When she left Professor Galland’s office, Nadine felt she was on the edge of a precipice, flattened by the contents of a letter that should never have seen the light of day. She wasn’t ready to forgive and walked for hours. Anton called her cell phone again and again in desperation, without getting an answer. He chided Luna for not going with her mother, who had said she wanted to be alone. Luna telephoned halfway across the world to speak to Mares, who promised she would get on a plane to be with her friend if she needed her.
As she roamed the streets, Nadine tried to understand why she was overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt. She should have looked for those she never knew: Franz, her mother, her grandmother, Herr Professor, even if only to visit their graves. She had refused even to go near Sachsenhausen, now turned into a dark museum where perhaps the remains of her grandmother and Herr Professor were spread on the earth. She had trusted that her daughter would take charge of rescuing them, as she had done with Ally. Now she was the one who needed to bring them all back.
Nadine sat on a bench in the Tiergarten, with the letter her grandmother had written lying open on her lap. It had taken seventy-four years to reach her. Nadine felt she was passing through, like a tourist walking in the shadow of something that should be long gone, but still endured. A swastika on a forgotten wall in the Bismarckstrasse, the eagle with the hooked cross between its talons, the red marble at Mohrenstrasse station that came from the Führer’s New Reich Chancellery, Albert Speer’s lamps along Strasse des 17 which nobody had the desire to tear down, the inerasable footsteps of the Führer’s dream city.
She put her phone aside and unfolded the two withered sheets. Before her was one of the keys to her past, she thought. The essence of Ally, her grandmother. She tried to decipher the order of the letters. One, penned in hasty handwriting, loose sentences, full of questions; the other, in small, almost illegible handwriting, as if she were taking advantage of every millimeter on the blank sheet. In both letters, several paragraphs had faded away, as if the sheets of paper had survived a shipwreck.
On one, there was no date or addressee.
You took my Lilith from me. What was my daughter’s sin? Did losing her make me more pure in your eyes?
Yes, we were a disgrace to you, but it was too late. I still am. There were my published poems. You can’t get rid of them. The past, Franz, always condemns us.
In the end, my daughter traveled by night: she is safe. Away from this hell, from you, from everyone.
Now I just want you to know that you will never be able to get rid of me. You are tainted too. I am pregnant. Your child will be born in a cell.
The other letter was dated.
Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, January 1, 1940
Franz,
We have little time left.
Your son is about to be born.
Every time he moves, every time he gives me one of his kicks that shake me, that bend me with pain, he makes me happy. He is alive, eager to come into the world.
The days are long, the nights are too short.
In the evenings, I talk to our son, I tell him about Lilith, his sister. I know that one day he will find her, when the war is over, when we tire of being beasts.
Franz, I do not come to blame you, it would be pointless. I only ask you, in the name of the love we once had for each other, to think now of our son. You have the chance to save him. Saving him will save you too. It is impossible to live in darkness for so long. I know that someday it will dawn again.
She was reading fragments of the letter aloud when she received a phone call. It wasn’t Anton or Luna, and she decided to answer. Night had already fallen.
“If I could be by your side now, I would,” Mares said. “You should come to Valparaíso.”
Nadine was silent for a moment, then said, “Remember the time we visited the Pergamon Altar?”
“Nadine, dear, listen to me. Anton and Luna are worried. I think it’s time you went home.”
Nadine wanted Mares to remember the visit to the Pergamon Museum, where they had seen an old man weeping inconsolably in front of the magnificent ancient Greek altar. Nadine had assumed he was on the losing side, yearning for a Germany that never existed, a thousand-year Reich that had crumbled in a decade. Mares, on the other hand, saw him as a victim of the Nazis, for whom the symbolism of the altar conjured painful scenes that prompted tears of loss. They had just walked through a U-Bahn station and seen the model of what Berlin could have been. It was now possible to exhibit the legacy of Albert Speer, the great architect, the Führer’s best friend, the man who had captivated everyone with the imposing size and spare symmetry of the buildings he created, designed to stick in the memory, and which would survive his own ruin.
