We arrive in Berlin in the late afternoon of the 10th of July. The train stations and ministry buildings seem to have been hit particularly badly by Allied bombings. As we walk through the government district to Unter den Linden, past all those jagged piles of brick and stone, past the ruined columns and the doorways leading nowhere, past a way of life that will never be repaired, I have the sensation I’ve returned to a damned city that will have to be razed before it can hope to rise again. The façades of many buildings have been blown off, so we have X-ray vision now, too. It is with the eyes of an astonished thief that we gaze into an office at the shattered desks and chairs, or into a bedroom at a ruined mattress and what’s left of a wardrobe. We say nothing as we walk by the carcass of the State Library on Unter den Linden; those angels given earthly form as books that were fortunate enough to survive the Nazi burnings must have been turned to ash by foreign bombers. In front of the main entrance is an old man in a derby hat sitting on a bench reading the shreds of a colorful magazine. Beside him looms a wrecked and twisted German tank. Looking far west, we see that the Brandenburg Gate seems to have survived reasonably well, but to the east the cathedral has had its dome and spires shattered. As we cross over to Museum Island, we confirm that the Spree has not changed its course. Nature, as Isaac told me, is on our side—the side of life. And yet the water seems so still, so indifferent. Though maybe that’s a good thing.
Hans senses our mood and talks little. He’s exhausted from the trip, so I carry him for a time. In front of the makeshift cafés, scantily clad, blond prostitutes stand chatting with Russian soldiers, who call out well-meaning greetings to my son.
Everyone—even the enemy—likes little children after a war, I discover. Proof that the cycle of human life will go on. But would the prostitutes and their Russians ask if he wants a piece of cake or sip of beer if they knew he was Jewish? And have I raised a reticent son without meaning to? When the men offer him candy, he looks back at me with supplicating eyes to see if he can accept their gifts. I suppose it’s for the best that he’s wary, but I can’t help wishing his spirit were freer. I’ve instructed him not to reply if anyone asks if he is Jewish. Despite what Vera thinks, I will indeed buy a gun. Anyone who tries to hurt him will carry a bullet with him to his grave.
My heart feels like a ticking grenade when Prenzlauer Allee opens before us. And the smell of a beer factory—can one be up and running already?—makes me dizzy. Home is straight ahead, and an electric jolt of anguish halts my thoughts. My feet lead me onward but my head is now inside a glass jar made of disbelief.
Passing the Immanuel Church, I picture Isaac’s face, and I see him open the door to my knocks, his pipe clamped in his mouth. Overjoyed, smiling with relief, he says, Welcome home! In his embrace, I release five years of grief and cede to him all the resilience I’ve kept coiled in my body. I can be the person I want to be because he is holding me. I’ll hand him Hans. “Our son,” I’ll say, and a glow of gratitude will burn in Isaac’s eyes, as in a Renaissance painting of grace and sainthood, and he will cry the tears that fathers since Adam have shed, then dance the boy, laughing, around the apartment.
I have fantasized about making love with Isaac a thousand times, and now he will enter me again. And I will enter him. The sea and the mountain shall meet in a damned city.
Seeing our building, I give Hans to Vera and start to run. My eyes, clouded by emotion, do not yet notice the ruined roof or the gouged windows. I rush through the courtyard and take the back steps two at a time. Please, please, please, I am thinking, let my life begin again …
I knock on Isaac’s door, and I keep knocking, and I call out his name from a place so deep inside me that my voice is a stranger’s. A short man I’ve never seen before finally opens the door. Wiping away my tears, I say, “I’m looking for Isaac Zarco. He used to live here.”
The man shakes his head. “I don’t know him.”
“When did you move in?”
“Who are you?” he asks suspiciously.
“A good friend of his. I’ve just returned to Berlin. Please tell me how long you’ve been living here?”
“Nearly two years.”
My mind is caught on the thorns of simple subtraction. Two years … 1943, 1942 … ? Georg comes up the stairs carrying Hans, who reaches out to me with both arms.
“Isaac isn’t here,” I tell Georg, taking the boy from him.
“Do you have any idea where he might be?” Georg asks the man, who again shakes his head.
“Are any of his things still here?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“A portrait I did of him was hanging in the main bedroom. Maybe you found it?”
“There was nothing here when we moved in.”
The miserly wretch won’t even open his door more than a crack to let us look in. I’m convinced he’s lying, and I’m about to argue with him, but Georg takes my shoulder and says, “Let’s go to the Munchenbergs’ apartment.”
