Let Me Go Page 10

  I get up and kiss her.

  She seems genuinely moved and wipes away a tear.

  "Did your second mother kiss you?" she asks all of a sudden.

  "No," I answer simply.

  "Never?"

  I shake my head. "No, never."

  Now she is growing agitated, almost sobbing. "You should have stayed with Stefan's mother. Not that she was nice to me; she was a bad mother-in-law. But you might have been better off with her than with that . . . that . . . " She twists her mouth. "It was all Hilde's fault," she concludes resentfully.

  She gets up and goes over to the window. It's stopped raining, but the sky is still dark.

  "Hilde, Hilde!" she explodes and beats a feeble fist against the glass.

  "If only a bomb had fallen on her head!" she groans. "Then she could never have gone to the gallery and bought 'Lions in the Savannah'!"

  She sits back down in her armchair, and when she lifts her eyes to me, I see that she is eaten up with malign curiosity.

  "What happened to her in the end?" she asks. She really is obsessed with that woman.

  "Who?" I ask in turn, to gain some time.

  "Hilde. Did she ever get married?" She is very alert now, desperate to know.

  "No," I reply. "After we were repatriated to Austria, Hilde followed us, or rather she followed her sister to settle down somewhere nearby."

  "Did she work?"

  "She set up a little farm."

  She explodes with laughter.

  "So it's true, then, a bad penny always turns up again!"

  I don't tell her that Hilde has been dead for many years now. I don't feel like it.

  She thinks for a moment. "Certainly, she was efficient. That was why she worked with Goebbels. Anyone inefficient wouldn't have lasted two minutes with him. And anyway, he himself was a monster of efficiency. That man was a genius."

  She seems to grow distracted and glances at her empty glass.

  "I want another apple juice," she announces. "Call Fräulein Inge." But I'm not going to have the last few minutes of our conversation wasted like that. I throw her some bait. "I saw Goebbels once."

  "Really?" She bites straightaway. "When?"

  I think. "It was . . . well, Papa had married . . ."

  She cuts in. "Spare me the details."

  That bizarre jealousy again. After fifty-seven years.

  She sulks for a few minutes before her curiosity overcomes her.

  "You really saw him? Where?"

  "At the Propaganda Ministry on Wilhelmsplatz. I remember lots of banners flapping about on all the buildings."

  "And what else?"

  "Hilde took us to his office. It was a big office, filled with light. He struck me as tall and severe—"

  "But Goebbels wasn't tall," she objects.

  "Yes, but I was a child and had to raise my eyes to look him in the face. He was serious. He barely glanced at me and immediately turned to Peter. He reached out a hand as though to stroke him, but Peter turned his face away. Only then did he give a half-smile. And he didn't deign to take a closer look at me until Hilde told him my name was Helga, like his elder daughter."

  My mother quickly runs her tongue over her lips, an automatic reaction that you often see in old people. Every time she does it I can't help feeling a twinge of nausea, of disgust.

  "And what happened after that?" she persists. It is as if she is waiting to hear the epilogue to a fairy tale.

  "My—" I break off. Better not to mention my stepmother again. "At the end we were given some coupons for extra food rations."

  "And Goebbels didn't say anything else to you?"

  "I can't remember. The grown-ups talked. Oh, yes, I remember they called him to the phone, and we left without being able to say good-bye properly." It's not true. The story about the phone call is pure invention.

  "And what about the coupons?"

  "Ursula got them from a clerk. A tiny little clerk, I remember. A serious little thing who called Hilde 'Fraulein' rather deferentially."

  "And what else?"

  "That's all. We went away. Hilde stayed because office hours weren't over yet. We got home just in time to run to the shelter. Alarms were going off on the corner of Friedrichsruherstrasse."

  The light in her eyes goes out, and suddenly there's an infinite distance between us once again. It takes as little as that for her to be drawn back into the "old days."

