Let Me Go Page 8

  All of a sudden someone throws a big fishing net over us. I didn't know there was one in the house, and I don't understand why it's been thrown over us, but I'm terribly frightened.

  I scream and Peter screams too; he clutches me and yells at the top of his voice. We clumsily scramble about, but the more we try to free ourselves from the net's embrace, the more entangled we become and the more we shriek.

  There is no sign of the grown-ups. Perhaps they're spying from behind the door, enjoying our pathetic anxiety, our forlorn terror.

  We're like two beetles on their backs. We wave our legs around and scream. The sun has set and the shadows of evening are coming in through the window.

  A trap. A trap set by a world of adults, suddenly cynical and malevolent.

  My mother had frightened us on other occasions; above all when she handed out her implacable punishments. If my stepmother's motto was "don't think, know," my mother's was "above all, obey." She was hypersensitive to disobedience. She couldn't bear the slightest hint of insubordination. Since I was rebellious by nature, every time I showed the slightest sign of insurrection, she would punish me by locking me in the shed. In Berlin, when we were living in the district of Niederschönhausen, we had one that had only a tiny window, but my mother had covered it over with cardboard so that I would stay in total darkness for hours. Another punishment that I considered terrible was the administering of a triple ration of cod liver oil. Peter, who still became absolutely terrified when he felt our mother growing more nervous and agitated than usual, feared that special spoon as though it were the devil incarnate, and the minute he saw it he started to shriek in desperation. One day he refused the spoon so firmly that the oil splashed in my mother's face. She was incandescent with fury and locked him up—after giving him the punitive ration of cod liver oil—in the big wardrobe in our parents' room (by this time my father had already been called up to the front). Once in there, my brother was in danger of suffocating. When she let him out, he was lying on the bottom, his head lolling on a shoe box. That gave my mother a genuine scare, and she started to shake little Peter. He looked as though he was dead or unconscious, but he was probably only woozy from the lack of oxygen.

  The Kremmen nightmare continues. There is no sign of the adults, and Peter and I are still imprisoned in that horrible fishing net. Peter is making a noise, clinging to me and digging his nails into my arms. It is as though reality has been turned on its head. We feel as though we have been catapulted into a dark and unknown world, in which our mother has become a witch in order to amuse her friends with a cruel and stupid prank.

  I start calling out to my mother in a high and pleading voice, "Mutti! Mutti!" I shout, sobbing and begging her to come and let us out. Finally she comes. She laughs until the tears come to her eyes. Her guests laugh too. They have clearly been amusing themselves. And I, caught somewhere between relief and rancor, hate them all even more, but above all I hate the man I bit, who is now laughing uncontrollably, showing his long, pointed teeth, and looking like a big fat shark.

  It's over—our mother releases us.

  Since that day both my brother and I have suffered from claustrophobia.

  PETER WAS BORN in Berlin, in that flat in Nordendstrasse, in the district of Niederschönhausen.

  When, a few years later, our stepmother entered our lives, my brother immediately accepted her, instinctively and without reservation. For about a year, after our mother had gone, our grandmother had looked after us, and by the time my father married Ursula, Peter seemed to have forgotten his biological mother completely. Our stepmother gave me instructions to tell him that our mother was not his real mother; I promised and I kept my word. We came up with the notion that Ursula had been ill for a long time and that she had finally come home from a hospital far away, and Peter remained utterly convinced that she was his real mother. I said nothing, at first because I was afraid of my stepmother, and then because deceit becomes a habit over time.

  But it's not enough.

  One morning immediately after the war was over, when everything was chaos, destruction, and loss, and no one was able to tell the new authorities anything at all, on the grounds that they had lost their documents—and many people really had lost them after the bombing raids that had leveled houses, offices, and archives—our stepmother went to certify the birth of my brother, declaring him to be her biological son. This lie was maintained over the years, until Peter began to get together the documents for his marriage, at which point the Austrian authorities (we had returned to Vienna in 1948) asked to see his real birth certificate, and he called it up from the state registry in Berlin. The reply came promptly, and in the space marked "mother's name," he read a surname and a Christian name that he had never before seen.

