Roman has vowed never to spend another winter north of the Alps and is touring with the Circo Cardinali in Italy. “He’s useless to me!” Vera tells me angrily. “It has to be now. I can’t wait.”
“Why?”
She refuses to give me any explanation, which is odd and infuriating. Nevertheless, I convince her to compose a letter to Roman, and we have it translated into braille by a blind worker at a brush factory run by Otto Weidt, an old friend of Isaac’s. We send it care of Gianfranco Cardinali at his office in Rome. Vera’s heart is carried overseas in a patterned series of dots …
Also at the end of January 1934, Papa telephones Isaac’s schoolmaster friend Philip Hassgall to talk about the possibility of enrolling Hansi in his special program for children who are … He’s at a loss for how to put Hansi’s difference but soon comes up with slow. Accurate, I suppose. Two nights later, I overhear my parents quarreling about whether we can afford to send my brother to a private school. Papa says we will make sacrifices; if we can’t get the bigger apartment we’d hoped for, so be it. Mama retorts that a private education for Hansi is beyond our means and that she’d prefer he remain with her.
I don’t take my luminal that night so I can think out our family’s dilemma, and I realize in the early morning that Mama will do all she can to keep Hansi with her forever. This will be our last chance to set him free, I think, and I get into his bed behind him, where his warmth is all the assurance I need that fighting for him is what I was born to do.
Dr Hassgall agrees to come to our apartment the next week to evaluate my brother. On the appointed afternoon, I bathe the boy and dress him in his best white shirt. I try to get one of Papa’s ties on him, but he bats my hands away. Sometimes I’d like to bite him hard.
Dr Hassgall is about fifty and very dapper. He’s dressed in a dark gray, antique-looking woolen coat and red silk tie. He has thick, closely cropped gray hair, and he makes precise gestures with his hands, as though he’s an orchestra leader. His blue eyes light up with eagerness when he spots Hansi sitting on the sofa. In a melodious voice, he asks my parents about when they first noticed he was different, and what happened at his last school. After their explanations, which are incomplete and scattered, our guest asks them why they think the boy stopped talking, which is when Papa and Mama look at each other as though they’re two defendants needing to collaborate on a lie. “We really don’t know,” Mama tells our guest.
“He just stopped,” Papa agrees, shrugging away further reflection on the matter.
Dr Hassgall asks if they will permit him to talk with Hansi alone in our bedroom. “I’d like to make my evaluation without anyone else around who might distract him,” he says, and seeing he’s about to be refused, he holds up both hands and adds, “Please, be patient with me. With children like Hansi, patience is often what we need most.”
“Very well,” Papa answers, but his voice is deep with warning. If you hurt a hair on my son’s head …
Mama glances at Papa as if she’s been betrayed, but before she can ruin our hopes, I rush to Hansi and lay my hand on top of his head, which usually calms him. “Listen up,” I say cheerfully. “We’re going to go into our room and Dr Hassgall is going to come with us, and he only wants to talk with you. Everything will be fine, I promise.”
He doesn’t answer of course, but I can tell from the way he’s tilted his head that he is scared enough to burst into tears at any moment.
“I promise I’ll never abandon you,” I tell him, pressing down on him. Then, I say something surprising. “If you do this, I’ll ask Mama and Papa to get you a dog. As cute as Minnie!”
Where does that little bit of inspiration come from?
He folds his top lip over his bottom—interest piqued. Maybe he’s even dancing inside the Hansi Universe.
I lead the boy into his room and summon Dr Hassgall. I close the door behind us, which my parents may find unforgivable, but I haven’t any choice.
“Thank you, Sophie,” he tells me when I’ve got Hansi seated on his bed. You can go now. And Sophie,” he says, smiling, “I’m very impressed with you. Isaac was right.”
The generous way he looks at me makes me shiver, but from that moment on, I feel a great solidarity with him because I know we are fighting for the same person.
“My brother stopped talking when he got scared,” I whisper, and I grimace so that he knows this is top-secret.
He leans toward me, a co-conspirator now. “Scared how?”
“Friends of my father’s stayed with us one night—Communists in hiding. Mama panicked, and then Papa decided to change … to become a Nazi. He feared arrest and he renounced his past, which includes us, too … me and my brother. You see, Papa is scared of what we might say about him. I think Hansi stopped knowing who our father was. And …”
Dr Hassgall pats my shoulder. “I understand, Sophie. You needn’t continue.”
“Just one more thing,” I say. “Hansi likes jigsaw puzzles. If you can get him to let you help him with one, you’ll be part of the way inside his universe.”
Dr Hassgall laughs sweetly. “I understand. We’ll work on that first.”
I leave the two of them alone.
“Why did you close the door?” Mama demands as soon as I step into our sitting room. She’s standing with her hands crossed over her chest.
“Dr Hassgall asked me to close it. I didn’t want to be rude and refuse him.”
“The nerve of that man!” Mama whisper-screams to Papa, and I can tell she won’t be satisfied until she’s punished someone—meaning me. “And Sophie, what’s this about a dog?” she demands.
“I got ahead of myself there,” I say, trying to wriggle free of her attack. “I guess it was a stupid idea, but I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“Very stupid. How could we have a dog in this tiny apartment?”
“You’re absolutely right,” I say.
I turn to my father and ask for permission to go to the kitchen, which he gives me. I sit there munching on a raw carrot. Waiting and wondering as if caught in a fishing net. After I hear footsteps, I count to ten and then rejoin the others. My brother has given Dr Hassgall his hand. They stand before my parents, supplicants, forming a united front.
Not bad, Dr Hassgall, I think.
“Dr and Mrs Riedesel, I work with what I call distant children, and I believe that Hansi is one of them. He could benefit from classes at my school, and I promise you my teachers and I will do our best to help him.”
“You’re sure he can be helped?” Papa asks.