  She murmurs to herself, "Goebbels was a genius, but I didn't like him as a man. Hilde, on the other hand, was wild about him. I've always been convinced that she was secretly in love with him." Another of her obsessions, clearly. Her eye runs over me without seeing me, lost in the past.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WAR, in Berlin, my brother and I were explicitly forbidden to mention Hitler or Goebbels. "From now on you have to look ahead," they said, "the past is past, and the future begins here."

  But what future? I can still clearly see the Berlin of'45. We children played among the rubble while the adults, utterly exhausted, almost guided by animal instinct, did their best to supply us with our daily needs: a scrap of bread, a ration of milk, a pane of glass for the windows. No, during those times the people of Berlin had no eyes for the future or any room for memories.

  So it wasn't until 1949 that I heard my aunt Hilde talk about Goebbels. Had she been in love with him? I couldn't say. Certainly she had sad words to say about him, which betrayed great emotion.

  It was Christmas. Papa, Ursula, Peter, and I had been repatriated to Austria the previous year—my father was a native of Vienna—and we had settled temporarily in the house of my paternal grandparents in Attersee in the Salzkammergut. In turn, my grandparents had been back from Poland for about a year. Hilde had come from Berlin to celebrate the Christmas holidays with us. She had just buried my beloved Opa.

  It was Christmas Eve. After dinner and a few bottles of wine, the conversation had grown animated. Only, Aunt Hilde seemed to become more serious and melancholy until she finally found relief by bursting into tears. I was dumbfounded. I remembered her from Berlin as always being stern, self-contained, and a little distant.

  After that outburst she started to remember the old times, when the defeat of the Nazis was still far off and she was working beside Goebbels in the building of the Propaganda Ministry.

  I listened to her in fascination. In spite of everything, Berlin was still close to my heart. One thing that particularly impressed me about her story was the description of the last occasion when she had seen her boss.

  Berlin, April 21, 1945

  GOEBBELS HAD SUMMONED a little group of his immediate circle to the private projection room in his villa overlooking the Tiergarten. It was here that he used to show—to his selected guests, often including the Führer in person—the anti-Semitic propaganda films that he himself had commissioned from the German film industry, of which he was in charge. That morning, however, the atmosphere seemed empty and icy. The windows had been walled up, weak bulbs cast a pale light, and the deafening clamor of battle penetrated the building from outside.

  Goebbels turned up late. He was unrecognizable, unshaven, and seemed downcast. He looked like a ghost. Before feeling seized by anxiety, Hilde felt sorry for him.

  As well as issuing the usual instructions for the day, Goebbels started shouting and inveighing against the German people, who had not shown themselves worthy of their Führer. The following day, April 22, as "Reichskommissar for the defense of Berlin," he would threaten with a court-martial anyone who dared to raise a white flag.

  Hilde never saw him again. A few days later she received news of his suicide. He had taken his wife and children with him. Hilde was very upset, even more upset than she had been about the death of Hitler himself.

  * * *

  I COULDN'T SAY what Hilde saw in her former boss. Certainly, on that occasion she didn't have a single critical word to say about him. She only recalled little acts of kindness on his part, at parties, or when one of his clerks had a birthd
ay. But as to the feelings that had driven her, they died when she did.

  MY MOTHER IS PONDERING something.

  "Peter turned his face away," she repeats, absorbed. "Who was Peter?"

  "Your son," I tell her once again. Little more than an hour has passed since we spoke of him, but she's already completely repressed him from her memory. She is vague again now, her face misty.

  "Which one?" She rummages in her memory and frowns.

  "You have only one son."

  "That's true," she admits in a faint voice. But it's clear that she isn't convinced, that she's fumbling around in shadow.

  "Do you ever think of him?" I venture. "Do you ever think about your son?"

  She tilts her head. "I don't know . . . and he died so long ago."

  But now, once again, her tone is uncertain, almost questioning. Remembering what happened before, I fear her reaction, but I want to bring her to some acceptance of reality. I ignore the nudge with which Eva tries to get me to stop.

  "Your son is alive," I say to her gently, in a persuasive tone, as though talking to a child.

