“Herr Sternberg died six days ago,” the man interrupted her, lowering his gaze and clasping his now empty hands in front of him.
Without raising his head, he tried to see how Amanda would react. Still silent, she smiled faintly. She had been prepared for this; it was nothing new. From the day Julius had been arrested, she had known he would not return. Lina too had foreseen it. The only letter she had received had been his farewell, and she needed nothing more. Much less any compassion from this man, who was as guilty as those who had let the father of her children die. All she wanted was for him to go, to leave her alone with this fresh, lacerating sorrow she would have to learn to live with.
“Herr Sternberg was a great man. He asked to see me, and I managed to visit him before the end. The infection was consuming him, but he had enough strength left to beg me to help you and your daughters.”
Hearing this stranger talk about her husband in the past tense, Amanda’s lips began to quiver. She bit them as hard as she could: there was no way she was going to share her suffering with him. Her eyes too refused to express any thanks: she was just counting the minutes to be on her own with her daughters, her friend, and to read Julius’s last letter again, as often as she could.
“I could only obtain two landing permits. Herr Sternberg insisted you should send the girls. The Saint-Louis sails at nightfall on May thirteenth from the port of Hamburg. You’ll find all the instructions in the envelope.” He paused and drew in a nervous breath, then went on slowly. “It’s the only way to save them . . .”
He left the last phrase unfinished, torn between what he saw as his duty as a citizen and the debt he owed to the man who had saved his son’s life. He was the one who had to protect beings from an inferior race that his country intended to wipe from the face of the earth. The scum, the worms, the lumpen, those who were rifling the coffers of Germany, stealing their jobs, humiliating the purest race God had created.
There was another lengthy silence. When he saw that Amanda was not reacting, he took a step toward her. She pulled away, her whole body shaking.
“Frau Sternberg, do as your husband says. From Hamburg you are to travel to Paris by the first train the next morning, and from there to Limoges. You are to head for a small village in Haute-Vienne, where Claire Duval will be expecting you. She has already been paid for a year, until you can rejoin your daughters. It’s also a way of helping Frau Duval: as you know, she is a widow living on her own with her daughter.”
It had been a year since Amanda had been in touch with Claire. Claire’s husband, who was much older than she was, had been a great lover of botany, and had shared this passion with Amanda’s father since they had met in the colonies. He had died several years earlier.
What Amanda couldn’t understand was why Julius had kept her in the dark about all these escape plans, this possibility of salvation of which, apparently, he had never envisaged being a part.
“It’s the best thing you can do for your daughters,” the man concluded somberly. “The only thing.” Giving her one last glance, he turned to the door and disappeared.
For several seconds Amanda did not move, as she rapidly went over in her mind the panorama opening up before her. She was condemned to bury herself in a tiny village in the southwest of France, while her daughters did the same on an insignificant island on the far side of the Atlantic. At a loss, she went straight to the back room and for the first time looked for the suitcases her husband had referred to in his farewell letter. All she could find was his doctor’s bag. Opening it, she discovered it was stuffed full of reichsmarks. She left it where it was, and paced around the room, deep in thought.
“Julius, Julius, what have we done . . . ?” she cried out bitterly, and the tears began to flow, heartbroken over her loss and the idea she would have to cast her daughters into an abyss. I know you meant to look after us, but how do you expect me to part from my daughters, our treasures, our little stars? Viera is older, but Lina . . .
She spent a long while in the back room of the bookstore, with the bag crammed with a fortune that could not buy freedom for her or her daughters. Time was against her. She had to prepare them for a crossing into the unknown, to an island lost in the middle of the sea, far from this dark world. Yes, on that island there will be sunshine, lots of light, and no one will dare look down on them. My brother will protect them, she told herself over and over.
She tried to imagine the future her daughters would have on a Caribbean island with an uncle with communist ideas, who confronted the world angrily, always ready to take up arms; all she could see was a thick, black cloud.
Oh, Abraham, I’ll have to have blind faith in you, from such a distance . . . what other choice do I have?
She remembered Abraham as a young warrior ready to combat the established order. From childhood, he had challenged his parents, religion, politics. In history classes he’d often ended in fistfights with his schoolmates, forcing his mother to intervene to save him from being severely punished. Her brother had been obsessed with the Russian communist writer Mayakovsky, and made his father buy all his poetry. The books arrived in Germany with their red covers hidden under brown paper. What is Abraham like now? she wondered. The last time she had seen him had been a long while ago, before her marriage to Julius.
Pondering this, Amanda finally went back upstairs. The girls were already asleep, and Hilde was waiting for her at the table with a cup of tea that gradually calmed her.
“They’re leaving,” she said, taking a sip. “Viera and Lina are leaving on a ship. It’s the only way they can survive.”
In that moment with Hilde, it felt as if someone else were speaking for her. These were not her words, or her thoughts. She slowly breathed in the tea’s aroma and repeated what she had just heard herself say.
“Let’s run away to Paris,” said Hilde, awaking from her initial stupor.
“They’re to set sail at night, in mid-May, from Hamburg.”
