Let Me Go Page 9

  I protest: "He had two children, and there was a war on. He wanted to give us a mother."

  "Give you a mother!" she rants. "What nerve! What would you have needed a mother for? The Reich would have looked after you. The Reich would have looked after my children better than any stepmother."

  I say nothing.

  Fortunately, the Reich collapsed before it could get Peter and me in its clutches. I still shudder at the thought of our narrow escape.

  I murmur, almost to myself, "I didn't want my stepmother— I wanted my grandmother."

  Now my mother gives me a sad look that seems as though it might be genuine.

  "Didn't you like Ursula?" she asks softly.

  I hesitate. I'd rather not spend too much time on this subject.

  "She didn't treat me very well," I reply curtly. "And she didn't love me. She never loved me."

  What could I have said about my second mother? That she was my enemy from the first day that Peter and I went to live with her? That after sending me first to a house of correction and then to Eden Boarding School, taking advantage of the fact that my father was far away, she managed to persuade him to shut me up in a boarding school again at the end of the war?

  I don't say a word, lost in my memories.

  "My poor children," she whines now.

  "When you were little I called you Mausi" she recalls for the second time, "and Peter"—she frowns—"I can't remember."

  She sits there sadly for a few minutes, then goes on.

  "But you were lively, a little piece of quicksilver you were. You stroked every dog we met and you were very stubborn. You stole bread from the bakery and you liked to hop on one leg. You were always disobedient, and one day you ended up in the pond."

  I know the story about the pond from the version my grandmother used to tell. But now I have the opportunity to hear my mother's account of it. I'm curious.

  "How did that happen?" I ask.

  "It was in Köstendorf," she replies without a moment's hesitation. "I took you there once to let you get a bit of fresh air. There was nothing to breathe in Berlin but hot dust."

  "Köstendorf in Austria?"

  "Yes. That's where my uncle's farm was. And there was a pond covered with the leaves and flowers of water lilies. You thought it was a field and went happily walking about on it."

  She chuckles with amusement. I was about to drown and she chuckles with amusement at the memory.

  "And where were you?" I ask.

  She seems suddenly annoyed and looks elsewhere.

  "I can't remember," she says evasively.

  I want to change the subject, but I can't help myself.

  "Why not?" I explode irritably. "How come you don't remember? Where were you when I fell into the pond?"

  She looks at me strangely, then, with a threatening and irritable glint in her eyes, she shrieks in a falsetto, "I won't let you interrogate me! I won't let you!"

  But I remember my grandmother's story very clearly.

  WITH THE ANNEXATION of Austria, Adolf Eichmann had been sent to Vienna to organize the forced emigration of the Jews and had set up his general headquarters in the Rothschilds' castle.

  The Austrian Jews were summoned to see him there; after which, officially deprived of their citizenship and of any movable or immovable property, and armed only with papers allowing them to cross the border, they were banished from the country, with instructions to leave as quickly as possible and never to set foot on Austrian soil ever again.

  My paternal grandmother, who had always been the only intermediary between me and my past, had referred several times to the fact that my mother had had something to do with Adolf Eichmann, but without providing any more detailed information than that. But she did tell me one thing: that when we were on the Köstendorf estate, my mother was summoned to Vienna by Eichmann—I think this must have been immediately before he was recalled to Berlin to run the Central Office of Jewish Affairs.

  My mother's departure for the capital meant that someone had to be found to look after me. But the farm was very busy at that time, and none of the farmworkers could guarantee that they would be able to look after me full-time. So their thoughts turned to Siegele, the thirteen-year-old girl whose task it was, when the weather was fine, to bring the cows to pasture on a vast cultivated area of grass not far from the farmhouse.

  They had fitted me with a kind of harness with reins, telling Siegele not to let me out of her sight for so much as a moment, but at some point she left me on my own so that she could relieve herself. Next time she looked, I wasn't there: I had resolutely walked toward the pond, and in a trice I was in the water. Fortunately, it wasn't very deep and I had stopped where the water was still shallow, so she didn't have much difficulty pulling me out. I developed a sore throat, she was solemnly chastised, and there were no further consequences.