  Her face drains of all expression. "That's not true," she replies darkly. And the scene, as in my worst predictions, repeats itself. My mother plunges her face into her hands and starts moaning, "My son died a long time ago . . . stop telling me lies . . . stop frightening me."

  She's so old, so frail. Once again, in spite of myself, I soften. I am about to go and am worried that I won't be able to sever the bond that ties me to her. And to think I've tried to do it thousands of times, in thousands of different ways, even denying my own mother tongue.

  Some time after my visit to Vienna in 1971, in Bologna I met a compatriot of mine who, naturally enough, started to talk to me in German. It took only a few phrases for me to realize that I could no longer speak my own language fluently and correctly. I was stunned. It was like discovering that I had painlessly lost a limb. A little like in wartime, when a man will lose a leg and go on running till he falls, unaware until then that anything has happened.

  It was only after seeking out and finding, after more than fifty years, my cousin Eva, who speaks no Italian, that I was forced to return to my mother tongue. But it wasn't an easy task. It was like climbing, step by step, on hands and knees, a high, steep staircase.

  I look at my mother. She's so distant, so unknown, so incomprehensible, so irritating. So disarming sometimes.

  She raises her head and starts begging me. "Don't leave me alone, never leave me alone again. You've got to come back. You've got to come back every day. I'm your Mutti, and nobody loves me. Nobody ever gives me a kiss. You've given me a kiss and I want you to come back. Because you're my Mausi." And she looks at me with a flash in her eye that, if we were speaking about any other woman, I would happily describe as loving.

  "My little Mausi," she repeats, and smiles sweetly, affectionately. But it lasts only a moment. And here she is once again, canny and sly.

  "It's a shame you're so old," she hisses. "I don't like having an old daughter. It makes me feel decrepit. Thank heavens Peter is dead. I couldn't bear to have two children as old as that!"

  She sighs. "But you must come back anyway, old as you are. My companions in here have younger children. What a shame that is."

  Something in me freezes. She has already tormented both me and Eva for quite long enough with all this talk of old age. But that's enough now, I say to myself. She's got to stop.

  I'm hurt and crushed. She doesn't deserve a thing; she's cruel, insensitive, and lying. She's just vulgar. I shouldn't have come. I should never have listened to Frau Freihorst.

  Why did I hurry to Vienna? Perhaps because in spite of everything I can't bring myself to hate her, this mother who isn't a mother?

  Make me hate you, Mother!

  Make me hate you. That would be the best solution. Say something vile about the Jews who were under your guard in Birkenau, those Jews you used to order about with the power to determine whether they lived or died. The demon that has possessed me suggests my next move, and it's the right one. I make a point of looking at the clock.

  "You're not going already?" she says, taking the bait.

  "It'll soon be the end of visiting time."

  "I want you to stay!"

  Fine, perfect. I reply with false regret. "I wish I'd known more about you, but you don't talk much. You don't talk much, and when you do, you break off halfway through. It isn't nice to visit your own mother and not be able to talk to her."

  She grows agitated, rises to her feet, waves her arms around.

  "But I do want to talk!"

  "It's getting late . . ."

  "If I tell you other things, will you stay?" She stares at me with pleading in her eyes.

  "Perhaps," I concede vaguely.

  "What do you want to know?"

  It will have to come of its own accord.

  "About Birkenau?" she suggests. But it's basically the topic that she finds most attractive. Her career, her faith, her iron convictions.

  "If you like," I reply innocently. "For example . . . yes, I'd like to know what sort of relationship you had with the prisoners on your block."

  She hesitates for just a few seconds. Her face, for one wary moment, becomes icy.

  "What relationship would you expect me to have with subjects that our government held to be inferior? Inferior and dangerous, which was why they were locked up in the camps in the first place. No relationship whatsoever, except the one you have with a hated enemy."

  That's fine, I say to myself, but it still isn't enough.

  "Did you just think that way because they made you?" I suggest. "Or were you personally convinced that the Jews were inferior creatures?"

  She hesitates and looks me in the eye.

  "Do you want the truth?"

