By Blood A Novel

79.


The table was too big for the space, said the patient to Dr. Schussler. It was a big, heavy mahogany table with ornate legs. It had to be shoved into a corner to fit into the room, and the chairs on two sides were pinned between the table and the wall. Michal sat at the foot, where she could look out the window, and I sat catty-corner to her again, my chair nearly under an arch that separated the dining room from a small kitchen.

It was an odd arrangement because Gerda, that young girl, was sitting in the kitchen—right next to me but not “in” the room, if you know what I mean. She sat on a high step-stool with her hands on her knees, just sitting, staring forward. That loud clock I’d been hearing hung above her head. I was uncomfortable because I still didn’t know what the relationship was between Michal and Gerda, who seemed to be a sort of servant or maid.

(Ah! I thought, one of those German youths doing penance in Israel.)

Michal began by saying: I suppose we now must leave the “before time.”

She looked at me steadily, so unblinkingly that I could barely meet her eyes. There was something accusatory in that gaze, an accusation that I was the one making her leave the “before time.” I was the reason she had to remember all this. It was all my fault. And it was clear why she never wanted me to find her. She wanted to leave behind everything that happened to her, and I was part of that “after” life. And again I went through my whole inner drama: wanting to protect her from bad memories, hating myself for wanting to protect her, and so on. But before I could get to the anger—the rage, it was almost there, that impatience that explodes into fury—you know what I mean, Dr. Schussler?

I do, said the therapist.

Before it came flying out, Michal suddenly softened. She gave me the sweetest smile. That loving look came onto her face. So, my little American, she said. Do you know any history? Do you know when Hitler came to power? When the Nürnberg Laws were passed?

I was confused by this sudden shift in feelings. Again. Just like the day before: hate, then love, any moment hate could come back. I mumbled something like, Early thirties.

And she said to me, good enough. Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nürnberg Laws were passed in 1935. There wasn’t a Jew in Europe who didn’t know that something terrible was coming.

Then Michal reached into her pocket and took out a coin. She held it by the rim, between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand—squeezed it hard, moving it back and forth, pressing grooves into her fingertips. It was a funny gesture, administering a little pain to herself, it seemed, like the pinch you give yourself when you’re getting a shot. All during this time—you’ll hear it on the tape—she picks up that coin, cuts grooves in her finger, then slaps it down on the table. Picks it up, slaps it down. Let me start the tape.

There was a long hiss, and finally, above the annoying drone of the poor-quality machine, came Michal Gershon’s beautiful voice.

Let us be clear, Michal was saying. I am only going to talk about what came just before the war, and what came after, where you are born and enter the story. Understand that. The middle, the Holocaust—too long, too dark, too many endless things to say. I would like to start just as you enter the story, but you cannot understand the “after” unless you know something of the time just … before all that. Do you agree?

What choice do I have? asked the patient.

Michal laughed.

None.

My parents left in 1938, she continued on an intake of breath. The whole family left. Only I remained.

Where did they go? asked the patient on the tape.

To the Netherlands, Michal replied. Then she stopped speaking.

The tape whined and hissed for fifteen long seconds. One could hear the ticking of the clock that hung in the kitchen. It seemed that all Michal Gershon’s resistance to remembering her “after” life had been distilled into those sounds: the clock tick, the machine drone, the sinister whisper of the tape.

Then came a loud clack—the coin slapped down on the table? Yes, that must have been it, the slap signaling Michal’s determination to continue. For now her words tumbled out in a monologue:

They went to the Netherlands, she said. They were sure they would be safe in Amsterdam. Such a mistake. The Dutch are still seen as such nice people. They get a “good rap,” as the Americans say. And all because of Anne Frank. The world thinks the good Dutch people hid her. Ah! But they also betrayed her. Consider that the Germans needed only two thousand soldiers to keep the entire country subdued. The Dutch police did all the work. Eichmann himself was dumbfounded at how easy it was: at the willingness of the good Dutch people to turn over their Jews.

She laughed.

My parents rented a house on the Prinsengracht, she went on. On the canal. They settled in. They received funds from—I’ll get back to that. I’ll just say that all seemed well for while. Then … the roundups began. Roundups of the Jews, done with the quiet but thorough compliance of the Dutch police and bureaucracy. What else could they do? the good Dutch people told themselves. Poor us! We are conquered! Well … My parents were rounded up early. They were too prominent, too visible.

For a while, I still received letters from them. They tried to be reassuring. They said at first they were only going to be resettled. Then that they were “only” going to a work camp. Finally I received a strange, cheery postcard that said, We are resettled in a lovely valley.

She paused.

Then nothing, she said. I never found my family again.

I turned off the tape at that point, the patient told Dr. Schussler. Michal stopped speaking for a long time, and in that silence, with the clock ticking away madly over my head, it seemed somehow wrong to keep the recorder going. I didn’t dare say a word or ask a question, because Michal’s face had fallen in on itself again. She picked up that coin and pressed it hard, then harder; I could see the tendons flexing. Finally she cleared her throat and said:

Anne Frank was sent to Bergen-Belsen.

This startled me and I said:

Did you see her there?

She gave me this terrible look.

How naïve you are! How stupid! By the time I got to Belsen, Anne Frank and her sister were stinking corpses in tattered clothes, half returned to the earth.

I just sat stunned, the patient told Dr. Schussler. What could I say to that? The clock ticked, Michal said nothing, and Gerda shifted around on her clanking stool.