Seeing tears falling from Hilde’s tightly closed eyes, Amanda smiled at her friend. Hilde could let her emotions out, could weep, shout, be comforted in her place while she remained stoic.
Amanda told her they were leaving the Garden of Letters and Berlin behind, but did not mention where they were headed, apart from insinuating that it would be a one-way journey. Hilde understood. Amanda did not embrace her, nor allow a single sob to escape her.
“I have to pack the suitcases. Three of them: one for each of the girls and one for me. We won’t need anything more.”
In her bedroom, she looked for the small ebony box that her father had given her, pausing to stare at the delicate mother-of-pearl inlay.
“Diospyros ebenum,” she whispered, tucking the box in the suitcase along with the precious botanical album.
Stripped of its books, the room was nothing more than an empty, lifeless space. There was nothing more to be saved, no reason to stay there, no possibility for nostalgia.
“The girls are going to Cuba,” she explained to Hilde when she returned to the dining room. “At least there they will be able to go to school. They’re not allowed to do so here. And with no books . . .”
What most disturbed her was being at the mercy of the unknown, of distance, of time. She stood up to comfort her dearest friend. Hugging her, relieving someone else’s pain, she found the strength to say it:
“They let Julius die six days ago.”
Six days: an eternity. She tried to reconstruct in memory what she had done that day: Was it raining? Was it cold? No, it was sunny, and she had gone out with the girls. Yes, now she remembered. It was a beautiful day. Did he die at dawn or in the middle of the night? Who could have held his hand, or closed his eyes? Who said goodbye to him, who listened to his last words?
“We’re going to be all right. Julius arranged everything. The girls will be with my brother in Cuba, and I’ll be in the south of France, on a small farm, with my friend Claire, far from the savage hordes. You see? Julius has saved us. He’ll al
ways be looking after us. I married an angel.”
The two women smiled. The image of Julius watching over them gave them a false but consoling sense of peace. Now they had to plan how they would keep in touch, and when Hilde could visit her.
“Ah, Hilde, we still have time to say goodbye. This won’t be forever.” She paused painfully. “We’ll meet again, when Germany has come to its senses. We live in darkness, but you can be sure the light will triumph in the end. No one can live forever in the dark.”
Hilde retired to her bedroom, leaving Amanda alone, something she had needed ever since she had begun to accept that she must be parted from her daughters.
Alone. With nobody to judge her or feel sorry for her when she cursed the air she breathed and put the blame on her ancestors, the parents of the parents of her parents, for having made Germany the promised land and given up their nomadic life—the one, when it came down to it, for which they had been born. She had no right to put down roots. Now she, with her two daughters, was responsible for closing the door on a century of illusory permanence. It was up to her to set out and conquer a new world that would be just as hostile, she was certain, as the one they were being forced to abandon.
8
Friendly greetings disappeared from everyday speech, substituted by an impetuous raising of the right arm to the skies, accompanied by the howl of Heil Hitler! Amanda was completely cut off: she was not permitted to use the telephone, buy a newspaper, or board a streetcar.
Each day after Hilde had gone to her classes, she went out with the girls to search for bread, cheese, meat, potatoes, down streets where they were constantly fighting against the tide. No one walks anymore, thought Amanda, they all either march or run. We go at our own pace.
One morning from the doorway of the butcher’s shop, she saw a gang of them beating the owner, who was trying desperately to shield his head. His yarmulke had fallen off a few feet from him. A young boy started kicking it as if it were a football, jumping up and down and crying victory.
“What are they doing to Herr Ross?” Lina asked tremulously. Viera started to cry.
A man wearing a hat and a swastika armband on his right jacket sleeve bumped into Amanda.
“Get out of here, it’s not safe for you. Take the girls home at once,” he ordered in a low voice, casting her a complicit glance before joining the group assaulting the butcher.
Amanda dragged the girls away, and this time they did run as quickly as the barbarians, trampling on everything they met, until they finally sought shelter in an entryway on a street leading to Grolmanstrasse. Pushing open a rusty iron gate that creaked jarringly, they entered the courtyard of a large tenement building whose bricks were covered with mold. Her face lifted to the skies, Amanda begged for a beam of light to guide her out of this humiliation. Only a few more weeks and the girls at least will be safe, she told herself in what was all at once a prayer, a profession of faith, and a request for forgiveness for having brought two beings into this turmoil. It was too late, there was no going back, Julius had understood that, and devoted his final days to protecting them.
She closed her eyes and gave thanks. She wondered who that man could have been who gave her the warning at the butcher’s. He must have been another angel sent by Julius, a barbarian whose heart he had rescued. She was convinced Julius had filled the city with angels.
After supper, while Hilde was clearing the plates, Amanda took hold of Viera and Lina’s hands and asked them to pay attention. All that could be heard was the clatter of dishes.
“Girls, your papa managed to arrange for you to go and spend some time with my brother, Abraham,” she said, not giving them time to complain, protest, or reject the idea. “We have to do what Papa has organized for us. First you two go, and then we’ll all meet up again there.”