“I believe … I believe he is behind a kind of wall. I will try to open a window so he can see us clearly, and so we can see him. So he can tell us what he needs.”
“But our physician said that he was …”
Dr Hassgall waves off my father’s comments. “Dr Riedesel, would you please consider excusing Hansi from hearing medical matters?”
My father agrees, so I take the boy to our bedroom. To my astonishment, Dr Hassgall waits for me to return before continuing. “Now that we’re all here,” he says, nodding at me,“German physicians know nothing about Hansi’s condition. And I assure you that he is neither feebleminded nor schizophrenic. Please, unless he becomes gravely ill, refrain from taking him to any more doctors. They will only put his health at risk.”
That seemed a strange comment at the time.
“Will he ever be … be normal?” my mother asks.
“I don’t believe so, but he can be happy and productive. I have more than ten children similar to Hansi, and if you visit my school, you will see how they play and learn. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what normal means anymore. When you work with children like Hansi, you come to understand that such determinations are not important and even dangerous. I have several former students who now live on their own and hold down good jobs. Some others have found partners for life who love them. That’s what’s important.”
Finally, a speech from a German worth hearing!
“Do you know why … why he is the way he is?” Mama asks anxiously. A question she’s been storing for eight or nine years, I’d guess.
“No one knows, but I don’t believe you did anything to cause his condition.”
Mama gasps and raises her hands to her mouth. Embarrassment that he has guessed her feelings of guilt? Or relief that she can now release them? I cannot tell.
“This just happens sometimes, Mrs Riedesel,” our guest continues. “But Hansi will need schooling if he’s to have a good life. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it?”
“But your school is so far across the city,” Mama points out.
She wants to start one of her tennis matches, but the words far across the city are my cue to rush onto the court. “I’ll take Hansi to school and pick him up every day except when I have the Young Maidens on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” I say. I’ve been practicing my offer but it still comes out in a desperate rush.
I expect Mama’s fury. Instead, she looks at me sadly and says, “If you’re willing to do that, Sophie, then … then…”
She can’t finish her sentence and says nothing more while our guest is with us. Her silent gloom puzzles me until later when I realize it was only when I spoke that she understood she’d lost this battle and would have to give up her innocent little boy to the world. I felt only cruel resentment toward her then, but now I know how hard it is to let go of someone we want to protect. And how much life-affirming courage it took for her to do it.
After Dr Hassgall leaves, Papa picks up Hansi in his arms and kisses him all over his face. God bless him for that. Then he tells Mama firmly that the boy will be enrolling at school as soon as possible.
Mama, stunned, runs to her bedroom. She prepares no dinner that night. Papa and I do not mention what’s happened. I make onion soup for Hansi, Papa, and me, and we eat cheese on pumpernickel bread afterward.
When Mama finally emerges near bedtime, her eyes are rimmed red. She avoids Papa, who reads his paper without glancing up. Their distance seems to sit on my shoulders, making all my movements labored. I heat up some soup for her, but she eats it with faraway eyes, as though she’s a condemned prisoner defeated again by the life she never wanted.
When I pick up her empty bowl, she takes my hand and brings it to her cheek, then kisses my palm as if I’m her last hope. “You’ll see, Mama, Hansi will love you even more when he’s better,” I tell her.
She looks up at me, and I see a fragile woman who’s unsure of her place in the world—not so different from me. She was only thirty-six. That seemed so old at the time. And over a distance of seventy years, I hear Isaac tell me, “People generally become bitter for lack of three things—love, attention, and justice.” He was talking about Vera then, but it goes for my mother too.
I could almost trust Mama at that moment and confess to her what’s happened between Tonio and me. In another time and place, she’d put her arms around me and tell me something soothing and sweet. But not in the Germany I’ve inherited.
The King David School is a large yellow house on Emdener Straße, a block from St Paul’s Church. My mother drops Hansi there for the first time at the end of January and I fetch him that afternoon—early, so I can make sure he’s all right.
Dr Hassgall lets me peek into my brother’s classroom, which is painted deep blue—the color of the sky in Giotto’s frescoes. Something else seems odd, but I can’t identify what.
“Children are very sensitive to color,” Dr Hassgall tells me, “and blue tends to keep them calmer and more comfortable with themselves than white.”
Eccentricity or full-blown lunacy? As long as Dr Hassgall helps my brother, he can paint the whole street blue with pink stripes, I don’t care.
Dozens of kids’ drawings—jagged landscapes and mop-haired stick figures—are taped on one of the walls. On the other side of the room is a gigantic map of the world. Framing the map are two windows that look out on a garden of bare-limbed trees rising up behind a slide and seesaw.
My brother and eight other students sit at desks pushed together to form a wooden island in the middle of the room. Three girls, five boys, all of them wearing light blue smocks.
The teacher is a young woman, maybe thirty, with copper-colored hair cut very short. She wears trousers and looks like an athletic young man. I bet she’d beat Maria in the hundred-meter dash. Enough reason to like her.
We smile as strangers do who want the same thing—in this case, for my brother to thrive. I wonder if she’ll ever lose patience with Hansi, like I do. I hope so.
No swastika flag flies above her head. And she’s not wearing an armband. That’s what’s odd.
When she comes to us, she introduces herself as Else König. She explains that Hansi is working on subtraction problems in his notebook.
Dr Hassgall tells me, “We teach subtraction before addition because it’s best if children learn that there exists a whole from which we may take things away before they get the erroneous idea that everything is separate.”
Could that be true? In any case, his reply is so unexpected that I give a little laugh, which is when Hansi spots me. I wave, but he puts his nose back in his notebook right away. And it’s then I understand more of what my mother feels.
Roman’s reply to Vera’s letter arrives in early March. He writes that he has wanted a child for many years. “I’ll be back in Berlin around mid-May and then we can get started on baby-making!”