Mares listened to her friend, trying to make sense of her rambling conversation. To Nadine, Franz and Albert Speer were similar types, both were experts in make-believe. If he had wanted to, he could have known what was happening in Germany, the architect had admitted during his trial after the war. In the end, you only see what you want to see, Nadine insisted. It was easy for Speer to convince others he was repentant. The architect, who had been the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, had listened to the witnesses against him with kindness and sympathy. This set them apart from the Nazis who denied the horror. There was one particular gesture of his that blinded his accusers. Speer had once visited an underground weapons factory and taken pity on the workers’ conditions, ordering the building of a barracks for them to live in, and insisting that they be properly fed. In truth, he was saving his cannons. For his part, Franz had taken great pains to save Ally Keller’s final poems. In the end, a gesture of kindness can prevail. Ally had told him that in the last letter. By saving their son, he would be saved too.
The day of the downfall, after saying goodbye to someone he thought of as a friend, Albert Speer had not carried out the Führer’s order to burn Berlin as Nero had burned Rome. He managed to seduce the Führer and now he once more displayed his talents and captivated the tribunal: he was the only one who showed remorse in court. In the end what he did or did not know was irrelevant. He was locked up in a cell with a yard in Spandau, a former Prussian fortress. In there he brought his Germania to life, secretly writing his memoirs on toilet paper, smuggled out by a compassionate guard.
The great architect was condemned to twenty years of tedium, a sentence he accepted until midnight of his last day in prison. The man who had been in charge of the armaments factories of the third and final Reich, died in glory, a millionaire, in a magnificent Art Deco hotel in London, as he was preparing to give a television interview. A blood vessel in his brain exploded.
In Lucerne one Christmas, at the home of a French friend of her in-laws, Nadine had heard another guest say that to understand is to forgive.
“I find it very hard to understand,” Nadine replied.
Mares voice on the phone brought her back to the present. “You and Anton should come visit me. Bring Luna. It does you good to leave the city once in a while.”
Before she said goodbye, Mares made Nadine promise she would travel to the end of the world, as she called the Chilean city where she now lived.
Arriving home, after reading the long letter a second time, she saw Anton at the window. When she got upstairs, he hugged her. Anton could feel her shivering.
The following morning, the first call Nadine made was to Elizabeth Holm.
Ever since Elizabeth had donated Ally Keller’s texts to the university, she had been waiting for a call from a relative she thought would probably not be willing to accept her. It was the only way she was able to fulfill her mother’s final wish. The letter had been a recent revelation for her too. Her father had never told her anything about her mother, nor that she had a half-sister whom they had sent to Cuba. She had grown up a child of the war, alone, with no past and no descendants.
Nadine sensed Elizabeth had been waiting beside the telephone for days. Her voice was soft, and she gave every word the same intonation. She didn’t drop a syllable or add any. They met in the afternoon at Elizabeth’s apartment.
“My father was—is—a good man,” Elizabeth Holm said, her eyes fixed on the window. She held a steaming cup of coffee, but she still hadn’t taken a sip.
Nadine and Luna Paulus, two strangers, had bombarded her with questions from the moment she had opened the door, as if she had any answers.
Nadine ran her eyes around the room looking for some kind of phsyical object that would connect them, while Luna stared at Elizabeth. The person sitting in front of them was her mother’s closest relative, her half-sister. Nadine hoped to find a piece of Lilith in Elizabeth. Lilith lived somewhere in this stranger, in her gestures, her tone of voice, her drooping shoulders, her hands clinging to the cup as if it were a shield. Lilith and Elizabeth shared the same mother, they must have something in common. But only one was the traitor’s child.
Luna tried to recognize her great-grandmother in the woman’s profile, the lost blue of her eyes, the weight of her eyelids. She couldn’t see any likeness. Of course, Ally Keller had died at twenty-five, much closer to the age Luna herself was now.