Lina turned around, hoping Hilde would intervene to help them convince their mother not to send them so far away, to an uncle they didn’t know, and who must be taking them in because he had no choice. But Hilde kept her back to them.
“When are we going?” asked Viera.
“Soon. In a matter of a couple of weeks.”
“I’m afraid, Mama.” Viera began to tremble, her eyes reddening.
“What do we do when we’re afraid?”
“We count our heartbeats one by one,” Lina answered instead and began to count them slowly under her breath. One, two, three, four, five, six . . .
She smiled, hoping to be rewarded for having answered her mother’s question correctly.
“Very good. We need to start packing. We’ll only take what we absolutely need.”
Hilde tried to determine what lay behind that face giving instructions as if someone in another dimension were controlling all her words, obliging her to inform her daughters that she was sending them to a distant island, possibly forever. She dropped a plate, and was startled when she heard the sound of the china smashing against the kitchen floor tiles. But none of the others noticed. None of them turned to see what Hilde had broken. They didn’t care. They were leaving.
Amanda went to her bedroom with her daughters. They got into bed together, the three of them hugging one another as if this was their last night. What they needed was time.
“One day we’ll visit the Acropolis . . .” Amanda whispered to her daughters, giving them a beautiful fantasy to hold onto as they drifted off to sleep.
As night fell that Friday, while they were lighting the candles in the dining room and their supper was almost ready, they heard a loud knocking at the front door. By now, nothing could alarm them. In a week, on Saturday, May 13, they would be apart. Nothing could be worse than that. Hilde went to open the door and returned to tell them that two women, each with a clipboard full of lists, were downstairs.
Amanda went down with the girls to the Garden that had no books.
“They’ve come to do our Vermögenserklärung,” Hilde told her, deliberately including herself in this inventory of possessions that everyone leaving the country had to complete.
One of the women gazed contemptuously at Hilde.
“How does she dare get mixed up with this garbage?” she said to the other woman, who burst into a coarse laugh. “To sink to their level . . .”
Hilde ignored them, and Amanda did not react either. She felt protected by the emptiness around her: there was nothing of value for them to put in their inventory, nothing she wanted to save from their search. Sheltered with her daughters and her friend amid the empty shelves of what had once been the Garden of Letters, they would be safe while these women plundered a past she no longer had any wish to protect.
The timid spring had finally reached Berlin, and the billboards with the grandiloquent ode to perfection had cast their shadow over the pale flowers. To Amanda, who walked around bidding goodbye to the city she had once believed was hers, the seasons had vanished. She wondered why the lime trees on Unter den Linden were still not in bloom.
On the last night, they ate in silence by the tremulous amber light of the candles. At the foot of the stairs stood their three light suitcases. Hilde brought some labels from her last trip to Paris and, with the girls, attached them to the luggage.
“Hotel Bellevue,” Lina read. “Is it a palace?”
“A small palace in the center of the most beautiful city in Europe that is full of palaces with no princesses. You can be the first.”
The car was due to arrive very early the next morning to take them to the port of Hamburg. Hilde made sure that their documents were in order, that they didn’t forget the landing permits, the first-class tickets, the passports with the proud eagle darkened by a swastika. Amanda on the other hand was hoping there was some mistake, something they had forgotten, a slipup that would save her from the guilt she was going to have to carry with her for the rest of her life.
That night, the girls rested peacefully, anticipating their journey. Amanda and Hilde remained awake, listening closely to the precarious sleep of those innocent creatures.
As the sun rose that Saturday morning, the last they would see in Berlin, they prepared their escape. There was no going back. Amanda clasped Hilde’s hands and smiled her most radiant smile. Tilting her head to one side, she gazed into her friend’s eyes and embraced her.
“You’ll always be with me, my beloved friend,” she murmured. “Thank you.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to take the girls with you to Paris?”
“I have to protect them, Hilde. We must escape from here. Even an ocean may not be enough to save them from this barbarism.”
“Will I be able to write to you?”
“Better not, Hilde, better not. This is our goodbye.”
“What’s become of us, Amanda?” said Hilde, her voice starting to crack.
“They will pay for it, Hilde. We all will. As you once said: ‘They start with books and finish with people.’ Germany is not what it used to be. My parents were proud to belong to the most civilized, the most cultured and creative country in the world . . . what are we now? Even worse is that the years will go by and we will still be paying for other people’s guilt. They have led the nation into an abyss it will be impossible to climb out of. Who will want to have a German child? We’ll grow old, we’ll be shunned by the whole world, and generation after generation will try to wipe clean this baseness, but they won’t be able to. It’s the end, Hilde. It’s the beginning of the end.”
Amanda moved away from her friend, and watched as Hilde turned her back and covered her face in despair. She walked out of the Garden of Letters, eyes downcast, staring at the ground. The girls kissed Hilde lovingly. Lina was carrying her stiff rag doll, arms outstretched. Viera had a flowery head scarf on, tied at the neck. Eager to embark on their new odyssey, they threw themselves onto the backseat of the car.
Amanda gave her friend one last look of pity. She was fleeing the terror, but Hilde would have to bear the shameful weight of the nation she belonged to. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.
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