NILS SCHREIBER

Words

THINGS WHICH I SAID TO HER, at one time or another, whether they were true or not:

That we Berliners erect plaques so as to sleep better at night.

She had agreed to meet me for coffee and a walk. We were standing in Grosse Hamburger Strasse by Boltanski’s memorial to the bombed-out and disappeared, on the block of the Jewish old age home that had been the roundup point for deportation. It was a cold, miserable October night, the uncollected detritus of the Scheunenviertel streets swirling around us like an early, dirty snow. Holly kept her silence. She dutifully looked. “We have a talent for memorializing,” I also said, to fill the silence.

A wise guy, me, who could have said much more as well, could have opined with mordant proficiency on the substitution of monuments for active memory as it affects our personal lives, how we build our mental memorials, we change our furniture entirely around, one day it’s this, the next day it’s that, and still there’s no forgetting, but only instead the transformation of feeling into stone. Or I might have confessed the twinge of bitter pleasure I might or might not have experienced in showing a visitor this neighborhood of mine.

Instead all I said was that I lived up the street.

She was taking no bait that night. She nodded and that was all. I thought she should speak, I wanted her to speak, to condemn my irony. But she already knew too much about me.

Later we walked the few blocks to where her father had owned the building that was now already an art gallery and was the subject of Holly’s second claim.

That Miss Anholt, property claimant, was no longer the object of my journalistic intentions.

We were in bed and only half-dressed. She pounded my chest in mock anger, but her surprise was real enough. “You were going to write a story about me?” she cried like a shot bird.

I don’t often laugh as I laughed then. “This is not only a confession, it’s a promise.”

“Oh thank you very much. How generous you are! How thoughtful!”

My words stumbled over my laughter. “Sounded good to me. American girl, totally American, post-war, nothing bitter, nothing more than curiosity, comes with a claim…just follow where it leads.”

“And I bet I know why you’re not writing it. Your editor doesn’t want it! ‘Too many stories with Jews, Schreiber. Don’t you have anything else to write about?’”

“As a matter of fact…”

“I’m right! I’m right, aren’t I? I’m right!” she repeated, pounding on me till we were ready to make love. “Bastard! Asshole!”

We may have known little more about each other then, but we knew we were joined in conspiracy. To be specific, I believe: a conspiracy of guilt. Kissing, touching each other’s nose and neck and hair. Things to remember, tenderness never to forget.

That dear Mother was in the cheerleading squad.

The B.D.M, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Nazis’ girls. This I informed her of in my parents’ bedroom, which for some reason we had entered, to get some piece of luggage down or something, over the Christmas holiday when we visited. Why I went along with this trip, or even subtly planted the seeds for it, is another matter again. The invitation was there. I hadn’t been home in years. They had gotten word of the girl and presumably were curious. Holly wanted to, eager, as ever, to see whatever could be seen about me. I must have been mad. Perhaps I thought of it as a personalization of my great theme, the return of the living. Because why, because the killers are gone? Because the world is full of killers? Why do they come back?

Actually, Holly had been quite specific on the question of Christmas. She knew that I thought the idea was preposterous. Holly asked “what if?” We discussed such various “what if’s.” And in the end she half-expressed and half-confessed a sentimental attachment to an old record cover of her father’s, a Brahms second symphony, that showed a steepled German church in the still, pale light of Christmas Eve. In a sense she wished to test this fantasy, to see if the life on her father’s record cover could actually be lived.

This led, perhaps inevitably, to our overnight stay in a little inn in Oxenburg, near Hamburg, and to my mother’s dresser. There were other photographs there as well, my father’s retirement, anniversaries, their vacations to Spain and Rio de Janeiro, my gymnasium graduation photo, portrait of a long-haired beanpole in black. Holly begged to differ. She saw an intense young scholar with the world in his dark sights. But when she was done cooing about her boyfriend, there was the small, creased snapshot of Gerhilde, long-legged and athletic, in hiking shorts, turning away for a moment from whatever mountain path she was on to have her moment in history taken in black-and-white. “How beautiful your mother looks, how happy,” Holly said.

I told her about the B.D.M. She already knew my parents had been in the Party. But this image of youth, and happiness, and health, alarmed her. Her eyes tightened. She may have been envious. I was flooded with remorse. I wished to tell her everything she had that my mother had never had.

She stared at the picture a moment too long. “Your mother looked great in shorts,” she said.

