Perhaps it had been Martina’s student Gertrud Memler, the Nazi turned anti-nuclear activist. She apparently experienced a deep revulsion against her young Nazi self. Maybe she was seeking Kitty’s forgiveness for causing her mother’s death.
Memler certainly regretted her weapons work, both in Nazi Austria and in post-war America. Her letters attacking America’s nuclear program meant the FBI was hunting her: she lived the last part of her life underground. If she wanted to meet Kitty, she had to do it secretly.
“‘Tell her, that was a cruel lie that you and tell her made up.’” I repeated the words out loud and they suddenly changed meaning.
Not “tell her,” but “Teller.” Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.
I pulled the seat back up. Memler attacked Teller for Star Wars, she’d attacked him for the hydrogen bomb itself. She might well have attacked him for signing on to that chirpy civil defense lie, that we could survive a nuclear war if we ducked under our desks and covered our heads with our hands.
Where I grew up, in South Chicago, we might vote Democrat, but we were a hundred percent behind our government and its nuclear weapons. The nuclear umbrella: I could remember the drawing Ms. Jostma put on the bulletin board in my sixth-grade social studies class. It showed a stern-looking Statue of Liberty holding a big black umbrella whose points were all hydrogen bombs. It was a terrifying picture, but all of us knew that the might of the American military kept us safe. Those ugly bombs were an umbrella that was as scary to the Communists as it was to my friends and me. Better dead than Red: my aunt Marie, Boom-Boom’s mother, often snapped those words at Gabriella.
“You’ve never lived through a war, Marie,” my mother would say wearily. “When your mother and grandmother are murdered by people of one ideology, you don’t long for another ideology to save you.”
Judy had heard the “old lady” and the man arguing. She knew part of the quarrel was about her, so when she heard “Tell her,” she thought they wanted to tell her something. And then her mother warned her that if she repeated what they’d told her, she’d be punished in a terrible way. For over forty years she had buttoned that fear deep inside her chest: you will go to prison if you talk about duck and cover, or the two people who quarreled over it.
In the early part of the encounter, the older woman and Kitty had talked in German about someone being dead. Maybe it was Kitty telling Memler that Martina was dead. Or the other way round.
What I had trouble with was the picture of someone moving from running a Nazi weapons slave camp to anti-nuclear activist. Some catastrophe must have hit her personally, although what could have been more devastating than war and its aftermath?
I sent your mother off to the Sobibor death camp when we had no more use for her. Can you forgive me? Even someone less damaged than Kitty would be furious in such a moment. You took everything from me and now you also want my forgiveness?
Just contemplating such a conversation made me clench my muscles. I got out of the car to get some air and stretch my aching arms. In the middle of Kitty and Memler’s argument, a man arrived. The older woman had called him a weasel for signing on with Teller.
Dzornen. It had to have been Dzornen. Breen had signed on with Teller to help design the computers needed to create hydrogen bombs, but it was Dzornen whom Memler and Martina knew back in Vienna.
The man had said, “I’m not doing anything else for you, so whatever it is you want, forget about it.” He’d brought her into America, that was one thing he’d done.
That couldn’t be right. Would an Austrian Jew like Benjamin Dzornen have supported Martina’s Nazi student but left Martina to languish?
On the other hand, that might be the crime that so burdened Julius Dzornen. When the Dzornens left Vienna, his wife, Ilse, probably thought she’d left Kitty and Martina behind forever. I imagined the hot fire of anger and jealousy burning in her, making her persuade herself that Kitty and Martina’s fate wouldn’t be so bad. She could have kept Benjamin from putting real muscle into finding a lab in America that would accept Martina. They might experience some privation, but Martina deserved that for having sex with Ilse’s husband. Ilse’s main feeling, as I imagined her, was relief: the fact that her husband was Kitty’s father was something she would never have to think about again.
Then Kitty showed up at the Dzornens’ Chicago house. Kitty’s frenzied journey around the neighborhood, looking for Dzornen, demanding a response from him, would have brought that old wound right back to the surface.