Let Me Go Page 3

  Her face is thin and pointed, her skin grayish and transparent, her nose slender and sharp. And her body, even though she is sitting down, looks like an empty husk that might crumble at any moment. Her shoulders are graceful, her chest concave. All of a sudden I feel a visceral, biological anxiety at the sight of this simulacrum of my own future senility.

  I lean forward slightly; I want to shatter that void in her eyes. I stay there with my eyes looking deep into hers.

  A few minutes pass.

  Finally, in the depths of those pupils, something awakens— an imperceptible flicker, an uncertain flame.

  "I've seen you before," she says all of a sudden, in a voice that I don't remember, a senile voice, dry and porous.

  My heart thumps in my throat.

  "Are you my sister?" she asks, more to herself than to me. But she immediately dismisses the idea.

  "No, she's dead," she announces darkly with a gesture that seems to want to chase away such an uncomfortable thought.

  "I'm your daughter."

  "Who?" And she leans her head to one side, holding her ear as though trying to catch a distant echo. Then she shakes her head adamantly and announces in a cold voice, "My daughter's dead too."

  Then she tilts her head, bends her shoulders, and begins to stare at her fingers with exaggerated attention, as though she had never seen them before.

  She has long white hands, bony and ancient. I find them rather repellent. For a fraction of a second I'm ashamed of them, but there's nothing I can do about it: I didn't learn to love them as they withered.

  "I'm your daughter," I repeat, tearing my eyes away from her hands.

  "No!" she insists. "My daughter died long ago."

  Then I lift her chin and say firmly and clearly, "Look At Me—I Am Your Daughter!"

  Without giving her time to deny it, I take my teddy bear from my bag and hold it in front of her eyes.

  THAT MOTH-EATEN teddy bear, a sad relic of early childhood, had been given to me the previous day by Frau Freihorst, my mother's friend.

  Frau Freihorst was small and plump, with a serious, slightly prim expression, some years younger than my mother, and she smelled of cinnamon and Marseilles soap. She had given my cousin and me an embarrassingly warm welcome in her old Viennese house full of trinkets and crocheted doilies.

  She had known Traudi, she said—using the affectionate diminutive by which she always referred to her friend—for more than forty years, and she had never condemned her for her past, because she didn't consider it her place to judge. But she had observed with distress her slow mental deterioration, and it was the inexorable advance of her illness that had prompted her to write to me.

  She showed us, not without a certain degree of mischief, lots of photographs of my mother and herself that had been taken during the years when they had still consorted with a group of men friends—widowers, divorcées, or even inveterate bachelors who were identifiable by the way they winked at the camera.

  Her friendship with Traudi was one of those that you often come across between people of very dissimilar, not to say opposite, temperaments: Frau Freihorst described my mother as "terrible," "barking mad," but before old age had dulled them, she had loved her vitality and resourcefulness.

  Their lives had taken very different courses, too: In contrast to my mother's fanaticism, Frau Freihorst had never been anything other than a dutiful citizen. She had lost a husband and two sons to Hitler's war. Otherwise, she was resigned to the events that had affected her and her country. "We wanted it," she admitted frankly. "I was one of those who voted for the annexation of Austria, and when Hitler crossed Vienna in his open-topped Mercedes, I threw him a bouquet of flowers."

  She repeatedly asked my forgiveness for writing to me. But she had written out of affection, she said. Perhaps she had been poking her nose into matters that were none of her concern, and anyway . . .

  "Traudi isn't in good physical health," she observed, with tears in her eyes, "but you never know. At her age she could go to sleep one evening and never wake up again. And if you hadn't seen each other at least one last time—"

  "I'm grateful to you, believe me," I said, trying to reassure her in the most convincing tone I could manage.

  Encouraged, Frau Freihorst began to tell me what had happened after my 1971 visit. My mother had begun to feel a sense of guilt—something that she had previously been unaware of—about myself, my brother, and our father. At first her feelings merely irritated her, and she tried to shake them off; then, gradually, as though a tumor were growing in her body, she started behaving in a very strange way.