A last question: “And the Riedesel family? They were living in the front building.”
“I never met them.”
Vera meets us in the courtyard. I can tell from the stony way she looks into the distance that she is trying to accept that Isaac is dead.
A boy of fifteen or so answers our knocks at the Munchenbergs’ door. He calls for his mother when we explain why we’ve come. Georg talks for us. He’s got on a handsome linen suit and looks like a professor, which is probably why she invites us in. Georg and I stand in the sitting room, and Vera waits outside with Hans.
None of the old furniture is here, and the photos of Raffi are gone from the walls.
“When we moved in,” the woman tells us, “a neighbor mentioned that the previous tenants had been sent away on one of the transports. I don’t know anything else.”
She claims never to have heard of Isaac or my father. These are my first experiences of a city in which no one will ever admit to knowing anything about the Jews except that they were sent away and never came back.
I had hoped to avoid talking to Tonio’s parents, but the awkwardness I feel no longer matters. Mrs Hessel answers the door. Gasping, she raises both hands to her mouth. Her eyes open wide with panic. Maybe she thinks I’ve come for vengeance, so I kiss her tenderly on both cheeks.
Her hair is gray now, and fraying, and her hands tremble in her lap when we sit together. She’s aged miserably. She tells Georg and me that she hasn’t seen Isaac in years. She doesn’t recall when he vanished. And she knows nothing about my father. She thinks she saw him for the last time in 1943. “But maybe early 1944,” she adds. Tonio is doing well, however. He was held in a Russian prison camp for six months but is now staying with her husband’s brother in Vienna. “His Russian improved while he was a prisoner and he is working as an interpreter.”
“So the Russians have hired Nazis?” I ask her.
It’s not my intention to wound her, but she gives me a startled, then affronted look. “Tonio was never a Nazi!” she declares.
All my tender feelings for her are pushed aside by a surge of contempt, and in that doom-soaked way that understandings about injustice spread through us, I realize that all the National Socialists in Germany are rewriting their pasts at this very moment, burning all evidence against themselves. How many millions of copies of Mein Kampf have already been thrown in ovens? I’ve no doubt that Papa’s copy is already just smoke. Unless he has been imprisoned because of my betrayal …
No one answers my knocks at our old apartment. I try my key but the lock has been changed. When I think that Hansi’s puzzles and clothing might still be there, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to turn away, but I do.
* * *
The restaurants have little food, and rationing is tight. We eat dumplings and turnips at what’s left of the Köln Beer Garden. A cheap rooming house on Straßburger Straße has two rooms available, so Vera and Georg take one, Hans and I the other. The electricity isn’t reliable, so we buy candles. At two in the morning, Hans starts crying and says his back and neck are sore. I hold up a candle to him; bedbugs have made red welts on his tender skin, so I wipe him down with a wet towel, dress him, and carry him to the garden in Wörther Platz. We sleep in our clothes on the grass, my arm under his head. It’s a warm night, and the stars above the city accompany us toward sleep. The lindens and oaks have all been cut down, which means we can also see the bombed-out apartment houses embracing the square. They seem to stand guard over us, and I recognize them all despite the damage. After all, we grew up together.
And here in the only place on earth where I could never be lost, I will find Isaac.
What does my son think of sleeping in a park in a strange city? He doesn’t say. He has elemental needs and right now he craves only slumber. He wakes me just after dawn to pee. In the slanting light, I take him behind an exuberant pink azalea bush. He leans his little belly out and sprays some yellow-flowered weeds. Like boys everywhere, he is pleased to use his pee-pee to hit a target. “Good work!” I tell him.
We meet Vera and Georg for breakfast. Vera says she squashed ten bedbugs. “And then I ate them!” she announces, earning a horrified face from Hans, which gratifies her.
When they go off to hunt for old friends, my son and I walk to Else König’s apartment. I talk to him about why the city was bombed. He doesn’t understand my explanations, but he hates for me to think he’s thick-headed and keeps nodding.
Else comes to the door in her bathrobe, half-asleep. “Sophie?”
Before I can speak, she’s already thrown her arms around me. We kiss and laugh. “And who’s this?” she asks, kneeling down.
“Hans, my son.”
Her eyes are so bright with joy that Hans shrinks back from her when she offers her hand.
“She’s an old friend,” I tell him. “We used to teach at the same school.”
“You taught in Berlin?” Hans asks her, his mind trying to embrace my past.
“Yes,” she answers.
“Are we in Berlin?”
