“Come, Janeen, you can tell me now. Have you been here with a boy?”
“No,” Janeen grumbled, walking her bicycle beside her mother’s as they crunched into the gravel parking lot of the Hollis tract, a swamp of ancient bald cypress and tupelo on the eastern edge of town. “I’ve only come with Dad.”
She waited for her mother’s face to change, for some note of sorrow upon hearing Remy’s name, but Anita only nodded. She jabbed her kickstand with the toe of her espadrille. “I have heard it’s a popular place where people park, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Janeen said, watching her mother carefully extricate the urn, its lid taped shut, from the basket on her handlebars.
A few weeks had passed since her father’s funeral, and they’d come to the swamp to scatter his ashes. Anita seemed to think they’d been sitting around too long. “We need to free him, Liebchen. We must return him to the earth. Ashes to ashes, et cetera.” It had been Janeen’s idea to leave him to rest in a place he’d loved. Her mother would’ve been happy to spread him in the park in the center of town and be done with it.
Janeen followed Anita through the entrance to the unfinished boardwalk, ducking under the caution tape into the pea-green air of the swamp. Closed to the public until a dispute between loggers and the county could be resolved, the waters were teeming with bass and catfish.
Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a good idea, Janeen thought as she stepped gingerly over the boards. Everything gave her pause, reminding her of the last time she’d been here with Remy. The overturned blue canoe floating in mud: he’d wondered if they could salvage it. Crude messages scratched in the boardwalk’s posts: they both had blushed and pretended not to see.
Her mother barreled ahead on the winding walk. “Careful,” she called as she shimmied down the trunk of a fallen tupelo that made a bridge over the water. Her long thighs gripped the bark. “It is a bit slippery.”
Janeen inched down the log in an awkward sidesaddle, glancing warily at the urn. “You be careful, Mutti. Don’t drop him.”
“I won’t, Liebchen. Iron grip.”
Finally, Janeen’s thigh touched her mother’s, and she stopped. The skin of algae beneath them lay perfectly still. The enormous bases of the cypresses’ trunks, some a thousand years old, looked like the humped spines of dinosaurs rising from the yellow water. A haze of tiny insects hovered at the surface.
Janeen could hear her mother breathing and the eerie kill-deer, kill-deer of plovers in flight. For a minute she watched a white egret take long, slow steps on its wire legs. She glanced at her mother, who squinted out over the swamp. Her nose was dotted with pale brown freckles. For years Remy had urged her to wear a hat, and Janeen noticed now that she’d finally put one on: Remy’s LSU baseball cap. Janeen reached for her mother’s hand.
“Okay,” said Anita. She turned the urn upside down and dumped the ashes straight into the water, as though she were making instant soup.
“Mutti!” Janeen shrieked. A bubble rose to the surface as her father disappeared. “What in the world—”
“What is it?” Her mother actually looked perplexed. “This is what we came to do, nicht?”
“But I wanted to . . .” How could she explain to someone who had no sentimentality whatsoever? She needed to weep, to scatter him gently. She had a Robert Penn Warren poem folded in her pocket that she wanted to read aloud. “I thought I’d say a few words,” she mumbled, embarrassed. Her mother just blinked at her.
“What did you wish to say? Please, sweetheart, he can still hear you.”
“Forget it.” The moment had already passed, and she’d never get a chance to retrieve it. Her eyes burned with tears.
They watched a pair of yellow warblers cross frantically from tree to tree, flapping madly then coasting, flapping then coasting. When Anita spoke again, her voice had softened. “I am sorry, Janeen. I’m not good in moments like this. They don’t bring up Germans to be light and fluffy, hadn’t you noticed? We are a hard-boiled people.”
A chill ran through Janeen’s bones, despite the heat. For two weeks she’d made sure she was first to the mailbox every day, yet she hadn’t received anything from Margaret Forsyth. In the meantime, she’d seen little updates about Klaus Eisler, or Henry Klein, in the news. He’d been spotted in Virginia, then Delaware. The more information about his background emerged, the sicker she felt: Eisler had been special assistant to Heinz Jost, chief of SS intelligence in foreign territories and later the leader of the infamous Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews. While Jost had been convicted—and later pardoned—for crimes against humanity, Eisler had vanished from Europe at the end of the war.
“But is that the worst way to be?” Anita continued, startling Janeen back to reality. “We cannot dwell on your father’s death, or we will fall into the vortex. It is like leading a horse—you cannot turn back to look at him, or he will never move forward.”
Janeen considered this for a moment. “Who’s the horse in this scenario? Me?”
Anita chuckled. “I think we both are, Liebchen.”
“I can’t put Dad behind me like you can.”
“I am not saying I’ve put your father behind me. I have never put anyone I cared for out of my heart.”
The boggy scent of the swamp overtook Janeen, stirring her stomach. A little itch of a thought came to her, and before she could control it, pushed its way out her lips. “But you had to leave everyone you knew in Germany.”
Anita grew very still and sat tall on the log. The toe of one of her shoes dipped into the water and drew absentminded circles in the algae. She cleared her throat and said something, her words lost in the birdsong and the warm breeze rushing through the leaves.
“Pardon?”
“I did what I had to.” Anita’s nostrils flared. She removed the baseball cap; underneath, her dark hair was soaked with sweat. She ran a hand over the back of her neck. “Sometimes we must convince ourselves we no longer care for the people we once did.”
Her words sounded callous, and convenient, and Janeen might have said as much had her mother not turned to her with flashing dark eyes full of anger and grief.
“Those were end-of-the-world times,” Anita said. Her lower jaw came forward. “You are a lucky child, having never known such. Now”—she pointed toward the boardwalk, the urn tucked in her elbow—“let us go; you’re in my way.”