“I hope I can hold out till then,” Vera says ominously.
“You’ve waited this long, and it’s only another ten weeks,” I point out.
Mr Cardinali has written the letter for Roman, and his handwriting is so neat and compact that it seems a sign that nothing will go wrong this time, but Vera refuses to accept her good luck. “When he’s inside me I’ll believe he’s kept his word, and not a minute sooner.”
Unable to come up with any other rational course of action in my investigation of Georg’s murder, I decide to follow other members of The Ring. I start with Molly and Klaus Schneider, the trapeze flyers at Althof’s Circus who participated in our protest at Weissman’s. The bad news is that they live all the way across town in Wilmersdorf. With all my commitments, I manage to get there only twice at the beginning of the month, risking frostbite while waiting down the street from their apartment, and only once do they come home. They go in at just after five p.m. and don’t go out again. My feet are so numb by seven that I trip and have a bad tumble while walking to the underground. I can’t see how I’m going to reconcile being a schoolgirl and Young Maiden with my detective work. And with Berlin’s winter.
The 9th of March, 1934—the day I join the war effort. And diminish any chance I had of furthering my investigations. My particular mission is Isaac’s idea.
He says he’s been buying books by Jewish writers and banned Aryan authors to keep them from being tossed into bonfires. “But as soon as the secondhand bookshop owners see me coming they double their prices,” he tells me. “Goniffs, ladrões, thieves, gangsters are what they are! You’ve got to save me—I’m going broke.”
So every Wednesday, when I am supposedly out with Tonio, Isaac gives me a list of what he’s hunting for and I bargain with the booksellers. After I’ve made my rounds, I sneak across the courtyard behind our building and eat supper in his apartment. Then we return to our lessons in Judaism.
“Each text you buy for me is another angel who will live to fight another day,” Isaac assures me, explaining that Berekiah Zarco used to refer to books as angels given earthly form.
Vera, Heidi, Rolf, K-H, Marianne, and other friends sometimes join us in the evening, though we never talk about mysticism in their presence. “They already think I’m daft,” Isaac confides in me, “and I wouldn’t want them to know my condition is even worse than they imagine.”
I love the secrecy of our time together—and that Isaac is all mine. His youthful happiness of late has lulled me into believing that he is perfectly safe. Maybe we both want to believe that, in fact. No one, after all, wants to spend one’s days cramped by fear, even when that would be the logical way to live.
Whenever I ask about his work with Turkish journalists, he says it’s going well. He doesn’t know how the other members of The Ring are faring in their efforts because they’ve agreed never to talk about such matters. “The less we can tell the Nazis if we’re arrested the better. And this makes it much harder for the traitor in our group to do any damage.”
Between dropping off and fetching Hansi, my own studies, Young Maiden meetings, choral practice, and hunting for Isaac’s books, I’m generally too exhausted to think about The Ring or Georg’s murder, or the Opposite-Compass’ rantings, or anything else the world might consider noteworthy. In consequence—and with help from my nightly lullaby from luminal—I sleep like a brick. Though Tonio occasionally steals into my mind as if he’s intent on hurting me further …
On my first list of books are two works by Adolph Jellinek that, according to Isaac, are indispensable for the study of Jewish mysticism: Philosophie und Kabbala and Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala; and two books by the Jewish story-collector and philosopher, Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman and The Legend of the Baal-Shem.
I save the list inside my diary because those books seem to mark the beginning of my real life—the one I wanted and chose. I keep my diary in Isaac’s wardrobe.
The Jewish booksellers I visit are mostly grouped around the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße and on Neue Friedrichstraße. The smell of leather and dust comes to gratify me and put me at ease with myself, since it’s the scent of my covert contribution to our cause. I become friends with Mr Poppelauer at Number 59 Neue Friedrichstraße and Mr Henrikkson at Number 61.
I tell all the bookshop owners and clerks that I’m making purchases for my own studies. I’m sure they don’t believe me, but nobody asks questions of strangers anymore. I keep my sweater unbuttoned to let my Young Maiden uniform show through when I visit a Christian-owned bookshop, and I button my collar for the Jews.
Isaac calls me his kyra, which is what the residents of Istanbul used to call the Greek women who brought merchandise to orthodox Moslem homes so that the wives and daughters cloistered there could purchase what they needed. Every time I put a rare book in his hands, he whispers a Hebrew blessing over my head and tells me, “Another angel saved, my kyra.”
One Wednesday in early March, Isaac presents me with a book printed in New York called Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler’s Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau. He tells me that the book documents how SS guards are treating political prisoners like slaves. Dozens have been hanged for refusing to follow orders and many others shot for trying to escape. The Jews and Communists amongst the prisoners are being slowly starved to death. The book has been written by a former member of the Reichstag, Hans Beimlar, who managed to escape from Dachau in May 1933.
“Have you told the Munchenbergs about the book?” I ask Isaac.
“Professor and Mrs Munchenberg read it two nights ago, and they left yesterday afternoon for Dachau. Right after going to the bank.”
“The bank?”
“They’re going to offer the SS a ransom. Apparently that works sometimes. They’ve taken every Reichsmark they’ve got.”
“You better hide the book somewhere really safe,” I tell him.
“No, this angel needs to speak. I’m giving it to K-H and Marianne next.”
Two days later, Isaac calls to me from his window as I head out with Hansi for his school, and he drops an envelope into my hands, then slips back inside and shuts his window before anyone can spot him talking to me. He writes, “The bribes worked, but not as the Munchenbergs hoped. They paid a small fortune only to be told that Raffi has been killed. Shot for insubordination. After six hours of standing at attention in the rain, he apparently sat down. They managed to bribe enough Nazis to get his body. The funeral is today. I will make apologies for you for not attending. They are killing our best young people first, so be careful. Maybe you should stop buying books. Come talk to me. I’m worried. Sorry, sorry, sorry to give you this terrible news. Be strong. Love, Isaac.”