“You most certainly are!”
Else hasn’t heard anything about Isaac. We tell her about Istanbul as we sip our linden tea. After five years of Turkish coffee, it tastes like hot water. Hans sits on a puffy old armchair by the window and watches the passersby in Potsdamer Platz.
Else’s face has thinned and she has let her copper hair grow out. Only now do I realize she could have been a cover girl for Worm-Eaten German magazine. I tell her she was courageous to give all that up.
“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” she replies. “Just looking at those perfect Young Maidens made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
Hans asks me if we can go now to the Berlin Zoo. I’ve told him about it as a bribe.
“What a good idea!” Else exults, plainly trying to please my son. “We’ll walk through the Tiergarten. I think the zoo might still be closed, but we can look at ducks in the ponds on the way. A few have come back.”
“They left?” I ask.
“We were starving. We ate ducks, rabbits … anything we could catch or raise.”
Hans turns up his nose.
“Yes, it wasn’t pretty,” she tells the boy. Whispering to me, she says, “The zoo animals were slaughtered too,” then adds in her regular voice, “We raised rabbits … my mom and me. But even half-starving, we couldn’t bear to eat them, so we exchanged them for chickens. My mom lived here with me during the bombings.” She leans toward me and whispers, “People ate squirrels, too. Hansi would be heartbroken.” She squeezes my hand when she says his name.
“She means your uncle,” I tell Hans, because he’s got excellent hearing and thinks Else is talking about him.
“Where is Uncle Hansi?” he asks. I’ve told him but he doesn’t understand death yet.
“We’ll go lay flowers at his grave one day soon,” I reply.
Else slips away to her bedroom to dress.
“Any news from Volker?” I call out to her. She’s left her door open a crack.
“Nothing, I’m afraid.”
“And the school?”
“Shut down. It became impossible to keep it going. No revenues.”
Hans climbs down from his armchair and looks at the photographs on Else’s coffee table. One of them, framed in silver, is of our students and teachers, but I don’t dare take a good look at it.
“And Dr Hassgall?”
“Wait till we go out. I’ll tell you everything.”
“There you are, Mama!” Hans says, pointing to me in the photograph.
Is that youthful, smiling girl really me? “Yup, that was me—in another life, before you came along,” I tell him.
Else has put on men’s trousers and a short-sleeved white blouse. She looks like a long-distance runner, which may be an accurate description, given that she’s survived. We sit on a bench in the Tiergarten, by Rousseau Lake. Such a despairing and empty place it is now; only a few scraggly trees have survived people’s need for firewood. I’ve encouraged Hans to look for goldfish in the pond because I don’t want him to hear what we’ll discuss. He turns around now and again to make sure I’m close by, and I give him a big wave. Mama the lighthouse …
“Four Gestapo officers came to take away the Jewish kids,” Else tells me. “It was January 1943. We still had six with us. David and Ruthie, Saul, Werner, Volker, and … and Veronika. I think you’ll remember Veronika Vogt.”
“How could I forget VV? ‘I like glue more than clean hands!’”
Else laughs freely. It’s good to hear. “I didn’t know she was Jewish,” I say.
“Her mother was. The Gestapo made her and the other Jewish kids line up at the front of the classroom. They did what they were told and the young ones started crying. Even the students still in their seats were terrified. I started to go stand by the Jewish children, where I could reassure them, but a Gestapo officer ordered me not to move. Everyone in the room was looking at me, and I felt as though this was the central moment in my life. I had been born only for this. And either I did what was right or I’d never be able to go on living. You know, Sophie, in years since, I’ve thought that maybe we’re all born for only one moment.”
“So what did you do?”
“I went to the door. One of the men shouted for me to stop, but I kept walking. When I got to the hallway, I ran to Dr Hassgall’s office. I figured I’d hear a shot and then I’d fall to the floor, dead. But all that mattered was doing what was required of me in that one moment.” She gives me a confused look. “Sophie, I don’t know why they didn’t kill me. And I don’t know why I’m alive when so many good people died.”