  It wasn't my grandmother's fault: Every time she wanted to bring up the topic of my mother's carelessness, of which she herself had washed her hands, the episode with the pond came up again.

  In any case, during the time when we were in Kostendorf, my mother was pregnant with Peter. Having answered Eichmann's call so promptly, she couldn't take on any other tasks, regardless of what they were.

  I LOOK AT MY MOTHER with a combination of resignation and resentment. A shame: She's avoided the truth yet again. She is sly, unfair, even hypocritical. But she's still my mother. And this is the last time that I'll see her.

  With a shudder I seek her eye, but she's being elusive now. She is contemplating herself, looking inside and seeing only what she wants to see. Good God, I think, what will I be left with after this encounter? What truth has she given me during these past two hours, apart from emphasizing the few memories that are still dear to her, and which touch her pride or her vanity? She insists on talking about Hilde, for example, my aunt by marriage. She refuses to remember the pond in Köstendorf, preferring to fan the flames of her ancient rancor toward the woman who had introduced my father to the young and lovely Ursula.

  "If she hadn't gone to buy 'Lions in the Savannah' that day," she insists, "she wouldn't have met Stefan, and she wouldn't have gone on to hand him her little sister on a silver platter." And once again I don't understand. If she was so fond of her husband, why did she leave him in 1941?

  And yet I let her go on talking. I want to take advantage of the opportunity to prepare to leave. For another few minutes the object of her resentment will be Hilde, the same Hilde who took my brother and me to Hitler's bunker in 1944, along with many other Berlin children, so that we could serve in one of Goebbels's many propaganda campaigns. This one was designed to spread the myth of a human and sympathetic Führer who acted as host to hundreds of children in the big bunker beneath the New Chancellery, to give them medicine, food, and comfort.

  We went to the bunker. I didn't want to. I didn't want to come out of one refuge to go into another one, however much bigger it was, even if it was absolutely enormous, a kind of citadel holding about six or seven hundred people.

  It was early December 1944, before the SS drew up the infamous "Night and Fog" decree, which focused their attention on the anti-Fascists and anti-Nazis in the occupied territories, inflicting the most appalling deaths upon them. Hitler's followers were instructed to kill all prisoners of war without exception, along with all anti-Fascists held in prisons and concentration camps. Many were murdered merely for "defeatism."

  My brother and I, I told her, went to the bunker. One morning a camouflaged, coal-driven bus—a Kokskocher—showed up. We climbed aboard and set off across a Berlin that was now nothing but an enormous smoking pyre. A month past my seventh birthday, I sat in amazement and gazed out the window at the scene passing before my eyes.

  Ruins, then more ruins, some still ablaze, flames reaching into the sky. Piles of corpses were heaped up on the shattered pavements. There was nothing to be seen anywhere but the most savage destruction.

  In Hitler's bunker we were given food and med
icine; I don't recall so much as a scrap of comfort. We were immediately examined by doctors, chiefly, I should imagine, to avoid any risk of contagion to the Führer, who was about to come and see us. We were dosed with vitamins and with the hateful cod liver oil; we were tested for tuberculosis and even put under a quartz lamp to make us look healthy and well. The Führer hated to see pale and undernourished children.

  Yes, we met him, the Führer of the Third Reich. He came with his bodyguards and shook hands with the children in the front row, including my brother and myself—a troop of unhappy children trembling with emotion and exhausted by the war.

  I stared at the great Führer and couldn't believe what I saw. To the undeceived eyes of a child, he was a sick-looking, wrinkled old man. He had a limp, one of his arms looked as though it was made of plaster, and his head trembled slightly. But his gaze was still forceful and intense. I felt as though I were being hypnotized by a snake.

