The German Girl (10 page)

The man paced slowly round the room, and as he did so, the current of freezing air expanded around him. I couldn’t stop trembling. I was going to have to run to the bathroom.

The Ogre waved to his two men to search the other rooms. Perhaps
they wanted to steal our jewels. It wouldn’t be hard to find them: they were in the box with the lonely ballerina on top, together with the Patek Philippe watch that Papa wore only on special occasions. Perhaps they were after the money Mama kept in one of her bedside table drawers. All our cash was there, apart from some she’d given to Eva in case of an emergency. The rest was in bank accounts in Switzerland and Canada.

The Ogre went back to the gramophone.

He lifted the arm with the needle and studied it intently. If he broke it, or if anything happened to the gramophone, Papa might have killed him. It was something he would never forgive.

“Herr Rosenthal is about to arrive,” said Mama, and I wondered how she could be telling them that when she knew they were there to take him away.

All of a sudden it became clear to me that it was not the money they were after, or the jewels, the paintings, or even Papa’s wretched gramophone: what they wanted were the six apartments in our building. First they wanted to scare us and then take them from us. No doubt the chief Ogre would move in, sleep in the main bedroom, take over Papa’s study, and destroy all our photos.

Silence.

The Ogre settled into Papa’s velvet armchair and began to stroke it as though testing the quality of the fabric. He took his time caressing the arm, staring intently at me all the while, telling me silently by this that he was willing to wait for Papa for as long as it took. He was comfortable and began to study the photographs of the Strauss family displayed on the walls around the room.

Until then I had never noticed how the staircase leading to our apartment creaked, but now it sounded as loud as church bells. The moment had arrived.

Silence.

The chief Ogre had also heard the footsteps and sat motionless, ears pricked. From where he was sitting, he dominated the whole room.

Another step, and I realized Papa was outside the door. My heart
was about to explode. Mama’s breathing quickened; I was the only one who could hear her soft moans from behind me.

I was going to shout “Don’t come in, Papa! The Ogres are here! There’s one sitting in your favorite armchair!” But I realized there was no point. There was nowhere for us to escape to. Berlin was a pocket handkerchief; they were bound to catch him sooner or later. And Mama was about to faint.

The Ogre and his entourage took up positions behind the door. I could hear the key scraping in the lock; it always got stuck a little.

Silence, growing longer and longer.

The delay disconcerted the chief Ogre, who exchanged glances with his men. To me, every second seemed like an hour: I even found myself wishing they would take him away once and for all—for him to disappear with them. A few more minutes like this, and I would be the one who fainted. I wanted to go to the bathroom; I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I didn’t want to be a witness to the humiliating spectacle that the Ogre had been carefully preparing for us, so that we would beg and weep disconsolately. Mama did not move.

The door opened.

And the strongest, most elegant man in the world came in. The one who put me to sleep and gave me a kiss whenever I was afraid. The one who hugged me, cuddled me, and swore that nothing would happen, that we would go far away, to an island that not even the Ogres’ tentacles could ever reach.

The look on Papa’s face showed how sorry he felt for us. He seemed to be asking himself how on earth he could have put us in such a position. We had already experienced something similar that November night when he was arrested. But this was the decisive moment. There was no going back, and he knew it. It was time for him to say good-bye to the woman he loved, to the daughter he adored.

“Herr Rosenthal, I need you to accompany us to the station.”

Papa nodded without looking the Ogre in the face. He took several steps toward me, trying not to glance at Mama, because he knew that
might weaken her. I was the one who could resist, who in the end would be without a father to protect her from ghosts, witches, monsters. But not from the Ogres. No one could defend us against them.

He put his arms around me and took hold of my icy hands. I could feel how warm his were.
Lend me some of your warmth, Papa. Chase this terror from my bones.
I hugged him with what little strength I had left. And I wept. That was what the Ogres wanted: to see us suffer.

“My Hannah, what have we done to you . . .” he whispered, his voice choking.

I closed my eyes tight. They were separating me from the man who until today had protected me; the one in whom we placed all our faith to save us. They were taking him away. Mama held me and drew me to her. I realized that, from then on, the weakest person in the family would be my only support. I still had my eyes shut tight, despite the tears.

“Don’t worry, Hannah,” I heard my father say. He was still there. Another second. Another minute, please. “Everything will be all right, my girl.”

Haven’t they taken him away? Haven’t they changed their minds?

“Look out of the window,” Papa said. “The tulips are about to bloom.”

Those were the last words I heard. When I opened my eyes again, he had vanished with the Ogre. The whole building could have heard me weep. I shouted out of the window:

“Papa!”

Nobody heard me. Nobody saw me. Nobody cared.

I could sense a whisper behind me. It was Mama.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked, her voice quaking.

“It’s routine,” I heard one of the Ogres say from the doorway. “We’re going to Grolmanstrasse police station. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to your husband.”

Yes, of course. They would send him back safe and sound. And he would return and tell us he had been treated like a fine gentleman. That, rather than water, they had served him wine in a big, warm, well-lit
cell. But I knew what was really going to happen: he would sleep in a crowded cell and go hungry. And if we were lucky, we would occasionally hear news of his wretched existence.

From the day they took Herr Schemuel, the butcher from our neighborhood, we’d had no news of him. There was no difference between him and my father. To them, we were all the same, and I was convinced: nobody came back from that hell.