Looking into the distance, as though unwilling to listen to my reassurance, she’s quiet for a time, then lifts my hand and presses it urgently into her cheek. “Thank you for trying to help,” she says. “So when I got to Dr Hassgall’s office, I knocked. Can you believe I knocked on his door at such a moment? But you remember how formal he was.” We smile together. “I rushed in and told him what was happening. He ran past me to the classroom. I’d never seen him move so fast. When he got there, he told the Gestapo officers that there had been a mistake. He named a high official he’d been bribing to keep the school open. The man in charge told him to shut up or he’d shoot all the Jewish kids on the spot, though he called them swine. Dr Hassgall and I knew that if these men took the students away, most would probably die, though one or two might survive. Sophie, we didn’t know about the mass killings yet, but we had no illusions about the labor camps. The kids who couldn’t work as expected would be shot or starved. Others would die of cold or dysentery. I thought there must be something I could say to the men to make them change their minds. But my courage had vanished by then.” She swirls her hand in the air. “I failed to speak from absolute terror.”
“Was Dr Hassgall afraid?”
“I’ve asked myself that a thousand times. He looked calm, but inside … I don’t know. He was hard to read. All I know is that in that wonderful clear voice of his he told the men, ‘I will never let my children leave without me.’ Calling across the room to me, he said, ‘Else, you’re in charge now.’ He must have seen the state I was in because he smiled gently and added, ‘I’m counting on you.’ Then he took Volker by the hand, because he was already in tears, and he instructed all the kids to link hands. He led them out of that classroom and out of the front door of the school and into the police van waiting on the street.”
“Did you ever learn what happened to him and the kids?”
“I tried, but I couldn’t find out anything. They must have been gassed. It’s odd, but I keep expecting to see Dr Hassgall at a café, in the metro, strolling down Unter den Linden …” She looks into the distance at Hans, who’s petting a big shaggy dog. “Or to see Volker sitting by a pond in the Tiergarten. But in here,” she says, tapping her chest, “I know that they’re long dead. The thing is, Sophie,” she adds, “Dr Hassgall refused to let the kids go off to die alone. I can’t stop thinking about his doing that. He didn’t have to go, but he did. It means everything to me now. It means he must have known this was the moment he was born for. And he didn’t fail.” She gives me a frightened look. “But maybe I did. I can’t help thinking that I should have gone with them and that everything I do now, for the rest of my life, will be wrong.”
So Volker is gone. Else and I cry together, but I keep waving to Hans when he looks back for me. Then he comes running over to us—panting and squirming—to describe the marvels of the sheepdog he’s befriended. But his breathless excitement turns to concern when he notices my red eyes. “What’s wrong, Mama?” he asks.
“I’m all right, Hans. I just found out we won’t be able to see an old friend of mine.”
“How come?”
“He’s no longer living in Berlin.”
As we walk to the zoo, Else and I reminisce about how the kids made us laugh—the conversation of women who’ve escaped the Angel of Death. Hans gives Else his hand, then walks between us, which he loves because it means he is at the center of the world. Else tells me that after the school closed she worked as a nanny for the two small daughters of a banker living in Grünewald. The man fled for Argentina at the beginning of 1945.
“I stole as many valuables as I could from him before he left,” she grins. “I still have some of his silverware. Good for the black market.”
“And since then?”
“Odd jobs,” she replies. “But now that the Russians are here, life is looking up.”
The zoo is still closed, so to cheer up Hans we buy an old loaf of bread and feed some ducks in the Tiergarten’s Neuer Lake.
I’ve told Else of our encounter with bedbugs, and before we go our separate ways, she invites us to stay in her guest room. I’m hesitant to agree, but she puts a spare key in my hand and says, “Doing what’s right is the only thing that will keep me alive now.”
Greta’s building has escaped bombing, which means that although the city may look like Pompeii, her windows overlooking Pfalzburger Straße are still framed by blue and green brocade curtains! But she isn’t home. I knock at her neighbors’ doors, and an old lady on the floor below confirms to me that Greta still lives upstairs. I leave a note under her door, asking her to get in touch with me through Else.
Hans and I eat lunch in Savigny Platz, but he decides he doesn’t like German food. He pushes away a perfectly reasonable sausage like it’s a dead snake and eats only his boiled potatoes. Obviously, he did not get his taste buds from me.
“How can you not like it? I’ve made you German food all your life!” I tell him, feigning outrage, because he likes me pretending to be angry. That he did inherit from me.
He exclaims, “But not this crap!”
He uses the word tref for crap, though it really means unkosher food, an idiosyncratic usage picked up from Georg and Vera. I admit it’s both slightly rude and Yiddish, but an elderly vamp smoking a cigarette in a silver holder, a white silk scarf hiding her turkey-skin neck, gives him a look that could set the poor boy’s underwear on fire. Is she irritated because she has heard that a few thousand of Berlin’s big-nosed, thick-lipped Jews have escaped the purifying ovens of the Reich and this boy might be one of them? She continues to stare at us, so I say, “Can I help you, madam?”
