.
And how all those people wrote letters?
I remember.
Dimitri stepped back and looked at the grave. That guy with the chins made me write them, he said. To kids. Did you write letters too?
Only one, said Elie. But I kept it in a notebook.
As for the trunk, it began a diaspora: First to a Russian refugee camp with Daniel and Asher. Then across the Atlantic to New Jersey, where Asher’s sister taught piano lessons on a tree-lined street in Hackensack. Then to an apartment in Greenwich Village, then to one in Brooklyn, then to a typewriter shop on the Upper West Side. The trunk stayed in attics, in basements, in houses with yards, in cramped, one-room walk-ups. No one bothered to open it. The contents began to grow rife with mold. Forgotten.
Asher remarried. He refused a teaching job, saying philosophy was only an endless series of invented arguments, and set up a typewriter repair shop on Broadway in the Upper West Side. Daniel got a doctorate in chemistry. Maria, who came to New York when she was nineteen, became an art historian. In their early twenties, they were married in a small ceremony in a Brooklyn temple. They kept the trunk but argued about throwing it away.
Why not the East River? said Maria.
Or a lake in the Berkshires? said Daniel.
But throwing the trunk in the water seemed unthinkable, and one hot summer day, when they couldn’t stand the sight of it, Maria and Daniel gave the trunk to Asher, who kept it in the back of his shop. It sat among the spools and ribbons, the keys, and dull metals.
It was Daniel and Maria’s youngest child who was responsible for opening the trunk. She was a surprise, an accident, born when Maria was forty-six. Her name was Zoë-Eleanor Englehardt—everyone called her Zoë. Zoë was thin, blond, liked mathematical puzzles, accepted the adoration of her older siblings with bemusement, and was fiercely independent. At least once a month, after school, she walked into her grandfather’s typewriter repair shop with the commanding presence of someone distracted by something important.
That trunk, she’d say to her grandfather. I need to see it.
Asher never encouraged Zoë to open the trunk. But even as he tried to dissuade her, she would pry it open, breathing the smell of moldy paper, the faint aroma of tea-rose. The top was covered with Ferdinand La Toya’s handkerchief; folded and refolded so many times it looked like the bare palm of someone thousands of years old. Zoë-Eleanor saw stamps of every color and nationality, and pictures of statesmen whose names had umlauts, cedillas, tildes, and graves. She saw letters in every imaginable language. Most were on thin, brittle paper; a few typed on thick ivory stock, with deep seals and official letterhead. Some were on vellum in old-fashioned, calligraphic handwriting. Beneath the letters were green notebooks that reminded Zoë of her own diary. There was also a manuscript her grandfather said almost sixty people had written, in a language only they knew, and he’d never translate because—he said with an ironic smile—translators are traitors.
There were also numerous objects: velvet roses shredded from age, empty perfume bottles, a blue and white coffee mug, two fur coats, five fingerless gloves, a lace blouse, an ermine scarf, a black lace corset, a silver hand-mirror, a broken wool carder, black cigarette holders, two maps, a gun, photographs, and a pair of glasses marked
für Martin Heidegger
.
When Zoë tried on the glasses she saw the world in a blur, a place with no distinct edges, and her grandfather told her to take them off. Everything in the trunk had come from an unbelievable place, ten meters under the earth, he said. It was a place that had saved his life and the lives of her mother and father, even though none of them wanted to talk about it. And it contained an infinite number of objects. Every time he closed the shop in the evening, Asher had to pull Zoë away.

Other books

El Fuego by Katherine Neville
Kilometer 99 by Tyler McMahon
King's Fool by Margaret Campbell Barnes
Night's Child by Maureen Jennings
Craft by Lynnie Purcell
Broken April by Ismail Kadare