• • •
Janeen waited to get up until her mother had gone to work the next morning. When finally she went down to the kitchen, she found Anita had left her half a pot of coffee and some soft bananas, as well as a list of chores. She ate a banana, then watered the trees in the little backyard orchard her father had kept and pulled weeds from the beds. By lunchtime she was ready to trim the creeping fig that grew up the risers of the front steps. She’d finished two of them when she heard a friendly honk behind her.
When she stood she felt the static charge to the air. Clouds rumbled overhead. The mailman had parked at the end of their driveway. He waved at her, probably expecting her to come say hello—he was the father of one of her kindergarten classmates—but she waited until he’d put the letters in the box and driven off. The air around her felt thick, giving her the sensation of swimming toward the mailbox. When she yanked it open she heard the grind of rust.
There it was: a fat envelope postmarked in Manhattan, with a handwritten return address this time. East Seventy-Eighth Street . . . she ran her finger over the delicate script.
Skin tingly, she dropped the pruning shears on the lawn and took the letter up to her room, closing the door. She tore open the envelope and spread the pages over her mattress. She realized now that a little part of her had hoped this letter would never come, that she’d be able to continue believing her mother was the same woman she’d always thought she was. It wasn’t too late, of course. She could ignore this. She could return it to sender.
She opened her eyes. The name Klaus caught her eye, right on the first page, and she shivered.
Dear Anita,
You have sent me a life preserver. You do not know what it means to me, to be able to say the things I should have before. I know I punished Berni with silence, and the fact that you have chosen not to answer me with silence is the greatest gift.
The last time you and I spoke, in the Eislers’ courtyard, you urged me to look past our differences and write to Berni. I’m sorry to tell you I failed. For the two and a half years that I worked for Helmut Eisler’s sister, Mildred, in Potsdam, I could not find the strength to answer Berni’s letters. I worried she’d want to see me, and after hearing that she’d been intimate with Helmut Eisler, I knew I would not have been able to look her in the eye.
At Aunt Mildred’s I could disappear. She lived alone in a three-room unit above a delicatessen, and she never looked at or spoke to me once. All day she blinked at the wall and licked her lips. The first night, when I took her housedress over her head and lifted her arms to run a washcloth underneath, I cast my eyes down. Within two days I could bathe and clothe her without hesitation. Numbness and nurture: this was my first taste of my future profession.
I talked to Mildred, though she didn’t answer, and I practiced my speech. Klaus had attempted to teach me to speech-read, and he’d helped me learn to feel rather than listen for my own voice, parts of which were lost to me. But the speech-reading was mostly a lost cause. German is a dark language, most of its sounds uttered deep in the invisible throat. I had to learn to anticipate what people were saying, to fill in the gaps.
At Mildred’s I was free. I was lonely. I read Berni’s letters, and I treasured them, even though I offered her as much interaction in return as Mildred offered me. Not long after the Third Reich began, she stopped writing, finally discouraged by my silence, and my only connection to the world became Klaus Eisler, and at his urging, my BDM troop.
I was no Hitler Youth star. The one area in which I excelled was first aid, mainly because I was immune to disgust. Our leader made me first-aid girl, and the others treated me as I was accustomed to being treated: as a servant. And the Nazi indoctrination, which increased after 1933, made me uneasy. Our leader lectured on eugenics: Why deny humans the science that had made our dogs smarter and faster than any other dog on earth? The other girls ate up the material like caterpillars on leaves.
I did not mention my doubts to Klaus. I wrote how proud I was to serve Hitler. We had grown far more affectionate in letters than we had in person. Distance had an intoxicating effect. Within five letters we called each other du.
There is a way for you to go to school again, my dear, he wrote one day, shortly after my sixteenth birthday in August 1933. Ever wanted to work on a farm?
A farm? I imagined dirt and plows, the dizziness I felt in the sun. Am I suited for that?
You can’t stay at Mildred’s forever. Consider the Landjahr. It’s for the best of the Hitler Youth, girls and boys. I would do it myself if I weren’t already vetted by the Sicherheitsdienst. Landjahr graduates are first in line for trade schools and colleges. You could go to nursing school after you complete your duties.
I shook my head; they’d never choose me. But I read the end of his note over and over again. I can recite it by heart:
I imagine what you have become, little Grete’s face with a womanly shape. At night I think of your fingertips on me.
I found Aunt Mildred dead one morning in February of 1934. The cords in her neck were stretched out, her eyes open and teeth bared, caught in the act of biting for one more second of life. I stared at her for a long time. Then I washed her body before I called the hospital.
The Eislers did not attend her funeral. They’d resented her; her money was in a trust they could not touch until now. But even before this, they had moved to a nice new apartment beside the Grunewald. Herr Eisler, through Klaus’s connections, had a new position as a custodian, with a salary and pension. I cringed to imagine him cleaning toilets, but Klaus celebrated over putting his parents’ creditors in their place. Jewish bankers, I assume, who’d been after the Eislers for years. Hitler had made such loans defunct.
Does this mean your father has come to support the Party? I wrote, because I knew this had long been a concern of Klaus’s. He didn’t answer; he told me much later that I should never have put such a thing in writing.
Knowing full well I had no chance of being chosen for the Landjahr, I approached our leader anyway, at the next sports afternoon. My palms and thighs were dusted with sand, and my tongue felt thick and clumsy in my mouth. Our Gruppenführer tweeted her whistle for a water break, then glanced at me, her face broad, freckled, and clean. I greeted her with “Heil Hitler.”
Before I could say anything, she put a hand on my shoulder. I wished she’d look at me, instead of gazing out at the field with athletic pride on her face, but I gathered enough of what she said for my mouth to drop open. She told me she’d mentioned my “leadership potential” to the higher-ups in the Party.