“I just think you ought to teach your son some manners,” she tells me.
Should I laugh or cry? The Nazis have murdered half a million German Jews and God knows how many distant children, and she wants proper Prussian etiquette. This woman is why I need a gun, I think, but all I tell her is, “Your complaint is noted so now you can go back to your crappy German food!”
On the way out, I promise to make Hans his favorite meal, manti, if I can find yoghurt. When he continues to moan I beg him to stop being such a nudnock, which makes him snort with laughter. Our similar sense of humor remains our bridge even at bad times.
In the afternoon, we take a bus to Rolf’s apartment. Hans lays his head on my lap and takes a nap. The ease of his breathing calms me, and passengers look at him sweetly. “He’s handsome,” one young woman whispers to me. I’d never have expected so many smiles around me. I suppose it’s the sense that we’ve all survived a shipwreck. A lie, of course, because some of us were in the luxury cabins and others were tossed overboard. But I smile back.
“Oh, Sophie, thank God you’re here!” Rolf says, and he tugs me inside. His spine is so bowed now—and his hunchback so bulky that he’s unable to lift his eyes to see me.
Hans is terrified, though I’ve warned him what to expect. I feel his shivering through my hand, which is resting on top of his silken, auburn hair.
“Come in, come in…” our host says excitedly. “Is this your son?” he asks, smiling.
“Yes, and Isaac’s. His name is Hans.”
Rolf, overjoyed, asks my son what he’d like to drink but the boy can’t form an answer.
I’m gripping his hand tight and we’re standing by the sofa. Rolf asks us to sit and we do. To calm Hans, I say, “Rolf is the man who taught me my magic tricks. He’s a wizard!”
The frightened boy leans into me and won’t look at him. So I ask Rolf to just make us some tea or coffee, whichever is easier. I mouth for him to give me a minute alone with my son.
“Do you want us to leave?” I ask Hans as soon as Rolf is in the kitchen. “I can come back alone later.” He shakes his head.
“If you want, you can go into Rolf’s bedroom and play there by yourself. I’m sure he won’t mind, and maybe you can find some picture books.”
He nods, so I take him down the hall. Hans’ mouth falls open at seeing the tiny furniture. Clothes and books are everywhere. Plenty to keep him amused.
“Don’t get lost,” I tell him, which is what I say whenever I leave him alone, but he’s already lifting up a red shirt and showing it to me. “Can I put on some of Rolf’s things?” he asks in Ladino. He tends to speak Ladino whenever he’s nervous or excited. The clothes are just about the right size for him, so his question makes sense.
I translate for Rolf, who gives his permission.
“Yes,” I reply to Hans in German, “but don’t make a mess.”
“Mama, it’s already a mess,” he points out solemnly. I love it that he doesn’t even know he’s funny.
As Rolf hands me my cup of tea, he says, “I know what you think, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t turn Isaac in.” He goes on to say that after Isaac fled the Nazis hunting for him at his boathouse, he went straight to Rolf’s apartment. “It was the 7th of August, 1940,” Rolf tells me, and I can tell from the momentous way he says that date that it has been branded in his memory. “He came here to hide, in part, out of kindness to me. He gave me a chance to make up for the evil I’d done. He stayed here for a few days, looking over those manuscripts of his. Then he said he was going to have himself arrested. I tried to reason with him, but he told me, ‘It is not my decision to make.’”
“Did he say whose decision it was?” I rush to ask.
“Maybe he meant the Nazis. Or that ancestor of his who wrote the manuscripts he was studying. I don’t know. He prayed all that first night. In fact, for the next two days and nights he did nothing but chant and pray, facing Jerusalem. At times, he’d breathe in a special way and shout out syllables in Hebrew. It was odd, and a bit scary. He fasted, too. He would drink only warm milk and honey. Then, on the third morning after his arrival, he began talking to me again. He took a bath and shaved, and we ate together. He was very playful. You know how he could be. And he laughed a lot. He was in a kind of vibrant, ecstatic state. And he ate all I could feed him, as if he was storing up for a long journey. When he got dressed to go out, he put on a nice coat, very stylish in an antiquated way. It may have been his father’s, or maybe Vera made it for him. And he put on a beret that he said you’d bought for him, though it was August and it was really too warm to wear. I gave him one of Heidi’s red silk roses for his lapel, which made him happy. When he hugged me to thank me, he was vibrating, like … like a kind of tuning fork. And his eyes, they were water, clear water …” Rolf shakes his head. “I can’t describe his appearance well, but I’d say that in his head he was flying … flying very high. Then he asked me for two more favors. The first was to accompany him to the Reichstag. He said that he needed to make his way to the center of Hitler’s power, that the Reichstag was a first level. He used the word Stock, as if it was a floor in a building. And from there he said he’d descend ever closer to the center until finally he would enter what he called the vessels. He said that would make sense to you.”