Seeing her by the window, Nadine felt that in her own way, Elizabeth was also saying goodbye. It’s impossible to bear such a heavy load as one’s journey nears its end. Elizabeth raised the cup of coffee time and again, savoring the aroma, but without taking a sip. She brought it to her lips, then paused nervously. She’d never gone back to Sachsenhausen, she said. She never could. On her birth certificate, issued belatedly, it had been recorded that she was born in Oranienburg and not the concentration camp where her mother had actually brought her into the world. Yes, Ally Keller was registered as her mother, but her father had told her that Ally had died during childbirth. A young love affair cut short by the war, that was all he had said. He was only twenty-one years old, and had been called to the front line, as everyone was in those days. Nobody could refuse. Elizabeth had grown up with her paternal grandmother, in the same apartment where she still lived. She hadn’t known the grandfather who had died in the Great War, leaving her grandmother pregnant with Franz.
The only thing Elizabeth remembered from her childhood was, one night, plunging into a river with her grandmother, tied together with a rope around their waists, the pockets of their overcoats filled with stones. Fleeing the bombing in Demmin, to the north of Berlin, they had gone to stay with one of her grandmother’s sisters.
“What was a five-year-old girl doing in the dark, icy waters of the River Tollense?” she said she asked herself for years.
One day her grandmother helped her decode the nightmare that had been tormenting her. Her grandmother’s sister had not survived. The waters swept her away, along with hundreds of other villagers who chose to take their own life rather than live as the defeated. She and her grandmother were saved by soldiers of the Red Army, or so she was told.
The German army had abandoned the village and blown up the bridges over the river. Where could they run? The Red Army was closing in, determined to destroy everything they found. Almost all the families of the village had disappeared beneath the waters of the three rivers surrounding the village. Yes, she and her grandmother had been saved, but the horror never left her. They had wandered around for days, sheltering among the debris, eating scraps, before returning to a Berlin they no longer recognized. This is what her grandmother had told her, but all that existed for Elizabeth was the moment in the water, the sky above them, and a rope around her waist so she couldn’t move. And the stones, those stones dragging her down to the bottom of the river. Her grandmother had intended for them both to die that night, but for some reason they had not.
Her days in Berlin were marked by the constant sound of sirens. Elizabeth couldn’t understand why, if the Reds had already taken the city, bombs continued to fall, perforating streets and shelters. One day you had neighbors, the next you didn’t. One day there was a row of terraced houses, and when the sun came up, the block was reduced to a huge lump of cement and bricks. She could still hear the sound of the sirens, Elizabeth said.
The war had continued after the liberation, for her at least. As a little girl she had decided never to marry or have children. The men were taken to the front, and you ended up losing your children too. She remembered the way her grandmother had scoured the streets of liberated Berlin, looking for food. She would return home dirty, bleeding, with a chunk of bread or a couple of potatoes. On the best days she might bring a chocolate bar handed out by an American soldier.
Nadine knew Elizabeth was just another victim. Sometimes people let themselves die. Her mother had been able to choose. Perhaps her grandmother too? She imagined the little girl among the rubble. What would the city have looked like out of that window seventy years earlier?
Three years after the liberation, Franz came home. Elizabeth smiled when she said her father’s name.
“You see? That’s why one shouldn’t leave,” she added.
If she and her grandmother had left, where would Franz have come home to? The only token the little girl had of her father was a photograph of him in uniform.
“He was handsome,” she said. “But the man who returned was hunched, dragging one leg, and without a drop of life in his face. He had sunken eyes, and his skin had darkened and taken on a greenish tinge.”
Elizabeth still remembered her father’s smell, like that of a dead animal. From that day on, Franz was always an old man to her.
After he returned, Elizabeth had a name, documents, a passport. Her father decided to take his mother’s surname, and everyone in the house became a Holm. They wanted to erase the name Bouhler, as if in doing so they could amend the past.
Elizabeth had gone to study in Moscow. She was just another foreigner there, and they looked down on her. She became a teacher, and when she came home she found out that her grandmother had died. She had been buried without a tombstone, and a wall now divided the city. Her father worked in a library, classifying books. He once told her he had dreamed of becoming a writer, but the war made decisions for people, took away their free will, turned them all into shadows.