I should have clung to him until he dragged me away, to have recorded that moment I could no longer remember, because I tended to erase sad moments from my mind.

Mama rushed to her bedroom and closed the door. Terrified, I ran in after her and saw her opening drawers and pulling out documents that she scanned hastily.

“I have to go,” she muttered. “I’ll see you later.”

I couldn’t believe it.
Where are you going, Mama? There’s nothing we can do. We have lost Papa!
But it was no use: with the strength of the Strauss family, which had been suppressed until that moment, Mama plunged into the street after months of shutting herself in. She slammed the front door and vanished, unconcerned about her makeup, whether her shoes and her handbag matched, if her dress was properly ironed, or if she was wearing the appropriate springtime perfume.

I closed my eyes again and told myself: you must not forget this. I started to list everything I had to engrave on my memory: the brocade wall coverings, the light in the hallway, the velvet armchair, Mama’s fragrance. Even so, the most important thing escaped me: Papa’s face.

I was all alone. In an instant, I knew what it was like to be without my parents. And I also knew it would not be the last time.

A
unt Hannah lost her nephew, her only descendant, her last hope. I lost my father.

Until I was five, I always hoped Dad would come in one day without warning, just like that. Every time the front door buzzer rang, I used to run to the door to see who was coming.

“You’re like a little dog,” Mom would scold me.

He left a huge world map that I hung on the wall over my bed. I imagined Dad traveling to exotic countries in jet planes, nuclear submarines, and zeppelins. I could see him climbing Everest, bathing in the Dead Sea, emerging from an avalanche of snow on Kilimanjaro, swimming across the Suez Canal, going over Niagara Falls in a canoe. My father was an imaginary traveler who one day would come to find me and take me with him to undiscovered places. A huge adventure.

Until one cloudy September day: the fifth anniversary of the fateful day on which Dad chose to disappear. My school had organized a ceremony, and in the auditorium, packed with children, somebody read out a list of the disappeared. Dad’s name was the last on it. I sat there like a statue; I had no idea how to react. The children in my class began to hug me, one by one.

“Anna lost her father,” the teacher declared solemnly when we were back in our classroom.

“Those of us who lived through that day will never forget what we were doing at that time of the morning,” the teacher began to say. She kept breaking off and looking at us to make sure we were paying attention.

“That morning I was in my classroom, when I was called to George’s office. Classes were suddenly suspended and the children sent home. There was no public transport, the bridges to Manhattan were closed. A friend picked me up here at school, and I spent the night at her house in Riverdale. Those were such anxious days.”

The teacher’s eyes brimmed with tears. She searched for a handkerchief in her pocket and continued.

“Many people at our school lost family, friends, or someone they knew. It took a long time for them to recover.”

I tried to react calmly, although I was completely shaken.

On the bus ride home, I sat by myself in the back row and started to cry silently. The children in front of me were shouting, throwing pencils and rubber erasers at one another. I slowly realized that, from then on, to the others, I would be the poor little girl who had lost her father one day in September.

Mom was waiting for me at the entrance to our building. I got off the bus without saying good-bye to the driver and walked to the elevator without even looking at her. When we reached our apartment, I confronted her:

“Dad died five years ago. The teacher said so in class.”

When she heard the word
died
, Mom jumped, but she recovered immediately, as if to show that the news did not affect her that badly.

I went to my room; I had no idea what Mom did. She had no energy; maybe she wasn’t even interested in giving me an explanation. Her mourning was over, while mine was just beginning.

Later on I went into her darkened room and saw her there, still in her clothes and with her shoes on, curled up like a baby. I let her get some rest. I realized that, from then on, we would talk about Dad in the past tense. I had become an orphan. She was a widow.

I started to dream of him in a different way. To me, it was as if somehow he was still on a faraway island. But to Mom, for the first time, he was really dead.

Every September, mechanically, I think of how Dad left the apartment one sunny morning, never to return. So am I.

That day when I was only four and a half years old and learned how Dad had disappeared, I stopped being a little girl and retreated to my bedroom with his photograph. Before then, there were parks and trees, people selling fruit and flowers on Broadway street corners. Before, we used to go out for ice cream in spring, summer, and even in winter. Mom had promised to teach me to ride a bike in Central Park. She never kept her promise.

With her head sunk in the pillow and her voice a weary monotone, Mom told me what happened that awful day in a litany that frightened me. Every September, her voice comes back to me like a prayer repeated without alteration.

When the alarm went off at six thirty in the morning, Dad’s eyes were already wide-open. He turned over to make sure that Mom was still asleep, though, in reality, she was pretending. She had spent the night feeling sick, with headaches and trips to the bathroom.

For a few seconds, he sat on the edge of the bed in silence. He took his dark-blue suit into the bathroom to get dressed without making noise. He showered, shaved in a hurry, and just as he finished buttoning his shirt, he
noticed a drop of blood close to his crisp white collar. He pressed his index finger against the tiny cut and then checked the mail—he’d left the letters in a pile as usual—and took two envelopes with him, Mom insists: one from his work and the other from his trust fund. He checked that Mom was still in bed and closed the door very carefully behind him.

She was planning to tell him the good news that night. She had waited three months because she wanted to be sure it wasn’t a false alarm. My mother doesn’t like premature celebrations. She could have told him on one of the many early mornings disturbed by the queasiness of the first three months of pregnancy. The doctor had confirmed she was twelve weeks along the day before. There were all the signs.