Finally I thought to ask Michal:

But how is it you stayed in Germany when your whole family left?

Ah! she said, with a long breath. Then she gazed out the window for some seconds. Finally she turned her cool light eyes on me and said:

Start up again your little machine.

Now comes the first part of the story.





80.


My grandfather was a smart businessman, said Michal on the tape. He understood the firm was about to be “Aryanized”—stolen from us. So he and Dieter Gerstner, one of his plant managers, came up with a plan: I would marry Dieter’s son, Albrecht. I would convert. And the firm would be assigned to the Gerstner family, good Catholic Germans since the dawn of time.

I should say that I once loved Albrecht, in the romantic way, when we were in Gymnasium together. He was fair-haired, tall, athletic: a quite beautiful man in the Germanic sense, which was also my ideal. I truly believed that such a blond god of a man was superior to the dark Jews who lived in the Scheunenviertel district, who had been filtering in from the east, from Poland and Russia. They were uneducated, poverty-stricken. I was embarrassed by their horrid black hats, their ugly clothes, their poverty—yes, I was embarrassed to see the naked face of Judaism in those people.

Don’t be shocked. We all felt that way. We were, after all, the Rothmans, rich and cultured and fair-skinned. Look at my hair, my eyes. Many of us were like this. You could not tell us from the most Aryan of Germans. Even Hitler said so. Ha! So perhaps that is why I did not protest my grandfather’s plan too very strongly. Maybe that embarrassed part of myself, stupid girl that I was, welcomed it: my chance to be German, not German of Hebrew heritage, but simply a German German.

She laughed, sighed, called out for more tea and whiskey.

Then there came the sound of the coin slapped on the table.

The patient stopped the tape.

Gerda rattled dishes behind me, said the patient to Dr. Schussler. And I sat there, again seeing myself through the eyes of my birth mother—through the eyes of the woman who bore me. I was too Jewish! No wonder she gave me away. I nearly laughed out loud. I thought it was only my WASP mother who could feel this way.

If not for Gerda standing over me with a sweet smile, I think I would have run from the house and never returned. But events have a way of keeping you in rooms you wish to leave, don’t they? Just when you think you’ve had enough and are going to run away, right then normal life—teacups and creamers, two sugars or one—cement you in place. And you have no choice but to say please and thank you and just go on with what you hate, the life you’d like to abandon, the people who don’t love you and you’d like to leave.

I went ahead and took my tea. Michal took hers with a shot of whiskey, and then I turned on the recorder.

So I converted to Catholicism and married Albrecht, said Michal. The conversion was not at all taxing. By then the priests had had a great deal of practice converting Jews, and were all too happy to capture another soul about to marry into a Catholic family. I agreed to read three books. I learned four prayers in Latin. I was tested in a recitation of the Credo, which of course I already knew from all the great choral music of Mozart and Beethoven and so on. The priest prayed over me. I accepted the trinity of God, Jesus as God’s incarnation on earth, the holiness of the Virgin Mother. The sign of the cross was sketched above my head. A little sprinkle of holy water, and it was done. I was now Maria. And then I married and became Maria Gerstner, wife of Albrecht Gerstner.

(Ah! I thought. There you are, my little German Jewish convert. My elusive Maria G.)

Well, said Michal, sighing. Grandfather executed all the paperwork to assign the business to me and Albrecht and Albrecht’s father. Then my family packed up and left. My mother, father, sister, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, cousins—everyone went to Amsterdam.

There came the sound of tea being sipped, once, twice.

Weren’t you sad when they were all gone? the patient asked her mother. Terrified? Desperate?

There was a long pause, then:

Yes.

Michal clacked down her teacup.

Albrecht’s father, Dieter, had worked for my grandfather as a plant manager. He was not an educated man but a shrewd and ambitious one. At first he acted as if he were honored by my grandfather’s trust in him. Because, after all, it was all based on trust. Dieter, Albrecht, and I may have been the legal owners, but the understanding was that three-quarters of the profits were to go to Grandfather in the Netherlands, for further distribution to our exiled family. Look at it: The Gerstners received our magnificent house and one-quarter of our esteemed and very profitable firm, and for nothing, making them richer than they ever could have imagined in their dreams.

But Grandfather did not realize the hatred the Gerstners had nurtured over the years. And most of all, he underestimated the effects the Nazis were having on even the most moderate of anti-Semites. Dieter Gerstner, under all his pretenses of faithful service, was a nascent Jew hater who came to full bloom, shall we say, under National Socialism. He resented our family’s wealth. The wealth had been honorably earned. Mein Gott, Rothman Textiles made fabric for the Kaiser during the war of fourteen-eighteen! Nonetheless, as soon as my family was gone, that rat Gerstner began making comments about “Jewish theft” of Germany’s resources, about “Jewish cunning” and “Jewish pollution of the race.” Each time he would look at me accusingly, as if I had polluted him, despite the fact that he was the thief.

There came a long pause.

But I did not see all this from the outset. A strange kind of normalcy reigned in the household. Each Sunday, I covered my head with lace and knelt down before the great crucifix. I listened to the prayers intoned in Latin and the sermons thundered in German. I endured the incense. I took communion. I went to confession and lied.

After six months had gone by, Herr Gerstner proudly bought tickets for a performance at the Deutsches Opernhaus Berlin—the opera house.