  "What I mean," the woman continued in a sad voice, "is that she developed an impulse to rid her apartment of everything that had anything to do with her ex-husband and her two children. Photographs, documents, things."

  "How did she get rid of them?" I asked.

  "She threw them all out into the trash, along with some things she'd just bought."

  "Just bought?" I asked, bemused.

  "Yes, it was all part of the ritual. She had to throw away your things along with things that she'd just acquired. She bought all kinds of things: shoes and books, pajamas and sets of plates, clothes and carpets. One day she came home with an enormous indoor cactus, which went the same way as everything else. Oh, and then there was a camera as well, you know, one of those cameras that take instant pictures. That ended up in the trash as well, and you can imagine the fuss there was in the neighborhood. The rumor went around that your mother was throwing away new things, and there was this dreadful competition to see who could retrieve the most interesting and valuable objects from the bins. Two old ladies came to blows over that cactus, and one of them ended up on the ground with a terrible gash on her head. The footpath was covered with blood; it was a disgraceful performance. The ambulance turned up, and a crowd of people came to gawk. All for the sake of a stupid cactus."

  Frau Freihorst ignored my bewilderment.

  "I don't know what you would call Traudi's behavior in psychiatric terms, but in my view it was a funeral rite. In short, to rid herself of her sense of guilt, your mother was giving you, your brother, and your father symbolic funerals. The dead make no demands on you, you know?"

  "None of us ever planned to ask her for anything," I objected.

  "But she didn't know that. Who knows what kind of mess there was in that poor head of hers."

  "But then she calmed down?" I asked.

  "Yes, but she needed treatment. I went along with her. She had to report to our district mental health service three times a week. It was at around this time that she also developed an obsession with cleaning."

  "What did she do?"

  "She cleaned from morning until night. Her apartment, I mean. She cleaned and cleaned, tipping up whole buckets of water over the floor, so that the water flooded the landing. She cleaned furiously, and there was nothing her social workers could do."

  "And what was the meaning of it all?"

  Frau Freihorst shrugged her shoulders.

  "Who knows? . . . Perhaps she wanted to cleanse her past, sweep away—let's call them the nasty things. That phase lasted for about a year, and then it stopped one day. She went through a period of relative calm, and the Traudi that I knew seemed to come back. But then she started having problems with her short-term memory. At first, there was the question of sugar."

  "Sugar?"

  "Yes. She would buy it one day, and then she would buy it again the next day, and the day after that. She could accumulate up to ten pounds. The same thing happened with bread. One day I discovered an enormous quantity of it in a cupboard; she must have been buying loaves of bread every day for at least a week. But then things got even worse. She would often leave her house and get lost. In her purse she always carried a piece of paper with a message to phone me in case of an emergency. Have you any idea how many times I went to fetch her from the most unlikely places? One day, for example, she went into an undertaker's. She'd ordered a white coffin
for a little girl, with all the trimmings you would have for a funeral. But then she wouldn't leave; she just sat there on a chair, silent and sulking. After a while they decided to call the police. Then she took out the piece of paper with my phone number on it. That time, as usual, I went and collected her in a taxi." And she added with benevolent indulgence, "Which she never paid me for."

  She thought for a moment.

  "But I prefer to remember the times before her problems became quite so serious. Every now and again she would make me laugh. After the funeral rites, for example, she started talking about her children and about Stefan, her ex-husband, in the past tense. She said: Perhaps it's a good thing that my daughter died prematurely. I wouldn't have been able to bear being the mother of . . ." She broke off with an embarrassed smile. "No, I can't say it."

  "Go on," I pleaded.

  "She said she couldn't bear to be the mother of an alte Schachtel, an old bag."

  "She really said that?" I asked, a little hurt.

  She nodded. "Your mother was always a rather . . . a rather vain woman. She didn't want to grow old."

  MY MOTHER STARES at the teddy bear with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief.