“It does—more or less.”
“I begged him not to go, but he told me he had no choice. And then he asked me his second favor, which was to tell you what I’m telling you now. There was no time to write to you. And anyway, there was too much to explain, and he didn’t feel he could control himself enough to write the long letter you deserved.” Rolf holds out his hands and makes them shake. “He was too volatile. Though he did hand me an envelope with a few lines he’d written for you. I will give them to you in a moment, but he told me to talk to you first and describe what happened to him.” Rolf takes two quick gulps of his tea. “So then Isaac took a copy of the Torah from his suitcase, and we left together. We walked west toward the center of the city, talking of old times. He was happy, like a man off to meet an old friend. I pleaded with him again not to go to the Reichstag. He just shook his head and smiled. And he told me that this was why his father had moved back to Europe, for this chance to keep the world from ending. As we got closer to our destination, while we were crossing the Friedrich Bridge, he put his hand on my shoulder and said he wouldn’t be able to talk to me any longer, that he needed to prepare himself. I didn’t know what he had planned, so I still had some hope that nothing bad would happen. Then, as we were walking down Unter den Linden, his lips began to move. He was praying in Hebrew and breathing in his funny way. He began walking so fast that it was hard for me to keep up. It was as if he were being tugged forward by a cord … or by a power beyond him. I had to run to stay even with him. He strode straight through the Brandenburg Gate, and just after we emerged on the other side, he turned back for me and said, ‘Rolf, this next gate is for me alone. It would be dangerous for you because you haven’t prepared. Wait in the Tiergarten. And thank you for your help.’ Those were his exact words. I wrote them down because I knew I’d tell them to you one day.” Rolf takes a big breath and straightens up as best he can, so he can look me in the eye. “Isaac then squatted down next to me and he … he kissed me on the lips.” Rolf looks down to compose himself. At length, he says in a quivering voice, “You’ll think it strange, but I remembered that scene in The Kid, where Chaplin kisses the tiny boy he’s just rescued. After that, Isaac said, ‘That kiss was for both you and Sophele.’ You can imagine how stunned I was. It was like I might never breathe again. It was as if my heart … as if my heart were beating outside of my chest. And when he walked on without me, I could feel that force that was tugging him forward, because my legs and arms … they were tense with the need to go after him. But I stayed where I was, as he had instructed me. He walked to the Reichstag, which was guarded by soldiers, and turned west, then continued on until he reached the center of Königsplatz. There, he turned around to face the Reichstag and put on the beret you’d given him. He opened his Torah and began to chant. I rushed to the edge of the Tiergarten to watch him.”
“Do you know what he was chanting?”
“No, I wasn’t close enough to hear. I was standing at the edge of the park. And anyway, it must have been in Hebrew. Two soldiers approached him and talked to him, but he wouldn’t look up from the Torah, so one of the men knocked it out of his hands. The other pulled off his beret and threw it down. Isaac raised his head and looked up into the sky, and he began to chant louder. And he wouldn’t stop. So the men grabbed him and rushed him away, past the north side of the Reichstag. He didn’t resist. And I never saw him again.”
* * *
Barren winter branches and frozen lakes, and welcoming words never to be spoken—these are my surroundings in the world that descends over me. Hans races into the room to show me several hats he’s found, including a floppy yellow one with bells that I remember well. I put that one on him and say he looks handsome, but I am miles and years away from the here and now. And I don’t fully return while I’m in Berlin.
Rolf brings me Isaac’s last note and the beret I’d given him. “I retrieved it after the soldiers took him away,” he explains. “I couldn’t let it just lie there.”
Inside the sealed envelope are two gold wedding bands. “Sophele, one of the rings is for you and the other is for our son or daughter,” Isaac tells me, his usual neat handwriting wobbly and erratic. “I’ve been wearing both of them since you left. Know that I am happy and well, and that I am on the road that Berekiah has asked me to follow. Enclosed is a second note for our child. Give it to him or her when you feel the right time has come. I have begun to hear the winds of Araboth in the sky around me and must go now. You’re schön, schön, schön, and I love you. Isaac.”
