IT’S HARD TO KEEP my mind on my work. When the bricks I piled up topple over into a heap, Herr Schafer says, “What’s this sloppiness, Peter? You must have your mind on some girl.” I feel my face grow red. I am glad to be busy. I work to the sound of Herr Brandt testing the organ, the deep tones of the music filling the church as if the music were water and the church a thirsty basin. Reiner Nordstrom is applying gold leaf to his decorations. The leaf is real gold and so thin that if you touch it, it flies apart, the bits of gold floating in the air. Herr Nordstrom applies it with a special brush and then burnishes it until it shines. The steeples reach a little farther into the air, landmarks now, because once again you can see them from a distance.
I hadn’t planned to confess my worries to Herr Schafer, but we have grown close. Our lunches, taken together, always end in a discussion of something or other. It took a while before I saw that he launches these talks as a way of getting me to think. Whatever position I take, he takes the opposite. The Socratic method, he calls it. I know he was a philosopher, but our arguments are seldom about life-shaking issues.
“Which is more important in your sandwich, Peter, the liverwurst or the pickles?”
“The liverwurst.”
“Would you eat the liverwurst without the pickles?”
“No way—the pickles hide the taste of the liverwurst. Mother says the liverwurst we get from the butcher shop is probably made from stray cats.”
“Would you eat the pickles without the liverwurst?”
“Sure—I love pickles, especially the pickles Mother makes.”
“If you would eat the pickles without the liverwurst, but not the liverwurst without the pickles, perhaps you need to rethink which is the more important of the two.”
Then Herr Schafer has a good laugh.
Having found out there is a mystery about myself, I begin to wonder if other people have secrets, so I ask him, “Weren’t you a professor at Heidelberg University?”
“Yes, Peter. My days in Heidelberg were the happiest of my life, first as a student and then as a professor. Heidelberg is a student’s dream. There is a romantic ruined castle standing on a hill. A peaceful river wanders through the town, and beside the river is the Philosophenweg, the philosophers’ path, where great men like Goethe once wandered. There are cafés where students and professors talk and argue by the hour. To be a part of so great a university was all I wanted from life.”
“But you couldn’t have learned to lay bricks at the university,” I said.
“No, Peter. That is not where I learned to lay bricks.” He is quiet for a minute, as if he is deciding whether or not he can confide in me. He must decide he can, for he says, “The Nazis came along. They decreed Jews could not teach at universities. When I could no longer teach, it was misery to see my colleagues and students every day and know I could have nothing to do with them. Besides, I knew danger was coming and I wanted to be near my family. I went back to Hamburg, where I had grown up. My family lived in a pleasant flat near the Inner Alster, a pretty lake in the middle of town. From the shores of the lake you could see the spires of five churches and the town hall. We were Reform Jews and went each sabbath to the synagogue, but we did not take our faith too seriously. We had many friends who were not Jewish. My father had been a successful lawyer. A year before, he had suffered a heart attack and had to retire. My mother was a curator at the fine arts museum. She had studied art in Paris and was an expert in her field of Chinese porcelain.
“Friends told my parents to leave Germany, but even after I had been expelled from the university, my parents said that leaving would be running away. Then it was decreed that if you were Jewish, you could not work at the museum, and Mother was separated forever from her beloved porcelains. At last my parents saw the danger ahead. By then it was too late to leave.
“One evening we were at dinner. My mother prided herself on her cooking. She was artistic in everything she did. It was my birthday, and she had baked a cake for me. She had been saving eggs and had some chocolate given to her by a friend at the museum who, in spite of the danger, remained close to my parents. With the precious ingredients so hard to get during the war, she had made my favorite chocolate cake, a Schokoladentorte. We all sat for a moment admiring it. Just as Mother raised the knife to cut the cake, the doorbell rang. We thought it might be a friend who lived nearby and by some magic had guessed Mother had made one of her famous cakes. Father started to get up, but to spare him, for he was quite weak then and every movement was an effort, I hurried to the door.
“Before I could get there, the door was battered down and six Gestapo officers rushed into the room. They had a paper with our names on it. “We give you five minutes to pack,” they announced, as if they were doing us a great favor.
“Mother ran to Father, who was white as the tablecloth. He shook his head. “Never mind me. Go and get what we need, my dear. Take warm clothes and good shoes.” So I knew he had been thinking this time might come. Mother and I ran upstairs. I helped her throw some clothes into a suitcase and I did the same. They were shouting at us to hurry, but Mother ran back to her room to snatch a picture of the three of us together taken on a picnic when I was still a boy and Father a healthy man.
“When we got downstairs, I saw that the torte had been eaten and the officers in their pristine uniforms and shiny boots had rings of chocolate around their mouths. To this day I cannot touch chocolate.”
I can hardly bring myself to ask, but I have to. “What happened to your parents?”
“There were trucks outside. One for the young and healthy, and one for the sick and elderly. When I insisted on going with my parents, I was knocked down and shoved into the truck for the healthy. Later I learned that my parents were sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed almost at once.
“I was sent to a work camp, where they taught me how to make bricks. Like the Jews enslaved in Egypt, I made bricks for the enemy.”
After a very long silence I ask, “Herr Schafer, why do you stay in Germany? You could go to another country and teach in its universities.”
“Jews have lived in Germany for a thousand years, Peter. The Nazis took everything from me, but they could not take my country. It is not theirs to take.”
“Why aren’t you teaching here in Germany, then?”
“There aren’t that many teaching positions. The universities are just getting back on their feet. Anyhow, I need to see the world a little more clearly before I go back to teaching students what they ought to think.”