Elizabeth’s first job had been in a school, where she was greeted with distrust. She taught Russian to children who had no interest in the language, and who treated her like a spy or an informer. Everyone was frightened of one another. Your neighbor had become your enemy, listening to your every thought.
One day the Stasi took her father, and she didn’t see him again for more than a year. They had loaded him into a van as he left work, taken him away without even asking his name. A woman who said she worked with him called Elizabeth that night, telling her he wouldn’t be coming home. Elizabeth didn’t ask questions. They both knew the phone might be bugged.
“They took him in a van,” she said.
Everyone knew what that meant. When a man in plain clothes asked you to get into a van with no windows, you knew your fate. There would be no accusations or trials. You would just disappear, and that would be that. Then one day they would let you go, and you would have to start again from scratch. What could she do? Nothing. What could anyone do against the Secret Police? She was fortunate that she didn’t lose her job at the school; she could continue to teach.
The afternoon her father returned—how many times is one allowed to return?—neither of them dared talk about why he had been taken, or what had been done to him. The past never goes away, however strong might be the desire to forget. Elizabeth eventually pieced together that her father had been denounced by a jealous library administrator who wanted to give Franz’s job to a nephew of his. He accused him of being a Nazi officer who had never stood trial. What about those years he had spent in Soviet prisoner of war camps? Elizabeth asked rhetorically. According to her father, he had been better treated there, because he had been an officer and had turned himself in and collaborated with the Allies, than by his fellow East Germans, who had tortured him in the basement of a building that didn’t appear on the map of Berlin, where they locked away the politically disaffected.
Being a Nazi wasn’t the thing that most concerned the Stasi, but rather certain telephone calls he had received from a military colleague who had survived the war and was writing a memoir in West Berlin. Her father had told them he had no recollection of the man, that time and hunger had wiped his brain clean. Even so, the Secret Police had subjected him to extreme cold and heat, locking him in a solitary cell for weeks, with no windows and a lightbulb permanently lit. Her father began to wish he had never been brought into the world. He had been born into an era nobody should have had to endure.
Franz was never able to go back to the library, and one day he gave up looking for work. There was only so much an old man like him could do, so he stayed at home reading, or wandered the city. He eventually gave up going for walks when he noticed he sometimes struggled to work out where he was and would have difficulty finding the way home.
One night, when her father had been in bed for several days with a flu that left him feverish, Elizabeth heard the name Lilith for the first time. She had thought she must have been an old flame. When she asked her father who the woman in his nightmares was, Franz blushed, then fell into his habitual silence. By then he was confusing past and present. Sometimes he woke up believing he was in the Soviet prisoner of war camp, at others, that he was in a Stasi cell. He would fall to his knees and pray—he, who had never before believed in God.
Soon he began calling Elizabeth “mother.” Elizabeth bore a striking resemblance to his mother, Franz would say when he woke in a more lucid state. Elizabeth accepted her father’s mental deterioration as she had accepted everything else life had thrown at her, until one night, much to the neighbors’ alarm, he ran out into the street naked, shouting her mother’s name: Ally.
He underwent a multitude of tests and Elizabeth held on to the hope that some magic pills might bring her father back, rescue the calm, gentle man he had once been. They visited numerous doctors and hospitals, where he was given brain scans and subjected to group therapy that made him increasingly ill-tempered, until he was eventually diagnosed with senile dementia. He deteriorated rapidly. Two months later he was lying in bed, refusing to get up, shower, or eat. It broke Elizabeth’s heart to listen to his incessant whimpers, so in the end she made the difficult decision to send him to a care home for the elderly, Senioren-Domizil. She always hoped he would recover, that this was merely a passing illness, but he never spoke or walked again. He had given up.
It was then that Elizabeth decided to clear out his bedroom. She donated his clothing and shoes to charity and disposed of everything her father had accumulated over the years: newspaper clippings, magazines, theater programs, instruction manuals, receipts. In a corner at the very top of the closet, she discovered a heavy and battered box. She could sense that whatever was inside was different from the rest.