  His beloved "mother," Ursula, had been deceiving him for twenty-six years, with the complicity of my father. Even our paternal grandmother had been involved: Every time she talked to us about my father's first wife, she seemed to imply that I was "that witch's" only child. So Peter had lost not one mother but two. This belated revelation traumatized him deeply and created a great gulf between him and our stepmother.

  GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME that my mother refused to celebrate Christmas according to the Christian tradition. Such was her blind loyalty to the SS that she stopped going to church, and on December 24 she celebrated the Sonnenwendfest, a festival inaugurated on Himmler's orders. The SS distributed booklets containing instructions as to how and when the festivities should be celebrated.

  For example, my grandmother said that at Christmas my mother went to a great deal of trouble to make cookies in the shape of a particular rune, which the SS saw as signifying the eternity of the world, a garland that signified eternal return, and a snail representing the sun from which life on earth arose. Those sweets were to be the only decorations on the spruce tree because the booklet forbade everything else—silver tinsel, colored straws, and the various sentimental knickknacks that the Germans have always liked to hang on their Christmas trees.

  Grandmother, who came with Grandfather from Poland at Christmas to bring presents for me and Peter, violently disagreed with my mother, saying that her "SS hobbyhorses" shouldn't be allowed to deprive us children of a traditional festival which was celebrated by all "normal people." There were furious arguments, and once Grand-mother managed to throw all the cookies my mother had made into the bin. They almost came to blows. My grandparents quickly returned to Poland.

  Later my father, who also disapproved of his wife's political activism, would always defend her to his mother, to the latter's fury; from the first, Grandmother had been hostile to "that madwoman" whom her son had insisted on leading to the altar whatever the cost.

  As for my mother's fanaticism, I think it was typical of the double morality of the SS: An outwardly austere fagade of rigor, pride, moderation, and temperance masked great gulfs of excess, fanaticism, and conceit—and a limitless thirst for power.

  FRAULEIN INGE APPEARS at the door. "How are we doing? Can I get you ladies anything? Tea, coffee, or anything else?" Behind her, someone peers curiously into the guest room.

  My mother protests disagreeably: "You never offer me anything at this time of day."

  Fraulein Inge comes into the room.

  "But today is a special day! Your guests have come from so far away."

  My mother glances at me in surprise. "Far away? Where have you come from?"

  "Italy," I reply.

  "Why Italy?"

  "Because that's where I live."

  "Since when?"

  "Since 1963."

  She's perplexed. "In Italy," she repeats several times.

  "My daughter lives in Italy."

  Fraulein inquires politely, "So, ladies, what can I bring you?"

  Before Eva and I can reply, my mother declares imperiously, "I want an apple juice!"

  Fraulein Inge nods. "Fine. And the ladies?"

  Eva asks for a coffee, and I do too, although I know it won't be the w
ay I like it.

  Once Fräulein Inge has left, my mother sits in silence for a few moments. She has gone to sit by one of the big windows, far away from me, and she looks as though she's seeking refuge. From there, with a gloomy expression on her face, she shrieks: "I don't want to be interrogated! You've come here from Italy to interrogate me and I'm not having it!"

  I'm dismayed: Is she hurling a truth at me, and I just can't see it?

  "I have no intention of interrogating you," I say, trying to reassure her. But she crouches in her armchair and, body stiff and eyes narrowed, croaks in a voice that seems to come from beyond the grave: "I am innocent. I am not guilty. I obeyed orders like everyone else. Everyone obeyed orders. All of my comrades, and all the Germans, what's the point of denying it? Even children blindly obeyed their teachers, following orders from above."

  She waves a trembling finger at me.

  "You obeyed too!" she snarls venomously. "In school they taught you to hate the Jews and you hated the Jews. Try telling me that's not true!"