The only area in which I could remember having led was medical training. I do not know how I formed words. “I have considered the Landdienst.”
“Excellent,” she said. “They need medic girls in the country service, too. I’ll put in the paperwork.” The water break was over; she looked off toward the field and blew a sharp blast on her whistle.
I was stunned. I’d have felt more like celebrating were it not for the sense that she anticipated my question, that somebody had put in a word for me ahead of time.
I suppose you will want to know about my current life. I am a professor of nursing. I teach pathophysiology lectures. I have a daughter who lives in London, and I have never been to visit. We have grown distant. We have always been a little distant. My son is still at university but does far too much to take care of me. Neither knows anything about my youth in Germany.
My ex-husband, Charles, is a former war journalist. We met in a refugee camp in Zurich in 1942. I had been there three years, by way of Stockholm in 1939. Charles found me at the bedside of a woman whose baby we were trying to turn. The version was successful, but when the baby was born she sobbed and sobbed, screaming that it looked like its father, and asked us to take it away. Later we learned the father was in the SS.
I’d scarcely noticed the photographers, but while I was at the sinks, Charles caught an image of me that would find its way to an American newsmagazine. In the photo my apron is dirty and hands yet unwashed. I’m staring straight into the lens, sheepish, tired. After he took it, he put the camera down and told me I looked like I needed lunch.
Charles introduced me to America, where I started in the first year of nursing college, even though I already had a degree. Nobody asked where I’d been trained to insert catheters and stitch episiotomies. Nobody asked who taught me to draw blood from even the deepest veins. That was how our marriage went as well: no questions asked.
The closest we came to discussing my past was when the photo in the field hospital reran in a big magazine for the tenth anniversary of the war’s end. I gave an interview to go with the photos, and the writer asked a few questions about Berlin. He asked what I knew about the concentration camps. Of course I told him I’d heard of them. I said everyone had—and some readers didn’t like that. Dozens of Germans wrote to the editor to insist that they’d had no idea.
But that was where the interview ended. I sat waiting for him to ask if I’d participated in any substantial way to assist the Third Reich. For weeks I’d been thinking about this moment, and I’d prepared an honest response. The writer searched in his pockets for a smoke and asked whether we planned to have another child, something like that, and Charles, who sat beside me, took over. Neither of them wondered how I’d contributed to make Hitler’s dreams become reality. How could I, they must have thought. I was only a girl.
The Landdienst program sent me to a farm in Silesia run by a family named Winkler. When we stopped at Dresden someone sat beside me on the train, a handball enthusiast with thick thighs. “Wonderful,” she said, “what we’re doing for Germany. Saving our breadbasket from the Poles.”
“Yes,” I said, wishing she’d sit somewhere else. “I suppose so.”
A huge group of young people arrived at the farm, and Herr and Frau Winkler fawned over us and embarrassed us terribly. Frau Winkler wore a clean dress but was missing teeth on the sides. Her husband was equally sun-browned and simple. That first evening they slaughtered a pig larger than I, and we drank so much beer that none of us felt well in the morning.
The Winkler farm was on the small side, just under thirty acres. We stayed two kilometers away in another, larger house. The Winklers grew sugar beets and golden Raps flowers, from which they made rapeseed oil. When the Raps bloomed, the fields ignited in brilliant yellow underneath the blue country sky. Our primary duty was to convert some fallow fields near our group house. I helped yank out rows and rows of old beetroot. I discovered I could handle far more physical labor than expected, and I wished my BDM leaders and Klaus could see me work.
Life had never been so easy, so prescribed. I began to wonder about my plan to become a nurse. Perhaps I’ll stay here forever, I thought. The farm could be my place.
One night, when we’d all had a little too much ice wine, a group of girls gathered to go walking. The rest of us were turning down our beds, or brushing the smell of campfire out of our hair; these girls snickered and stage-whispered, pinching their cheeks. I knew where they were headed. These were the ones who kept photographs of Adolf Hitler under their mattresses, their lipstick prints on his ugly mouth. They’d confused their Führer-lust and all that talk about “good blood” into an insatiable desire for the boys in our camp.
Disgusted by them, I went outside to take a real nighttime stroll. Alone I walked, through abandoned rows of dry brown corn, my head buzzing from the wine. To the left of the field, the surface of a small pond shone black and stippled. I suspected anyone watching me could have seen the white of my blouse from miles away, glowing blue in the night.
My pace quickened. I felt chased, even though each time I turned around, nobody was there. I began to run. I ran until I felt my insides would bleed. When I finally collapsed onto the soft earth and turned around, I was alone in the middle of the large field. It was Berni who’d been chasing me. I’d seen her in the excited, amorous faces of those other young women. But those were Nazi girls, of course, who would have called her, and you, whores and deviants.
For a long while I’d pushed both of you from my mind. In escaping you I felt I’d escaped everything that scared me about life. Sex. The feelings for Klaus that I fought. The confusion over Herr Eisler and Berni. Now I saw that was everywhere, and what a fool I’d been to judge Berni and you. I thought of your particular struggle, Anita. Berni had urged me to consider this, in her letters, and I had shut out any empathy until now. Now it came flooding in.
I lay on my back, crying. In the sky there were so many stars, so many more than in Berlin. I looked at them for a long time. When finally I went to wipe my tears on my sleeve, I noticed something pink in the dirt. My fingers plucked it out. It was a tiny mitten, for a girl of four or five. It hadn’t been out there long; the yarn was still bright. I turned it inside out and looked at the little knot someone had tied when she finished. I thought about the fingers that would have tied that knot.
The Winklers had no children.
I looked around at the land, frozen in blue-white. The abandoned fields. The large farmhouse, adjacent to this field, which had been conveniently available for us to inhabit.