When I was tiny, Raffi would sling me over his shoulder and carry me laughing to my room and sit with me as I fell asleep, reading to me softly, and I loved his voice, and the feel of the mattress sagging in his direction and the heat on my cheeks made by the candles that he would light and put on my bedside table. Raffi was the gravity of affection. Maybe he was the first person outside my family whom I loved.
So when I read that he is dead, I squat on the pavement, hollowed by disbelief. And then I run to Frau Koslowski’s grocery and go to the back where no one can see me and sob over all that will never be. Because now I know that Raffi will never see the Nile again, or bring us home dried dates, or go with me to visit Hansi at his new school. And he will never babysit my children, which is a fantasy I didn’t even know I had until now. Strange how we only know our deepest hopes too late to do any good.
And I realize, too, that one day in the not-so-distant future I’ll be older than Raffi; when I reach thirty and then forty and fifty, he will still be twenty-five and buried in our neighborhood cemetery, a bullet hole in his skull.
I take a luminal to get through the day, but even so tears come to my eyes when Dr Richter greets us with a Heil Hitler that morning. Hate burns in my chest like a sulfurous flame, and I can’t get my breath when he asks me what’s wrong. I finally stammer, “A friend … friend of mine died and I need to go to the funeral. I want to be excused.”
“Do you have a note from your parents?”
“No.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to stay.”
It was a mistake to reveal my grief, because Gurka—with the intuition that comes to the truly wicked—has guessed that it’s a Jewish friend of mine who has died and draws her hand across her neck like a throat being slit whenever she sees me.
What books would Raffi have written on Egyptian sculpture that will now never be read?
And the point is, he would want me at his funeral, and disappointing the dead makes me feel as if I’ll be haunted forever by his contempt and my own cowardice. My only comfort is knowing that Raffi would approve of my way to fight this war, so when Isaac returns from the cemetery, I tell him that I’ll never stop saving books while Hitler rules Germany. Brave words, but maybe they’re just my excuse for not doing more.
The next Saturday, I wake to hear my name being called from the street below my window. Tonio is waving at me to come down. It’s too late to make believe I don’t see him. And turning away would only sentence me to a life of what-might-have-been, so I hold up my hand, meaning wait. I feel as though I’m mesmerized by my own confusion.
Tonio greets me cheerfully. He takes a step forward, so I take one back.
“Do you want to go to a movie with me this afternoon?” he asks. He pokes his tongue out at the corner of his mouth to give me his puppy face, eager for us to embark on mischief, as if we were our younger selves.
“You gave me crabs,” I say, dead-voiced. I feel like a shadow stalking my own mind.
“Sophie …” He gazes down, thinking of what to say. He needs help, but I’m not going to give him any. I feel dry and impoverished. And gray—the color of my thoughts.
An elderly couple passes us, the man in a black suit that’s way to big for him and his wife wearing bright red silk flowers in her hat. Down the street, a group of kids are playing tag.
At length, he looks up and says, “Can we go somewhere where we can be alone?”
“If you don’t have the courage to talk with me here, then what good are you?”
He looks down again, ashamed. “I was upset,” he tells me. “I was feeling pressured. We’d been friends for so long that I … that I thought I wanted something else. And …”
“And you got something else. Filzläuse. From someone else. Or more likely, from many someone elses.”
He grimaces. “I’m sorry. That was rotten of me. And it was only one other girl.”
I don’t believe that, but I’m not going to humiliate myself by asking for names, ages, and addresses.
“I only realized I had them when it was … was too late to warn you,” he adds.
Across the street, the wrinkled old grandmother who lives on the top floor of Mr Mannheim’s building starts shaking a white rug out her window, making clouds of dust. We’ve never talked, but I give her a big wave, and she waves back. That’s my way of making sure that Tonio knows that my life goes beyond him.
He turns around momentarily to see who it is, not to be left out.
“So will you come with me to the movies?” he asks in a supplicating tone. The sound of real regret or the role he needs to play to win me back?
“You said something terrible to me,” I point out.
He kicks the pavement once, then a second time, which means our conversation is not going as he expected. “I’m sorry about that, too,” he says. “I lied about you not being pretty. I was angry at you. I felt you were making me decide whether I wanted to be with you forever, and I wasn’t sure I was ready.” He looks at me firmly. “You may not like what I’m saying, Sophie, but I’m being honest with you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
I keep my lips sealed because I don’t know how to answer. As we stare at each other, I feel our intimacy growing around us, blocking out the buildings and the sky, and the rumbling of the tram, and I sense a latch opening inside me. Freeing me to desire a future together. Even though he has betrayed me.
“Please don’t hate me,” he says, his voice breaking.
“I don’t hate you, but you hurt me badly,” I reply, my voice about to vanish as well.
“Sophie, I’d never known any girl but you before I … I … If only I could take back my betrayal, I would.”
His big black eyes—which I’ve known for so long—are asking for my forgiveness. He plays his trump card: “Sophie, I’ve got to go into the army in two months. I don’t know how often I’ll be back in Berlin, and I don’t want to go without making up with you.”
His eyes are moistening. He wipes them roughly, but I let my tears fall, wanting to taste the salt of my own vulnerability—to make it as real as possible before I let it go.
At length, he says, “How’s Hansi?”
“He’s started school again.”
“Oh, Sophie, that’s wonderful!”
“Yes, I’m happy about it.”
“I bet it was hard getting your mother to agree.”
“Nearly impossible,” I admit, and I feel a second click deep in my chest, because I hadn’t expected Tonio to understand my family so well. “I had to promise to drop my brother at the school and pick him up three days a week.”
“Where’s the school located?” he asks, eager to steer our conversation along a safe route.
“Near St Paul’s.”