What I heard from Herr Schmidt were lectures. What I hear from Herr Schafer is real. “How can people be so evil?” I ask.
“There are some Jews, Peter, who believe that in every generation there are only thirty-six righteous people in the whole world and no one knows who they are. Without those thirty-six the world could not exist. For myself, I think there are many, many more. The difficulty, Peter, is that we often do not recognize evil. Evil can begin with a word.”
Because Herr Schafer has been so frank with me, I believe I can talk with him about my worries. We are having our lunch on a bench in the shade of a tree. We look at the people moving about in the bright July afternoon as if we are watching a play on a lighted stage. In the distance someone is pushing a lawn mower, and I can smell the newly cut grass. In the trees, squirrels are hopping restlessly from branch to branch.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I ask.
“Of course, but keep in mind, Peter, that we tell secrets grudgingly—that is why they are secrets. If you tell me something you have been careful to keep to yourself, you may regret it and then you might become angry with me for hearing that secret. Think carefully before you tell a secret; and Peter, I must reserve the right to break my promise of secrecy if I feel it is for your welfare.”
His solemn words nearly silence me, but I have already determined that I will tell him. I open my mouth and the words tumble out. “It started because of Herr Schmidt at my school telling us about what happened to the Jewish people, people like you and your parents. My father was in the army and I got to worrying about what he did during the war, so I snooped around the house. I read letters Father had written to Mother.” When I see Herr Schafer frown, I blush with embarrassment. “I shouldn’t have, but I had to know.” I blurt out the contents of the letters to him. “The really strange thing is that there is this picture of a woman and I recognize her.” I tell him of my nightmares. “Father tells me I can’t know the truth just yet. He promised to tell me who I am, but I’m not sure now I want to find out. I think maybe I’d just rather be me.”
Herr Schafer is staring closely at me. “You believe that this woman might be your mother?”
“Yes, I believe she gave me to Mother. It’s just like my nightmares—the woman giving me up.”
Slowly, as if he isn’t sure of how his words will come out, Herr Schafer says, “Peter, have you wondered why the woman had to leave her child and why your parents made such a secret of it?”
“At first I thought I might have been one of the children that they took away from Claus von Schauffenberg and his family. I even wrote to the family, but they got all their children back. Maybe my real mother was sick or poor.”
“Poor people, even sick people, seldom give their children away, Peter. And wouldn’t she have kept in touch with your mother; wouldn’t she want to know what happened to you? I wonder that you haven’t thought of people who were facing death for themselves and for their children as well.”
Herr Shafer is looking at me in a strange way. It has never occurred to me that I might be Jewish. In my daydreams I have been the son of a hero like Stauffenberg, someone rich and maybe famous. I remember the crying woman and the look of misery on her face. Of course she could be Jewish. I have heard stories of Jewish children who were saved by someone taking them in and hiding them. St. Mary’s Church stands only a short distance away. I look at the church. It is one thing for Herr Shafer to work there, but I belong there. I remember how Mother has wanted me to go to church and Father has never insisted. I can barely get the words out. “You think I might be Jewish?”
“Certainly it is a possibility. How would you feel about that?”
What would it be like to be Jewish? What would Kurt and Hans say? There is St. Mary’s, which I am so proud of. What if it’s no longer my church? Once when I was little, I had been sailing a toy boat on the canal. The string attached to the boat broke. Before I could stretch out my hand to rescue it, the boat sailed away. Now, like that boat, my world is slipping away, the string that holds it together broken.
Herr Schafer must see the look of shock on my face, for at once he puts an arm around me. “Ach, Peter,” he says. “I should never have suggested such a thing. It’s my own sad experience that puts that thought into my head. I want to believe that someone has reached out to save a child as I wish someone had reached out to save my family. I’m sure there is a simple answer. Now it’s time to get back to work.”
Reluctantly I follow him back to St. Mary’s and begin piling bricks on the pallet, thankful for the mindless work that leaves me to think my thoughts, which now are like tangled snakes I can’t unravel, and am not even sure I want to. I like and admire Herr Schafer, but he is the only Jewish person I really know. Right after the war the city had no Jews; then a handful of Jewish families like his returned to the city. No one gives them trouble, but I have seen people stare at them and whisper after their passing. Complications pile up in my head faster than the bricks pile up on the pallet. Though he has tried to make little of his suggestion, I believe it at once. It all fits. There was Mother’s letter to Father suggesting she had done something dangerous. There is Father’s reluctance to make me go to church. There is Father’s silence.
When the workday is over, Father is waiting for me. Reluctantly I walk along with him, hanging back so he will know I am angry and wish I weren’t there. We walk in silence that is much louder than talk would be. When we reach the small park where Herr Schafer and I had our lunch, Father says, “Let’s stop here a minute, Peter.” The park is deserted. The kids who usually play there have gone home to supper, to homes where, when they walk through the door, they will be certain who their mothers and fathers are. This morning I saw the fledgling falcons teetering on the edge of their nest. Even the birds have homes.
Father puts his hand on my shoulder. “Peter, I am sorry that I put off giving you an answer, but I needed the time to think how I would tell your mother. These last days I have been wondering what to say to her. I know she doesn’t want to talk about it, that she thinks it is better to put it behind us. But it isn’t fair to you. Tonight I promise I will tell her.”
Of course I know who Father means when he says “your mother.” Now for the first time I realize my mother might be someone quite different. I ask myself, Who is my mother and where is she? It’s not just a quiet question but a silent shout. I have to know at once.
“Father,” I insist, “can’t you at least tell me who my mother is?”
“Peter, if I could tell you I would. The truth is, I don’t know.”