I told myself it wasn’t possible. The Winklers? Would they have stolen someone else’s . . . and where would that family have gone? Where would they have been sent? I felt something form in my stomach, like a fist of lead.
Now that I’d found the mitten, I began to see other signs: a chest of delicately crocheted afghans I found in the farmhouse where we stayed, a ledger at the bottom of my drawer, written in Polish. The leaden fist remained in my stomach for the rest of the time I spent in Silesia. As I went on with my duty, and when the following winter I began nursing school, it grew more painful, despite how I tried to pretend outwardly that it wasn’t there.
I returned in 1935 to a Berlin I didn’t recognize. I hadn’t been there since Hitler became chancellor, so I hadn’t seen the parades of adoring crowds packing the sidewalks, their children in swastika sweaters. I hadn’t seen the massive swaths of red all over the Brandenburg Gate and the new offices the Party had usurped in buildings all over the city. When my taxi rode past the Silver Star Club in Mitte, I saw dirty snow drifted against its boarded-up doors. Outwardly, the city seemed to be in better order. I heard Hitler had “cleaned up the party,” tamed the SA, though it would be years before I heard the full extent of the Night of the Long Knives. There were fewer homeless on the streets, fewer soup kitchens. The weather seemed to have improved. Even the sun worked for Hitler.
There were other, more troubling, changes, of course. Signs outside businesses declared the owners would not sell to Jews. There were whispers about Dachau, but when people claimed it held only criminals I allowed myself to believe them. Hitler supporters, particularly those whose lives had improved, had answers like this for everything. What did it matter if a Jewish woman couldn’t buy her eggs from this grocer if there was another downtown that let her in? What harm was there in denying Jews entry to the civil service, when they could pursue other professions?
I was one of those people who benefited from measures such as the “law against the overcrowding of German universities.” While in Silesia I’d gotten the news that I’d been accepted to nursing school. The excitement brought back old conversations and dreams I’d shared with Berni, and I vowed to contact her as soon as I’d settled in the dormitory. I bought new white leather shoes with the tiny bit of money I’d saved from my Landjahr, and had my hair cut the way I knew Klaus liked it. My goal, as always, was to please him. We were eighteen and twenty-one, a nursing student and an officer in the SD, the intelligence branch of the SS. We could marry. But I didn’t see him for a while; they needed his assistance in securing the Rhineland. I wasn’t sure exactly what he did, but he made it sound innocuous. Gathering information, he called his work. Getting to know the local population. The 1930s will go down in history, he wrote, as the years in which Germany restored what was rightfully hers.
Take care of yourself, I replied. My dear young soldier.
Ours is a peaceful revolution. We are simply reclaiming what is ours.
I thought of the pink mitten, and of what the girl on the train had said about our breadbasket and the Poles. I did not mention it, though. I anticipated the day he’d see me in my new gray dress, my white bonnet, the shiny black cross pinned at my throat. I wrote that thanks to him, nobody in Silesia had even mentioned my speech. Thanks to him, I had a shelf of medical texts and journals, which I read late into the night, fascinated.
The day I learned there was such a thing as nonprogressive hearing loss was one of the best of my life. I decided—on my own, as I didn’t dare consult anyone else—that I had mild conductive hearing loss in my left ear, moderate in my right, and that my tinnitus was most likely linked to anxiety. Conductive hearing loss, my books claimed, could be partially remedied via something called a hearing aid, a device nearly the size of a telephone. I couldn’t imagine ever daring to use such a thing, but I had answers. I felt as though the sun shone more brightly upon me than it ever had before, that someone had arranged a parting of the clouds, finally, just above my head.
My elation faded when I thought of Sister Lioba, the one in charge of the infirmary at St. Luisa’s, and her callous pronouncement that I might or might not become deaf one day. I wondered how many hundreds of girls had passed through her “care” since I’d left, and I vowed to become a different kind of nurse.
As for Berni, I was too cowardly for the direct approach. I waited outside your apartment building one foggy spring morning, trembling. After thirty minutes a girl came out, reed-thin, her greasy black hair hanging ragged underneath her hat. I almost didn’t recognize her, but I saw the way she walked with her shoulders thrown back, and I followed.
By the time we reached the S-Bahn station at Julius-Leber-Brücke, I still had not found the voice I needed to shout to her. A train approached; I could see the cone of dim light on the mist. This was it, otherwise she’d get on and leave me. I pushed my way through the crowd, toward the lone figure kicking pebbles onto the track, and I cleared my throat.
“Berni!”
I wasn’t sure she heard me until I saw her back muscles stiffen, and she whirled around. She lunged at me with teeth bared, because at first all she could see was my uniform. And then she recognized me. The back of her index finger landed on my cheek and she said, “Grete-bird.”
There was so little we could say to each other in that listening crowd. I wanted to tell her that I’d realized what hypocrites people could be. I had to say, somehow, that I no longer blamed her for sleeping with Helmut Eisler. Finally I thought of a safe topic: “I’m going to a nursing college.” She’d always wanted it for me, and I thought maybe she’d celebrate.
She didn’t answer right away. The train closed its doors, leaving only a few of us on the platform. Her eyes darted over my clothing, my brown coat, the pin on my neckerchief. With two blistered fingers she held my Landjahr badge, the green triangle.
“Yes, Grete-bird, I can see.” She leaned in close to me, so that I could feel her skin’s warmth on the left side of my neck. “Helmut told me you’d turned nationalist, and I defended you. ‘Not my sister,’ I told him. I said you’d never become Hitler’s whore. Yet here you are.”
I took a step back. Even with that leaden fist in my stomach reminding me of all I’d seen, I resorted to my old defense. “You’re jealous of me.”