By then all the Jewish players had been banished. And Goebbels, that puny propaganda minister, had forbidden the staging of any works by Jews. Most of the talented conductors refused to participate and left the country. But that traitor von Karajan stayed—he later went on to world renown, as if he had never collaborated, the hands that held the baton now cleansed. He was conducting that night, Mozart, Die Zauberflöte. Officials of the Reich marched in and filled the first row. As one, the audience stood, thrust out their arms, and roared: Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

It was at that moment that I understood the life that lay ahead of me. There I was, standing in the balcony, my arm out, feebly, covertly resisting, I thought. My dear father-in-law watched me closely from the corner of his shrewd little eye, and I had to mouth the words and hum softly to add some sound: Sieg heil! Then I sat through the performance. In the end, I stood and applauded with everyone else.

So began my double life.

Then she called out: Gerda! Mehr Tee!

Und whiskey? asked Gerda.

Ja, mit whiskey.

Again Gerda stood above us, said the patient after stopping the tape, that apple-cheeked young woman cheerfully bringing the teapot, the cups, the sugar, the creamer. Michal didn’t say anything, prolonging the rituals of sugar and cream and stirring, it seemed. Once she had a teacup cradled in her hands, she looked at me and went on:

I should tell you that Albrecht truly loved me. He was a kind and good man, and I could be myself only with him. He was very brave; he withstood the great danger that he would be declared a Rassenschande, a race defiler. He defended me against the barely disguised slurs from the extended Gerstner family. We both agreed we would just let them talk, not answer back. We decided I would behave like a good Catholic: go to church with a headscarf, kneel and cross myself. And like a good German, heartily shouting Sieg heil! when the occasion called for it.

She was silent for several seconds, drinking her tea, then said:

All right. Time goes by. I pretend to be Maria Gerstner, and my family is still thriving in Amsterdam. I don’t know if Dieter sent all the funds he was supposed to send, but whatever it was, it was evidently enough.

Then … then. May 10, 1940, Germany invades the Netherlands. Hitler bombs the hell out of Rotterdam and threatens to do the same to Amsterdam. The Dutch surrender in five days.

Now come the roundups, the letters from my parents, finally that strange, cheery postcard. We are settled in a lovely valley. Dieter stops sending funds to Amsterdam. I saw that he was happy about it. Now he owned it all, except for me. If only I did not exist. It was the thought I saw in his mind every time he looked at me: How can I get rid of this one last Jew?

Now comes another terrible year, 1941. The Nazis slowly begin “cleansing” Germany of its Jews. But the full force of Hitler’s death machine does not take aim at us immediately. Regulations strangle us. We cannot use public transportation. We cannot have certain professions, then we cannot work at all. Jews are wearing yellow stars. Not I—I was a convert, protected by my marriage to an Aryan. I walked the streets of Berlin and saw my former schoolmates, my old friends, their families, wearing the yellow star. And they looked at me.

The patient stopped the tape.

Michal said nothing more for a long while, the patient told Dr. Schussler. By the changes in her breathing, and the twitches of her eyes and mouth, I could tell she was remembering the scene. I could not imagine what she felt at that moment when she stood there, protected, and everyone she knew from her life as Margarette Rothman walked by wearing the yellow star. I hoped she would go on and characterize her feelings, but she was shut up tight.

The patient sat quietly for some seconds.

The hour is almost up, isn’t it? she said.

Almost. A few minutes more, said Dr. Schussler.

You’re a German, said the patient. How do you sit and listen to all this? What do you feel when you hear it?

Ah, that is not the point, said the doctor. The question is how you feel.

Right, said the patient. You’ll never tell me. But I’m not alone in the room, and knowing who I’m talking to is pertinent in this situation. I’m not asking, Did your mother love you? I’m asking how you, as a German, think about the events of the Holocaust.

(Yes! I thought. Demand to know!)

Dr. Schussler sat back and sighed before answering.

I am a human being, she said, and of course there will always be things in my patients’ lives that will evoke personal reactions. However, whatever my thoughts and feelings, my every concern is for your well-being.

(Liar!)

Can you see that? asked the therapist.

I suppose.

And whatever personal reactions I may have, the doctor continued, if they interfere with our work together—if—it is then my task to manage such issues. My task, not yours.

I see, said the patient flatly.

(She suspects, I thought. Good!)

All right, said the doctor. Let us resume on Monday night.





81.


For five days, I looked forward to the confrontation between the patient and Dr. Schussler: She must learn her therapist’s bias! But then again I wondered: Could it be that the patient did not really wish to know the details of her therapist’s life? I thought back to my own therapies and remembered how, in many ways, I wanted the analyst or counselor or doctor to be little more than a blank wall. The therapist who insisted that we had a personal “relationship” was the one I detested most. So perhaps the patient, too, would be content to remain ignorant of the doctor’s private life.

These ruminations were interrupted by a letter.

It came through the mail slot in an odd fashion: alone, many seconds before the other mail, as if it had frightened away the advertising circulars. I saw the Gothic typeface in the return address. The silver seal above it. The motto: Per Aspera Ad Astra. I knew it at a glance: the university’s stationery.

It was a thin envelope. Only one sheet inside, it seemed. Therefore it could not contain a firing, because surely any such action would be accompanied by documents requiring signatures, including my own. (I laughed to myself as I considered how this reasoning was the opposite of that used by university applicants, who knew to be happy at the sight of a thick envelope, the sign of acceptance, and to feel dread at a thin one, the one-page letter of rejection.)