  Then she says slowly, in a whining voice, "This is Zakopane and you must have stolen him. He belonged to my daughter . . . Where did you get him?"

  "I didn't steal him," I answer. "He belongs to me."

  "He belonged to my daughter!" she protests vehemently.

  "I am your daughter."

  She shakes her head, and for a few moments she hides her face in her hands. From the shaking of her body, I assume that she is crying, but she isn't. Uncovering her face, she murmurs, serious and alert, "His name is Zakopane because Stefan and I bought him in Zakopane in Poland. We were on our way to fetch . . . " But she's already having problems. "We were on our way to fetch two people. . . ."

  "Your children, that's who you were going to fetch," I say, coming to her aid. "Your children, Helga and Peter."

  Berlin, July 1941

  THE SECOND YEAR of the war. My grandparents were looking after a farm in Poland, fortunately for them as "annexed Austrians" rather than natives. The Nazis saw the Poles as an inferior race, so much so that they forbade them to bury their dead in consecrated ground. But they were afraid of the awkward local intelligentsia and decided to wipe them out. A dear friend of my grandparents, for example, a politician with radical tendencies, was murdered outside the city hall in Wroclaw.

  One day my grandmother paid us an unexpected visit in Berlin, to discover me and my brother being looked alter by a stranger. The woman explained to her that "the lady"—meaning my mother—was always very busy with her political affairs, which was why she often turned to her to look after her two "little angels." It was certainly not the first time that we had been given to strangers to be looked after, and our grandmother, who knew that, went through the roof: She paid the recalcitrant babysitter on the spot and told her she could go to the devil.

  All afternoon my grandmother waited for my mother to come home. At about eleven o'clock in the evening there was an air raid. We all went to the shelter, heavy with sleep.

  At dawn my mother still hadn't come home. At about nine o'clock Grandmother started making our breakfast: Fortunately she had brought some groceries with her from Poland, because our larder was nearly empty. The milk was powdered, and I complained because I hated it. I vaguely remember my grandmother trying to explain it to me: The war, she said, imposed certain restrictions. More than her words, which I understood up to a certain point, it was her soothing and undramatic tone of voice that calmed me down. At the time, Grandmother, hating the Fuhrer and the Third Reich with all her heart, was still fairly optimistic about the outcome of the war, and she certainly didn't imagine the catastrophic fate that awaited us.

  After breakfast she thought she might distract us by reading to us; she took us into my father's study—he was already at the front—in search of a book of fairy tales. There weren't any, but instead, in the middle of the room, there stood a cumbersome bookcase full of copies of Mein Kampf It may have been my mother's task to distribute them: At the time the book was being widely disseminated among the German people, and young couples were even given copies as wedding presents from the state.

  Grandmother picked up one of the volumes and, turning it around in her strong peasant hands, said, with extreme disdain: "Pfui!" It was a critical reaction that, had it been expressed in public, would at the very least have brought accusations of defeatism down on her head.

  When my mother finally did come home, my grandmother greeted her with her face white with rage and her fists in the air. There was a frightening scene that made the walls shake. My mother came out of it as though paralyzed: For the umpteenth time she had been found wanting by her mother-in-law, who had never hidden her aversion to my mother since her engagement to my father. Her attempts at self-justification fell on deaf ears. She tried in vain to explain that as a member of the SS, when the call came from the Reichsführer she had to jump.

  Grandmother, who had already made the basic preparations, took Peter and me and brought us with her to Poland.

  MY MOTHER STARTS staring at me with a cautious expression. I smile at her, but her face is grave. She actually presses her arm tighter around her chest as though in an instinctive gesture of fear. A tremor runs through her limbs, the muscles of her face stiffen, and her lips curl into a series of grimaces.

  "Who are you?" she asks finally, in a dark and anxious voice.

  "I'm your daughter," I repeat calmly.

  With a surprisingly agile movement she grabs the teddy bear out of my hand and presses it to her cheek.