Her body seized, and her laughter turned to coughing that worsened so quickly she had to lean over. I could diagnose it now: my sister had chronic bronchitis.
“Berni,” I said, “you need to go somewhere with fresh air.” I reached for her, forgetting what we’d both just said, and I put my hand on her back. “The weather in Silesia—”
Her coughs subsided, and she embraced me. Crushing my ribs, she whispered in my ear that all she needed was a way to leave Germany altogether. Damn Silesia, she said, and damn all of Germany, and I panicked inside, though I knew nobody else could hear her. She said that if she had the strength to do it she would take every last good citizen with her, and—this part chilled me—she said that if I had any sense left in my Nazi brain, I would leave as well.
After that, I did not see Berni for a while. I dropped a bottle of Prontosil in the mail for her—my professors sang its praises, hailed its German inventors—spending a week’s pay on it, and I prayed she would not throw it out. I would not find out for some time, because in that year she, too, did not write or reach for me. I thought about our last conversation frequently, trying to find any meaning or reason in it other than the truth. Because I knew in my gut exactly what she meant when she said “whore,” and I knew she was right. Signs were everywhere, and even I could not ignore them for long.
For one, there was the nursing school curriculum. In the BDM I learned first aid: splinting broken bones, resuscitation techniques, and dental and bodily hygiene, all of which I imparted to my troop in monthly presentations. I could see nothing but positive results from this sort of medical training, and naively expected that my nursing program under the Nazi regime would be the same. But our instructors focused exuberantly on what they called “ground-breaking measures in institutional and curative care.” Within the first few weeks of school, they handed us charts detailing the protracted suffering—at great cost to the Volk—that patients with physical or mental handicaps endured. What did those patients deserve? Peace, the pamphlet claimed. And we would be trained to give it to them.
“What does this mean?” I whispered to Lise, the beauty of our class with her gleaming black hair and elegant figure. I chose the wrong girl to ask.
“It’s law,” she snapped at me. “They passed these racial hygiene initiatives three years ago. Where have you been?”
Although the government had not officially “euthanized” anyone yet—that would come later—I soon realized forced sterilization had been going on all over the place. What was their justification? People unfit to have children burdened the Reich. Among ordinary instruction in obstetric, orthopedic, and pediatric nursing, we learned how many dependent babies we accumulated each year because of syphilitic prostitutes and idiot pimps.
When our teachers spoke that way I broke out in cold sweats, thinking of Berni. When they used the phrase “genetically deficient,” the tinnitus in my right ear reminded me of my secret. I felt dizzy, often, in class, and had to get up frequently for a glass of water. At night I would sit bolt upright, and vow the next morning to warn Berni and you, and Fräulein Schmidt, who I knew was Jewish, to find a way to get out of the country.
By the light of the morning everything would look different. People still took dogs for walks and planned birthday parties. Look how calm they are, I thought. Could our country really be edging toward a cliff? Could a government turn against its citizens? I reminded myself of all that had drawn me to the Nazi movement to begin with. The sense of family and belonging it seemed to promote. The Jobs-for-Germans initiatives. National Socialism wasn’t all bad, I told myself; there were simply fanatics at the margins who would never realize their goals.
And maybe the sterilizations that had already happened had been welcome. People did opt for them all the time. As for euthanasia, I had a hard time imagining it would ever happen.
An ardent Nazi called Schaller, a gaseous and warty man who would have been called a spinster had he been a woman, taught our anatomy class and did nothing to hide his lust for girls in crisp uniforms. Of course any girl who had joined the Party and wore badges had an A from Schaller, just as we automatically had a C or below in Fräulein Angstadt’s geriatric care class, brave Fräulein Angstadt whom they sacked the following year.
That spring semester, Herr Doktor Schaller leapt headfirst into racial theory. He gleefully pulled down a chart showing heads in profile, with measurements of skull and nose and brow that were supposed to determine bravery, laziness, and malice. He showed us the “Nordic” type, whitewashed with baby features, the “Dinarian,” Roman-nosed, the “Jew,” a caricature that looked like no person’s face I’d ever seen.
Herr Doktor Schaller proclaimed the Dinarian type thoughtful and serious, because the rendering looked like Hitler. “But the Nordic,” he said, “is the ideal. And there’s only one Nordic type I can see in this classroom.”
I began sinking in my chair.
“. . . And that’s Grete,” he finished, his glance gleaming in my direction.
“She’s no Nordic!” cried Lise, whose face had broken into splotches as soon as he pulled down the chart. She tucked strands of her dark hair back into her bun. “Aren’t they supposed to be smart?” She imitated my speech, dropping the s and z. I was mortified to hear that a problem I thought I’d fixed had not been fixed at all.
The class’s laughter soothed her initially, but she would not be satisfied for long. She cornered me on our walk home to the dorms that evening. “Just wait,” she told me. “Wait until they find out what you really are.”
One evening in summer that same year, 1935, I had just prepared a cold dinner for myself in my little room when I heard a knock at my door. I opened it to find a young towheaded orderly, his hands clasped behind his back. The sight of him made my stomach drop.
“Margarete Metzger? You are wanted in the medical director’s office.”
My heart pounding and knees weak, I walked to the far wing of the hospital. I passed every exit but did not dare run out. As I walked my breathing became erratic, and phlegm drained down my throat. Twice I had to stop, put my hand on the wall, and catch my breath.
When I arrived I knocked softly. All my skin tingled as I pushed that door open.
The room was dark, lit only by one lantern on the director’s desk. Herr Doktor Schaller leaned back in his chair, a folder opened in front of him. When he saw me he beckoned me inside, removing his glasses. “Please, have a seat,” he said, but I couldn’t. I stood at the far corner of his desk and waited.