I put the unopened letter on the kitchen counter and could not bring myself to so much as touch it. The sight of the boy in the bar, now this letter: I felt that the university had begun to stalk me, had followed me to San Francisco, where I was a different person, I longed to think, a loving friend to the patient, a good man. As the days went by, I convinced myself that a thin envelope could indeed signal disaster, was perhaps a note saying, “You are fired. Paperwork to follow.” So I left it lying there amidst the embedded greasy remains of food whose preparation had preceded my tenancy in the cottage.

By Sunday night, I felt my resistance falling. The patient’s session was but one day away. I convinced myself that whatever the effect of the letter, I would be returned to health by the sound of my dear patient’s voice. I could pull her life over my head like a blanket covering (smothering, superceding, replacing) my own. Therefore I might open the letter and subject myself to whatever fate was contained therein.

It was late, nearing one in the morning. The traffic on the Great Highway was sparse; the ocean seemed tame, perhaps at ebb tide. My own breathing was the predominant sound in the house.

I went to the kitchen and opened the letter.

This is to inform you that the Professional Ethics Committee has taken up your case. Investigations will proceed through the fall semester. The Committee hopes to complete its work before the start of the spring semester; in any case not later than the beginning of the 1976–77 academic year.

As you have been interviewed previously, your participation is not needed at this time, and you should not expect further communications from the Office of the Provost until the matter is resolved. However, the Professional Ethics Committee may, or may not, keep you apprised of their progress, as they deem appropriate.

Sincerely yours,

Bill Selyems, for the Office of the Provost

What kind of special torture was this? A committee that may—or may not—see fit to keep me informed. An investigation that may be completed within a semester—or an entire calendar year! What was the point of this letter except to remind me that I had been hung by the neck. And yet provided with a tiny footstool that might hold my weight for a time—then any moment be kicked away.

I paced throughout the night, realizing I had underestimated the potency of the letter, underestimated how much hope—in the very back of my being, before the patient, before anything that had happened in San Francisco—how much of my future depended upon the university. Oh, God! I called aloud. Oh, someone! Oh, something! Show me there is a reason for my life! I should have opened the letter late on Monday, I told myself, not on Sunday night; for now I had to endure an entire day before I might receive the medicine of the patient’s voice.

I closed the curtains. It was a gray day, and I managed to sleep. I awoke at five in the evening; ate a sandwich; went to the office and waited. She was all that could save me, I thought. She must distract me from whatever was (or was not) happening at the university.

And thanks to God (or to whomever, to whatever Providence might or might not exist in the universe), here she was finally, not confronting Dr. Schussler, not demanding to know the details of her doctor’s life, abandoning that battle as I had thought she might. Instead she resumed her story right where she had left off: in Michal’s little house, where she sat with her mother in the dining area that adjoined the kitchen, at the table that was too large for the space.

It seemed as though we had been sitting there for hours, said the patient to Dr. Schussler, although less than an hour had passed.





82.


Michal was telling me about her friends who now wore the yellow star, the patient went on. About having to walk right by them. She was afraid to associate with them. Her father-in-law watched her constantly, she said. He never said it exactly, but the implied threat was that if she did not behave herself, if she brought even a whiff of Jewishness into the family, he would somehow force Albrecht to divorce her, and then she would be on the next train to Auschwitz.

Some of her old friends and acquaintances tried to go underground. U-boats, they were called, after the submarines. They tried to disappear, blend into the woodwork, pass as regular Germans, helped out by sympathetic non-Jews. She was terrified when she ran into one of her friends who was not wearing a star—terrified that her recognizing them would give them away. Because everyone knew she was an ex-Jew, and her knowing them would be suspicious.

The patient clicked the recorder on and off, on and off, cueing the tape. When it played again, we heard Michal saying:

Slowly they all disappeared. All the old friends and acquaintances, with and without the yellow stars.

Then came a long pause.

And as all this was happening, Michal continued, I just went about my life as Frau Gerstner. Frau Maria Gerstner.

Dieter Gerstner barely let me leave the house, she continued. I should describe him. A very undistinguished-looking man. Short and stocky, with a pockmarked face under a brush of thick, light-brown hair. He was not an Aryan god of a man. Albrecht got his good looks from his mother, Swanhilde, who was beautiful but a meek, weak person who ceded to her husband in all things. Dieter was a brute. One day he walked into my private dressing room unannounced, without knocking, stood looking me up and down, and said: Beware, my son’s fake little wife. The race laws are changing, and you are not as well off as you think you are.

What relish he took in reporting this.

Until then, being married to an Aryan was enough to make me privilegiert, to give me privileged status. But now the most privileged Jewish women were those who had children with their Aryan husbands. It was not enough just to be married; you had to have a child.

That night, Albrecht and I decided I would become “pregnant.” We didn’t want a child. We agreed we didn’t want to bring children into the world as it was, and we were very careful in our sexual activities. But we had to pretend I was pregnant. And then I would have a “miscarriage.” If necessary, I would get “pregnant” again.

So began our subterfuge.

My father-in-law had filled the house with spies. He wanted to be sure I was not secretly being a Jew—as I explained, for fear of losing the company. So the servants watched me constantly. I had to hide all evidence of menstruation from the maids. I had to be careful not to stain the sheets. Albrecht carried out my bloody cottons hidden in his briefcase. After three “dry” months, we announced I was having a child. One of my old school friends was a doctor. I told the family he was my physician, and luckily for us, he did not live close by and was not part of the Gerstners’ circle.