  "We bought him in Zakopane," she murmurs after making a slow and laborious effort of memory, "along with . . . something else." She comes to a standstill.

  "A toy squirrel for Peter," I say, coming to her assistance again.

  She nods as though in her sleep. "Yes, a squirrel. We had gone to fetch the children. My mother-in-law had taken them away, you see. And she sent a telegram to Stefan, that harpy did. And Stefan had to ask for his leave that wasn't due until Christmas, and we went to take the children back. Stefan was furious, but it was all his mother's fault. She hated me and I . . . hated her. And then . . ."

  She takes one last glance at the teddy bear and puts it in one of the pockets of her woolen suit, the color of a soldier's uniform.

  "Peter's dead," she declares, staring at me grimly.

  I decide not to correct her for the moment. Instead I ask, in an almost sad voice, "Do you really not remember me?"

  She shakes her head stubbornly, irritably. But a shaky little smile begins to spread around her lips.

  "Are you Helga?"

  I nod, touched.

  I would have liked to be able to answer, "Yes, Mother," but there would have been no point in even trying. We aren't used to it. The last time I called her "Mother" was when I was four years old, and since then I have rarely said the word: Mutti. My stepmother was insistent that I should call her that. She would yell, "Now I am your mother and you must call me Muttil" I couldn't help it: However much I tried, I couldn't say that word. And she punished me. She sent me to bed without any supper: "You can eat when you've called me Mutti." Or else she would lock me up all day in the dark, in my father's study. Or beat me with a stick. She tried everything she could think of, but she could never get me to say Mutti. I was stubborn, and I didn't want her. I wanted my grandmother, who had cared for me and Peter after our mother had left. I rejected my stepmother, who from the start had only ever loved cuddly, happy little Peter, and she had never concealed the fact. She wouldn't even show me love when things were at their worst, not even when the situation in Berlin became insupportable and we were forced to spend months locked up in the cellar with all the other tenants of the building, with no drinking water, no light, no running water, and only a small amount of rationed food of appalling quality.

  One morning, down in that hell
, we all discovered that we were covered with red boils. We found that our straw mattresses were infested with bedbugs. Even in that awkward situation my stepmother demonstrated her rejection, not to say her loathing, of me. In fact, she did everything she could think of to keep me from using the precious ointment that eased the terrible itching: She said it had to do for everyone in the cellar. So, unlike everyone else, I went on furiously scratching myself.

  This came to the attention of her father, my grandfather by marriage (I called him Opa, grandfather). He registered what was going on and flew into a rage; he furiously attacked his daughter, using, for the first time, very harsh words, calling her "perfidious" and "despicable." My stepmother was obliged to treat me. I was still the last to stop scratching. I had been in serious danger, and Opa realized that: In a situation like ours, without medicines and in atrocious hygienic conditions, those wounds could have gone septic and might even have been fatal.

  "HELGA'S DEAD TOO," says my mother, but her voice sounds less certain now. She looks at me: "Are you Helga?"

  "Yes," I answer for the third time. "I'm Helga, your daughter."

  And once again I'd love to add the word "Mutti," but I can't.

  The only person I ever addressed that way in my life was Frau Heinze, the headmistress of Eden Boarding School, in which my stepmother imprisoned me while the war was raging on the pretext that I was mischievous and insubordinate. I was permitted to call her "Mutti Heinze," and I did so with enthusiasm because she was good to us, even if she was strict. In the evening she sang us Brahms's Lullaby:

  Guten Abend, gute Nacht,

  Mit Roslein bedacht,

  Mit Naglein besteckt.

  Schlupf unter die Deck.

  My mother leans toward me and narrows her eyes. I can smell her old woman's smell. Her hair smells of honey; it must be her shampoo. Finally, she slowly brushes one of my cheeks as strange noises emerge from her mouth, as though she was counting or whispering something learned from memory.

  "Helga!" she shouts all of a sudden.

  She leaps backward. "It's Helga! My daughter's here! It's really her, look!" she announces at the top of her voice.