Schaller shut the folder and simpered at me. He’d been somewhere sunny for the weekend; his nose and the tip of the fleshy wart on his cheek were tinted scarlet. “Margarete.” His whitish tongue performed a staccato of my syllables. “Mar-gar-et-te. Do you know why you’re here?”
I shook my head no, but surely he could see guilt on my face, welling in my eyes. I knew why I’d been called here alone. I knew what he’d expect of me, in exchange for his silence about my deficiencies. I wondered seriously if I could do it—lower myself, desecrate myself, to save my own skin. Spit gathered at the back of my mouth. I closed my eyes, teetering a bit on my feet, thinking of all I’d said to you and Berni, all my unfair judgment.
“You’ve been reported,” the doctor continued, in a manner that showed this had little consequence for him. He might have been letting me know a library book was overdue. While I stood there with palms perspiring, he poured himself a short glass of something brown and lifted it to his fat face. When he’d downed his drink, he tapped the folder on his desk. “The Gestapo received a tip about you, and they were gracious enough to allow your friend to intervene.”
My friend. He meant himself. The intimacy of the term made me want to choke. But I’d heard the other word, the one that mattered: “Intervene?”
Doktor Schaller’s eyes flitted over my shoulder. I jumped when I felt movement behind me. A tall man in a black uniform had been standing against the bookshelves the entire time. Someone to arrest me, of course, and I nearly produced my wrists for him right then. As he stepped closer, the light hit first his smooth lower lip, then his strong nose, then the gleam of his eyes. I could not breathe as he removed his cap with its shiny brim, his gaze locked on mine. He had grown much taller since the last time I’d seen him—almost three years before—and his jaw, neck, and hands had all become those of a man. He inclined his head toward me, a hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth. His hair had darkened from blond to sandy brown.
“Guten abend, Fräulein Metzger,” Klaus said.
The fear rushed out of my body. I felt a surge of love, warm and sweat-inducing. Despite what I had begun to feel about his uniform—even despite the sterilizations, the pink mitten, Berni—I felt unbelievably, unbearably proud that such a man had come to my rescue.
Schaller sat back and interlaced his fingers. “Officer Eisler is here because one of our students had a concern about your racial identity. She seemed to think you were secretly Polish, possibly a Jew.” He and Klaus both laughed.
I could not join them. Secretly Polish. Not hearing deficient. How stupid, I thought. All Lise had been able to consider was race.
“I must say, you have an unusual accent,” said Schaller. “Not Polish, though, eh?”
Klaus answered for me, as my tongue felt thick. “Our Grete is a fine little Aryan.”
“Evidently. But you can never be too careful,” Schaller added. “Plenty of Jews walking around with blond hair these days, dyed or otherwise. It’s a good thing you have a friend in Herr Eisler here, Margarete.”
“Thank you,” I whispered to Klaus.
“It was nothing, Fräulein,” Klaus said, flicking invisible dust off his sleeve. “All I had to do was produce your file and the matter was cleared.”
The doctor shook a finger at me. “Why hadn’t you submitted the proper forms? You weren’t listening when I explained the new racial background checks, were you?” I shook my head, and he slid my folder across the table to Klaus, winked, then told us we were free to take our leave. Klaus put his hand on the small of my back and held open the door.
We were quiet on our walk to my dormitory. I felt rattled, exhilarated, as though I’d stood too close to the train tracks when a locomotive blew past.
Beside me, Klaus took big steps, my file tucked under his arm. I could not believe this was Klaus, here in the flesh, in my building. Now in my corridor. Now, at the door to my bedroom. My shaking hands took what felt like hours to find the right key. After I unlocked it he tipped the door open with one finger, and I went in under his arm. Inside my room he placed his black cap on the desk and turned on the study lamp. He strolled around my room, his large steps covering it in an instant. He took up so much space that I felt dizzy in his presence.
We stood in the middle of the floor, staring at each other. His pale skin glowed in the dim light; his shoulders were broad. When had he become a man? And in that time, had I, too, become a woman? My thoughts were a woman’s; I wanted to run my fingertips over his smoothly shaved cheeks, to unbutton his jacket and see his chest.
“You saved me,” I whispered.
He nodded and pulled out my desk chair. When he sat his long slacks drew upward, showing black socks and a sliver of skin. He ran a hand through his short fair hair.
“You must be very careful when you speak, my Fräulein Pole,” he said, grinning. “You were lucky this time, nicht? You must continue to work on your pronunciation. The Hereditary Health Court has the ability to sterilize anyone whose genetics pose a threat to the Reich.”
Had I been thinking clearly, I might have noticed the respect in his voice for the words “Hereditary Health Court.” To Klaus, they were not the problem. I was. But so overwhelmed was I with gratitude, with relief, that I fell to my knees in front of him, my cheek on the woolen knee of his pant leg. Patiently he stroked my head. “You silly one. Don’t you want to read your file?” His hand moved to play with the sweaty hair at the base of my neck.
“My file?” I’d been so focused on Klaus having saved me that I hadn’t considered what sort of evidence the Gestapo had on me. Klaus lifted me to my feet so that I could take the folder. I was so distracted that I glanced over the pages inside without reading them.
“You must read,” Klaus urged me, his face alight.
I shuffled feverishly through the papers as Klaus watched. There was an application signed by my Ringführerin, recommending me for country service, and a copy of the certificate declaring I’d completed the Landjahr. I dreaded reaching the back of the file, where I’d learn everything Berni had told me about our background was untrue. But Klaus kept pressing me to look, and finally I reached the two oldest documents: my birth certificate and the admitting papers from the orphanage.
I sank onto the bed. The first detail I noticed was that I’d had my birthday wrong all these years: instead of August 15, I’d been born on August 19. Born at home, to Frau Gertrude Metzger, wife of Joachim, son of farmers. A midwife in Zehlendorf caught me.