“I’ll come with you sometimes,” he announces.
Showing his solidarity is a good strategy, I’ll give him that. “You don’t have to,” I reply. “I’m sure you’re very busy.”
“I want to! I’ve missed Hansi.”
“A friend of Mr Zarco’s is the headmaster,” I say, and as I speak I see what I need to tell Tonio before we can go any further on the road to our union. “Mr Zarco even arranged for my parents to meet with him,” I begin.
“That was kind of him,” Tonio replies.
A good answer, but not enough. “Yes, very kind,” I say. “Mr Zarco is a wonderful man and I do not want to see him ever hurt ever again by Nazis. And Rini was my best friend ever. I don’t want to see her hurt either.”
I speak as if Tonio could protect them against all the men with guns, which I know he can’t, but I have to make my point.
“I know you loved Rini,” Tonio says, “but times have changed. Maybe later, when things calm down, you two can be friends again.”
I don’t give that an answer because I’ve been such a coward. “And another thing,” I say instead, “Raffi was shot for insubordination. I will never forgive the Nazis for his death. I want you to know that … and remember it. And I’m worried about Hansi, too.”
“Why?”
“He deserves the best life he can have, even if the Nazi Youth would never accept him because he isn’t racially hygienic. I’ll never leave him behind, wherever I go.”
I say these things one after the other in order to draw a magic circle around the people I most love—one that Tonio should not cross. And I close the circle tight around Raffi and Hansi with a trembling voice of warning.
“I love your brother,” he assures me. “You know that. But the world is the way it is. And I have my place in it.”
That’s Tonio drawing his circle—and it’s around only himself. If someone with more experience were watching us he might notice that our circles don’t overlap.
“I don’t want you to change,” I tell him. “I just want you to understand me.”
He looks convinced, but the truth is that I’d prefer us to be real companions, not just lovers, and save all the Yiddish books in Berlin.
“Tonio …” I’m considering how to put a last request, but when I look up, he comes to me and embraces me, and I can feel our bodies easing into each other, as though into the same waking dream. He kisses my eyes because he knows that makes me feel protected, and I press into him, feeling our potential for a life of kindness and passion, and then he says, “I’ve thought you’re beautiful ever since we met. That’s what makes things difficult for me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Everyone says I should want to be with lots of girls at my age, but I don’t want to be. I discovered that the hard way.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“My Nazi Youth friends. And … and even my father.”
The last thing I wanted to tell him was that we had to be perfectly honest with each other. But now, in his arms, I don’t think either of us really wants that. In fact, we have drawn our magic circles to make it clear that our separate lives will continue as before.
Later, after I’ve asked permission from my parents, we go to the movies—Dawn, a heroic film about submarine combat in the Great War—and we take Hansi along. As we ease down in our seats, I realize I’ve forgotten something essential. “If ever my parents ask,” I whisper to Tonio, “we’ve been going out every Wednesday for the last few months.”
“I know.” Seeing my shock, he grins. “I’ve been going out every Wednesday evening so no one would find out about your lie.” He puts his arm over my shoulder. “Mostly I play billiards at the Köln Beer Garden. I’ve gotten pretty good.”
“But how did you know that was the deal I had with my parents?”
“Your father came to talk with my father before our first Wednesday together. He wanted to make sure that it was all right with my parents for us to go out on a weekday. So when Papa talked with me, I was confused at first, but I kept dancing till I figured out the steps.”
After the movie, we go for a walk, and we end up on Museum Island because a band is performing hymns in front of the Cathedral. We’re just five minutes from Oranienburger Straße, so I steer us to Julia’s shop, maybe because I miss watching her. Or maybe an idea is already forming inside me …
We stand across the street, in front of Goldman’s Bakery, and the glorious scent of bread is so strong that Tonio makes believe he’s dizzy and wobbles around on the sidewalk, making Hansi giggle.
Julia is standing behind her cash register, her hair up, a white scarf around her neck. And just like that, I realize that the time has come for me to start poking answers out of their hiding places.
I’ve thought a great deal about why I chose Julia in years since, and I think it comes down to this: I suspected that she knew much more about poisons than she’d told me and believed she possessed the fierceness of will to kill anyone who might have threatened her good life. For better or worse, that was enough for me to take a stupid risk.
“Wait here,” I tell Tonio, “I’ll be back in a minute.” I don’t want him to overhear what I have to say, of course; he is soon to be a soldier in Hitler’s army, after all.
“But what are …”
I wave away his question. Julia is standing behind her counter reading a thin book when I enter. “Sophie, hi!” she exults, her obsidian eyes opening wide with surprise.
“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d say hello. How’s Martin doing?”
“Oh, he’s fine. He’s even found a job! He does pick-ups and deliveries for a cleaning company. He goes around with a man in a truck. He loves the truck.” Her eyes glow with fondness and humor.
“I … I want to ask a favor.” I lean across her counter and whisper. “A friend of my father’s has just arrived secretly in Berlin—back from exile.” There’s no point in being subtle when setting a trap, so I add, “He’s a Communist and a labor leader.”
Julia gazes down, considering what to do, then whispers, “Wait, don’t say any more.”
She gets up to lock the door and turn around the closed sign in the window, then leads me into her storage room. We’re surrounded by wooden shelves holding hundreds of white porcelain jars with blue Latin lettering. It smells musty, and a bit like ginger.
“So what does your father’s friend need?” she asks, her hands playing nervously together.
“He’d like something for his asthma. If you want some time to make a mixture, you could have it delivered.” Clicking the latch on my trap, I say, “He’ll be at Number 18 Tieckstraße from five to six this afternoon.”
“No, I can give you what he’ll need right now.”