  "Yes."

  For a moment she remains silent and motionless, then she leans toward me and smiles. "Mausi..." she murmurs, almost deferentially.

  She's too close to me—she's making me feel uneasy. And disgusted, I would have to admit. I can smell her breath, the slightly acid breath of an old woman.

  Fortunately, she draws back, crosses her hands on her bony knees, and says in one breath, "If you want to know the truth, I hated those Jewish women. They gave me an almost physical feeling of repulsion; it turned my stomach to see all those perverted faces, the faces of an inferior race. And how united they were, how they protected each other! They managed to conceal the sick to make sure they didn't end up with Klahr. Yes, my little Mausi, I hated those cursed Jews. A horrible race, believe me. Pfui."

  I'VE GOT WHAT I wanted. I'm stunned, and perhaps she can read it in my face. She looks at me uncertainly.

  "I've been open with you," she declares, "you mustn't think ill of me. Hating the Jews was an unavoidable duty for a member of the SS, you understand?" She is trying to explain the inexplicable.

  "Does that mean you can hate to order?" I ask with a kind of melancholy irony.

  "If you are convinced of the reasons, certainly," she replies very seriously.

  "What reasons?"

  "The reasons why the Jewish people had to be liquidated."

  I don't take it any further. Instead, I ask: "Why were the prisoners afraid of ending up with that . . . Klahr, you said?"

  Even more bitterly than before, she says, "Yes, I said Klahr. Oh, everyone was afraid of Klahr; they were terrified of him."

  "Who was he?"

  "A medical worker. Let's say . . . a sort of specialist nurse."

  "And why were they afraid of him?"

  "He was the one that gave the injections."

  "What injections?"

  She makes a sharp decisive gesture, as of someone fixing something in the middle of their chest.

  "What does that mean?"

  She takes a breath and replies indifferently, "If a prisoner ended up in the sick bay, the medical wing, or the hospital block, and contracted a serious illness, they wasted no time."

  "So w
hat did they do? Tell me!"

  "The patient was given an injection."

  "What sort of injection?"

  "An injection of phenic acid right into the heart. Zap!" And she repeats the horrible gesture. "Do you know what phenic acid is?"

  I DO KNOW WHAT phenic acid is. Not precisely, but I know. Before I have time to compose myself, however, Fräulein Inge comes back in.

  "Nearly lunchtime," she reminds my mother gently. But my mother shrieks, "I'm not eating today!"

  Fraulein Inge nods indulgently. "Well, we'll see."

  "How much time do we have left?" I ask.

  "There'll be another half an hour before all the guests have taken their places and the soup has arrived," she replies politely. "I'll come and get your mother at the last minute."

  "I'm not coming!" she shrieks again.

  "I know," Fräulein Inge answers, giving me a little wink. I admire her patience. So I've got another half hour. I look at her. I'm convinced that she'll have forgotten me soon, perhaps even by this evening, just as she must have done in 1971. And I've done everything I can to remove her from my thoughts.

  What a sad couple we are, Mother, and what an absurd bond connects us. We will finish each other off.

  "Will you stay another little while?" she asks, with a tear in the corner of her right eye. Sometimes her voice is so sad and soft.

  "Yes," I reply.

  "I don't want to eat," she repeats. "I want you to stay with me. Will you stay for a long time?"

  "I'll stay for . . . a while," I answer vaguely.

  "Another two hours," she wheedles. "And will you call me Mutti again?"

  Eva nods to me to keep her happy. I'm worn-out and repelled. I say it.

  "Mutti."

  But the word finds no echo inside me.

  But she flies off into a great emotional performance. She explodes into a torrent of sobs, blowing me tearful kisses on her fingertips. Until all of a sudden she gets to her feet, comes over to me, and kisses me on the forehead.

  "Thank you," she says in a broken voice.

  She goes back to her armchair, smooths her skirt over her thighs, and calms down. Her eyes grow gradually distant again.

  I'm bewildered: This new, sudden distance between us worries me. I try to bring her back to me.