“Oh yeah. Good view of it from here.”
“And the sound of the boat horns. That is much the same, though I am sure the boats look more modern. The sea air and the wind, that never changes. I remember that so well from the whole voyage. I do think the harbor smelled better back then, though. Not so much pollution.”
“You really remember all the details from when you were eleven?”
“Oh yes. I have very detailed memories. Only . . . sometimes I wonder. You have the memories, and you go over and over them in your mind. And after a time I wonder if I am remembering the actual event or just remembering the memories.”
They fell silent for a moment. Seabirds wheeled over their heads, calling out strange sounds. Raymond thought they were strange, anyway.
“You saw things back then you would not see today,” she said. “Masted schooners were still docked, and the skyline was different. Many tall buildings, yes, but I remember they all had smoke or steam pouring up from them. They heated the buildings differently back then. All brick, they were. Not steel and glass. Oh, they had windows, yes. But they were not made entirely of windows as they are these days.”
“You lived in New York almost your whole life,” he said after a time. He did some quick math in his head. “Eighty-one years. Didn’t you ever come back here?”
“Oh yes. A handful of times. But I have not for a long time. Maybe twenty years. And it’s funny, but I don’t remember much from the later visits. I remember mostly that first time.”
Another moment of silence, but it felt peaceful to Raymond. She was going to tell him something that would help him make sense of her world and her reactions. He could feel it. But there was nothing he needed to do. It would come in its own time, and that time would be soon.
As if hearing his thoughts, she said, “What I am about to tell you I have told to no one except Rolf, my late husband. My family of course knew, because they were there, but they are all gone now. I am the only one left. I never even told Luis, though now I very much wish I had.”
He waited. He did not dare speak.
“You know your world history well,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Pretty well, I think. Yeah.”
“Good. So . . . I was born in Germany in 1927. And I have already told you I came to America by boat in 1938.”
She didn’t speak for a moment. She seemed to be wanting something from him. Some reaction.
So he said, “Good thing you got out when you did. Because things got bad there after you left.”
“Yes, my young friend. That is the understatement of a lifetime. Things got very bad after we left.”
“Especially if your family was Jewish.”
He had been afraid to say it. So he watched her face to see how it would land. She only smiled sadly.
“It’s a funny thing about that. We were and we were not. My father was not Jewish. My mother was. In the Jewish religion, it is the mother who confers Judaism on the children, so in that sense, yes. We were. But from a more secular viewpoint . . . in the eyes of the society we grew up in . . . my brothers and sister and I, we were half of this thing that it was so dangerous to be. And now I feel bad because I did not tell you this sooner, because it’s a thing we have in common. We both know a strange truth about the world: that people judge you by your most controversial half. If you meet a person, Raymond, who is prejudiced, this person will not think to himself, ‘This Raymond has a white half, and I will respect that half of him.’ People judge you only by the half they don’t like. If my family had stayed in Germany, they would not have put half of me in a camp or sent half of me to the gas chamber. No. I would have been completely killed.”
A seagull landed on the pavement in front of Raymond and stared at him, wiggling closer. As if fascinated by their words, it seemed to him, but he knew it wasn’t that. Hoping for food, most likely.
He waved his hand and the bird flapped away.
“How did your family get out?” he asked after a time. “Wasn’t it hard to get out?”
“Ah,” she said. “Now we move closer to my shame.”
A sudden memory flooded into Raymond’s head. A time when she had told him that guilt can tear a person apart—told him as though she knew from personal experience. She had done something to bring herself guilt, and a shame that still had not left her alone all these decades later. He could only wait, frozen, to hear what it had been.
“My father was not a rich man, but he was a businessman, and the family did well enough. He owned a haberdashery, and business had been fairly good until the neighbors began to whisper that his wife was a Jewess. Then things fell apart, and he had to shutter the shop because of serial vandalism. But he had a little money put aside. Really it was our whole life savings for our whole family. I won’t tell you how much it was in German marks, because that will not help you picture the sum. The exchange rate is constantly changing, and of course inflation. If it were in American dollars, and if it were today, I would have to say it was a sum in the neighborhood of maybe fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. He used the vast majority of it to bribe an official. Simple as that. He had this money in cash, and he put it in the pocket of a corrupt official, and the next thing you know, we were steaming across the ocean to start all over again from nothing.”
“Okay . . . ,” Raymond said. He was waiting for the part that caused her guilt and shame. But he had no intention of hurrying her there. “So you came all the way across the Atlantic on a boat. I thought maybe you were afraid of boats.”
“Why would you think that?”