Inside her shop, she scoops up colt’s foot, chamomile, and two other herbs I’ve never heard of into a bowl, then swirls around the mixture with a wooden spoon and funnels it into a pink bag. “He’ll have to prepare this as an infusion,” she tells me as she folds the top closed. She raises a teacherly finger: “Three times a day. You understand?”
“Thank you,” I reply, taking the bag from her. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” she says, putting her hands together into a position of prayer. “Just be careful. And please don’t tell anyone you were here.”
“What did you get?” Tonio asks me as I meet him across the street. He reaches for my bag but I hold it away from him. “Some medicine for Hansi.”
“What’s he got?”
“Pinworms.”
“Hansi, you’ve got pinworms?” he asks the boy.
The little lizard shakes his vacant head, which makes Tonio look at me and frown.
“It’s to help me sleep,” I tell him in a confessional voice.
He buys my explanation, and we go home. But after I’ve kissed him goodbye and dropped Hansi at home, I dash back to the street. I reach Tieckstraße at ten to five according to my watch. I wait down the block from the apartment where Tonio and I have our trysts, trying to calm my frenzied breathing. But by 5:15 I begin to believe I’ve misjudged Julia, and when 5:30 goes by, I consider leaving. It’s so cold that my teeth are chattering, and my nervous excitement is completely gone.
A few minutes later, however, a black Mercedes drives by and stops in front of Number 18. Two Gestapo officers step out, one with his gun already drawn. Another man—hard to see what he looks like—stays behind in the back seat of the car.
“The traitor in your group is Julia, I’m sure of it!” I tell Isaac as soon as he lets me in his apartment. I’m panting from the thrill of catching a murderess, and because I think I’ve just saved him and Vera, though I won’t deny that I can also hear a whisper from the part of my mind formed by Hollywood saying, This was too easy … “Though I bet she’ll deny it,” I add. “She’ll say the police already knew where he was hiding. She’ll …”
“Sophele, slow down,” he pleads. He leads me into his kitchen and points to a chair. I sit down and so does he.
“Isaac, listen to me!” I tell him, and I go on to explain then how I trapped Julia, the words flying out of me like arrows.
He questions me for a time, then stands up and goes to the window. He lights his pipe. I try to speak, but he holds up his hand. “I need to think,” he tells me.
When he returns to me, he kneels by my chair. “Now listen, you have to let me handle this. You have to promise me you won’t do any more … you won’t go to see Julia.”
“Isaac,” I say desperately, “how can I promise that? I loved Raffi, and she might be responsible for his death. Who knows what she told the Gestapo about him? And what about Georg? She has to be punished!” And you’re not even grateful! I want to add, but instead I say in a hesitant voice, “You … you don’t even seem pleased I found out who was betraying you.”
“Because Julia is one of my oldest and dearest friends. Though I thank you for finding out about her. Now listen,” he adds, standing up, “you are to keep away from her. She might make trouble for you—and even Hansi.”
Does he add my brother’s name because he knows I won’t dare put him in danger again, not after the terror we went through at Weissman’s?
I agree to let Isaac deal with Julia. And I promise, too, that I will refrain from buying books for at least a month. No Risks for Sophie is the title of this new movie, and I am to rejoin my quiet life far from the front lines. Though I am happy to report there are other battles to be won …
“No, and don’t ask again!” Mama says when I beg her for a small dog for Hansi for the third or fourth time, adding, “I don’t want to hear of this ever again! The last thing Hansi needs is a mutt leaving his … his deposits all over the house.”
Isaac worried for my safety
I’m nearly seventeen and she still can’t say shit in front of me.
But Dr Hassgall surprises me by telling me that Mama is perfectly right and that a fish tank would be better for the boy. “Distant children need lots of visual stimulation,” he says conclusively. “But nothing too … exciting. I’d say fish are perfect.”
So we buy one orange and one white goldfish at Tannenbaum’s Pet Shop on Prenzlauer Allee. They’re as fat-bellied as George Grosz bankers. Still, out of affection, I call them Fred and Ginger, but the names my parents give them are the Germanically dull Willi and Tilli.
“Be glad they’re not Adolf 1 and Adolf 2,” Isaac tells me to cheer me up.
Hansi follows the two gulping, marble-eyed fish with a rapt gaze. As for those poor creatures themselves, they’re now confined to a two-foot-wide, green-tinted tank that sits on a wooden stand near our radio. Do they prefer Lotte Lenya to Al Jolson? They’re not saying. I’ve planted two daffy-looking, bright green wooden palm trees with yellow coconuts in the white gravel floor of the tank—my homage to Flying Down to Rio. My brother can sit there for hours, entranced. Maybe he sees the key to the universe in Fred’s air bubbles or in how Ginger swims up to snare the food pellets we shake in.
Dr Hassgall also tells us that Hansi would benefit from a fixed routine. So after school, he watches the goldfish for an hour, then works on a jigsaw puzzle till dinner preparations, when he peels potatoes or carrots as if each one is a block of Carrera marble.
“You’re the Michelangelo of potato peeling,” I tell him with my best Italian accent.
He smiles up at me, which earns him a kiss, and returns to sculpting. He’s more alert since he started school, and happier, but his voice is still on an extended holiday.
After supper, he and I work on his jigsaw puzzle, then Mama puts him to bed. Every Friday and Monday I bathe him. I love knowing the ins and outs of his little body. I draw him whenever I can’t sleep.
My own after-school routine becomes Young Maidens on Tuesday, Tonio on Wednesday, and choral practice on Thursday. When I resume book-buying, I make my rounds only when my schedule permits. I’ve lulled my parents into thinking I’m as loyal as the Rhine, so they’ve stopped checking up on me. On Saturdays, I generally go to the movies or stroll through the Tiergarten with Tonio and Hansi, and on Sunday, after church, I visit Vera or Isaac on the sly. Sometimes, if we’re not in the mood to continue my Jewish studies, he and I go to the Jewish Old Age Home on Große Hamburger Straße, where he has a ninety-year-old friend—Mrs Kaufmann—who adores the poppy-seed cakes we take her. Mrs Kaufmann usually thinks I’m her granddaughter Else and gives me photographs of herself as a girl in Heidelberg that she keeps in a box under her cot.
