The German Girl (13 page)

The Adlon was the symbol of a majestic Berlin. Everybody wanted to stay there. Now they were all fleeing. The Ogres’ flags were draped from every balcony at the hotel and from the streetlamps in the surrounding avenues where we once used to stroll happily.

But we were leaving. That was what was most important. Luckily, there was nothing I felt attached to. Not to our apartment, or the park, or my adventures with Leo in the neighborhoods of the impure people.

I was not German. I was not pure. I was nobody.

I had to find Leo, and so I decided to take a risk: I would catch the S-Bahn again and turn up at his house at 40 Grosse Hamburger Strasse. I repeated it to myself so as not to forget it. That was in the neighborhood Mama had refused to move to, where all the impure of Berlin now lived. Leo could have waited for me outside our apartment block. He was not afraid of anybody, much less of Frau Hofmeister.

I got off at Oranienburger Strasse. When I reached the intersection with Grosse Hamburger Strasse, I kept my eyes on the ground, and I bumped into a woman carrying a bag full of white asparagus. I apologized, and I heard the woman grumbling behind me, “What is a pure German girl doing on her own in a neighborhood like this?”

When I reached Leo’s street, I had to get my bearings. On the right was the cemetery and the so-called Free School for the impure. His house was on the left, toward Koppenplatz Park. I finally knew where I was.

The buildings were piled together in a charmless way in three- or
four-story blocks that had identical façades, no balconies, all of them the same. Their mustard-colored walls were starting to fade because they had not been painted in years.

Here people walked about as if they had too much time on their hands. They were lost, disoriented. Two old men dressed in black stood in the entrance to one of the buildings. I could smell a sense of neglect and layers of sweat on jackets that were handed down without any real owner.

At least there was no smell of smoke, although there was still broken glass on the pavement. Nobody seemed to care: they trod on the shards and crushed them. The crunching sound ran down my spine.

In one shop, they had nailed up huge wooden boards to replace the windows smashed back in November. Someone had used black ink to make six-pointed stars on the wood, as well as phrases I refused to read.

I was looking for number 40; nothing else interested me. I did not want to know why the old men would not leave the doorway, or why a young boy, not yet four years old, was taking savage bites out of a raw potato and then spitting them out.

Number 40 was a three-story building painted a mustard yellow blackened by damp. The windows hung open as if they had lost their hinges. The front door, set to one side, had a smashed lock. As I climbed the narrow, dark staircase, the air inside was even colder. It was like stepping into a filthy refrigerator that stank of rotten food. The stairwell was lit only by a feeble naked bulb. Some children rushed down the stairs and pushed past me. I clung to the banister so as not to fall, and felt something sticky on the palm of my hand. I walked along the corridor with no idea how to clean it off. The doors to several rooms were wide-open. I imagined that, at some time in the past, this had been a huge apartment belonging to a single family. Now it was packed with the impure who had lost their homes.

There was no sign of Leo or his father. The last door opened and a barefoot man came out wearing a stained undershirt. I walked on warily. The man had the same nose, like a poisonous mushroom, and the six-pointed
star on his chest that I had seen on the cover of
Der Giftpilz
, the book we were forced to read at school. When he saw me, he stopped for a moment and scratched his head. He didn’t say a word, so I continued on my way, because I wasn’t afraid of him. Or of anybody.

I peeped inside one of the rooms, where they must have been boiling potatoes, onions, and meat in a tomato sauce. An old woman was rocking in a chair. Another disheveled woman was making hot tea. A little boy was staring at me as he picked his nose.

I understood now why Leo had not wanted me to see where he spent his nights. It had nothing to do with Frau Dubiecki, the landlady, being a dreadful crow. It was because of this sadness: Leo wanted to protect me from the horror.

You could have asked for help. You could have come and lived with us. I know it would have been dangerous, but we should have opened our doors to you, yet we didn’t. Forgive me, Leo.

I had reached the second floor, when someone grabbed my arm.

“You can’t be here.” The short woman with a huge belly thought I was not like them. That I was pure.

“I’m looking for the room where the Martin family lives,” I said in a feeble whisper, trying to hide the fact that I was really very afraid.

“Who?” she asked me scornfully.

“I need to talk to Leo. It’s urgent. A very serious family matter. I’m his cousin.”

“You’re not his cousin,” spat the tiny harpy, turning her back on me. Now I was the one holding her back by the arm.

“Let go of me!” she screeched. “You won’t find them. They scuttled away last night like rats with their suitcases. They didn’t tell me a thing.”

I didn’t know whether to cry or to thank her. I stood still for a few seconds, looked her straight in the eye, and couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. I ran down the stairs and out in search of the S-Bahn. I had no idea where I was heading.

On the sidewalk, the light blinded me, and I felt paralyzed by the street noise. The doorbell to a nearby bakery resounded inside my head
like a struck metal bar that kept on reverberating. The conversations of the passersby intermingled in my mind. A woman shouted at her child. I could hear the breathing in the bushy nostrils of old men as though it were amplified by loudspeakers, their breath reeking of liquor, their conversations in an incomprehensible language.

I was lost. I didn’t want to walk in the direction of the ancient cemetery with its headstones piled with small pebbles. Who on earth could want to live so close to the dead? There was no Leo to guide me. I had to find the station.