  Her eyes are flashing scornfully; her whole attitude is menacing. In all the time I've been here I've never seen her so overexcited and resentful.

  "You came from Italy to put me on trial, but now I'm going to turn the tables on you!" she shrieks, her voice quivering with malice. "I'm not going to let you interrogate me—do you hear! I won't let you do it!"

  She's breathing with difficulty, ashen-faced, flaming patches of red above her cheekbones.

  "Everyone spits on Germany now," she says furiously, "and do you know why? Because we lost the war. If we had won, the whole world would kiss the Führer's feet, not just his feet."

  She cackles. "Not just his feet," she repeats, pleased with her joke.

  They are old words, words that I have heard uttered many times after the war by the survivors in Berlin. After the capitulation of 1945, crushed by the international chorus of hatred and contempt, many Germans had imagined that they could reacquire a scrap of pride by saying such things.

  I exchange a glance with Eva, but my mother is already repeating the malign accusations she voiced a few moments ago. "You can't get away from me, my dear, don't act the innocent! Can you claim in all honesty that you have never felt hatred toward a Jew?"

  I find myself hoping that Fräulein Inge is going to come back in with the coffee, but she doesn't. "Just you think about it!" croaks my mother's voice in a falsetto.

  She has won. An unpleasant memory creeps back into my reluctant mind.

  IN 1943 I HAD BEEN sent to Eden Boarding School in the suburb of Oranienburg. The pupils lived in a solidly built house with dormitories in the attic, gardens and orchards. But the foul breath of the war, filled with violence and death, reached even this little Eden.

  I hated being sent away from Berlin, from my brother and my new grandfather who loved me.

  But I had found understanding and affection at that boarding school. I had learned to love the headmistress, Frau Heinze—the only person, I repeat, whom I ever, once I was abandoned by my mother, called Mutti.

  The inmates of the boarding school were children who had been rejected by their families for various reasons— often, as in my case, mere excuses. The children of failed marriages or divorced parents, orphans, or children rejected by parents unwilling to have them in the house.

  And the war took care of the rest.

  The sound of enemy gunfire reached us from a long way off, but at night it terrified us. At the beginning of the war, I was told, only soldiers died, but soon it would be the turn of the civilian population. The soldiers didn't die, they "fell," and monuments were erected in their honor. Civilians didn't fall, they died, and no one thought of erecting monuments to their memory or in memory of their children, wives, mothers.

  Once our nocturnal fears had been overcome, we had slides and swings and seesaws to entertain us during the day, and as we pushed ourselves high up into the air, as we looked beyond the school grounds, we could see the country road, flanked with plane trees, where the soldiers marched between a hay cart on one side and a dung barrel on the other, or the armored cars of the Wehrmacht rumbled along on their caterpillar tracks, making the earth shake.

  In the evening, when Mutti Heinze handed out the meager bread rations, I always managed to get a smile from her, sometimes even a caress. These were new and precious sensations for me: They cheered me, and they were a powerful source of strength.

  One morning as we left our dormitories, the frost was on the ground. The school was no more than three hundred yards away, and we went there on our own: a flock of little sheep with the older children, of eleven or twelve, at its head. We called ourselves "Mutti Heinze's children." We felt a strong sense of solidarity.

  About fifty yards from the school building we noticed a crowd of people furiously beating somebody. As we approached, we saw that their victims were a man and a woman. We stood there, frightened and alarmed, as we watched that blind violence, until one boy broke away from the gang of brutes and told us that they were a Jewish couple. They had lived in hiding for a while, protected by a family friend, but then he had been called up, and after surviving for a few weeks with practically nothing to eat, they had been forced out into the open.

  The head of our little flock said, "Let's go to school."

  One little girl burst into tears. "Why are they beating those people?" Meanwhile the poor couple, bruised and bleeding and in a wretched state, pleaded with their attackers not to hand them over to the Gestapo.