Our parents lived in Zehlendorf. I read it again: Zehlendorf. We, their two daughters, lived there until January 1919, when someone—I could barely read her signature, but it began with a K, not our mother’s G—took us to St. Luisa’s. Our mother had been dead since the end of 1918.
Our aunt! It was our aunt who’d taken us to St. Luisa’s, not our mother, as I’d always feared. Berni had been right. A sense of Gemütlichkeit overtook me as I remembered her unwavering faith in our parents. She shared those stories with me so that I, too, would believe. How I missed my parents, whom I never knew! How I missed my sister!
I was sobbing into Klaus’s shoulder; he’d joined me on the bed. I realized I didn’t care about their origins. I wish I had known them, whether they were Catholic, Jewish, fair, dark, bourgeois, proletarian. Klaus held me as I mourned them, and I clutched at him, clawed at him, still looking at the names of my parents and conflating my grief for them with my love for him.
I moaned into his shoulder. “How can I thank you? How can I ever . . . ?”
“Shh,” he said, his thumb on my chin. “We will find a way.”
I wiped my chin on my sleeve and tried to catch my breath. “I must share this with Berni. It will protect her, too. She’ll have to register to become a citizen as well, won’t she?”
His pale eyes, which had been droopy, almost drunk, sharpened. He nudged me off his shoulder, squared his face with mine, and held my wrists. “I will not have you torturing yourself over Berni’s choices. She’s a grown woman. Nobody is forcing her to be a prostitute.”
“She isn’t a prostitute.” I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice, even though I feared I’d ruined the moment.
“Don’t defend her, Margarete. She nearly destroyed my family.”
“You’re right, of course,” I said. “Of course, Klaus. But I wonder . . . the Hereditary Health Court. Anita, Berni’s friend, the—the one who dresses like a woman. Will they go after him?”
“If ‘Anita’ doesn’t mend his ways, then yes, I think they will go after him.” Klaus wiped my tears with his thumbs, a didactic expression on his face: patience and impatience mixed. “Nobody wants unnecessary violence. In the case of a Transvestit, like ‘Anita,’ there doesn’t have to be any. He and your sister are Aryan, thus part of the Reich. I’m sure the authorities’ approach would be rehabilitation. You see? You don’t have to worry.”
He’d moved his hand to my lips. That old gesture, his dry fingers against the hot breath of my mouth, stirred me. My eyes rolled back. They were tired of crying, and I was tired of fear.
I did something that would have been nothing to you, nothing to Berni, but set off explosions in my little mind: I kissed the rough tips of his fingers. I used my tongue. When I opened my eyes, I found his face closer to mine than it had ever been. Our noses touched, and a thrill like a small electric shock jolted my nervous system.
We breathed heavily for a moment. I could taste his breath. His lips moved forward half an inch, and then they were on mine. We began to kiss, slowly at first, his lips sliding over mine. His breath tasted yeasty and sweet, like beer. Our front teeth clicked when he opened his mouth.
I made a noise, something between a moan and a sob. Could this be happening to me, in my plain room? If only he would stop for a moment! I needed him to stop so that I could make sure I would remember it later. I pulled away and gazed at him, up into his face, to be sure of him. He smiled at me; he knew how long I had been imagining this. I tried to swallow, but there was a lump in my throat. I was on the verge of crying again, though now I didn’t know why.
I heard something like violins inside my head as he came back down to me and his tongue touched mine. Explosions happened within me, in my throat and heart and thighs. My hands were on his warm neck and the soft back of his blond hair. His went around my waist, to my breasts. He pulled me onto his lap and I could feel the stiff shape in his pants. My thumb lingered on the button on his waistband.
Then, just as quickly as it had started, he stopped. He got hold of my wrists, turned me around and put me in the chair so that I sat and he stood. His face returned to its characteristic smoothness.
“We will find a way for you to thank me, Margarete.” A note of gentle rebuke crossed his face. “Not like this.”
He left me throbbing all over, stunned, sitting there in my dark room alone. I went to the mirror and studied my swollen lips, which felt as though he’d stung them. My throat ached from crying. Yet I went to bed that night feeling hopeful. If he planned to find a way for me to thank him, that meant I would see him again, and that was all I could think.
Too late Janeen heard a rattling, and before she could gather the pages strewn all over her quilt, her mother had burst into the room. Quickly Janeen sat up and wiped her eyes, coming back to the present. Outside it was pouring, the rain drumming the roof and splashing on the sills of her open windows. Her mother looked at them and tsk-tsked.
“I have been thinking about what you can do this summer,” Anita began, crossing the room in a few big strides to yank the sashes down. “It may do us both good if we visit colleges next month, nicht?” She looked at Janeen strangely. “My God, you are hyperventilating. What is the matter? What are you reading?”
Janeen wasn’t fast enough to hide it. In a second her mother was standing over the bed, rifling through the pages.
“What is this? This is—” Anita read a few words, mumbling them to herself. Then she closed her eyes. Her entire body swayed, as if a wave had hit first her head, then her chest, then her hips. “This is for me.”
Janeen shook her head vigorously, still unable to speak.
“It is. You have been reading my mail.” Anita grabbed for the stack of pages in Janeen’s grasp, but she held tight to them.
“Are you . . .” Janeen couldn’t begin to ask the question. “It’s for Anita,” she said, her heart pounding. “It’s for someone named Anita, but maybe you’re not Anita. What I mean to say is that this might be a different Anita.”
Something flickered over her mother’s face. “What do you mean?”
Janeen took a long, unsteady breath. The letter was written to an Anita who had been a transvestite. It couldn’t be for her mother. Yet there was so much in it that felt familiar. “Who’s Berni?” she blurted out, her voice strained. “What happened to Berni?”