I find comfort in having a set pattern, too, which may mean I’m more like Hansi than I’d like to believe.
I do not go near Julia’s shop. I’m afraid of what I’d say to her, and of getting Isaac in trouble. All he tells me is that she’ll never hurt anyone again in a voice darkened by anger. I suspect he’s threatened her, and I sense—just as she must have—that he’d be capable of murder to protect the friends he loves.
Near the end of March, Tonio is inducted into the army. He’s handsome and commanding in his uniform, and I’d get on my knees before him any time he likes. And he knows it.
He’s stationed at a training camp near Potsdam, and he is permitted to leave only one weekend a month, which is good because I enjoy him more in small doses. We never even come close to quarreling, which may mean he likes me better only two days a month as well. In any case, he adores soldiering. He can talk for hours about rifles and guns, and the gang of boys training with him. We often do complain about being apart, but that’s just to prove we’re committed to each other. Is he sleeping with other girls on occasion? All I know for sure is that no more crabs try to build Metropolis in my pubic hair.
Just as leaves sprout on the branches of the linden trees on Prenzlauer Allee, Roman returns, tanned and relaxed. He and Vera get down to the business of baby-making at the end of May. I visit them with Isaac sometimes on Sunday. They’ve become playful together, like kids who’ve embarked on a grand adventure, and Vera is so exultant that she’s taken to singing as she sews, as off-key as a seal. She’s also stopped smoking in her apartment, since Roman hates it. I’d never have guessed she was capable of such a concession.
Vera has worked out a circus act with Roman that makes her laugh as if it’s the funniest thing in the world. “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asks him, sticking up three of her massive breadsticks, for instance. But he’s as blind as the bottom layer of hell, as she once told me, and what chance is there that he’ll spot her fingers from way down there?
“Three,” he says. And he’s always right, whether she’s holding up one or four or none.
She must give him the answer with a particular inflection in her voice, or some coded pattern of words, but she denies it. “I’m not telling how we do it!” she declares, and that’s when she collapses giggling and snorting in the nest of overstuffed pillows on her battered couch. I’m guessing it’s the effect of several weeks of sex after a decade of chastity.
Not even Roman will let me in on their technique, but I give him a bear hug meant to squeeze the truth out of him, which is really just an excuse for me to touch him; he’s all muscle and lithe elegance. If life were a Schiller play, he’d be the good prince who brings peace to his dominion, which worries me sometimes, because wouldn’t a good prince only make most people jealous in the real world?
I occasionally accompany Roman home on Sunday evenings, and alongside such a man, I feel as if we’re walking across a magic carpet. Of course, this is Berlin and not a Persian rug, so when I’m off in the clouds and not steering him properly, he occasionally puts a foot atop a squashed bratwurst or in some other unidentifiable muck, but he doesn’t get angry. He’s yet to invite me in for drinks. I think he suspects I might jump on him. I suspect he’s right.
Proof of Vera’s love … Roman performs one Sunday on Grenadierstraße for the benefit of the Jewish Old Age Home and she comes out of hiding during the day to see him. Not only that, she buries her head in her hands as he rides a unicycle across a wire stretched between the roofs on opposite sides of the street, fifty feet over the death waiting for him on all those grimy cobbles. He’s bare-chested and wearing shimmering white tights. Every sleek contour is visible, including the one I’m most interested in, which does not disappoint …
We have blue skies and an unusually warm breeze from the west, so everyone is out in their shirtsleeves. The old folks gaze up from their walkers and wheelchairs, mouths agape, dentures in their hands. Even Mrs Kaufmann watches him with her gooey gray eyes open wide for the first time in ages. Mistaking me for her granddaughter again, she whispers to me, “My God, Else, he’s like a Greek statue of Antinous come to life. If I were twenty again …”
Mrs Kaufmann might occasionally try to water the roses printed on her pillowcases, but she knows the right man to bring her snoozing soufflé to life when she sees him.
A scalding summer day in mid-August brings out an irrepressible sense of curiosity and freedom in me, and I go to Julia’s shop. The petite salesgirl I’ve seen before is helping two customers. After they leave, I go in and explain I’m a friend of Julia’s.
“I’m afraid she’s no longer here,” the young woman tells me. “She decided to stop working.”
“But she’s still living here—in Berlin, I mean?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure where she’s gone.” She smiles, embarrassed not to know more.
“And Martin?”
“I’m assuming he’s with her.”
When I tell Isaac that Julia has probably left town, he says, “Then that’s that.”
“That’s what?”
“Sophie, you must learn to let go when you have to. And to move on. Or else you’ll find yourself stuck in glue so thick you’ll never get out.”
Good advice for some people, no doubt, but not for me.
Isaac drops another note to me from his window at the end of August: “Good news: the mieskeit is pregnant!”
Vera dances me around her apartment that Sunday, while flapping an ostrich-feather fan she’s taken out of mothballs for the occasion.
“Are you absolutely sure you’re pregnant?” I ask her.
“Yes, I visited my doctor twice. A little Roman is tightrope walking inside my womb!”
She drops down on her sofa and puts a pillow over her head, then fans herself some more because she claims the pregnancy makes her hot. She sticks her tongue out at me because I’m staring. Vera has the long, pointy tongue of a demon. And it’s fuzzy from all her smoking.
“Do you want a boy or a girl?” I ask.
She starts, then gazes down, afraid to speak.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, coming to her.
“Oh, Sophele,” she says, grabbing my hand, “I don’t care if the baby is a boy or a girl, as long as it isn’t deformed!” She looks up to heaven then and whispers, “Are you listening, mein Lieber, or are you as deaf as death?”