The Gerstner family threw a big party for us, which was exactly what Albrecht and I had hoped for. All Dieter’s friends in the Party now believed I carried the child of an Aryan. So I was golden! Nothing could touch me now.

I had to begin “showing,” so I bought a girdle that was too large for me and filled it with stuffing. I was terrified that Marta, the housemaid, would find it. She afforded me no privacy. She went through my closet, my drawers. I still believe she stole my mother’s cameo. She wanted to come and help me dress, help me in the bath, and it took all my conniving to keep her from seeing my naked body.

Albrecht and I then determined it was time I had a miscarriage. We waited for my next menstrual period, and I purposely stained the sheets. It was quite a scene as I held the bloody sheets up to Marta and cried over the lost child. I really did manage to cry. It was not hard to find in myself great sadness and desolation.

This meant, of course, that I was now childless, and vulnerable, so Albrecht and I made quite a deal of the fact that we would try for another child immediately, as soon as it was medically safe for me. I had to present myself as an Aryan vessel-in-waiting, a walking womb about to be filled any day with a good German child. My father-in-law’s dear friends in the Party began making jokes about when I would become pregnant again—didn’t I know it was my responsibility to the race?

So I soon became “pregnant” again. My whole life was subsumed by this subterfuge. And poor Albrecht, there he was carrying off my bloody cottons, my stained underwear, in his briefcase, finding ever more clever excuses to take a ride in the country, where he could bury the evidence.

There was a pause, then a command in a cold voice:

Turn off that machine.

She called for Gerda to come help her, the patient told Dr. Schussler. She wanted to stand, move around, take a walk, she said. Gerda came and, with Michal leaning on the girl’s arm, they walked toward the front door, then out into the courtyard.





83.


The sound quality was poor on the next part of the tape. One could hear the cries of children, a faint rumble that might have been passing trucks, but mostly one heard the wind rushing across the microphone.

Albrecht had been my hero, Michal began. My rock, my only true companion. The only person on earth with whom I could express my feelings and my fears. And of course we were bonded by the drama of my “pregnancies,” my supposed desperation to be what a good German woman should be: a mother.

The wind lashed at the microphone. What she said was not clear, until she said the word “sick.” Then:

Pneumonia. In those days it was not like now, where you take some pills, go to bed for a few days, recover. Albrecht’s lungs had never been strong to begin with; he had suffered from asthma as a child, and was always a little wheezy.

Again the wind overcame her words. What one heard next was:

… to the car. Fainted in the street. It was the fever, you see. He was running a high fever, although he told no one. I heard Marta cry out, and I looked out the window to see Albrecht sprawled out on the pavement. Next to him was his briefcase. And I remembered: He was carrying away my bloody underwear and rags! Marta ran out the door, and I had to race behind her, not only because I was afraid for Albrecht, but also to get that briefcase before Marta could put her hands on it.

She paused. The shouts of children rose in the background, the boink of a ball bouncing.

Finally she said, I had to go to the briefcase before I could go to my husband.

Another pause.

Which I did. And then I nursed him, as best I could. He was all to me; I was in terror of losing him. Gerda, bitte …

And the wind took away the rest of the sentence.

The patient stopped the tape.

Gerda helped Michal take a turn around the courtyard, said the patient. When Michal sat down again, I asked her what happened next.

He died, she said. Just like that she said it, very flat: He died.

Then she said nothing for a long while, just sat there, vaguely looking at the children, as if her thoughts were far away.

I asked her to go on.

And she said, On? What else is there to do but to go on?

She laughed.

Here is the part where I am caught.





84.


It was Albrecht’s funeral, said Michal as the tape resumed. There were very few of us at the graveside, just the immediate family, a few cousins, a friend or two of the Gerstners.

I felt lost, desperate, was sobbing, having only Albrecht’s mother, Swanhilde, for support, otherwise I really would have fallen into the grave with him.

Suddenly Swanhilde tightened her arms around me. I followed her gaze to the edge of the graveside circle. Two men—Gestapo. With them was a woman, her arm linked with one of the men, hanging on him like a gang moll. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, but you could see a swirl of gold hair peeking out. And her eyes: just visible below the brim of her hat. The eyes.

I knew at once who she was; we all knew who she was: Stella Goldschlag, “the blond poison,” notorious traitor. A Jew. She was a “catcher”: she hunted down other Jews for the Gestapo. They promised, if she cooperated, that her parents wouldn’t go to Auschwitz. Ha! Later her parents were taken anyway.

And staring at me: those terrible hunter’s eyes.

I nearly fell. I grabbed on more tightly to Albrecht’s startled mother. I watched as Stella pointed me out to one of the men. And he came toward me. Marching. I couldn’t believe it: Were they going to take me away directly from a burial? Were they that callous? Of course they were, I answered myself.

The Gestapo officer grabbed my arm and said, Come with me.

Then Frau Gerstner said, What are you doing?

It was not like her; she was usually so meek; but even she could not believe what was happening. And she said again, What are you doing?

The officer said that I was no longer privilegiert. With Albrecht dead, I was now just a Jew like any other. A Jew by blood. And Swanhilde, suddenly brave, answered him back by saying: But she is carrying my son’s child! She is pregnant with a good German child!

I nearly fainted. Oh, God. A child.