The note for Hans reads: “Your mother will tell you about me, and maybe you will hear about me from other friends of ours. I hope so. Know that you were made in love. And inside that love may you always remain. I want you to know that I would be with you if I could. And I will come to you if I can. Wear my ring. I have placed my love in its band, because it is a circle, and as you know a circle has no end and no beginning. Your father, Isaac Zarco.”
Hans and I walk home. Rolf has let the boy keep the yellow hat—the same one he wore when I met him thirteen years before. Hans wears it proudly, like the king of the elves. When I tell him Vera made it for Rolf, he dances around. Then he starts skipping and jumping down the street. So much energy he has! Passersby point and smile.
We meet Vera and Georg back at our rooming house, as we’d agreed. I explain about Isaac while Hans naps in Georg’s lap. “That’s it, then,” Georg whispers, as though it means Isaac is dead, and he begins to cry.
But I grew up on Hollywood plots, and I keep thinking, there is still a chance …
We sleep at Else’s place over the next week. Hans sleeps clutching his hat. Vera and Georg stay with an old friend of his in Wilmersdorf. How am I to find out where Isaac was taken by the Gestapo? Surely a concentration camp, but which one?
When I tell Else I want to buy a gun, she suggests the black market behind the Friedrichstraße Station. There, we find the scrap metal seller who’s renowned for his stash of weapons. Else returns from the man’s “office” in the shell of a nearby building with a P08 Parabellum pistol and two bullets. Its wooden handle fits perfectly in my hand.
We discover the Jewish Old Age Home has been shut down. Neighbors tell us that Nazis used the building as a collection point for Jews being transported to the camps. Thousands passed through there. Maybe Rini and her parents, Mrs Kauffmann, and the Munchenbergs. Maybe Isaac.
The River Jordan bakery is boarded up. Weissman’s Fabrics, where we tried to break the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops, is now a small beer hall catering to boisterous Russian soldiers. The King David School was damaged by Allied bombs in 1944 and has been bulldozed down as a public hazard. Greta does not phone.
Georg helps me ask French, American, and British soldiers how I can find lists of Jews transported to the camps, but they’ve been informed that the Nazis destroyed most of their records. Some of the Americans speak Yiddish. They tease me merrily and sometimes suggestively, but they could be my younger brothers. And in any case, I am as dry as a desert inside.
Hans is bored and restless, as well he should be. He wants to play in the rubble of burned-out buildings, like the German street children he watches, but I don’t let him. He asks if we can see if the zoo is open yet, and when I tell him that I’ve been informed that it won’t be ready for visitors for months, maybe even years, he punishes me with silence. He could be his Uncle Hansi. If only he liked jigsaw puzzles, but he thinks they’re stupid.
Else leaves her apartment every evening after supper to work on Unter den Linden. I’ve never seen her in makeup before. She wears bright pink lipstick. “I know, I look like a neon sign,” she tells me, laughing.
“You’re beautiful,” Hans tells her in Ladino—És fermosa.
She kisses him for that, then explains to us that Russian soldiers don’t appreciate subtlety. Using a kind of coded German, so Hans won’t understand, she tells me that she works with an old high school friend because the soldiers will pay a week’s salary for two women at once. She also sells them watches that she buys on the black market. “As best I can tell, Russian boys think only about sex and showing off their German timepieces,” she says.
I make no judgments of her and she knows it. Still, she tells me, “I’m saving up so I can leave Germany and never come back.”
“You could join us in Istanbul,” I tell her, and Hans and I take turns describing the wonders of Büyükada.
But she has her heart set on Palestine. “I read about a kibbutz near the Dead Sea with so much sun that even the shadows there are a lesser form of light. That’s where I’ll go.”
* * *
Isaac’s factory is unoccupied, but the sewing machines and furniture are gone. A dozen handwritten notes are taped to the walls, along with two photographs. Hans runs right to the pictures, points to one, and turns to me excitedly, exclaiming, “Tia Vera!”—Aunt Vera. But another photo has already captured my attention: it’s from the series K-H took of Isaac in which I had to pin back his silver hair in order to show his “Semitic” left ear. Between the two photos is a note from K-H himself: “I’m looking for information on Isaac Zarco and Vera Moeckel.” I jot down the address of the factory in Charlottenburg where he’s staying. Hans has been standing on his tiptoes and pleading with me for a closer look at the photos, so I lift him up, but I point to Isaac instead of Tia Vera: “Your father,” I say in Ladino. Tu papá. And I repeat my words in German and Turkish when Hans gives me a puzzled look.