Her mother swayed on her feet. “What? Who told you that name? Die Wahrheit sagen!” She yanked the remaining pages out of Janeen’s hands. “We are going to forget this, as soon as you tell me where you got it. Tell me.”
Janeen couldn’t. She put her face in her hands. Through her fingers she watched her mother stumble toward the door, and for a horrible moment she knew what would happen. Anita would take the letter to the garbage. “You have to read it!” Janeen cried. “You have to tell her what happened to Berni!”
Her mother paused on the threshold but didn’t answer. The back of her trim head, the erect carriage of her shoulders, were regal yet terrifying, eerily calm. She stalked out of the room and slammed the door shut behind her.
Janeen waited a moment, breathing hard. She’d been weeping, she realized, for Grete and Klaus. What kind of monster was she? Klaus Eisler, the man who’d murdered Jews, the man who’d come to rescue Grete in his SS uniform—she’d been able to taste his lips.
Through the wall she heard an uncannily familiar sound: the screech of rusted iron. Where had she heard that sound before? It brought to mind Christmas, her father bent over their rarely used fireplace, wondering how he could open the damper . . .
She bolted into the living room in time to see her mother toss the decorative logs aside and throw the letter onto the grate. Janeen cried out to her as she lit a match and threw it atop the first page. It caught a corner, which curled up and blackened. Janeen clawed at her mother’s shoulders, shouting to her to pull it from the flames. But Anita was too strong for her; she held Janeen back with one firm shoulder. Kneeling behind her mother’s back, Janeen watched in horror as another page lit.
“Please, Mutti,” she said, sobbing. “Please, take it out. You need to read it—to read about your parents. Please!”
A low groan leaked from Anita’s lips, and she fell forward. Janeen lunged toward the fireplace and dragged out the paper, blowing on it, lifting clouds of white soot. Grit went under her fingernails. She left the singed pile on the bricks and sat back on her haunches, panting. Rain still pummeled the roof, darkened the sky outside. She could hear it dripping down the chimney. Her mother had her face in her hands.
Janeen felt stunned, as though she’d just suffered an electric shock. Neither of them had spoken since “your parents”—she wasn’t even entirely sure why she’d said it. “You could have told me,” she spat, her voice high-pitched and bitter. “You could have warned me.”
Anita glanced up, her face tear-streaked. “But I had to leave it behind me, Liebchen. You were an American child. I didn’t want you to have to even think of all this—”
“No, dammit,” Janeen said, and now she could barely get the words out. “About Daddy. Why didn’t you tell me?” Her stomach lurched. “His father had it too, Mutti. Prostate cancer. His father had it. You never tell me anything.”
Her mother’s mouth constricted. She swallowed a few times. “I had to worry for twenty-five years.” Her voice wobbled. “But it is not always true that what kills the father kills the son. I didn’t want to think his day would come. Why would I let my little girl worry the same?”
“It wasn’t fair. You should have told me. He should have told me. Instead I had to be surprised, blindsided—” Janeen tried catching her breath; she was truly hyperventilating now. In her mind’s eye she saw her father packing her lunch on their last normal morning; that afternoon they told her he had cancer. She’d whined she was tired of tuna fish. Seven months later he was dead. “Who expects their dad to die when they’re seventeen? I could have prepared, I could have done more with him . . .” Her breaths came in great gulps. “I would have . . .”
Anita came toward her, arms outstretched, making shushing sounds. “I know this now. I’m sorry. I am sorry.”
“I would have been . . .” But Janeen could no longer talk. She covered her mouth with her hand, then leapt up off the floor and ran to the bathroom. Her teary face stared back at her in the toilet water, puffed and red. Her mother’s reflection appeared behind her, and then Janeen retched more violently than she ever had before. It all went into the bowl—her mother’s secrets, her father’s death—and when she had finished, she felt better.
For a while they sat on the linoleum as Anita held her, cradling her forehead in one large, cool hand. Janeen let herself melt into her mother’s chest. Slowly, slowly, they rocked together.
“Perhaps you can go for a little drive?” Anita finally asked, and Janeen nodded.
Through the octagonal window beside the door, she saw that the sky had cleared. It was orange and purple. Outside she gulped lungsful of the cooling air before she and her mother got into the car. The streets were wet, the blacktop pungent. Nightcrawlers wriggled in hot little pools along the road. Their neighbors’ houses, shielded by trees like ladies peeking from behind fans, revealed people lighting charcoal grills or washing their cars. Their normalcy felt startling to Janeen; it was almost an affront to everything she and her mother had endured.
Fireflies grazed the tops of the spartina grass along the path to the gazebo in Shortleaf Park. A summer chorus of clicking locusts, lawnmowers, traffic, and birdsong surrounded them, thick as the humid air. Janeen took a seat on the wooden bench, Anita across from her. Janeen watched her mother reach over the gazebo railing for a lily past its prime, its petals like elephant skin. She plucked the bloom from its stem and lifted it to her lips. Her pale Teutonic skin was flushed with exertion.
Finally, she spoke. “I have told you I do not remember when my own father died. But I do. I remember when my mother received the news. Trudi . . .” She looked at the ceiling and frowned. “She used to tell me that my father, Joachim, was out winning the war. You see, unlike Grete I did not need my Nazi file to confirm who my parents were. I always knew.”
Janeen’s breath caught in the roof of her mouth. A minute passed before her mother continued.
“When I was a girl in Berlin, I was called Berni.”
There was something Klaus had said about Berni, a word he’d used; it lingered on Janeen’s pursed lips, but before she could ask, her mother said, “Listen.” The blush-colored lights around the perimeter of the park went on, one by one, as Anita began to speak.