Michal stopped speaking; the wind rushed into the pause; there came the sound of something tapping, perhaps Michal’s cane against stone. After some seconds, she resumed, her voice lowered, flat, drained.

I got away that day, she said. But now I had to keep the subterfuge going. But how long could I do it? I was already supposed to be four months pregnant. I would have to begin to “show” again. I had managed to keep my girdle, but the stuffing had been thrown away, and now I had to smuggle in some stuff, bit by bit, in a handbag. Without Albrecht, I had to find a way to dispose of my menstrual pads, again in my handbag, which became stained one day, a stain I had to explain to Marta as a cut on my hand. But there was no cut.

It was inevitable. My spirit had already surrendered. One day, while I was in the bath, Marta broke in—broke the flimsy lock on the door. She saw the girdle, the stuffing. She reported me to the Gerstners.

I must tell you this scene, she went on. We are in the great drawing room in which my mother once held her salons. Dieter calls me in. Frau Gerstner is there, Marta is there, and her husband, Hans. Dieter says, You cur! You liar! There never were any pregnancies, were there?

It must have been all arranged, because right then the officers were ushered in, and I was taken away.

There was a long pause. On the tape, the patient then asked, Where did you go?

I was taken to Theresienstadt, then to a labor camp in Poland.

There was another long pause.

And what happened to you there? the patient asked.

I told you, said Michal. We would not discuss this part. Nothing happened to me. It was nothing about me, personally, as a human being. The point was to humiliate us and take away our personhood. What happened to me is what happened to everyone.

But you survived, said the patient. I think it’s … heroic.

Michal laughed.

Heroic! That is ridiculous. All I had to do was convert and have my husband protect me for years, while the Jews of Berlin slowly disappeared. If he had died a year earlier, I would be another rotting piece of flesh in some mound in Poland. Heroism! Living through that time had nothing to do with my heroism. The heroism was all my dear Albrecht’s. He endured the taunts of his family. He defied the race laws. He kept me alive.

The tape whined on, as if empty. The patient clicked off the machine.

She made me stop taping, she said to Dr. Schussler. Gerda helped her up, and they started back to the house. At the doorway, Michal turned and said to me, Come back tomorrow, and I will get to the part where you come in. After the war. To Belsen.





85.


To Belsen, to Belsen. The words rattled in my thoughts in the rhythm of a rushing train. I was the one who had gotten us here, on that train hurrying to the site of the patient’s birth. And what awaited us?

I did not fall asleep until the sky was brightening; I awoke past three o’clock in the afternoon. I am not certain why, but I switched on the battered radio my landlord had left me, something I rarely did, since, as I have said, its defective tuner drifted along the dial. I must have wanted to hear a sound, any sound, to vanquish the words that had installed themselves in my mind. To Belsen, to Belsen. Through the static came bits of traffic reports, sports scores, commercial advertisements, weather forecasts; when suddenly there came the jangle of a fake teletype, then a man’s excited voice shouting:

Bulletin! Bulletin! Patty Hearst captured!

After which the voice, the fake teletype, the news reports, the ads, all drifted off into the static storm.

I tried to retune the station but succeeded well enough only to hear “fugitive heiress,” “FBI,” and “house in the Outer Mission.” I rushed out to a nearby electronics store, where televisions normally were tuned to each of the five stations received in the area. All the channels had interrupted their normal programming, their announcers excitedly reporting the story.

The newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who had been dragged screaming from her Berkeley apartment some seventeen months ago by a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army—its motto “Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People”—who apparently had joined forces with her captors, taking for herself the nom de guerre Tania, banding with them in a bank robbery and murder (appearing on security cameras sporting an assault rifle and looking rather jaunty in a beret)—the fugitive Patty Hearst had been captured by the FBI.

A month earlier, there had been a shootout in Los Angeles between the police and six members of the SLA, and all six group members had been killed, either by bullets or as a result of a fire that had been started by police tear-gas canisters. Patty Hearst’s reaction at the time was to send a tape saying that the “fascist pig media” had painted a distorted picture of her “beautiful brothers and sisters.” Now, however, when the FBI came for her, she walked out quietly, saying, “Don’t shoot. I’ll go with you.”

The late edition of the San Francisco Examiner (her father’s newspaper) reported that Patty, upon leaving her arraignment, raised her handcuffed hands in the black-power salute. Her hair was died a brassy red. In an AP photograph taken through a car window, the top half of her face is obscured behind large, tinted aviator glasses. But her mouth dares you. The lips are drawn back to form a perfect triangle; the lines of her even white teeth exposed, upper and lower—a shark’s smile, a mouth you would not want to see swimming toward you out of the depths.

The story of Patty Hearst had fascinated me—it was one of the few news events I had followed while in San Francisco. How could I not? How did this heiress to the Hearst fortune, granddaughter of the legendary scoundrel William Randolph Hearst, she who was set up for a life in high society—how did she go from kidnap victim to the rifle-wielding “Tania”?

And how had the transformation been achieved within fifty-nine days? For that was the mere slip of time between her capture and her first communiqué saying she had joined forces with her captors. Was a person so malleable? Could sweet Patty, engaged to a wispy man with the unfortunate name of Steven Weed, be swept away so easily, so quickly?

Or was Patty Hearst one of us, her fate already inscribed within her, an inheritance from her notorious grandfather. Perhaps that shark’s smile was always there, merely waiting for a salty sea.





86.


The patient returned to Michal’s house as directed.