She lifted it and placed it on the dining room table, where it remained unopened for several days. Elizabeth ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner looking at the box, as if it were a guest at the table. Finally, she looked inside. The first thing she saw was a recently published literary magazine. Her mother’s name was written on it, and so Elizabeth read The Night Traveler. She guessed the red gabardine coat must have belonged to her, along with all the other papers in the box. It was the first time she had ever felt close to the woman who had brought her into the world. Then, at the bottom, she found the letter and discovered she had a half-sister named Lilith.
She could have thrown all the yellowing papers into the trash, along with the red gabardine coat. She could have chosen to forget. But then she came across the name of the professor who had rescued and studied her mother’s texts and decided to telephone him. Her half-sister, though older than Elizabeth, might be alive. Perhaps her father had looked for her before, to carry out Ally’s wish, only to find ashes, or closed doors. In any case, what did she have to lose? Had she done the right thing? She couldn’t yet be sure. She wanted to believe she had, she said, as if waiting for confirmation from one of them. Nadine said nothing. Luna looked around at the house, frozen in time as if the wall between the two Germanies were still standing.
“And what about Lilith?” Elizabeth asked, her voice unsteady.
Luna snapped out of her daydream, waiting for her mother to answer. Nadine wavered.
“My mother died in Cuba,” she said. She didn’t want to tell her that it was likely she had taken her own life. “The war never ended for her. But she was able to save me… She sent me on an airplane, alone, when I was very young, and I was adopted by a family in New York.”
Hearing herself speak, Nadine realized the war hadn’t ended for her either. She had lived through one war after another. War was getting on an airplane, a courthouse waiting room, a rag doll with her name on it.
Elizabeth’s face fell. The reason she had taken the box to the university and welcomed Nadine and Luna into her home was that she hoped to fulfill the final wish of the mother she never knew: that her two daughters would one day meet.
“We’d like to visit Franz,” Luna said.
Nadine thought that if Franz had taken refuge in oblivion and lay in a bed in a care home for the elderly, what sense was there in confronting him? She couldn’t understand what else her daughter wanted to know, why she continued to interrogate Elizabeth as if hoping for a miracle. Franz wasn’t going to wake from his unresponsive state, and he was the only one who had known her mother and grandmother.
“You must understand, there’s not much to see,” Elizabeth said, at last putting her cup of coffee down on a table covered with a fraying lace tablecloth. “My father can’t leave his bed, he doesn’t move. He can barely say a word. He’s ninety-five years old.”
Nadine knew Luna had been storing up every word, every gesture, and that later, in her apartment, she would write until dawn, filling notebooks with her impressions, to preserve every moment. She was the one who needed to meet Franz.
“I’ve written about him, or rather the memory my great grandmother had of him,” Luna said. “Now, with this letter…”
Elizabeth glanced at Nadine. She wanted to know what she thought. Nadine nodded her assent.
“You have the right to meet him,” Elizabeth said. “It would be best to visit in the afternoon… Perhaps Friday?”
Nadine stood up. Luna was already by the door, her eyes still on the unsipped cup of coffee. Elizabeth remained in her armchair by the window, but realizing the visit was coming to an end, she rose to her feet.
“I can’t drink coffee at this hour, I’d never sleep,” she said to Luna.
Nadine and Luna waited for Elizabeth to open the door. Luna was the first to leave. Once they were out in the corridor, Nadine went back to Elizabeth and hugged her. The old woman stood still, eventually lifting her arm to stroke Nadine’s back. Luna watched from a distance.
They crossed Gustav-Adolf-Strasse without knowing in which direction they were going. They walked for a long while, until they arrived at Jüdischer Friedhof, with over a hundred thousand graves. Luna sensed the reunification had not made a great deal of difference to life in this neighborhood. The women still dressed as they did in the Soviet era. The streets were dirty, graffiti covering every passageway. The smell of the city was different over here, sweet yet rancid.
“If you like, I’ll come home with you and stay over,” Luna told her mother.
“There’s no need. You’ll have a lot to write tonight…”
They embraced, and Nadine watched Luna walk away until she disappeared around a corner.