“Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where Dorfstrasse can be found?” The man ignored me and kept walking. A stab of fear went through me when I saw a woman resembling Gerda Quernheim, Nurse Gerda from the camp, pass by on the sidewalk. Could it possibly be her? Out of prison already?
I found the doctor’s office, a single-story building of white-painted brick. I parked far down the street, relieved to turn my car off, and sat there attracting hostile looks from passersby. One peered into the backseat in a pointed way, looking at the muffler lying there. I tried to steady my breathing and gain courage. Should I just return home? Call the police and ask for help? That might not end well.
A silver Mercedes-Benz slid by me and docked at the curb in front of the doctor’s office. It was an older model but the kind of car Pietrik would have admired.
A woman got out of the car. Could that possibly be Herta driving such an expensive car? Why had I forgotten my glasses? My heart beat like a crazy, flip-flopping fish. The woman was too skinny to be her, wasn’t she? My hands were slippery on the steering wheel as I watched the woman walk into the doctor’s office.
I slid to the passenger door and exited, the hinges complaining, and shook my hands about like two wet mops, trying to calm myself. I entered the doctor’s office, and stopped to read the brass sign next to the door: FAMILY MEDICAL CLINIC. The words WE LOVE CHILDREN were painted below. Children? It couldn’t be Herta. Who would let someone like her touch their little ones?
It wasn’t a big waiting room, but it was unnervingly neat and tidy. The walls were painted with schools of manic fish and turtles, and an aquarium bubbled in the corner. I sat and thumbed through magazines, glancing now and then at the patients, waiting to see if she’d walk by. It was hard to look at those well-fed infants with their velvety skin and know Herta might be the one touching them. As their names were called, the mothers went in to see the doctor just as we once had. Did she give them their inoculations or leave that to a nurse?
I watched an angelfish in the tank suck in and spit rocks from the pink-gravel bottom. A German mother sat across the room, the picture of Aryan purity. The Nazis would have put her on the cover of every magazine during the war. I considered telling her how they killed babies at Ravensbrück, but then thought better of it. Never volunteer information. The Germans were always suspicious of that.
Though it was cool in the room, sweat ran down my back. To calm myself, I paged through German Mother magazine. The war was long since over, but the Hausfrauen had not come far. Still working hard, but no longer for their beloved Führer. If the magazine was any indication, the Germans worshipped a new idol—consumer goods. Volkswagens, hi-fis, dishwashers, and televisions. At least that was an improvement. The receptionist scraped her glass window open.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, blue eye shadow on her lids. Makeup? The Führer would not have approved.
I stood.
“No, but if the doctor is free, I’d like one.”
She handed me a clipboard, a long form trapped under the silver clamp.
“Fill this out, and I’ll check,” she said.
The Germans still loved their paperwork.
I filled in the form with my real married name and a false address in the nearby town of Pl?n. It was barely readable, my fingers shook so. Why worry? The war was long over. Hitler was dead. What could Herta do to me?
I listened to the music as I waited. Tchaikovsky? It wasn’t calming me.
The last patient went in to see the doctor, and I sat alone. Would she remember me? I was certain she’d recognize her own handiwork.
The receptionist appeared at her window.
“The doctor will see you after the last patient. I will be leaving soon, so may I have your paperwork?”
“Of course,” I said and handed her the clipboard.
I’d be there alone with the doctor? Should I just leave?
I went to the wooden coat-tree in the corner, empty except for a white lab jacket, to hang up my coat. The nameplate pinned to the breast pocket said DR. OBERHEUSER. A chill ran through me. How strange to see that name in print. At Ravensbrück the staff had been careful not to reveal their names. Not that we hadn’t known them.
The receptionist stood and tidied her desk, ready to go home.
Why stay? If I left then, no one would know I’d been here. Caroline could send someone else.
The last mother walked through the waiting room, baby at her shoulder, and smiled at me as she left the office. I thought of Mrs. Mikelsky’s baby with a pang of sadness. I could follow that nice girl out of the waiting room and go home to Lublin. I hurried my coat on and started toward the door, openmouthed, sucking in air. I made it and felt the knob smooth in my hand.
Just go.
Before I could turn it, the receptionist opened the door that led to the back rooms.
“Kasia Bakoski?” she said with a smile. “The doctor will see you now.”
1959
October 25, 1959, turned out to be a perfectly lovely day for a wedding. Mother was in rare form, despite the fact the United States had just launched monkeys Able and Baker into space on a Jupiter missile and she was knee-deep in a letter-writing campaign to end such animal cruelty.
It was a year of firsts. The first diplomatic visit to the United States by a Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. The first time the musical Gypsy played on Broadway. The first wedding at The Hay.
Serge and Zuzanna were guaranteed good weather for their nuptials, since we’d erected a tent at great expense in the lower yard below the garden. It was Indian summer up in Bethlehem, hazy, hot, and just a bit blustery.
This was not a society wedding, if that is what you are accustomed to—far from it, as our procession back from the church proved. Our raucous little group meandered from Bethlehem’s Catholic church, past the town green, to The Hay, attended by a great gonging of bells from the town’s churches. All of Bethlehem had come out for Serge and Zuzanna’s big day, except for Earl Johnson, who felt duty-bound to remain on his post office stool.
Mother, understated in gray taffeta, led the procession, Mr. Merrill from the general store by her side. She walked backward, conducting her Russian orchestra friends, their instruments festooned with gay flowers and ribbons. They performed a rousing version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” lovely actually, on balalaika.
Next came the bride and groom. Serge was striking in one of Father’s gabardine suits we’d cut down for him and wore the kind of wide grin usually found on a man standing next to a trophy marlin on a Key West pier. What man wouldn’t be proud to marry lovely Zuzanna? She was part Audrey Hepburn and part Grace Kelly, with the temperament of a spring lamb. She and her strong-willed sister, Kasia, were as different as chalk and cheese. Kasia refreshingly forthright, Zuzanna subtler.
Mother had sewn Zuzanna a dress of ecru lace. It was becoming, even with dollar bills pinned all about it in the Polish tradition, the breeze sending them fluttering like a flapper’s fringe. The bride carried a spray of Mr. Gardener’s Souvenir de la Malmaison roses, fragrant and blush pink. The groom carried a blossom as well—a ten-month-old named Julien, peach cheeked with a headful of hair that was, as Mother would say, “black and straight as a Chinaman’s.” The dear boy had officially been theirs for two weeks, and his feet had yet to touch terra firma, so many adults loved holding him so.