So now we come to the time after the war, said Michal’s voice on the tape. As we agreed. Just before the very end. Where it was supposedly all over.

Mother and daughter sat in the same upholstered chairs they had occupied the day before. It was early morning, the patient told Dr. Schussler. The room was in shadow. Without light, it was cold, smelling of ancient damp from the stone walls.

There were rumors that the German army was in retreat, Michal continued. The skies were filled daily with bombers, and from the look on the faces of our torturers there was suddenly—how shall I put it? Suddenly they looked like men and women in whose dark minds something had lit up. I don’t mean their consciences. I mean they knew they were going to be punished. The effect was for them to hate us all the more. Because one day we were useful to them, doing things they wanted done. Then—I cannot give you the exact moment—then suddenly we were … evidence.

But where were you? the patient interrupted her mother. In what camp was this?

I told you it does not matter! Every one of us went through the same thing, internally, the ripping-out of every shred of self-respect. What is this constant need to retell the stories in horrific detail? That child frozen. That woman experimented upon. That man electrocuted. All the many ways humans can be humiliated. Why tell everyone how to do this! It is practically pornographic. Yes! It’s pornography to keep disclosing exactly what was done.

She had been ranting; now she was breathless; she said nothing more for several seconds.

All I know is this: One day I was called to an assembly and immediately pushed onto a train. It was a regular passenger train, but we were packed in, so that no one could move. People were sick, emaciated, exhausted, many half-naked—all jammed in together.

I cannot tell you how long that trip lasted, she continued. When you have to remain on alert at every moment, time stands still, is a constant present, and duration has no meaning.

Eventually the train stopped, and we were ordered to march down a road. Ahead I saw barbed wire. I thought: another imprisonment, yet another. The guards pushed us through the gate and left. No one led us to a barracks. No one said when food would be given. No one ordered us to do anything. We were just left there.

Nothing, not even the labor camp or the transport, could prepare me for what lay before my eyes. At least the camp had had rules. There were boundaries, duties, orders, lists. People were used up systematically. The evil was deliberate, conscious, human.

But here …

Before me there seemed to be a field of corpses. Arms, legs, feet, heads protruding from the mud. Wisps of cloth, the remainders of clothing, shivering in the breeze.

Then I saw the blink of eyelids, the tremor of a hand. And I realized there were still living people among them—no, not living exactly. Here a man, there a woman, sitting, staring, vacantly, not turning a head, not a shred of attention for us, the new arrivals, we who had been tossed in among them. They simply fell, as if their joining the dead were inevitable. A process that began with being dropped into the camp, sitting down in exhaustion, falling to one side, dead.

I do not know how long I stood there. But suddenly there was a commotion at the gate. Shouting, screaming, then gunshots—shots fired into the air. Burly guards, not in German uniforms, came rushing toward us. They spoke Hungarian, a language I understood. And after the scene had quieted down, one of the guards came over to me. He stared at me, looked me up and down. His eyes slithered over me like an anxious Midas counting his possessions. Neck, breasts, belly: all mine. And then he circled me, once, twice: a snake sliming around me. And then he said—slowly, I will never forget it—he said:

You are as fat and rich and yellow as a big stick of butter. And I want to lick you.

Michal paused. The tape wound on. There was a cough, a sniffle—was she crying? Suppressing tears?

Then she laughed.

Do you know how hard it is to learn Hungarian? It has no relationship to Romance languages, none to Slavic languages. I stood there with the stupidest thought. I thought: I wish I did not understand what that man had just said.

He took me to his barracks, where he raped me for the full day. No sense describing it. It was like all the other rapes, all the other times I had to give up my body to survive. Yes, I slept with them all: guards, inmates, kapos, jailors, kitchen help, it didn’t matter. You see, because I was taken later in the war, and had done what I could to keep eating, I still had breasts. Real, full, suckable breasts. Among all the skeletal women, there I was with two round, soft breasts. What gold I had in them! What I could not exchange for sucks at those nipples!

Finally he brought me food. Then he kept me for two more days, raping me and, in between, feeding me. It was only because of him—and my breasts, and I had those only because Albrecht had kept me safe—for those reasons I am still alive. Outside there was no food, not even any water, as my tormentor kept telling me, saying how lucky I was he had taken me. A typhus epidemic was raging. Hundreds were dying by the hour. See? he said. Compared with death, what is being here with me?

On the third day after my arrival, I was alone in the barracks—locked in—and I heard the rumblings of heavy trucks, maybe tanks. I was afraid it was the German army, and they would come into the camp and just shoot us all. These rumblings went on for some time—hours—then a loudspeaker came on with a screech of, what do you call it, feedback. A howling screech of feedback. And then a big booming voice said:

Ihr seid frei!

You are free, said the patient.

Ah, said her mother, at least you understand a little German. Yes, the voice said we were free.

So it was April 15th, said the patient. The day the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. The day of your liberation.

Liberation! said her mother. You Americans, with your idea of liberation. Sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. Ticker-tape parades down Fifth Avenue. Happy families moving to Levittown. How glorious for you to be the victor with not a speck of damage to your homeland. Oh! Has there been a war victor since Rome in which the winning armies went home to such a pristine land?

She paused.

Liberation, she muttered, then fell silent.





87.


At that, the therapeutic session ended, early, for reasons I did not know. The church carillon was not yet done sounding the three-quarter hour when doctor and patient went their separate ways.