“The Day We Lost Our Sight” and “Portraits of Men Who Have Sold Their Minds” are two of the exhibits K-H wanted to create before the war. Banners hand-painted with those titles are hanging over the entranceway to an empty factory in Charlottenburg. Was beer produced here or is the scent of hops a part of me now? Photographs are taped to the walls. Mr Weissman is the subject of the first picture. He’s gazing down, his shoulders hunched as if he’d like to recoil into himself, and the sign around his neck reads: Kauft nicht bei Juden, kauft in deutschen Geschauften! Don’t buy from Jews, shop in German businesses. Next is the burly storm trooper who grabbed my arm when I tried to break the boycott. He is shouting, his mouth open, teeth ready to bite, like a flesh-eating demon in a medieval fresco. Then comes an angry young Nazi, frowning at Arnold Muller, who is passing by in his wheelchair. The fourth photo is Hansi reaching down for Minnie as the rose of blood blossoms on her belly, his face torn open by misery.
“Look, it’s you, Mama!” my son yells.
The boy is already ten paces ahead of me, pointing up. This must be an astonishing day for him; photos of his mother and her friends are appearing all over the city …
I can’t answer him. I’m sitting on the ground because I wasn’t prepared to see Hansi. My son climbs onto my lap because he’s scared. “Too many memories,” I explain to him.
He leans into me, catlike, and I take off his hat and scratch his head. He loves that. After a while, he puts his arms around me. God only knows what he sees when he closes his eyes, but I picture the Büyükada beach he loves. Nothing can harm us. Not even German-speaking ghosts.
“Sophele?”
My name has been spoken as a question, and when I look up K-H is smiling down at me, tears in his eyes. He’s still hollow-cheeked and handsome, and he’s wearing bright red suspenders.
Hugging him is like discovering that this nightmare will one day end. After a while, he wants to look at my face, but I press my head to his shoulder until Hans starts tugging at my skirt.
“This is Karl-Heinz,” I tell the boy. “The photographer.”
When I introduce Hans, K-H says, “Wait here, I’ll get my camera!” And he dashes off. We pose beside a photo of Isaac lifting Hansi into his arms.
“To show that there is an after-time,” K-H explains to me.
“You talk funny,” Hans tells him.
“Because I’m deaf,” K-H replies.
“Then how do you hear me?”
“I read your lips.”
Hans looks up at me suspiciously, as if K-H might be lying, so I say, “It’s the absolute truth. Just like his photos.”
I tell K-H about my brother, Vera, and Georg—and that I’m still hunting for Isaac. He says that Marianne and Werner are in Lisbon. He didn’t want them to return to Berlin until he could be sure it was safe. Lisbon? Over glasses of cheap red wine at a nearby café, K-H tells me that a French friend of theirs managed to sneak them over the border. From there they made their way to Paris. “We didn’t dare write to Isaac. We figured all his mail was being read.”
On the 12th of June, just before the Germans took Paris, they made their way south, hoping to catch a boat from Marseille to North Africa or Istanbul. “But on the way, we heard of a Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux who was issuing transit visas for Jews and other refugees. We reached Bordeaux on the 16th and waited outside his apartment. Hundreds of Jews and others were there. We formed a line and kept filing inside. He was issuing visas for everyone who came to him. It was a miracle.” K-H’s eyes moisten. “His name was Sousa Mendes. He was signing visas as fast as he could. I took pictures of him. I’d like to make an exhibition of people who saved Jews someday.”
“So you’ve been living in Lisbon all this time?”
“Yes, we thought of going to Brazil, but Marianne had this idea … Isaac’s family was originally Portuguese, so we looked up the name Zarco in the phone book and found five in Lisbon alone. We visited them with a German refugee friend who’d been in Portugal since ’33 and who could speak the language. We explained that an Isaac Zarco from Berlin was a good friend of ours. The first three Zarcos didn’t want anything to do with us. But the fourth one, Samuel, said he’d help. Marianne started cooking at a small restaurant he owns. I take photographs of tourists at the city’s sights. Werner goes to a Portuguese public school.”
Before we go to meet Georg and Vera, I ask if K-H shouldn’t lock the door to the factory housing his exhibit. “No,” he says, “if visitors want to steal the pictures for their own use, so much the better. I have the negatives. I’ll make as many copies as people want.”