English Lessons
School still had three weeks to go when Hugo and I reached London, but Minna didn’t think it worthwhile to register me, since my lack of English would keep me from understanding any lessons. She set me to doing chores in the house and then in the neighborhood: she would write a shopping list in her slow English script, spelling the words under her breath—incorrectly, as I saw when I learned to read and write in the new language. She would give me a pound and send me to the corner shop to buy a chop for dinner, a few potatoes, a loaf of bread. When she got home from work she would count the change twice to make sure I hadn’t robbed her. Still, each week she gave me sixpence in pocket money.
Hugo, whom I saw on Sundays, was already chattering in English. I felt humiliated, the big sister not able to speak because Minna kept me barricaded behind a wall of German. She hoped day to day that I would be sent back to Vienna. “Why waste your time on English when you may leave in the morning?”
The first time she said it my heart skipped a beat. “Mutti und Oma, haben sie dir geschrieben? They wrote you? I can go home?”
“I haven’t heard from Madame Butterfly,” Minna spat. “In her own good time she will remember you.”
Mutti had forgotten me. It hit my child’s heart like a fist. A year later, when I could read English, I despised the children’s books we were given in school, with their saccharine mothers and children. “My mother would never forget me. She loves me even though she is far away, and I pray every night to see her again, as I know she is praying for me and watching over me.” That’s what the girls in Good Wives or English Orphans would have said to Cousin Minna, boldly defiant in their trembling little-girl voices. But they didn’t understand anything about life, those little girls.
Your own mother lies in bed, too worn to get up to kiss you good-bye when you get on a train, leave your city, your home, your Mutti and Oma, behind. Men in uniforms stop you, look in your suitcase, put big ugly hands on your underwear, your favorite doll, they can take these things if they want, and your mother is lying in bed, not stopping them.
Of course I knew the truth, knew that only Hugo and I could get visas and travel permits, that grown-ups weren’t allowed to go to England unless someone in England gave them a job. I knew the truth, that the Nazis hated us because we were Jews, so they took away Opa’s apartment with my bedroom: some strange woman was living there now with her blond child in my white-canopied bed—I had gone early one morning on foot to look at the building, with its little sign, Juden verboten. I knew these things, knew that my mama was hungry as we all were, but to a child, your parents are so powerful, I still half believed my parents, my Opa, would rise up and make everything go back the way it used to be.
When Minna said my mother would remember me in her own good time, she only voiced my deepest fear. I had been sent away because Mutti didn’t want me. Until September, when the war started and no one could leave Austria anymore, Minna would say that at regular intervals.
Even today I’m sure she did this because she so resented my mother, Lingerl, the little butterfly with her soft gold curls, her beautiful smile, her charming manners. The only way Minna could hurt Lingerl was to hurt me. Perhaps the fact that my mother never knew made Minna twist the knife harder: she was so furious that she couldn’t stab Lingerl directly that she kept on at me. Maybe that’s why she was so hateful when we got the news about their fate.
The one thing I knew for sure my first summer in London, the summer of ’39, was what my papa told me, that he would come if I could find him a job. Armed with a German–English dictionary, which I found in Minna’s sitting room, I spent that summer walking up and down the streets near Minna’s house in Kentish Town. My cheeks stained with embarrassment, I would ring doorbells and struggle to say, “Mine vater, he need job, he do all job. Garden, he make garden. House, he clean house. Coal, he bring coal, make house warm.”
Eventually I ended up at the house behind Minna’s. I had been watching it from my attic window because it was so different from Minna’s. Hers was a narrow frame structure whose neighbors almost touched on the east and west sides. The garden was a cold oblong, as narrow as the house and only holding a few scraggly raspberry bushes. To this day I won’t eat raspberries. . . .
Anyway, the house behind was made of stone, with a large garden, roses, an apple tree, a little patch of vegetables, and Claire. I knew her name because her mother and her older sister would call to her. She sat on a swing-bench under their pergola, her fair hair pulled away from her ears to hang down her back, while she pored over her books.