  All of a sudden one of their assailants called out to us, "Come on, kids, if you're good National Socialists, give us a hand!" His comrades echoed his words in a chorus of encouragement.

  I can't say exactly how it happened; all I know is that something like an electric charge ran through us all, as though some kind of primal aggression or some kind of contagious hatred had been awakened within us.

  We hurled ourselves en masse on the two unfortunates, kicking and punching. Some of us spat on them; others stamped on the hands of the two unarmed victims as they lay there on the trampled earth. I leaned over the woman and pulled her hair. I pulled hard and shouted, "Bloody Jew!" She looked at me in fear and dismay. I will never forget that look.

  The poor woman's head was in a cowpat that had encrusted in her hair, but I felt neither compassion nor pity for her.

  Someone, of course, had alerted the Gestapo, and they arrived with a truck that looked enormous to me; it would have held fifty Jews, let alone two. Shouting hysterically, five or six SS men jumped out, along with a team of snarling dogs.

  As I'M ADMITTING to myself that I'm in no position to cast the first stone, Fräulein Inge comes in with the two coffees and the apple juice.

  My mother pounces eagerly on her glass, draining it in one gulp. Then she puts it on the table and stares at me uncertainly.

  "Where were we?"

  I'm hoping she's lost the thread, but she declares confidently, "You're not a bit like your father—you're just like me."

  She's right, I think regretfully. I so wanted to be like my father, and instead my brother was the one who inherited his features, while I am the image of my mother.

  The last words we exchanged before Fräulein Inge arrived must have slipped her mind, and yet what she says next in a sense brings us back to where we were before.

  "Even your father bowed to the regime," she says with a hint of malign irony, "and him so pure, so filled with noble ideals. He was a gifted man, a fine painter. Just think, when I knew him he was spending his time with people like Schlichter, Grosz, Klee, Dix, Nolde."

  She glances at me as though dubious about my knowledge of art history. "But perhaps those names mean nothing to you," she concludes.

  I let it pass, because apart from anything else, she's moved on.

  "Stefan devoted himself to the neoclassicism that the Führer demanded," she clearly recalls. "He started painting landscapes and portraits, sunsets and still lifes, peasants and tractors, people at work, horses, and
country scenes. He also copied out exotic animals from natural history books. He held exhibitions. It was at one of those exhibitions that he met Hilde, who bought a painting from him: 'Lions in the Savannah.'"

  She smiles mischievously. "And once I was gone, good old Hilde wasted no time and introduced her little sister to Stefan."

  I'm surprised. I didn't know about any of this.

  "A nasty piece of work, she was," my mother announces bitterly. "I never liked Hilde. I expect she thought she was really something because she worked for the Ministry of Propaganda, and I'm still thoroughly convinced that she was infatuated with Goebbels, but of course he barely noticed she was there. She was very efficient, I wouldn't deny that for a second, but Goebbels didn't pay any attention to her as a woman. He had all those actresses at his feet, and then he had that affair with Baarova. No, Goebbels just saw her as a capable and trustworthy secretary."

  I watch her with growing amazement. She can change from one moment to the next, like a chameleon.

  She isn't wearing any jewels, not even a ring. Nothing. Her nails and hair are neat and tidy. She seems still to have some connection with the rigor and the military discipline of the past.

  I'm interested in what she has to say about my aunt by marriage. I remember a cold and distant Hilde in Berlin in the forties. She always hurried home to change, and then she would immediately return to the office. As the war got worse, we saw her less and less frequently: Often she would sleep in the ministry bunker or in Goebbels's private bunker in his villa overlooking the Tiergarten. At that time all I knew was that she was working for that man whose voice came bellowing from the loudspeakers in the street or from our radios at home. It was only much later that I really understood who Josef Goebbels was and what position he occupied in the Reich hierarchy.

  My mother falls silent, having piqued my curiosity. I ask her another question about Hilde, but all of a sudden she flies into a rage: "Your father didn't wait so much as a year to marry that . . . Ursula!"