  I wasn't aware of any benevolence in his question "How do you like it in the bunker?" I couldn't detect any pity or sympathy on his part. No, Adolf Hitler didn't like children, any more than my mother did. Shortly before Germany's defeat, he sent hundreds of thousands of boys to certain death. I remember two of those young victims, whom I saw abandoned on the edge of a pile of rubble. Their eyes were narrowed to slits, their bodies disfigured. What remained of their gray-blue uniforms was nothing but blood-drenched rags; they still wore their flasks around their waists, along with hand grenades, rifle ammunition, and gas masks. It was the day after the surrender.

  And my mother? Did she ever, even for a single moment, love her children?

  Berlin, 1941—District of Niederschönhausen

  IT WAS AROUND six o'clock on a cold autumn afternoon.

  My mother looked at me severely. "You've got to be very strong now," she said, "Mama has to go away. Aunt Margarete will soon be coming to get you. You're going to go to your aunt's villa—you like your aunt's villa, don't you? And you'll be with your cousin Eva. Do you promise your mother you'll be a good girl?"

  "I don't want to go and stay with cousin Eva," I whined. "She's always calling me a stupid cow and won't let me touch her dolls."

  "Well, you're going!" my mother says impatiently. "And so is your brother. And you're going to be good and not drive your aunt Margarete mad. So no more nonsense!"

  She spoke very sharply.

  "And don't cry!" she ordered, seeing that my mouth was beginning to crumple. "You're always the same, always whining!"

  She was tense, nervous. She was clearly in a hurry.

  Terrified, I tried to obey. I sensed that something serious and irrevocable was taking place. I glanced out of the window. Night was falling and the blackout would soon have to go up.

  I hated those horrible rolls of black cardboard. They had been fitted to all the windows by an old workman with only one eye (a souvenir of the first war, he explained) "on government instructions." When my father, who had fought in an antiaircraft division, returned from the front, he told us that all this business with blackouts was so much nonsense. The Allied bomber squadrons were perfectly able, simply by following their radio instructions from headquarters, to locate their targets even if they were flying blind. But no one dared to say that the blackouts in the city were entirely useless. To voice such an opinion during the war would have been considered an act of defeatism.

  My mother gave me a quick peck on the cheek and moved toward the little suitcase that was ready and waiting near the front door. I was overcome by panic.

  "Don't go away," I pleaded.

  She turned around and stared at me, exasperated.

  "Is that how you keep your promises? You promised to be a good girl, and here you are doing nothing but whining. But it's useless, Helga—I've got to go—don't make things so hard for me."

  I tilted my head, and in a heroic attempt to "be good," I gritted my teeth so as not to burst into tears.

  She put on something light-colored. I think it was a raincoat, and her long wavy hair fell on either side of her face. When she bent down to give me one last kiss, I instinctively grabbed that hair with both hands. "Don't go away, Mutti, please, don't leave me alone."

  She straightened up abruptly and hissed, "What are you doing? Pulling your mother's hair? You're still exactly the same as you always were, rebellious and naughty! You deserve to be punished."

  But she didn't punish me. She clutched her suitcase and, turning around, said with one finger raised, "And when I walk through that door, you're not to go wailing and waking up your brother, you understand? You promise?"

  So many promises in such a short time. I stared at her blankly and shrugged my shoulders.

  "That's better." She turned around. "So, auf Wiedersehen, meine Kleine."

  I didn't reply. My mother shut the door behind her. I wasn't to see her again for thirty years.

  I stood there as though paralyzed for a few minutes. Just my heart was beating loudly. I ran to the room where Peter was sleeping.

  He was perfectly peaceful, his angelic little face ringed by the blond curls that I had always envied him.

  I stopped for a moment and looked at him and was seized by boundless sadness: I burst into uncontrollable floods of tears. My violent sobs woke him up. He opened his eyes, and when he realized that I was crying, he started howling at the top of his voice, standing up, gripping the edge of his cot. I hugged him. He was shivering. We held each other in a convulsive embrace for a while, then I got my breath back, extricated myself from him, and pulled him out of his cot. He needed to be changed. I tried to carry him to the bathroom, but he vigorously objected. He wanted his mother; she was the only one who ever changed him.

