I drove down to the Gold Coast, thirty miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic. I found a parking space near Herta’s building, one of the grand duchesses of Chicago apartments that line Lake Shore Drive East. They face the lake and Oak Street Beach, with mortgages that would take a blue-collar woman like me a hundred thirty-five years to pay off.
I was stiff from my long drive. After feeding quarters into the ticket machine—twenty-five for an hour—I went to the little garden that separates the duchesses from the beach and stretched my shoulders. And thought about how to get past Herta Dzornen’s doorman.
INNSBRUCK, 1942
Pebbles in a Bottomless Well
AFTER MONTHS OF cold and starvation, all the prisoners hallucinate. Platters of beautiful food appear just out of reach. Parents and old lovers blur with the faces of other prisoners or even guards. Old enemies appear in the shadows on the cave walls.
One day Martina thinks she sees her high school mathematics professor, Herr Papp, examining her work.
“But you are blind,” she says out loud.
A guard pulls out the short whip that they all carry and snaps it hard enough to produce a whistle. “I see you perfectly, you lazy cunt. No talking to the other prisoners.”
She’s trying to measure the purity of a piece of carbon, but her hands are weak from hunger. The cold and damp in the cave also affect the balances so that it’s almost impossible to get the weight correct. As she returns to the task in front of her the last time she saw Herr Papp comes to her.
She had visited his shabby three-room apartment near the Volksgarten when he finally answered her letter. It had taken him so long to respond that she wondered if he had died, or thought she was writing as a prank: he had been a sarcastic professor, belittling the girls in his classes. In response, several of the students in Martina’s year had sent him flowery love letters signed with the names of cabaret singers or dancers at the opera.
By the time she wrote him, she was a full-fledged researcher at the Institut für Radiumforschung, although she couldn’t afford to quit her day job, teaching physics and mathematics at the Technische Hochschule.
When she arrived at Herr Papp’s apartment, a housekeeper waited at the top of the stairs. The woman didn’t acknowledge Martina’s “Grüss Gott,” except to gesture to the open door, disapproval lines dug deep around her mouth.
Herr Papp didn’t stand when Martina went over to greet him. Out of old habit, before sitting in a chair near his own, she curtsied to him—really no more gracefully than she’d done for Frau Herschel twenty-five years earlier.
Herr Papp’s thin voice with its sarcastic inflection hadn’t changed. “Ah, yes, you were the young lady who always worked out her problem sets so thoroughly. I remember that you sat so upright I sometimes wondered if your mother had tied a backboard beneath your jacket. And you are still upright. Please sit down so that your voice is at my level.”
It wasn’t until she sat that Martina realized he was blind. After the housekeeper poured tea for them both, the woman sat next to him, guiding his hand to the cup, placing a piece of cake on his fork, making sure he had control of the fork before releasing her hold, wiping the front of his frayed jacket when he spilled tea or cake.
It must have been the housekeeper who had written the reply for him: Martina had been surprised by the round, careful letters, not the spiky script in the notes that used to show her a more economical way of solving a problem.
“I never thought of you as the kind of young lady who paid visits to the elderly or the infirm,” Herr Papp said. “You struck me as the kind of single-minded person who is rather like the hypotenuse, taking the shortest distance between her present location and a goal.”
His words echoed her mother’s in such an alarming way that Martina was silenced for a moment. Not that Frau Saginor would ever refer to a hypotenuse, but her rages against her daughter’s obsession with mathematics and science always had this at their core: Martina was selfish, thoughtless, what she wanted came ahead of the needs of anyone around her.
Frau Saginor used to keep up a stream of hopes that Martina might fail her exams, a barrage of demands that she quit her studies and get a job as a bookkeeper or a shop assistant. “That would help put food on the table and pay for Papa’s medicines.”
This was when Martina was seventeen. Papa had been in the early stages of tuberculosis, coughing up so much blood every day that it was hard to know how his body was able to produce more. But even in his weakness, Papa told Martina over and over that he wanted her in school. On the table next to the bed, he kept those of her essays and problem sets that had been marked “100 out of 100,” or “First Prize in the mathematics section.” Until the last few days of his life, he read them in the long watches of the night when he couldn’t sleep.
Martina used to work out her math problems sitting next to him, and if he was still awake when she finished, she would play for him: her flute had also won her a prize. She often played at three in the morning, making the neighbors pound on the thin walls between the tenements.