When I caught sight of it at last, I knew I was safe. I had to get away from there. I didn’t belong anywhere.
There is a lot you needed to explain to me, Leo, because I have all these questions I can’t ask my parents.

On the way back in the tram, every time the pole jolted against the overhead wire, I jumped. The other passengers were strangely calm; they stared at the floor, and all of them seemed to be dressed in gray. Not a single splash of color in this uniform mass. My cheeks were burning, my eyes were brimming with tears I forced myself not to let out. No one wanted to sit next to me; they avoided me. I knew I looked pure, but I was as gray as the rest of them. I lived in a luxury apartment, but I had been driven out as well.

I went home alone. Nobody was ever going to accompany me again.

I still couldn’t believe that Leo hadn’t had the opportunity to run to my home and risk knocking on our door to tell me his father was taking him to England or wherever, that he would write to me, that we would never be distant from each other, even if we were separated by a continent or an ocean.

All I could think of was how to prepare for a journey with no future to a small island that Leo had imagined in his watery maps.

It was a Tuesday. I should have stayed in my room, staring at the ceiling. It had all been a dream, or, rather, a horrible nightmare. When I woke up the next morning, Leo would be there as ever, with his enormous eyelashes and tousled hair, waiting for me at noon in Frau Falkenhorst’s café.

When I pushed open the apartment door, I saw Papa standing at the window, staring at the tulips. Now he was the one who hardly ever left. He retreated to his study with its dark wooden panels, his back to the photograph of Grandpa with his bushy moustache and the gaze of a general. He had been emptying the desk drawers, throwing hundreds of bits of papers into the waste bin: his studies, his writings.

I went over to him. He kissed me on the head and went on peering out into the garden. He was bound to know where they had taken Leo, and whether he and his father had managed to get the permits they needed to disembark in Havana.

“What about Leo and his father?” I dared to ask.

Silence. Papa did not react.
Stop staring at the flowers, Papa. This is important to me!

“Everything is fine, Hannah,” he replied without looking at me.

That meant there was no good news.

I went into Mama’s bedroom. I needed someone to tell me what was going on. Whether or not we were leaving, if the journey was still happening. She was the one who now went out every morning to arrange things.

“Everything is settled,” she confirmed. “There’s no cause to worry.”

We had our passages and had obtained the permit to disembark—the Benítez—for Papa.

“What more do we need?”

“We have to leave at dawn on Saturday. We’ll travel in our car; one of your papa’s ex-students will drive us. We’ll pay him with the car.”

“We can trust him,” added Papa, who had appeared in the doorway to reassure me.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Leo.

Mama’s room was in chaos: clothes everywhere, underwear, and shoes. She was flitting about nervously, and I heard her humming a song. I couldn’t understand her. She seemed to have been transformed
into what she had once been, or the illusion of her past. I seemed to have a different mother every day. This might have been fun, but not at that moment. Leo had vanished without saying good-bye.

Mama had four huge trunks filled with clothes. No doubt about it: she had gone mad.

“What do you think, Hannah?” She put on a gown and started to dance round the room. A waltz. She was humming a waltz.

“If we’re going to America, I’ll have to take a Mainbocher gown,” she went on, as though we were going on vacation to some exotic island.

No one in Cuba was going to be the slightest bit interested in the brand name of the dresses she wore. She called them all by the name of their couturier: a Madame Grès, a Molyneux, a Patou, a Piquet.

“I’m going to take them all,” she said with a nervous laugh.

There were so many of them that she would never have to wear the same one twice during the crossing. She knew that whenever she sought refuge in this kind of euphoria, I distanced myself from her. I knew she was suffering: we weren’t going on vacation. She was aware of our tragedy but was trying to come to terms with it as best she could.

Oh, Mama! If only you had seen what I saw today. And you, Papa, you should never have abandoned Leo and his father to that nightmare.

An inventory of all our possessions had been made, the
VermögensErklärung
, or declaration of property, that every family had to complete before they left. Mama could take her clothes with her and the jewelry she was wearing, but the rest of our lives had to stay in Germany. We could not lose or break anything listed in the inventory. Any silly mistake, and our departure would be postponed indefinitely. And we would be sent to prison.

M
r. Levin has put us in touch with a survivor from the
St. Louis
, the transatlantic liner that took Aunt Hannah to Cuba. We’re going to visit her today. Maybe she knew Dad’s family, my family. We’re taking copies of the postcards and photos that we made, because, who knows, she might recognize some of her own relatives, or even herself as a young girl. That’s our hope.

Mr. Levin says there are only a few survivors left. Of course, it was so many years ago.

Mrs. Berenson lives in the Bronx. We’re to be met by her son, who warned Mom we would find a friendly old lady who didn’t talk very much but had a vivid memory of the past. She forgets the present more each day. She has lived with sorrow for more than seventy years, says her son. She is unable to forgive. And even if she wanted to forget, she cannot.

Her son has often asked her to tell him how she managed to survive, the persecution she suffered, her odyssey on board ship, and what happened to her parents. He wanted her to set it all down in black and white, but she has refused. She accepted our visit only because of the photographs.