I understand more about Vera’s urgency to get pregnant three weeks later, when she receives a letter from Reich Health Department telling her that she is to appear before an Erbgesundheitsgericht, one of those new words we’re all learning. This one means Hereditary Health Court, and it will decide whether she’s to be sterilized or not. Isaac gives me this news as I enter his apartment with an old book I’ve just bought from Mr Poppelauer. I do not recall its title, or the author, but I’ll never forget its dead weight in my hand because it was as I gave it to him that I first heard that brutal German word, Erbkranke—meaning people with a hereditary disease.
“Vera falls into one of the categories covered by the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses,” Isaac tells me. “So she’ll be sterilized.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.
“The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” he repeats. “The Nazis passed it in July of last year. At the very same time they signed a concordat with the Vatican and declared themselves the only legal political party in Germany, which should tell you something if you look below the glass. Where were you when all this was happening?” Isaac glares at me as if I’ve torn a page out of his Torah.
“I guess … guess I missed it.”
“I guess you’ve been asleep!” he shouts. I rush into his kitchen, but he stalks me there, and since he’s about to shout again, I say, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You should know what’s going on in your country. It’s that goddamned luminal you’re taking! Half the country is asleep and the other half has a mind like urine. And close the curtains!” He stomps past me and snaps them closed to frustrate snooping eyes.
“If I were aware of everything that was happening,” I shout back, “then I wouldn’t risk buying you books! I could end in Dachau, just like Raffi.”
Isaac turns pale. “Oh God, don’t even say such a thing, Sophele! Forgive me.”
Now it’s my turn to glare.
“A schnapps … I need a schnapps to calm my nerves. And so do you. Please, let me get you one. You’re old enough now.”
He pours me a glass and kisses the top of my head. “Do you forgive me?” he whispers.
“Yes, but no more yelling.” After he agrees to that, I ask, “Does Vera have to go to this hearing?”
“Yes, or she’ll be arrested. Her physician must have reported her to the authorities. She should never have had a doctor examine her. That must be why she got the letter now.”
He lights his pipe with quick movements. Even when upset, he’s agile. Sixty years of sewing seams.
“What did he report her for?” I ask.
“For being deformed.”
“Is that a punishable offense?”
He snorts. “Of course.” Imitating Hitler’s accent and savage delivery, he adds, “And the punishment is we turn your ovaries into a Wiener Schnitzel.”
“But Vera is pregnant!”
“Yes, she’s outwitted them for now. And we can thank God that Roman has avoided this trap so far.”
“Why would Roman be sterilized?”
“Sophele, he’s congenitally blind!”
“But he’s so handsome and …”
“Sophie, do you think it’s fine to sterilize people who are ugly? Or deaf? Or with epilepsy or anything else?”
“I only meant that Roman being so … so …”
Isaac laughs from his belly.
“What?” I demand, irritated.
“Nothing. Let’s just say that desire is a good thing for a young girl to feel.” Seeing that his amusement irritates me, he quickly adds, “I don’t mean anything bad. Half the people I know would like to sleep with Roman.”
“Would you?”
“Me?” He gazes off into his thoughts. “If he were to ask me, I wouldn’t refuse. But I’m afraid I have other preferences.” He raises his eyebrows and points the stem of his pipe at me, in that way that makes me feel special. “Do I shock you?”
“Yes and no,” I reply. His trust in me makes me understand that I’ll continue to take risks for him whenever he wants.
“So is Vera safe now?” I ask.
“Yes, the authorities will have to let her have the baby, and only then will they sterilize her.” He downs his schnapps in a gulp, licks his lips like a cat, and refills his glass. “You don’t mind if I get so drunk I can’t think, do you?”
“Not at all. So there’s no way out for her?”
“She can argue her case in court. Some judges resent the government usurping their authority. But in the end,” he says, “the laws of Germany will not bend … at least not for dachshunds, mieskeits, and Jews. I know several people who have been sterilized this year. Martin was sterilized three months ago.”
I’d never say so, but maybe taking away Martin’s ability to make a child isn’t a bad thing. Though even thinking that makes me feel disloyal. “I’m ashamed I’m so ignorant,” I tell Isaac.
“Don’t feel so bad. The Nazis keep their sterilization program mostly out of the newspapers. Though if you read Der Stürmer …”
“You read that schmatte?”
“All the time. Who doesn’t want to know their enemy?” Isaac gives me a serious look. “Sophele, I wanted to protect you, and so did Vera, but I think now we were wrong.”
“Protect me from what? I don’t understand.”
“It’s Hansi, he’s in danger.”
I look down to keep the pressure in my chest from making me cry, because I’ve always known something bad would come of his difference. Isaac moves his chair near mine.
“Do the authorities consider feeblemindedness reason enough for sterilization?” I ask.
“I’m afraid so, my dear.”
“So Hansi … he may …”
“Yes, but maybe there’s still a way to fight.” He pats my leg, then leans back in his chair. “Now tell me, has your brother seen any doctors lately?” he asks in a voice of strategizing.
Hansi bathed in my protection
“I don’t think so.”
“Good, because the doctors are the ones who …”
“But he’s seen Dr Nohel at least a half a dozen times over the last few years,” I interrupt, and I understand now why Dr Hassgall asked us to keep Hansi away from physicians.
“If Hansi has already been reported as feebleminded or schizophrenic, then we’re out of luck. Unless your father can use his influence to prevent him from being operated.”
I ought to rush to Papa, but I feel only a heavy hopelessness. That puzzles me until I realize that my father might believe it would be better if Hansi didn’t have children. And he might want to show his superiors that he’s willing to sacrifice his own son and grandchildren for his Nazi ideals.
I’ll have to talk to Mama alone. And she will have to work on Papa. Our only chance.