  I managed to change Peter but with considerable difficulty. He had scratched me all over. I felt exhausted, snapped at him that he was naughty, and went into the kitchen. I took a chair, put it by the window, lifted the roll of cardboard, and peeped out.

  Darkness had fallen; the air was damp and pungent. The few cars driving along Nordendstrasse had their headlights covered. All the windows of the buildings opposite were black and blind.

  My brother was yelling furiously in the bathroom, calling endlessly for his mother in a voice that was by turns imploring and imperious.

  He finally came into the kitchen, his eyes bright with tears and rage. He stared at me uncertainly for a few moments, then he started to kick the dresser, accompanying each blow with a raging cry of "Mutti!" I watched his fury with impotence and frustration.

  "Stop it!" I tried to tell him once or twice, but he became even angrier. Leave it. He'll get tired on his own, I thought, and go back to sleep. I couldn't wait.

  After a while someone rang at the door. I heard shouts outside. "What's happening? There's a blackout—why is your window wide open?"

  I recognized our neighbor's voice and went and opened the door. She looked at me in confusion.

  "What's going on, Helga?"

  "My mother's gone," I replied, starting to cry again.

  "What do you mean, she's gone?"

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  She shook her head in disbelief. She came into the house and immediately closed the window and the blackout.

  "What on earth got into you, opening the window like that? Don't you know you could be reported?" she yelled at me. Then she leaned over me. "Where's your mother, Helga? No lies, now."

  "She went away," I repeated in dismay.

  She was still staring at me, but now her face wore a different, strange expression.

  "What did she tell you when she went away?" she asked gently. She was quite young, and her hair was braided around her head.

  "She told me to be good. She had a suitcase and she went away. She said that Aunt Margarete was going to come and get us."

  "Ah, Aunt Margarete," the woman echoed, still with that baffled, intent look on her face. She smiled faintly, as though to reassure me, then picked up my brother, who was by now a little calmer.

  A few minutes
later Aunt Margarete turned up. Our neighbor went over to her, worried and anxious.

  "Helga says her mother's gone away. What's going on?"

  Aunt Margarete confirmed that this was the case. "Unfortunately it's true," she replied curtly. She hurried to pack our things and took us with her to her villa in Tempelhof. Aunt Margarete was rich. Her husband, a count, was away at the war, but the villa, which was frequented by the best of Berlin's high society, lacked nothing. There was always some delicacy on the table, while outside the ordinary people were starving to death. Our cousin Eva called Peter and me "poor people" and wouldn't let us touch her toys.

  After some time, having been informed of our aunt's situation, my grandmother arrived from Poland and immediately decided to take us away. "I don't want my grandchildren to grow up here with you," she told her daughter bluntly. "You would ruin them; you'd turn them into little snobs with a bad smell under their noses." Long and bitter discussions followed, but my grandmother won in the end and set up house with us in the flat in Niederschönhausen.

  And there we stayed until less than a year later my father got married again, this time to Ursula, the young woman from Berlin. And that was when I first found myself in hell.

  THERE HAS BEEN A LONG silence. I am aware once again of the mounting tension as the time approaches to say goodbye. It's inexplicable, incongruous. Haven't I managed without my mother for my whole life?

  I tear my gaze away from the window and meet her eyes.

  "What are you thinking about?" This time she speaks in the tone of a worried, solicitous mother.

  The last two hours have made me suspicious. I have learned how to avoid being wrong-footed as she dodges and dives from one position to another.

  "What are you thinking about, Mausi?" That nickname from long ago touches a very vulnerable part of my soul, but she goes on. She puts her scrawny index finger to my cheek and asks in an almost caressing voice: "Come and give your old Mutti a kiss."

  My stomach leaps into my throat.