The next days proved difficult. Thoughts of the university, of my banishment, swept through my consciousness at what seemed to be regular, four-hour intervals. There was nothing to do but endure it, since, as I have said, such internal processes had a way of suffusing themselves throughout my body, leaving me with as little control over them as one has over glucose absorption, for example. My sole relief was the anticipation of Monday night’s session, the continuation of Michal’s story, its effect upon my dear patient.

I therefore arrived on Monday during Dr. Schussler’s evening break, which she normally observed between 5:00 and 6:30. Her custom was to return no later than 6:45 to receive her three late-night clients, the patient being the last of these.

I sat reading a professional journal for perhaps an hour (by flashlight, of course, for fear of revealing my presence to Dr. Schussler), when I was startled by a sharp rap on my door.

I had no idea who it might be. It surely was not Dr. Schussler, whose walk I would have recognized in an instant.

The rapping came again.

Be calm, I told myself. Whoever it is will go away.

Yet again a fist rapped at the door.

Quiet, I told myself.

Now came a pounding upon the thin center panel of the door—so forceful that I feared for its tender fruitwood.

I saw you come in, said a man’s voice between two bangs on the door.

Who saw me? Who was watching me?

I know you’re there, said the voice.

Who is it? I felt compelled to answer.

The manager, he said. I must speak to you.

I opened the door a crack to see a very short man with bulging eyes—but he was not the manager as I had known him!

Are you new? I asked him.

What do you mean? he replied.

I do not know you.

Of course you know me, he insisted. You negotiated your lease with me.

Now I believed I must have lost my mind, because I was certain that I had never before seen this odd-looking man, who, as I examined him further, became stranger yet, with his wild eyebrows and mouth twisted down on the left side. Surely I would have remembered such a creature. In his right hand he held a lit cigar. He took a long draft, then blew foul-smelling smoke into my face.

Let’s go inside, he said.

I felt there was nothing to do but comply.

Hey! he said upon taking a step into the office. Why are you sitting in the dark?

My eyes, I said, extemporizing. A medical problem. I must use low-level lighting else harm my eyes.

He hummed. I feared he would flash on the lights. But happily he remained standing in the opened doorway.

This won’t take long, he said.

Yes? I asked.

I need to inform you that we’re moving your office, he said.

What? I all but shouted.

Move you. Downstairs. Same footage, same orientation, just down a floor.

I thought my heart would stop. Move me? I thought. Away from my dear patient!

How is this possible? I argued. My lease term runs through August.

The man who may or may not have been the manager said, Look at your lease.

What should I see there? I asked him.

He reached into his back pocket, from which he retrieved a sheaf of folded paper. He opened it, held it toward the hall light, and pointed at a paragraph.

See here? he said. It says we have leased you Room 807 or comparable space.

I leaned over. I tilted the sheaf of paper to catch the light. My God! The words were actually there!

But are you sure this is the same as my lease? I asked him.

Look, fella, he said. This is the deal. The guys next door want to expand into your space, and I can do it by moving you downstairs. They’ve been here for ten years, you only since last summer, and I’m obligated to accommodate my long-term tenant if I can. And I can. Anyway, they’ve already got your room number.

What was he talking about? Who had what number?

See, your room here used to be 805, he said, stabbing his lit cigar at me as he spoke. Those guys originally occupied it, and when they took the larger office next door, they took the number with them. And then this room didn’t have a number. So we gave it 807.

He laughed.

So you see, you are not even in your own room’s number! Which was supposed to be 805. Look, you move down to 705, since, as I said, 05 was the original number of this line. And the guys expand to fill their original 805, which is now your 807. Then goodbye to 807, since it will be part of 805, its original number. Done. Everyone has a space, everyone has a number. End of story.

I stood swaying; I reached out a hand to my desk to steady myself. Yes, all this taking of room numbers had been explained to me when I first engaged the space, but I never believed it could be forced upon one. Forcefully taken from one space and moved to another! Numbers marching behind like a retinue!

Then I should be in 707, I said, reaching for an argument—any argument—in my favor. At least I should be able to retain the 07!

Sure, said the man with a laugh. Why not? If you like playing James Bond, keep your 07. There’s no 707 at the moment. Sure. If that’s what it takes, we’re done.

No! I thought. We could not be done. This cannot happen. But what could I do? Argue with him further? I had to get him gone before Dr. Schussler’s return.

May we discuss this tomorrow? I asked him.

I don’t know why, replied the man.

You see, I cannot move, I said. I absolutely cannot change offices!

But you said. That 707—

I am in the midst of a project. And any interruption of the sort you suggest will ruin my work and cause me to miss a deadline. Material harm! I lied. You will cause me material harm!

I paused, and thought it would be best to add:

I am begging you, sir. Surely we may find another solution.

He hummed again, puffed on his horrid cigar, and finally said:

There is some possibility—possibility—that the architects on the other side of the engineers are moving. In which case, the engineers might … Well, we’ll see. In any case, even if we take your room, I can give you ninety days, at least.

Ninety days from—?

From the first of next month. See? That gives you nearly three months and a half.

I thought of all that must happen in the patient’s life, and how I might have to leave her in three and a half months. I nearly wept as I stood there.

In any case, the man went on, I’ll let you know … lemme see. The architects have to give notice by … lemme see … end of October. Yeah. October 31st.

At that he turned and left.

Not thirty seconds later, Dr. Schussler’s footsteps sounded in the hall.