My parents, I should add, were as gracious as they could be during our day and a half in Oxenburg. My father was hearty and jocular and my mother baked without stopping for breath. They presented us with calfskin gloves. And they still looked quite fantastic, as if they climbed a mountain every weekend. Hartmut went on about his hero, Moishe Dayan, for whose benefit we’ll leave to the reader to imagine. My mother kept her hectoring of my father to a minimum. I remained embarrassed and reluctant. Holly smiled at whatever either of them said. For certain she was struggling to see how I resembled them. My father’s jocularity occasionally had a bit of an edge: “Just don’t take him off to America! He’s the only one we’ve got!”

And, on a point of interior decoration, not previously thought to be my long suit: I had never been so aware how stuffed with bric-a-brac my parents’ middle-class house was. Tchotchkes, to use the proper Yiddish.

In the evening we went to church. A properly-steepled, eighteenth century church, by the way. Holly at least had been to a wedding or two over the years whereas I hadn’t been in a church in my adult life, unless it was to cover a peace demo or a lunatic fringe. To keep her company, I pretended not to remember what to do, and was so successful at this that I actually began to be unsure. We stood when others stood, sat down when they sat down. Once we were caught half-standing when the congregation was merely reaching for its hymnals, but at least we were caught together. I couldn’t tell a thing of what she was thinking, except by the music she seemed entranced.

We were up late that night in the inn, quietly, with the lights out. Holly couldn’t sleep. She felt, she said, like a stranger to herself. “It started sometime in the carols. I thought: listen, Holly. Really try to listen. These lovely voices of children: are they singing to me with Christian love? Is this the reality Jews are blind to, that could convert a soul on the spot? I must be weak, I thought. I hear the lovely voices of children, and then…all I could hear was a lot of my own voice, like static. Telling me to listen. All these words. The music! I wanted to live in the music. But just then I couldn’t.

“And so then I thought: is their love really different from mine? If they only knew how much a part of me wanted to be them, how that would simplify my life. To be converted to love and grace, me who just then was afraid I was living without either.”

“Love is love,” I said.

“Of course love is love,” she said.

I kissed her the way you do when you wish to change a lover’s hurtful subject. But she was having none of it. Light-headed now, nostalgic to the point where her voice got frail and insistent, as if she had to will it to keep it going, she said, “Remember that record I told you about, with the church and Christmas Eve and the steeple and snow? Do you remember that, Nils?”

I said that I did.

“It was a cheap record. It was so cheap it had a hole punched through the label, to show it had been dumped by a warehouse or something. Probably a dollar apiece, but my father would buy piles of those records, until he had his classical collection complete, one or two of everything. Of course they weren’t usually the star conductors, I don’t remember many von Karajans. But they were good, always good, mostly guys he remembered from Europe… And they were a bargain, they were what he could afford, or thought he ought to afford… It gave him such pleasure. The size. The completeness. The economy. All a reflection of him, of the way he’d learned how to live.”

She leaned closer to me, against my arm. “My father,” she said.

Her eyes were lightly shut. Mine were wide open.

I thought of my own father and wished I had not.

That I slept with Oksana.

Well, it was so. I could hardly deny it. Or I suppose I might have, but this would not have been my style. Anyway, it was well in the past.

Still, Holly was not quite amused. She accused me of having a thing about Jewish girls. We had one of those conversations, sweet and hurt and silly all at once.

“I’ll make a list for you of my lovers.”

“Good. Then as I meet them I can check them off…”

About the Jewish girls, I denied. It’s only good form to deny such things, to refuse to admit such paralyzing generalities. “How will you tell us apart?” she said. “Will you keep a scorecard? Will you give us numbers instead of names?”

She thought Oksana must still be in love with me. She thought, when we were in Italy, that Oksana was bringing Herbert’s files to me. But I knew otherwise.

As for the numbers, in the end I conceded her point. Perhaps I was more sociologist than lover. Numbers might make more sense. Number one was in New York and played the cello and showed me the whisper chamber in the basement of the train station there and had a neck as thick as a boy’s but a gentle way that could seem a little defeated, that could make you root for her in fear. Number two was passing through. The same with number three, as best I could tell. Number four reminded me of my mother, an amazing thing considering my mother’s coldness, sentimentality, narrowness, and preference for long, bracing walks over thought. Number five was the aforementioned skinny Russian girl. Number six was Holly. I took to calling her Number Six. She hated that.

But, of course, she was a sociologist too.